• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Clarifying the “secure boot attack”

Obviously, this protection is based on all the components of secure boot (ie, everything that runs before ExitBootServices() is called) being perfect. As I said, if any of them accept untrusted input and misinterpret it in such a way that they can be tricked into running arbitrary code, you’ll still have problems. But when discussing the pros and cons of secure boot, it’s important to make sure that we’re talking about reality rather than making provably false assertions.

The Linux Week In Review 25

Desktop

• New built PC unable to use 64bit Linux

  I just built an AMD A8-3850 APU on TA75M MB with 8GB PC3 Seagate Barracuda 1TB and LG DVD/CD/RW [suppose to be cd+- and DVD+- compatible]. I can download and burn 64bit Distros

• 60 Days as a Linux user by a recovering Windows Guy.

  If your not working on Linux, maybe its a good time to give it a try.

• Tamil Nadu Goes With GNU/Linux

  There was a bit of dithering, but Tamil Nadu has decided to use GNU/Linux on students’ computers and all computers run by the state, effective Nov. 14, 2011.

Server

• TOP500 List of Supercomputers Released

  Linux has dominated the list so long, it’s not even broken out in the statistics when TOP500 lists are announced. With the November 2011 list, Linux holds steady at 457 of the 500. That’s right – 91.4% of the top 500 supercomputers in the world are Linux-based.

Kernel Space

• A Journal Comes To systemd

  The new feature to systemd is the “journal”, which for providing new system logging functionality. From a quick glance, a replacement for syslog.

• How does Linux kernel detect and plug in your hardware? Kernel, sysfs, udev and dbus collaboration.

  I have been administrating Linux systems for a while now and were always strugling to „dig deeper“. Today I found myself wondering how does Linux detect, plug in my hardware and show that pop-up window asking me to choose what I want to do with my flash drive. So I launched my web browser and began to search for an answers in forums, tutorials and how-tos which almost ended in complete failure. I say „almost“ because I did find some of the answers but they all were scattered and incomplete or too old. So I had to use „heavy artillery“ and read through all those manuals… And I think I finally get it how it works This is what I will try to explain further. *I really hope I didn’t misunderstand something*

Applications

• Cool Tools: VIM

  One thing that I cannot live without is a text editor, namely VIM. VIM was first released as free and extended version of the VI program found on all Unix machines. I first cut my teeth on VI when I started my sysadmin career, and switched to VIM a couple of years later. VIM by default works mostly like VI, but i’ts highly configurable, and has a lot of power, especially when you start working with your .vimrc. Since starting with the editor, I’ve carried my .vimrc from machine to machine, and company to company.

• Social Media Player for Linux, Windows and MAC OSX – Tomahawk

• Set Wallpaper from Command-line in KDE4

• Krusader The Ultimate Two Panel File Manager

  If you are looking for a fast, effective, and powerful file manager that is loaded with features, Krusader might be the right choice for you. Krusader is a twin panel file manager that will work on most Linux desktops, Krusader will also help you perform many daily tasks. You can also create your own customized user menu for functions you use most often. Krusader can even function with an optional terminal emulator below the main window. You can connect to remote file systems, work with archives, and much more. To install Krusader on your system just use these commands in your terminal.

• Free Tools for Getting Started with the Mighty GIMP Graphics Editor

  If you’ve spent any time working with graphics–whether you favor open source software or not–you’re probably familiar with the power of GIMP, one of the very best open source graphics applications. And, if you know your way around GIMP, you’re probably also familiar with the many effects you can execute with it. This particular open source graphics program is so powerful that it can be daunting for new users, so we regularly update our collection of accessible, free resources for learning GIMP and making using it easier. Here is our latest roundup, including a great, free online GIMP book.

• Proprietary

  • The Campaign Against Adobe Flash and the Counterattack

    Last week a group of people came together to launch a website Occupy Flash and started a campaign against Adobe Flash plugin.

    Identities of these people are not known and they have no corporate backing but they have said the Goal of this campaign is to see Flash plugin dead on desktop browsers and they want everyone to uninstall it.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • MySQL migrate to MariaDB

  • Getting SSH fingerprints for machines in your network

  • Capture and report (Bash Scripting)

  • HowTo: Using Aptitude to Minimize Software Bloat in Debian, Ubuntu

  • How to get GNOME version from the command line

  • HowTo: Use APT or Aptitude to install specific packages (Debian, Ubuntu)

  • Manage A Task List From The Command Line

  • Keep ssh alive

  • How To Use pfSense To Load Balance Your Web Servers

  • How to Install Firefox 9 in Ubuntu 11.10 and 11.04

  • Apache failing to read .htaccess file? This fix worked for me!

  • How to search for text in files using Linux command line

  • New Books

  • How To Use pfSense To Load Balance Your Web Servers

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.33 Has Been Released | What’s New | Download

• Games

  • Humble Voxatron Debut is over + Info on the next Bundle!

  • Minecon and Minecraft 1.0 official out today!

  • Gaming on Linux, Now a Reality with Desura

  • Minecon and Minecraft 1.0 official out today!

  • 5 great FPS game for Linux

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 6th November 2011

  • Google CodeIn 2011: A Chance for the Next Generation to Join KDE

    KDE is honored to be chosen again this year to be part of Google Code-In. Pre-university students aged between 13 and 17 are offered a great chance to contribute to KDE by choosing from a large pool of tasks, depending on their skills—code, translation, videography, user interfaces, research and more. Spread the word about the contest to any students and parents you know.

  • KDE and Colour Management

    Colour Management has a long way to come to the Linux desktop. Like on other computing environments first came single applications like Scribus, CinePaint or Krita and proved colour management be useful and mature. Now the open source Desktop stacks are following. Most advanced and wide spread inside colour managed applications is colour correction for monitors.

  • Debugging nepomuk/virtuoso’s CPU usage

  • Kraft 0.44 released

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome Pie Is A Slick Application Launcher For Gnome [Linux]

    There are thousand and one ways to launch application in Linux. You can use the Application menu, via the dock, use a app launcher like Synapse or Gnome Do or simply press “Alt + F2″ and type the name of the application. Gnome Pie is yet another application launcher that allows you to quickly launch your applications, except that it is slick and highly configurable.

  • GNOME 3.2.2 Released

    A lot of bugs have been fixed in this new release along with some static analysis bugs. Some of the existing modules have new versions too. The “Forgotten Release” release is new to this new version which fixes a lot of memory leaks in the log viewer. In addition, this new release has updated translations as well.

  • Gnome Shell Introduction

    Now finally the Gnome Shell guide you have waited for. Surely some users are still broken-hearted about the loss of the Gnome panel and other components of Gnome 2. Gnome Shell is getting better every day, and there are certainly some features that are becoming quite popular. Gnome Shell is designed to be even more user-friendly than Gnome 2. Not only that, Gnome shell was created to look absolutely stylish and offer users a fun experience. New integrated instant messaging and advanced system notifications are reported to be some of the most popular upgrades. But more on that soon!

  • Overlay Scrollbars, No Maximized Window Titlebar By Default In GNOME?

  • Using the GNOME file manager’s FTP capabilities to manage my Ode site

  • What People Are Saying About GNOME [Part 3]

    The GNOME 2011 User Survey is still going on, so be sure to participate. For those wanting to know what other Linux desktop users are saying about the GNOME3 desktop environment, here’s one thousand more comments. (After publishing part 1 and part 2 previously.)

Distributions

• Ubuntu Alternatives, Xfce, & Having A Go With Fedora 16!

  A little over a year ago I fired up the then latest version of Fedora (13) and found much that I liked. Ultimately though, it just wasn’t the right tool for the job and I ended up going back to Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

  Fast forward another year, a few more releases have come out from Fedora, and Canonical has been making some choices that, while likely great long-term for Ubuntu, are a bit awkward currently for some of its user base.

• Red Hat Family

  • A new lover… RHEL 6.1 Desktop

    There’s Community Linux… and Enterprise Linux… which is one the best? I don’t know and I don’t care, for a tinkerer anything works out… For a long time that I wanted to move back to Enterprise Linux and there were two choices to contemplate, and I’ve picked the red one… My laptop count still does weight in favor of green (2 vs 1)…

  • The Cloud Will Be Open Source And Ubiquitous

    When you architect servers with virtualization, distributed computing and the ability to handle big data, so a single Web site or job can take power of the whole system when needed, that’s a cloud.

    Salesforce.com (CRM) (whatever you may think of it) is not a cloud. It is Software as a Service (SaaS), something that can result from a cloud architecture but does not require a cloud. The same can be said for Apple’s (AAPL) iCloud. It too is SaaS, which could come from a cloud or from a standard enterprise set-up.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 KDE Review: Gnome 3 vs KDE 4

      After playing with Gnome 3 under Fedora 16 and openSUSE 12.1, which made me a happy GNU/Linux user. I tried to see the issues people have with Gnome 3, most issues are not about ‘status-quo’ these issues are genuine so I looked at the alternative and tried to see how suitable is the second most popular Desktop Environment, KDE, for a Gnome user. I am writing this review as an average user. Advanced users know what they need – they are like mountaineers, they don’t much care about such things. So, let’s see how good is Fedora 16 KDE for an average Gnome user.

      Gnome 3 Is In The Same Boat As KDE
      The beauty of Linux is ‘diversity’. You can have what you want as you are not stuck in the one-size-fits all model. There are couple of DEs (desktop environments) you can try if you are not happy with the one that comes with your OS. Fortunately, most leading distros, including Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE come with almost all the top DEs to choose from. Gnome and KDE are the most popular ones.

• Debian Family

  • Debian, World’s Easiest GNU/Linux Distro You Can Install

    Here’s how to do it and here’s where to find the CD or USB drive image. These links point to the squeeze/stable branch of Debian GNU/Linux so there could be a few less bugs than you expect with Ubuntu.

  • Derivatives

    • Unexpected uses of a knoppix thumbdrive system.

      Knoppix is pretty cool. It’s a linux live system on a USB stick, which by itself is not something too impressive anymore. This is something that’s been done for years now, with other systems like Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, based off the original Knoppix I believe.

      But the Knoppix guys really have a good setup. You can encrypt local storage on the stick so that someone else can’t get to your data if you lose the drive. You can install applications that are persistent and available the next time you boot the stick. In essence, you have a portable computer that just borrows whatever hardware you boot it on.

    • Tails, the incognito live system, gets 0.9 release

      Tails, “The Amnesic Incognito Live System”, a live CD or USB distribution of Linux which is designed to preserve privacy and anonymity, has been updated to version 0.9. The developers also urge users of the previous version, 0.8.1, to upgrade due to “numerous security holes” in that release.

      Tails is based on Debian GNU/Linux and comes with several built-in applications which have been configured with security in mind. For example, it relies on the Tor anonymity network to protect the user’s privacy online, and all outgoing connections are forced to make use of its ability to bounce internet traffic between multiple nodes. As a live CD or USB, Tails can be booted on a machine without being installed on the hard disk. It is configured to never use the hard disk even if, for example, there is some free swap space on it. It also attempts to wipe the RAM memory of the computer system as it is shutdown. Despite these capabilities, the developers do warn prospective users of the limitations of the technology.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 live from USB — first impressions

        Since I spent some time running Fedora 16 with GNOME 3/GNOME Shell via a live image, and I judged it as working well but not as polished in the design department as Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 with Unity, I figured I should give Ubuntu 11.10 a try with its live image and see what I thought.

        So I grabbed a 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 ISO. Since I was already in Debian Squeeze, and Debian and Ubuntu ISO images these days are “hybrid” images that can be burned to CD the usual way, or easily (very easily!) dropped onto a USB thumb drive, I found the 4 GB drive I used for my Ubuntu 11.04 test and put 11.10 on it. It’s this easy (use the filename of the ISO you downloaded and the filesystem location of your USB drive):

      • Welcoming Our New Horseman: Michael Hall

Devices/Embedded

• Cortex-A8 dev board takes on the BeagleBoard-xM

  Embest is shipping a single board computer based on the Texas Instruments Cortex-A8-based DM3730 or AM3715 system on chips. The DevKit8500D — also available from Premier Farnell’s Element14 engineering community as the DM3730-EVK Evaluation Kit — is equipped with DVI-D, Ethernet, USB 2.0, and serial expansion interfaces, plus options including touchscreens, wireless modules, and cameras.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google Activates 200 Million Android Phones, Closes Gap With Apple

      The Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s new number doubles the 100 million devices it claimed to have activated in May. From May through June, the company has activated roughly 500,000 devices a day.

    • Android, Android, Android!

    • 50 Good Android Apps: Utilities, Games, Productivity

      Android apps are plentiful – no doubt about it. So owners of Android devices aren’t starved for choice when it comes to apps. Yet it is this sheer variety of apps that makes it difficult to select the best apps for your handheld. Hopefully this list of 50 good Android apps will help you find the most worthy apps – let the downloading begin.

    • Dropping The Bomb on Usage

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Microsoft Surface Beaten By 65 Inch Android Tablet

    Microsoft has been playing with the concept of touch-screen for ages without having developed any product that can be used by ordinary user or which targets a mass market.

    The company is now working with Samsung (the leading Android phone maker who are wrongly paying Microsoft Android taxes) to release their 40 inch Surface tablet running on Windows 7 and Surface 2.0 software.

    Ironically, within a week of the announcement an Android tablet has beaten Microsoft’s surface by creating a bigger — 65-inch — tablet running on Android.

  • Amazon Kindle Fire shipments upped to 6 million in quarter

    A market research firm has boosted its projection for Kindle Fire shipments in the current quarter, as the Amazon tablet is proving to be one of the hottest consumer devices this holiday season.

  • Kindle tablet? Check. Kindle smartphone? Maybe next year

    The Kindle Fire tablet has only been available for a few days, but already Amazon could be looking to launch a smartphone, according to a new report.

    According to a note from Citigroup analysts obtained by All Things Digital, Amazon is believed to be currently working with well-known manufacturer Foxconn to develop a smartphone slated to be released in the fourth quarter of 2012.

An other Open Source Colorimeter

Richard Hughes, the author of colord, developed in the recent months new hardware for measuring monitor colours. The ColorHug called device shall come at a relatively low price. It shall be useable for LCD/LED monitors providing input to calibration and profiling software. The most wide spread open source colour management system, which can create ICC profiles from colour measurements, is Argyll.

Open Source WYSIWYG Visual Editor for UI Mockups

Maqetta is an open source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces. The Maqetta application itself is authored in HTML, and therefore runs in the browser without requiring additional plugins or downloads.

Maqetta allows User Experience Designers (UXD) to perform drag/drop assembly of live UI mockups. One of Maqetta’s key design goals is to create developer-ready UI mockups that promote efficient hand-off from designers to developers. The user interfaces created by Maqetta are real-life web applications that can be handed off to developers, who can then transform the application incrementally from UI mockup into final shipping application.

Adobe Donates Flex to Apache

In a move that appears to be another step away from its Flash platform, Adobe has submitted the code for its Flash-based Flex framework to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to be managed as an independent project.

Events

• OpenICC @ FOSDEM 4 + 5 February 2012 in Brussels, Belgium

  OpenICC can next year use a DevRoom at FOSDEM on Sunday together with Xorg people. The goal is to provide a meeting space for colour management topics.

• Speaking about Linux at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg next week

• FOSDEM 2012: announcing the devrooms

  Just sent out the ack/nack emails for the developer rooms at FOSDEM 2012, the latter part always being pretty tough, but we have to make choices.

• ABLEconf CfP early bird deadline approaches

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Introducing Mozilla Conductors

    In the last couple of months I’ve be involved in a surprising number of conversations about how to make communication through Mozilla bugs and
    discussion threads more productive. This ranges from how to keep the discussion on point, how to keep the discussions about the substance and not the people, and what to do if one feels uncomfortable. The topic is raised by both long time contributors and new participants, and ranges from asking for help in how to deal with the topic, to noting how much poor communications makes it difficult to work effectively.

SaaS

• Big Data Attracts Big Money

  More than $350 million has been invested in Hadoop and NoSQL technology to date. A top VC tells us why.

  The move towards Big Data and NoSQL is being fuelled by big money, as investors bet on the next big thing in technology.

  One of those venture capitalists is Frank Artale, a partner with Ignition Partners and an investor in Apache Hadoop startup Cloudera and NoSQL vendor Couchbase. In an exclusive interview with InternetNews.com, Artale explained that Ignition wanted to have a footprint in cloud and Big Data for a variety of reasons.

  In his view, there is the potential for several large multi-billion dollar companies to exist in the Big Data space, which is one of the reasons the firm invested in Cloudera.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Visio Import filter: the goodness soon on your desktop

  It has been a long time since I last time blogged about the LibreOffice Visio import filter. My silence did not prevent a pretty cool code from falling gradually into our git repository. To the point where now we are working on the last 5% of features that normally take the 95% of development time. But, let us see what happened since my July blog:

• Trying to visualise Open Source OpenOffice.org derivatives

  The caveats. As to my motivation (please remember to play the man not the ball): I do not intend to make anyone afraid, uncertain or doubtful. If graphs scare you – please look away at this point. These graphs are built from estimates, hopefully they are fairly un-controversial ones, I detail them at the bottom. This is probably misleading in all sorts ways I didn’t discover yet. My hope is that it provides a more helpful picture of the world today than this history graph that gets a frequent airing. By rendering only the last two years, we de-clutter lots of lapsed projects, and by not rendering version numbers we can use perceptual area for showing something more useful: an estimate of user-base. As/when I discover major bugs I’ll update this, it is a work in progress:

CMS

• Zynga using Drupal

Semi-Open Source

• New admin GUI for Zarafa

  Internally, Z-Admin is based on Yaffas with a customised ZCP theme and several Zarafa-specific modules. The modules are developed on the Zarafa Community Hub, while Yaffas is hosted on SourceForge.

BSD

• A Simple OpenBSD Router For Your Virtual Machines

  I tend to use VirtualBox a lot at home for experimenting with different operating systems or trying out scenarios that are too dangerous to “do it live”. While I could just give these virtual machines a bridged connection, I like to try to keep things as close as possible to the original environment, especially for “forensic” inspections.

• FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 Arrives Late, Pushes Back Final

  The good news: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is now available. The bad news with that announcement: FreeBSD 9.0 RC2 is late, which also means the third (and last) release candidate has been pushed back along with the final release. Hopefully FreeBSD 9.0 will arrive in time for Christmas.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The Richard Stallman saga, redux

  But the commentary was by no means all negative. Several readers wrote in to express their own appreciation of Stallman. Chris Hanson, a research scientist at MIT who says he has known Stallman for 20 years, contributed the most telling appraisal.

  “Most people that I know are seriously alienated by Richard’s politics and by his uncompromising attitude; I’m often uncomfortable around him as well,” wrote Hanson. “But he has a knack for getting to the heart of things, and once you understand where he’s coming from, the things he does make perfect sense. In fact, it’s hard to understand how else they could be done. It’s sad that so many people reject him out of hand, often while mouthing some empty boilerplate phrase about how they admire him for his programming skill or something. As if one part of him could be separated from the other.”

  “I don’t always agree with him,” added Hanson, “but I always listen carefully to what he has to say. Richard is a genius, a man with a clear and unusual vision, and like others before him, he comes in a quirky and difficult package. Mozart wasn’t too well-liked among the cultured people of his day, either; perhaps someday someone will make a movie about RMS, his dry humor, temper tantrums, and beautiful vision of people working together.”

Programming

• new avr-gcc packages

• Strangest line of python you have ever seen

Standards/Consortia

• 7th ODF Plugfest in Gouda

• Khronos Group releases OpenCL 1.2

  The Khronos Group has announced the ratification of version 1.2 of the OpenCL (Open Computing Language) standard. Developed under the industry panel’s leadership, the standard defines parallel programming interfaces for applications that run on different OpenCL-compatible processors. The OpenCL standard is designed to enable other general applications to harness the computing power of graphics processors by allowing computations to be distributed across multiple graphics processors and CPUs. OpenCL uses a subset of the ISO-certified C99 C dialect with added parallel programming extensions.

Health/Nutrition

• The Supreme Court Will Uphold Health Care Reform, and Here’s Why

  Opponents of the Affordable Care Act who believe the Supreme Court will declare the law unconstitutional are going to be disappointed next year when a majority of the nine justices vote to uphold it. It will likely be a 5-4 decision, but moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy will, I’m confident, recognize that without the law, the free-market system of health insurance, so highly valued by conservatives, will implode, sooner rather than later.

  The high court announced earlier this week that it will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of the law next March. A decision is expected in June, just a few weeks before the parties hold their conventions. Regardless of which way the justices go, the decision will ensure that health care reform will be as contentious a campaign issue as it was in 2008.

• CMD Opposes Gutting of Telemarketing Regulations

  The Center for Media and Democracy is asking Congress to reject a bill that could “open up everyone’s cell phones, land lines, and business phone numbers, without their consent, to a flood of commercial, marketing and debt collection calls,” according to a letter signed by the Center and a number of public interest groups. The Mobile International Call Act of 2011 amends the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a statute that regulates telemarketing and limits telephone solicitations and robo-calls. The bill purportedly makes sensible updates to the TCPA to allow consumers to be notified about fraud, appointment cancellations, drug recalls, late payments, and the like. However, other provisions of the bill would allow businesses to make pre-recorded robo-calls “for any commercial purpose that is not a solicitation.” This applies to any consumer’s cell phone, even for those that have placed themselves on the Do-Not-Call list. The bill also exempts modern automated predictive dialers from the TCPA, “permitting repetitive ‘phantom’ calls to cell phones doctor’s offices, hospital rooms and pagers.”

Security

• BIND 9 denial of service being seen in the wild

Finance

• What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe

  The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.

• JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs Sued for Alleged MF Global Misstatements

  JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. units were sued by two pension funds over claims they made misleading statements about the exposure of MF Global Holdings Ltd. securities to European sovereign debt.

  As a result of the misstatements, MF Global’s stock traded at “artificially inflated prices,” the funds said in the complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan. “While the extent of MF Global’s exposure to European sovereign debt was concealed, the defendants were able to raise some $900 million in the offerings.”

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Abramoff, Released from Prison, Rebrands Himself as Against Corruption

Intellectual Monopolies

• Infographic: Effects of the Internet Blacklist Bill (SOPA)

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired.com, seven years later. “If you play golf with Steve and he loses a five-cent bet, he’s pissy for the next week. Should it surprise you that when I tell Steve I’m quitting and going to work for Google, he would get animated?”

The famous flying chair shows just how volatile Steve Ballmer can be, but it also underlines the talent Mark Lucovsky brings to the art of software engineering. Lucovsky joined Microsoft in 1988 as part of the team that designed and built the company’s Windows NT operating system — which still provides the core code for all Windows releases — and after joining Google, he was one of three engineers who created the search giant’s AJAX APIs, online programming tools that drew more traffic than almost any other service at Google. “[He's] probably in the top 99.9 percentile when it comes to engineers,” says Paul Maritz, the CEO of virtualization kingpin VMware, who worked with Lucovsky as a top exec at Microsoft.

Desktop

• Chrome OS Linux 1.7.932 Has Google Music Manager

  The Chrome OS developers announced today, November 17th, the immediate availability for download of the Chrome OS 1.7.932 Live CD operating system, which brings the new Google Music Manager.

• Life with a ChromeBook

  During May’s Google IO developer conference, the first netbooks using the Linux-based ChromeOS were announced from Acer and Samsung. This was a public follow up from the very public beta of ChromeOS netbooks kicked off in December. One of the morning keynotes was dedicated to describing the new netbooks and their features. In June, the ChromeBooks finally shipped and were available for purchase from Amazon and Best Buy. Amazon actually sold out of Samsung Chromebooks in the first week.

  ChromeOS was the cover topic 2 years ago on the July 20th (2009) issue of Information Week. In that article, the bottom line was “… Google has a shot at gaining respectable consumer market share if it produces a slick, fast, secure OS that delivers a great web experience. And if Google succeeds with consumers, it is logical to expect it to steer that momentum toward the enterprise.”

Kernel Space

• New Kernel Patch Slashes Linux’s Power Appetite

  Linux users working on laptops and other portable devices may soon have cause to rejoice thanks to a new kernel patch that finally promises to fix power regression problems associated with recent versions of the software.

• Linus Torvalds Takes Aim at Proprietary Tech, and Apple

  (Brazil has recently squared off with Apple over policies on iTunes.) Apple co-founder Steve Jobs delivered a defense of the company’s tendency to deliver proprietary tools in Walter Isaacson’s biography of him. He told Isaacson that “people are busy” and don’t want to be bothered with incompatible products and products that don’t just seamlessly work. “They’re busy doing whatever they do best,” Jobs said “and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.”

  It seems that that explanation is not good enough for Linus Torvalds.

Applications

• The Best Disc Burning App for Linux

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Mailuils 2.99.94 [alpha]

Distributions

• Comparison of major Linux package management systems

• New Releases

  • Incognito 0.9

  • IPCop 2.0.2

  • CAINE 2.5.1 – SUPERNOVA is out!

    CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is an Italian GNU/Linux live distribution created as a project of Digital Forensics
    Currently the project manager is Nanni Bassetti.

  • Announcement and release notes for Wary (and Racy) Puppy 5.2.2

    Wary Puppy is built from a “Puppy builder” system named Woof (http://bkhome.org/woof), which can build a Puppy Linux distribution from the binary packages of any other distro. There are many “puppies” built with Woof, including Lucid, Wary, Racy, FatDog, and Slacko.

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 7 on Acer Aspire One D255

    The Acer Aspire one is a a 1Gb, Intel Atom Netbook PC, and while you may think the netbook is dead, having a low powered throw in the bag computer is never a bad thing. However even in these heady days when Microsoft are willing to convince you that Windows 7 will happily run on devices such as this, and then effectively killed the market a customers just couldn’t figure out why their £200 netbook ran like a dog there is still hope with the Gnome 3 based Distro..

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Getting the Blooming Flavor of Fedora 16 KDE

      If you have read my review of Fedora 16 KDE Live, you should understand that I liked this Operating System. That’s why I decided to give it a chance to show all bloom in installed version of Fedora.
      In order to run installer, I booted my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop using same Live USB as before.
      Before running the installation, I activated WiFi connection.

    • Fedora 16: A GNOME lover’s paradise

      After several delays, Fedora 16 has been delivered. While hold-ups are a characteristic of the distro’s release cycle, these latest ditherings have put the latest version of Fedora a few weeks behind its main competitor, Ubuntu.

      Fortunately for Fedora fans this release is well worth the extended waiting time, offering an updated GNOME Shell, the Linux 3.0 kernel and plenty of the under-the-hood improvements that Fedora is known for.

• Debian Family

  • I’m back home with Debian

    I have been struggling with my conscience recently over using Ubuntu as a server. From a technical perspective, it’s an excellent choice. It has regular releases, can be both stable and cutting edge, has thousands upon thousands of packages, supports a lot of hardware, has a very pragmatic approach to enterprise server requirements, and much, much more. With all these benefits Ubuntu has been a favorite of mine for a long time. But recently I have been thinking more philosophically.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 3 Interesting Ubuntu Unity Mobile Mockups

        User created ideas and concepts have always been an hallmark of popular Linux based distors like Ubuntu. We have featured such awesome works by loyal users, ranging from awe inspiring Ubuntu Unity mockups to professional looking LibreOffice mockups. Shuttleworth, during the recently concluded Ubuntu Developer Summit(UDS), made it clear that they will be taking Ubuntu to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Inspired from that, some users have already created interesting mockups based on the idea of mobile Ubuntu Unity.

      • Ubuntu launches at retail in Portugal with ASUS

        As of this week, Ubuntu is now on sale in over 100 retail outlets in Portugal.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Kubuntu 11.10 review

          Kubuntu 11.10 is the latest stable release of the desktop Linux distribution sponsored by Canonical Ltd., a Linux software provider based in London, UK. It is based on Ubuntu, but uses KDE, the K Desktop Environment. According to the Release announcement, Kubuntu is a “perfect OS for casual users, social butterflies, Linux gamers, software developers, professionals, and anyone interested in a free, open platform that is both beautiful and useful.”

          That statement, by the way, applies to every (desktop) Linux distribution.

        • Lubuntu 11.10 review – Alternative to Unity?

          I just figured out I never did give the LXDE desktop paired with Ubuntu a proper review. We did have several stabs at Kubuntu, Ubuntu with Gnome classic and Unity, even the Xfce-flavored Xubuntu, but not this one. Now that it is officially endorsed by the company shipping the most popular Linux distro, it’s time to dig in and see whether Lubuntu can deliver the missing zen lost in the Gnome 2 and Unity guard change.

          Lubuntu is supposed to be a simple, lightweight alternative to heavier, more fully featured desktops, so it seems like a logical choice for older hardware. But then, all my past experience shows that these dietary environments are always lacking in something, never quite as good as the top two or perhaps top three desktops. And there’s the matter of spotlight and quality assurance. That said, maybe Lubuntu can deliver?

        • The most popular Linux is…

          Trying to figure out what the most popular Linux distribution is isn’t easy. We can safely say that Red Hat’s Rat Hat Enterprise Linux is almost certainly popular server Linux. You don’t close in on a billion in annual revenue without a lot of users. You could argue that it’s Android since there are over two hundred million Android smartphones out there, but I was thinking of PCs. So, which distribution do most individual people use on their computers?

          For years, Ubuntu has been the number one end-user Linux, but, somewhat to my surprise, it looks like Ubuntu has to face not just a challenger, but indeed it appears that Ubuntu has already been dethroned by Linux Mint, my own current favorite Linux desktop distribution.

        • Linux Mint 12

          Linux Mint was officially released on November 12, for almost a week now. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. For those not familiar with the Mint distro, Linux Mint is based on the latest release of Ubuntu, but with a few wrinkles. For starters, it works out of the box with full multimedia support.

          So, no more hassles in trying to get your DVD movies and other multimedia formats to work, which is a common problem for people starting out with Ubuntu. You also get a Windows-like menu system. Hey, anything helps to smooth out the transition when switching from Windows to Linux.

        • How to make Linux Mint look like OS X

          You might be wondering why we’d spend time morphing elements of the Linux Mint desktop into the shape of OS X, but there are several great reasons.

          Firstly, while recent Linux desktops like Unity and Gnome Shell take many of their cues from OS X, they don’t give you the option of only changing what you want to. Our piecemeal modifications will let you add only the features you want, while getting some of that OS X eye candy and usability. This isn’t a betrayal – it’s an example of Linux’s adaptability.

        • Linux Mint 12

        • Review: Pinguy OS 11.10 Beta

          For those who don’t know, Pinguy OS is basically Ubuntu plus everything and the kitchen sink. Also, the interface is made to look much more like Apple’s Mac OS X, with a top panel featuring a global menu, along with docks and similar themes. However, there have been some changes out of necessity because as of version 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”, Ubuntu no longer officially supports GNOME 2, so Pinguy OS has also had to upgrade to GNOME 3. As a result, the whole “Apple Mac OS X” look has had to be adapted to the new interface and restrictions (and there are many such restrictions) of GNOME 3. I’d like to see if it still remains as usable and friendly as before.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Amazon will launch a Kindle phone next year

      ONLINE DEPARTMENT STORE Amazon already has its Kindle e-reader and its Kindle Fire tablet, and it could branch out into Kindle smartphones too.

      The device, so far dubbed the Kindle Phone for want of another name, will be launched around this time next year in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to All Things D. The information comes from Citigroup’s research department which bases its theory on intelligence gathered from supply chains.

Women in FOSS: men need to do more, says senior dev

A long-time member of the FOSS community believes that men need to do much more about increasing the participation of women in the community and improving their experience of being part of the community.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Silent installation – following up

  In my earlier post about administrative installation of LibreOffice i described how its possible to use the program ORCA to manipulate the msi-file by creating a new mst-file.

  Unfortunately this subject is not very well documented from the developers. if you are a developer and find that I am giving wrong or inaccurate information then please notify me ASAP.

  Lately I have investigated some more details and possibilities in the installation process.

• Now you can buy LibreOffice merchandise

• Oracle v. Google – Oracle Names Final Three Deponents

  On Monday of this week Judge Alsup settled the issue of whether Oracle would be permitted to depose any or all of the technical witnesses on which Drs. Leonard and Cox relied in preparing their damages reports by granting Oracle the right to depose any three of seven such witnesses. (Copyright Fight Moves To Trial; Oracle Gains Some Depos) Oracle had already identified Tim Bray and John Rizzo as two of those deponents, and Google had agreed to produce them. So what the judge’s ruling really did was to limit Oracle to one additional deponent out of the remaining five witnesses. Oracle has decided that deponent will be Dan Bornstein, a witness Oracle has already deposed for two full days.

• Oracle v. Google – Google Wins One and Has a Second Deferred

  Google won a victory on its motion to strike the “rebuttal” report of Dr. Serwin. In an order issued yesterday Judge Alsup sided with Google, granted the motion, struck Dr. Serwin’s report, and ordered that Dr. Serwin could not testify at trial. (622 [PDF; Text]) This means that Dr. Serwin’s survey is out the window, as well.

  Judge Alsup not only granted Google’s motion, he appeared to level a good bit of criticism at Oracle’s counsel, calling the attempt to introduce the Serwin report a “highly unusual maneuver.” Judge Alsup also said that “in twelve years of using this form of case management scheduling order, this is the first time anyone has suggested [that reply reports were not explicitly limited to the authors of the opening reports].” He went on to say: “Oracle’s argument that Google has not been prejudiced is meritless. As explained above, the practice urged by Oracle is inherently unfair and frustrates important case-management objectives.” Turn out the lights, the Serwin party is over.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This holiday season donate support to free software!

  Are you dreading the end of this month and all it entails in terms of mall-parking expeditions and frenzied spending amidst crowds of other buyers? Are you looking for a break from the gimmes and some respite from advertisers’ leitmotif that “you have needs”? Break with the year end’s usual rampant consumerism and give your loved ones a gift that makes a social difference: give back to the community by giving a membership as a gift, and make a positive change for you and your gift recipient.

Project Releases

• wdiff 1.1.0 released

  Translations can now make use of plural forms. While this means a drastic improvement for some languages, it may also mean that some languages for which no such plural forms are available yet might be lacking user visible message strings, not only error messages, but also for e.g. statistics. You might want to check the translation status if your users have problems with English.

• gnutls 3.0.8

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Mexico’s Largest University to Post Online Nearly All Publications and Course Materials

    The National Autonomous University of Mexico, better known as UNAM, has said it will make virtually all of its publications, databases, and course materials freely available on the Internet over the next few years—a move that some academics speculated could push other universities in the region to follow suit.

    Campus officials at UNAM, Mexico’s largest university, said the program, known as All of UNAM Online, could double or triple the institution’s 3.5 million publicly available Web pages, as the largest collection of its kind in Latin America.

Programming

• [Bazaar developers' blog] What I did on my Rotation

  Bazaar is the version control system used by top open source project hosting site Launchpad so I was surprised to come across a bug which prevented bzr from talking to Launchpad properly on errors. “This is really important to fix. We need error reporting.” said Jonathan Lange over 2 years before. Pleasingly I could fix it, very satisfying. I had to learn about the hooks mechanism in bzr which shows up some of the downside of Python, you have to guess the arguments to send the hook. But who needs API documentation when you can just read the code?

What is Usenet and How Does it Work?

Have you heard of Usenet? Maybe your father once mentioned something about his Usenet account in college. If you are unaware of what Usenet is, don’t worry. You are about to find out.

Usenet was initially an idea hatched by 2 Duke University students in 1979. It was soon available on college campuses around the world. Access was eventually granted to early internet service providers who gave free access to their subscribers.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Digital divides: UBB as part of a much bigger broadband mess

  1) Leadership. The FCC has been making headway with a real broadband strategy over the last 18 months, along with a set of network neutrality rules, because the vision comes from the top – the White House. Harper and his cabinet have never cared about world-class retail broadband, because that would put them on the wrong side of the consumer vs business divide.

• CRTC goes REM on UBB: everybody hurts, sometimes

  The CRTC’s usage-based billing decision is in and boy is it a lot to digest, which is perhaps why there were so many conflicting reports in the media as to who exactly the winners and losers are or will be. After reading and digesting the long document and speaking to a number of the small internet providers that will be affected by it at the ISP Summit dinner on Tuesday night, it’s hard to see how anybody really wins with this decision. Burdened with the impossible task of trying to make everybody happy, perhaps this was the CRTC’s desired outcome.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Universal Music Sues Insurer To Pay For Its Copyright Infringement

    Earlier this year, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada) – Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada – settled the largest copyright class action lawsuit in Canadian history by agreeing to pay over $50 million to compensate for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings. While the record labels did not admit liability, the massive settlement spoke for itself.

  • Creative Commons at WIPO

    This week, Andres Guadamuz (CC Costa Rica) is representing Creative Commons at the 8th Session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The agenda [PDF] promises review of several pending recommendations as well as a discussion of future work by the CDIP. Consistent with protocol, Creative Commons prepared a statement for the opening session, which you can read here, as well as find CC’s prior statements and presentations at the CDIP and other WIPO meetings and conferences.

  • File Sharing Lawsuits Progress in Canada as Dozens Face Payment Demands

    Earlier this fall, I wrote about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada as the copyright owners of the film the Hurt Locker obtained a court order requiring three major ISPs – Bell, Videotron, and Cogeco – to reveal the identities of dozens of subscribers alleged to have downloaded the movie. I noted that the targeted Canadians would likely face the prospect of demands to pay thousands of dollars in order to settle the case (or spend thousands in legal fees fighting the claims in court).

  • ACTA

    • Confirmatory application for legal service’s opinion on ACTA

    • 7 civil society groups ask for European Parliament transparency on ACTA

    • ACTA Secrecy Continues in the EU

      The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure has just released the response it got from the EU INTA committee to the request to disclose the legal opinion the Committee recently received on ACTA. In what would be a shocking response, if it was not so common in the history of ACTA, the Committee released a 16 page legal opinion with everything blotted out except for the legal conclusion that the EU is not required to publicly release any preparatory materials from the ACTA negotiation (ie the previous drafts).

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Linux for Work

  Here is the list of software I use daily in my work:

  1. LibreOffice 4.3 Writer and sometimes Calc
  2. gEdit 3.2.1 for note-taking
  3. FireFox 7 for Internet Research and Email
  4. and Ubuntu Linux 11.10 to make it all run flawlessly

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 3 Episode 22

• # The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 429 [Ogg]

• Salt

• #156 Computer America #44

Applications

• LiveUSB Install – Not Just Another Live USB Creator for #Linux

• Wakeup: An Alarm Clock That Tells You What’s Going On [Linux]

  Wake up to your computer telling you what’s going on. Whether you want to know the weather or how many emails you need to respond to, Linux application Wakeup can start up your powered-off computer and announce a variety of things.

• Revelation Password Manager

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Enabling Compiz On A Fedora 16 GNOME Classic Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

  • irssi For Beginners

  • Introduction to LaTeX on Linux

  • Zero-day suspected in BIND 9 DNS server crashes

  • Using a Simple Firewall in CentOS 6

  • Test To Give When Hiring or Interviewing a Junior Linux System Administrator

  • Disable SELinux on Fedora 16 Verne

  • How To Disable Strict Add-On Compatibility In Firefox

  • Enable Gnome-shell 3D Desktop Effects in Virtualized Fedora 16

  • How to Use KVM with Virtual Machine Manager

  • How to install the Nvidia drivers manually in openSUSE 12.1

  • An Easier Way to Generate A Public/Private SSH Key Via a GUI [Linux]

  • Installing Oracle (sun) Java 1.7u1 openSUSE 12.1

  • How to become comfortable with vim

  • Install nomachine in RHEL/centos/Fedora

  • HOWTO: Use APT without the Bloat

  • LPI Announces new Master Affiliate for the UK and Ireland

    The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, has announced a new Master Affiliate for the UK and Ireland (LPI UK). LPI UK will be managed and operated by TDM Open Source Services (www.tdm.info) of Worcestershire, England.

• Games

  • Doom 3 open-sourcing held up while Carmack writes new code

    Before it could release an open-source version of the Doom 3 engine code to all, id Software had to run it by the lawyers. But, their fierce eyes have spotted a slight problem. Chief id technomancer John Carmack is now writing new code to dodge legal issues surrounding the rendering technique, “Carmack’s Reverse,” which gave Doom 3 its lovely shadows.

  • John Carmack is the best of the best (Doom 3 source code)

  • Desura’s Public Linux Client Is Here With 65+ Games

    For those that didn’t notice yet, the public Linux client for Desura is now available and it’s out of the closed-beta process. You can now fetch some 65+ games for Linux from this Steam-like digital distribution platform.

Desktop Environments

• Enlightenment E17 Running On Wayland

  While the GNOME and KDE projects are still working towards making their desktops run on the Wayland Display Server rather than an X.Org Server, the Enlightenment project is also working towards bringing E17 window manager and libraries to Wayland. In fact, they have the first visible signs of success!

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Top 6 KDE distributions of 2011

    There are perhaps hundreds of KDE Linux distributions available, and like an active volcano, more are “erupting” at a rate that is tough to keep pace with.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Greg KH Is Not Happy With Gnome 3, Wants KDE 4. Ouch!

    Greg KH is not happy with Gnome 3. When I met him during LinuxCon and interviewed him (the interview is coming soon), and asked about Gnome 3, he said he was still running Gnome 2. Now, he has tried Gnome 3 and he is not a happy user. He was not as ‘harsh’ as was Linus Torvalds when he called Gnome 3 Shell a holy mess and said someone should fork it.

    Greg posted on his Google + page, “OK, after a day with GNOME 3, I’m finding that I am really not the person that the GNOME developers are trying to satisfy, and that’s fine, I don’t blame them, I know my needs are different from “normal” users.”

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • FrOSCon and OpenRheinRuhr: Mageia on tour

    For six years now, the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg is inviting to the Free and Open Source Software Conference (short FrOSCon) in August.

    Together with the German user community MandrivaUser.de Mageia was present there with a stand and a project room where several talks were done (and where we had the possibility to sleep).
    FrOSCon is not really targeting a public audience but is more some kind of family meeting of the German Open Source community as a whole.

    [...]

    Mageia was (again) sharing a booth with the German Mandriva user community MandrivaUser.de.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Veteran Putting Eucalyptus on the Open Source Path

    Eucalyptus was once “the” open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu’s cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn’t developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Available

    Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.

  • Fedora

    • First impressions of the Fedora 16 GNOME 3 Live CD

      I’ve spent probably more than a year avoiding new distributions, new releases, distro reviews and the dreaded “I ran the live CD of Project X and here’s what happened” posts.

      But I’m in an inquisitive mood. And here is one of those “I ran the live CD for an hour” reviews. Take it for the proverbial what it’s worth.

    • Fedora 16 KDE – First Impressions

      This time, I had a pretty new computer at hand to try the live system on – an Intel Core i5-2310 2.9GHz Sandy Bridge processor with Intel HD Graphics 2000, 4 GB RAM and an LG DVD drive. I burnt the image on a DVD-RW and booted it. The boot process was a bit slow, the limitation being the DVD-RW. Once the live system was up, it was an absolute delight to use. It was fast and really stable, but with one problem. The supported screen resolution of 1280×1024 was not detected but rather set to 1024×768. Apart from this, there were no other problems.

      On my laptop, a 4.5+ year old Dell Inspiron 6400 with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 1.73GHz with Intel 945 GMA and 2.5GB RAM, there was an error during boot stating that a bookmark couldn’t be saved. Not sure what this was, but, the desktop loaded successfully.

• Debian Family

  • People Behind Debian: Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder

    I probably don’t have to present Mark Shuttleworth… he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space. 2 years later, he found another grandiose project to pursue: bring the Microsoft monopoly to an end with a new alternative operating system named Ubuntu (see bug #1).

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Jason Warner Interview About Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop

        During the Ubuntu Development Summit for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Jason Warner, Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, gave an interview to Amber Graner, an Ubuntu contributor involved in the community since February 2009.

      • Ubuntu Phone, Tablet and TV – discussion opened

        Big thanks to everyone who turned up at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando to discuss Ubuntu’s future on new devices!

        Now, following Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote announcement and a number of initial UDS sessions on tablets, TVs and smartphones, we are setting up new channels to pick up the conversation.

      • Ubuntu loses HP cloud crown status

        The computer giant has told The Reg that, contrary to initial claims by Canonical, Ubuntu won’t be the “lead host and guest operating system”.

        An HP spokesperson contacted us to say: “While it is true that they are the first host and guest operating system powering our private beta, this does not mean that HP would not accommodate other operating systems moving forward.”

      • Ubuntu Development Update

Devices/Embedded

• Fingerprint recognition firmware released, including an open source ‘extractor’ package

  DigitalPersona is shipping Linux- and Android-ready fingerprint recognition software for biometric and mobile device manufacturers. FingerJet OEM provides fingerprint extraction, identification, and verification, runs in just 192KB of code space, and is compliant with NIST’s MINEX Ongoing Test standard — and the extractor function is available separately as a free, open source FingerJetFX OSE product.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google unveils Android-based online music store

      Google has launched an online music store in the US, which will allow devices running its Android software to buy, store and stream MP3 files.

    • Samsung is the Number One Maker of Smart Phones

    • Motorola welcomes Google slurp with open arms

      Motorola shareholders have voted overwhelmingly to accept Google’s $12.5bn bid to buy the company’s mobile phone arm, and any patents it may happen to have lying around.

      Over 99 per cent of shareholders who voted approved of the deal, representing nearly three-quarters of the total shares. Google had hoped to see the purchase completed by the end of the year, but a probe by federal regulators has scotched that deadline, and the company now says it’s aiming for early 2012, barring factors outside of its control.

How misinformation can still hurt FLOSS

There seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what open source means in terms of security: specifically, there’s a pervasive notion that because software is open source, it’s inherently insecure.

Seriously?

Apparently these folks have completely forgotten about software like sendmail, Apache, MySQL, SSH, and oh, what’s that platform called… the one with the penguin… oh yeah: Linux. The applications and platforms are regarded in the industry has highly secure and generally free of malware in the wild.

And yet, when Google Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona recently quoted an article that said that “critics have been pounding the table for years about open source being inherently insecure,” I decided to locate that article… I found myself running smack into what I believe is a serious error.

Open source biometrics technology for mobile devices, PCs and servers

DigitalPersona has open sourced its new MINEX-certified FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology.

FingerJetFX, Open Source Edition (OSE), is free, portable software that device manufacturers and application developers can use to convert bulky fingerprint images into small, mathematical representations called fingerprint “templates” for efficient storage or comparison.

FOSS over Miami

Here’s a little Larry-the-Free-Software-Guy history for those of you who don’t already know it: I grew up in Miami and didn’t move to San Francisco until I was 29 (and that was the summer of 1987, so you can do the math). More specifically, I grew up in a strip of unincorporated Dade County sandwiched between North Miami and North Miami Beach. So you’ll understand why I have a tendency to pull for the Dolphins and the U on occasion, and I don’t think twice about driving 30 or so miles down Highway 1 into Monterey County to visit The Whole Enchilada because it has the only Key Lime Pie in this region close enough to be considered Miami-class. Listening to Jimmy Buffett puts me back among the palm trees, retroactively sweating in the 80 degree/90 percent humidity coziness for which South Florida is known worldwide.

Web Browsers

• Top 5 Alternative Web Browsers for Ubuntu Linux

  If you’re tired of everyone talking about Chrome and Firefox, it’s time to try out something new. Windows users already have tons of web browsers to choose from, but only a few of them are worth your time. Linux (particularly Ubuntu) on the other hand, doesn’t offer that many choices. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any quality browsers for our favorite distro. In fact, out of dozens of alternative browsers, we’ve chosen the best 5 so that you would be able visit our site from the browser you love rather than sticking to the mainstream ones.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox to get faster, less intrusive updates

  • Native UI for Firefox on Android

  • Save Tabs when Quitting Firefox 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Nov. 21: Free Software’s Stallman

  Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, will present a visiting lecture from 7-9 p.m., Monday, Nov. 21, in Mitchell Hall at the University of Delaware.

Standards/Consortia

• All Eyes on HTML5 as Mobile Flash Fades to Black

Wintel is Fragmented

UPDATE A part of the changes to make “8″ will be a consolidation of re-re-reboots into one reboot per month where possible. The trolls here who claim re-re-reboots are no problem for competent users are again proven wrong. Even M$ admits re-re-reboots are a problem that needs fixing. Of course re-re-reboots don’t bother those of us who use GNU/Linux because we get to choose when and if we reboot. I have enjoyed that capability for a decade and love it.

The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

You would not have shown your face at, say, ApacheCon, with a MacBook.

Google’s Brin and wife plop half-million into Wikipedia’s hat

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit publisher of Wikipedia and its affiliate sites, has received a $500,000 grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, a philanthropic organization set up by Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of “personal genetic information” website 23andMe.

Security/BIOS

• Attacks on secure boot

  This is interesting. It’s obviously lacking in details yet, but it does highlight one weakness of secure boot. The security for secure boot is all rooted in the firmware – there’s no external measurement to validate that everything functioned as expected. That means that if you can cause any trusted component to execute arbitrary code then you’ve won. So, what reads arbitrary user data? The most obvious components are any driver that binds to user-controlled hardware, any filesystem driver that reads user-provided filesystems and any signed bootloader that reads user-configured data. A USB drive could potentially trigger a bug in the USB stack and run arbitrary code. A malformed FAT filesystem could potentially trigger a bug in the FAT driver and run arbitrary code. A malformed bootloader configuration file or kernel could potentially trigger a bug in the bootloader and run arbitrary code. It may even be possible to find bugs in the PE-COFF binary loader. And once you have the ability to run arbitrary code, you can replace all the EFI entry points and convince the OS that everything is fine anyway.

• UEFI Debugging Tools

  One of the many things I work on is UEFI support. It’s an interesting thing to work on, in part because there’s a lot of new development and it’s at a fairly low level, which is just the sort of thing I like.

  Often during UEFI development, we’ll see a bug and need to diagnose whether it’s a problem with the hardware, the firmware, the bootloader, the OS kernel, or even a userland program. One case of this is when console graphics don’t work right.

• GPT disks in a BIOS world

  Starting with Fedora 16 we’re installing using GPT disklabels by default, even on BIOS-based systems. This is worth noting because most BIOSes have absolutely no idea what GPT is, which you’d think would create some problems. And, unsurprisingly, it does. Shock. But let’s have an overview.

Finance

• State orders Goldman Sachs to repay investors for misleading sales tactics

  Florida’s securities regulators announced a settlement agreement with Goldman, Sach & Co. that has required the investment firm to back back an estimate $20 million in so-called “auction rate securities” because the company claimed they were liquid and secure when they were not.

• Middle-class areas shrink as America divides into ‘two-tiered society’ of rich and poor

  The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.

• Our friends from Goldman Sachs…

  Serious and competent, they weigh up the pros and cons and study all of the documents before giving an opinion. They have a fondness for economics, but these luminaries who enter into the temple only after a long and meticulous recruitment process prefer to remain discreet.

  Collectively they form an entity that is part pressure group, part fraternal association for the collection of information, and part mutual aid network. They are the craftsmen, masters and grandmasters whose mission is “to spread the truth acquired in the lodge to the rest of the world.”

  According to its detractors, the European network of influence woven by American bank Goldman Sachs (GS) functions like a freemasonry. To diverse degrees, the new European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, the newly designated Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, and the freshly appointed Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos are totemic figures in this carefully constructed web.

Privacy

• Wintel is Fragmented

  When I wrote about Google making it possible to opt-out of their Wi-Fi access point mapping program, I made a mistake. I thought Google was still using its StreetView cars to pick up Wi-Fi locations. Nope, Eitan Bencuya, a Google spokesperson, tells me that Google no longer uses StreetView cars to collect location information. So, how does Google collect Wi-Fi location data? They use you.

Civil Rights

• Going Incognito

  The Internet can be a dangerous place. Once it was the scam artists and the damage they wrought that users had to watch. These days it seems it’s more governments trying to oppress citizens and so-called respectable companies looking to track and sell your movements that strike fear in the hearts of Penguistas. Perhaps it’s time to go Incognito.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• EU Adopts Resolution Against US Domain Seizures

  The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which criticizes domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act .