• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Not Having Linux Skills is IT Malpractice

The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is famous, but the Microsoft Reality Distortion Field is much, much bigger and more pervasive. How else to explain so much devotion to a malware-ridden, inefficient, overpriced under-performing computing platform? Oh I know, those license fees don’t really matter, and Windows 7 is really good and really secure any day now! World wide botnet? Don’t be silly, when Linux gets popular it too will be riddled with malware.

Yes, many people really do believe that stuff, even in the face of years of overwhelming data to the contrary.

Should Linux admins also know Apple and Windows? Yes. Because, again, the real world is mixed environments. Running mixed networks, making a good business case for Linux adoption, making a migration plan, and performing migrations requires knowledge. It also makes you appreciate Linux more.

Amadeus systems to sit on Linux by 2012

Airline IT systems and transactions business company Amadeus yesterday announced it will completely migrate its commercial airline transaction processing systems onto Linux by 2012, saying proprietary platforms were “very limiting” and criticised the lack of open standards in the industry.

Desktop

• What Does Your Desktop Look Like?

  Driven by an urge to move out of my old, stale (to me, anyhow: I’ve been using KDE for years) KDE desktop environment, I went on an install binge, successively slapping Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 (UNE), plain ol’ Ubuntu 10.04, and Linux Mint 9 onto unsuspecting hardware that I had laying around. Yes, I know these are all Debian-based distros. I’ve served my RPM time with Mandrake/Mandriva, RHEL, CENTOS, and Fedora. It’s Debian-based distros for me from now on, if I have a choice.

Applications

• 11 Free Linux Apps Your Business Needs Now

  The good news is that there are free and open-source alternatives for virtually every package a small business might need, and most of them are excellent. Whether or not you’ve already made the switch to Linux — there are, after all, myriad security and other reasons for doing so — these free apps can be just what any small business needs to succeed.

• Instructionals

  • PenDriveLinux : Bootable Linux on a USB Stick

  • How to Schedule Tasks with Gnome-Scheduler

  • Get a Dynamic Interplanetary Background with Xplanet

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • DLT Solutions Recognized as Red Hat’s 2009 Public Sector Partner of the Year

    DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller of information technology to the public sector, today announced that Red Hat, Inc. has recognized the company as its 2009 Public Sector Partner of the Year at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World held in Boston earlier this year.

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks

  • OLPC and FOSS@RIT–Education innovation the open source way

    An initiative within the Laboratory for Technological Literacy caught our eye since it focuses on free and open source issues–FOSS@RIT. The FOSS@RIT group officially began in January 2009, as an offshoot of RIT’s Department of Interactive Games and Media. A course in Interactive Games and Media generated interest in open game development for the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), and led to the creation of FOSS@RIT. Though the group still does lots of work with OLPC development and education projects, it also has a broader purpose that includes general educational efforts around open source tools and processes, particularly in education.

  • Give Your Netbook an OS Makeover with Jolicloud

  • Jolicloud 1.0 netbook operating system now available for download

    Jolicloud is available as a free download. Founder Tariq Krim says premium features will be available later this year.

  • Netbook operating system Jolicloud launches

    Setup for Jolicloud is simple: Simply download and run the tiny installer, and follow the on-screen instructions to create a dual-boot installation of Jolicloud and Windows. Alternatively, you can download an image file to create an installation CD, or create a bootable USB flash drive.

  • Netbooks in name only?

Open source initiative will help the disabled

THE OPEN AJAX ALLIANCE (OAA) is using open source web 2.0 initiatives to improve Internet access for the elderly and disabled.

The OAA announced the open source tooling technology to help developers create accessible web 2.0 enabled sites that meet online accessibility standards. The guidelines followed are the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), considered as the industry-wide global standard for accessibility.

Intel Can’t Use Threats, Bundled Prices Under Accord, FTC Says

Intel Corp., the world’s largest computer chipmaker, can’t use threats, retaliation or exclusive deals to block customers from buying competitors’ products under a settlement of antitrust charges, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said.

The settlement covers graphics chips, central processors and chipsets, the FTC said.

Science

• Astronauts To Repair Cooling System On ISS

  The cooling system is essential for maintaining the temperature inside the station. There are two “loops” in the system, one that uses water and draws heat from the inside of the station and one that dumps the heat into space, which uses ammonia as the fluid. Ammonia is used because it freezes at a much lower temperature than water.

• Gamers beat algorithms at finding protein structures

  The Nature article makes it clear that researchers in other fields, including astronomy, are starting to try similar approaches to getting the public to contribute something other than spare processor time to scientific research. As long as the human brain continues to outperform computers on some tasks, researchers who can harness these differences should get a big jump in performance.

Security/Aggression

• UCLA Professor Warns of Hardware Hackers

Finance

• Defining Prosperity Down

  Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.

  And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is “structural,” a permanent part of the economic landscape — and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they’ll turn that excuse into dismal reality.

• Consumer Spending, Incomes Flat in June; Saving Up

  U.S. consumer spending and incomes were unexpectedly flat in June while personal savings were the highest in a year, implying an anemic economic recovery for the remainder of this year.

• Foreclosure activity up across most US metro areas

  Households across a majority of large U.S. cities received more foreclosure warnings in the first six months of this year than in the first half of 2009, new data shows.

• Arizona, California, Nevada and Florida Have Highest Foreclosure Rates in the United States – Las Vegas Leads with 6.6% Filings

• Homeownership Drops to Near 50-Year Lows

  Despite months-long speculation that the nation is primed for a housing recovery, homeownership — a tenet of the quintessential American life — is far from making a comeback.

• Superman Comic Saves Family Home From Foreclosure

  While many businesses have been hurt by the recession, the comic book collection industry has received a boost. It all started in the spring of 2009, in the bleakest days of current downturn, when ComicConnect sold a copy of Action Comics No. 1 for $317,200 – a record at the time.

• Commodity ETFs: Toxic, deadly, evil

  The warning screams at you: “Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs!” Yes, this Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover reads like National Enquirer or a flashing neon sign on the Vegas Strip.

  And just in case you didn’t get the warning, B/W repeats it twice more, on the cover: “Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs … Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs.” Then, as if afraid you still won’t get it, they scream even louder: Commodity ETFs are “America’s worst investment.”

  Worst? Add toxic, deadly, evil. Commodity ETFs are rapidly becoming a malicious virus breeding chaos in the global markets pricing all commodities: food, farm lands, metals, oil, natural gas, livestock, water and other natural resources are the assets under commodity derivatives and their ETFs, pricing that’s now controlled more by Wall Street speculators than the weather, adding wild swings in volatility and trillions in global derivative risks.

  And once again the usual suspects, the Goldman Conspiracy of Wall Street Banksters, are in the lead.

• Can you have a middle class without middle-class jobs?

• What do Republicans believe on state aid?

  he basic idea behind Brown’s bill is that state aid should be funded using preexisting stimulus dollars. That’s what he talks about in the video. He doesn’t say anything about conditions. And to double-check, I read the bill. Still nothing.

• More Workers Face Pay Cuts, Not Furloughs

  A new report on Tuesday showed a slight dip in overall wages and salaries in June, caused partly by employees working fewer hours.

• Gov’t OKs $600M in housing aid for 5 states

  The Obama administration plans to send $600 million to help unemployed homeowners avoid foreclosure in five states.

• Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Traders

  The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.

  In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they’re up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we’re witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it’s really bizarre.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• ‘I’ve Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

  In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

• Most Consumers Support Government Cyber-Spying

  Sixty-three percent of people believe that it is acceptable for their government to spy on another country’s computer systems

Intellectual Monopolies

• FBI asks Wikimedia Foundation to remove seal from websites, Wikimedia declines

  The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has asked the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), host of Wikinews and its sister projects, to take down its image of the FBI seal from its websites. However, the WMF declined, saying that FBI lawyers had misinterpreted the relevant federal law.

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • Nokia Criticizes ACTA Substance and Process

      Nokia’s global director of brand protection has published a critical column on ACTA in the World Trademark Review (sub required). The column says that ACTA is unnecessarily broad and that by excluding key countries from the negotiations, those countries “are practically forced into a position of opposition.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Applications

• Best Download manager for Linux

• Marave – Distraction free writing in Linux

  Marave aims to combat this by shoving everything but the task in hand out of the way. No toolbars, menus or web-browser peeking from underneath the window; As my mother likes to say, ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

• Remember those birthdays with GBirthday

  Since today is the birthday of both myself and the US President I thought it apropos to cover a birthday reminder tool for the Linux operating system. There are a few of these tools but only one of them really is worth discussing at any length. That tool? GBirthday. GBirthday is a tool that lives in your notification area and keeps track of the bithdays in your Evolution contacts or your Thunderbird/Icebird, Lightning, Sunbird/Iceowl events, even CVS files or MySQL databases!

• Instructionals

  • Lookup Words from the Command Line Using a Simple Bash Script

  • Fedora GIT package update (fedpkg) step by step.

  • Get the OS X ‘Genie Effect’ in Compiz easily

  • small screen Ubuntu windows customizations

  • Recover wasted disk space in Ubuntu

  • alias

  • Introducing CsoundAC: Algorithmic Composition With Csound And Python

  • Disk Information Utility – di

  • 15 Useful Bash Shell Built-in Commands (With Examples)

  • Using the Opera browser as a widget engine in Linux

  • Fedora 13 btrfs installation guide

  • Unix How-To: Give Me That Old-Time Security!

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Preview of KDE 4.5

    Plasma, KDE’s desktop shell, has a few new features added in SC 4.5. Among them are the preview button in Folderview. Instead of hovering over a folder and automatically giving you a popup access window, hovering your mouse will show an “up arrow” button that gives the same functionality, making it less intrusive.

    KDE has also added many new features and fixes to KDE games, admin tools, and other included software. KDE 4.5 is available for many operating systems, including Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix variants, Windows, and Mac OS X. Most Linux distributions provide updated binaries through their software repositories. You can also download KDE from the project’s website and build it from source. KDE is free and open source software, and the new version 4.5 is expected to be released today, August 4.

  • KDE release day for 4.5.0 delayed

    Today an email from the release team was sent out notifying KDE developers and packagers that the release of the next KDE software compilation, containing versions 4.5.0 of the Dev Platform, Workspaces and application modules, will be delayed by a week.

Distributions

• Weaknet Linux – Penetration Testing & Forensic Analysis Linux Distribution

  WeakNet Linux is designed primarily for penetration testing, forensic analysis and other security tasks. WeakNet Linux IV was built from Ubuntu 9.10 which is a Debian based distro. All references to Ubuntu have been removed as the author completely re-compiled the kernel, removed all Ubuntu specific software which would cause the ISO to bloat, and used a non-Ubuntu-traditional Window Manager, with no DM. To start X11 (Fluxbox) simply type “startx” at the command line as root.

• Hacking is easy…

  Now, Gentoo has currently a number of hacks over Rubygems (the library, and the package manager) for two main reason: supporting the Portage-based install of gems in the old manner (as in calling gem from within the eclass), and supporting multiple Ruby implementations to be installed at the same time.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • KDE 4.5 RC3 available for Mandriva 2010 Spring !!

    The third release candidate release of KDE 4.5 was released last week and again thanks to neoclust and mikala who did all the rebuild work this time, we have packages for Mandriva 2010 Spring since a couple of days now. Packages for both i586 and x86_64 are available. Here are the upgrade instructions:

  • Mandriva2010 Spring..

    1.faster boot
    2.quick response.
    3.better fonts.
    4.default wide range software
    5. large repository media(Free DVD version)..

  • August 2010 Issue of The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine

    In the August 2010 issue:

    Xfce 4.6.2: Xfce Settings Manager, Part 3
    Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Your Xfwm Theme
    Xfce 4.6.2: Customize Thunar’s Context Menus
    Video Encoding: Step-By-Step
    Linux IS Ready For The Desktop
    OpenOffice 3.2: Calc
    Clipping Objects Together To Create Cool Graphics With Inkscape
    Ms_meme’s Nook: Linux Time
    Forum Foible: Fun With PCLinuxOS
    Computer Languages A to Z: Modula2
    Command Line Interface Intro: Part 11
    Screenshot Showcase
    Alternate OS: Haiku, Part 2
    Game Zone: World Of Goo
    Firefox Add-ons: Xmarks Marks The Spot
    and much, much more!

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat gets bump as markets rise

    After a 200-plus point increase on Monday, the Dow was set to give up some of those gains. U.S. futures pointed to a weak opening, CNBC reports.

  • Red Hat vs. Ubuntu: Why upstream commits matter

    There has been some ‘debate’ that has bubbled to the surface again recently about Ubuntu vs. Red Hat on the issue of who contributes what to Linux.

    Red Hat leads the Linux world with its contributions to the core Linux kernel and it also leads with its contributions to the GNOME desktop project as well. Ubuntu on the hand does contribute (not as much), and is focused on ‘fit and finish’ for the most part.

    I personally don’t have much issue with the fact that Ubuntu doesn’t contribute as much upstream as Red Hat — though it is something that matters. Let me explain.

• Debian Family

  • On extending Debian membership to non-programming contributors

    Stefano raised again the issue of providing some kind of Debian membership to people that contribute to Debian in unusual ways (not involving deep purely technical skills), like doing translation, documentation, marketing, design, etc.

    [...]

    It’s true that the name “Debian Developer” is suboptimal for non-programmers. But it’s also suboptimal for most DDs, since most of us don’t strictly develop software: we “just” maintain packages, mainly developing meta-data around the upstream source code. “Debian Developer” is how we call our full-fledged project members. Do we want to classify those non-programming contributors as second-class citizens? If not, we need to make them “Debian Developers”, not some strange other name.

  • DebConf 10: Day 2

    Stefano delivered an excellent address to the Debian project. As Project Leader, he offered a perspective on how far Debian has come, raised some of the key questions facing Debian today, and challenged the project to move forward and improve in several important ways.

    He asked the audience: Is Debian better than other distributions? Is Debian still relevant? Why/how?

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Canonical Adjusts Ubuntu Linux Partner Strategy

      Canonical has made a subtle but important shift in its channel partner strategy. Sure, the Ubuntu Linux promoter continues to engage with solutions providers. But increasingly, Canonical wants to recruit hosting partners and cloud partners onto the Ubuntu bandwagon.

      [...]

      The VAR Guy is intrigued but key questions remain. For starters how does Canonical intend to compete with Novell’s Intelligent Workload Management (designed for on-premises and cloud environments) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), which Red Hat is promoting to cloud partners?

    • Main frozen for Alpha-3

    • Making room in the sound indicator

      In Maverick we’re adding the new Ayatana indicator for sound, Conor Curran’s very classy implementation of MPT’s very classy spec. It’s a Category Indicator, like the messaging menu, so it allows apps to embed themselves into it in a standard and appropriate way. You can have multiple players represented there, and control them directly from the menu, without needing a custom AppIndicator or windows open for the player(s). The integration with Rhythmbox and, via the MPRIS dbus API, several other players is coming along steadily.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo for IVI 1.0 Screenshots

      If you’re wondering exactly what MeeGo is, it’s a combination of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo project. This lightweight combination targets smartphones, netbooks, tablets, mediaphones, connected TVs and In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. This specific release is for Atom-based IVI systems. These systems are designed to deliver things like navigation, entertainment, and networked computing services inside of cars, trucks, buses, planes and more. On their website MeeGo states “As vehicles become connected to the internet, the demand for internet-based entertainment applications and services increases and MeeGo strives to accelerate the pace of innovation in IVI.” I couldn’t help downloading MeeGo for IVI V1.0, taking some screenshots, and writing some of my thoughts on the new features. Be sure to visit the cart where you can buy MeeGo on USB.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • JoliCloud Finally Launches

      JoliCloud is based on Linux, and is looking to go after cloud clients such as netbooks and tablets. However, the Paris-based company started by former Netvibes founder Tariq Krim is also exploring ways to recycle old computers and make them cloud compatible — targeting an economically sensitive demographic. Krim thinks web OS-based machines are going to find favor in the educational realm as well.

Six open source projects you should be using

Nagios: Open source network and system monitoring and notification
I’ve been a fan of Nagios for a long time. Nagios is a soup-to-nuts network and system monitoring and notification tool that has an extensive list of plug-ins and a vibrant community. There is a steep learning curve to set it up, but once that’s done, you’ll have your finger on the pulse of the entire IT plant.

CMS

• Drupal has a two-prong enterprise strategy

  The news peg here is an agreement with Cap Gemini to promote Drupal as part of its Immediate platform. On his blog Buytaert compared it to the decision by Dell and IBM to ship Linux on their machines in 2007.

Business

• Australia to Host Global Open Source Leaders

  Leaders of Ingres, Jaspersoft, Liferay, Sugar CRM, Pentaho and Red Hat are converging for the inaugural SPLASH Conference in Sydney on August 10, 2010. The main reason of the meeting is to share ideas with local firms in Australia.

BSD

• 10 differences between Linux and BSD

  How often do you hear people lumping together Linux and any of the BSDs? I’ve done it on occasion, and I hear it all the time. Of course, there are plenty of similarities between Linux and BSD: They are both based on UNIX. For the most part, both systems are developed by noncommercial organizations. And I must say that both the Linux and BSD variants have one common goal — to create the most useful, reliable operating system available.

Government

• CIA Software Developer Goes Open Source, Instead

  For three years, Matthew Burton has been trying to get a simple, useful software tool into the hands of analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency. For three years, haggling over the code’s intellectual property rights has kept the software from going anywhere near Langley. So now, Burton’s releasing it — free to the public, and under an open source license.

  Burton, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and software developer, speaks today at the Military Open Source Software Working Group in Virginia. It’s a gathering of 80 or so national security tech-types who’ve heard a thousand stories about good ideas and good code getting sunk, because of squabbles over who owns the software.

Licensing

• More GPL Enforcement Progress

  LWN is reporting a GPL enforcement story that I learned about during last week while at GUADEC (excellent conference, BTW, blog post on that later this week). I wasn’t sure if it was really of interest to everyone, but since it’s hit the press, I figured I’d write a brief post to mention it.

  As many probably know, I’m president of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is the non-profit organizational home of the BusyBox project. As part of my role at Conservancy, I help BusyBox in its GPL enforcement efforts. Specifically and currently, the SFLC is representing Conservancy in litigation against a number of defendants who have violated the GPL and were initially unresponsive to Conservancy’s attempts to bring them into compliance with the terms of the license.

Openness/Sharing

• Update on Open Source Initiative’s adoption of the Open Knowledge Definition

  A few weeks back we blogged about Russ Nelson’s proposals for the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to adopt the Open Knowledge Definition, our standard for openness in relation to content and data.

  [...]

  Here are the questions we arrived at (thanks to Skud aka Kirrily Robert for taking notes):

  1. What happens with data that’s not copyrightable? 1a. What about data that consists of facts about the world and thus even a collection of it cannot be copyrighted, but the exact file format can be copyrighted? Many sub-federal-level governments in the US have to publish facts on demand but claim a copyright on the formatting.
  2. What about data that’s not accessible as a whole, but only through an API?
  3. We’re thinking that OKD #9 should read “execution of an additional agreement” rather than “additional license”.
  4. Does OKD #4 apply to works distributed in a particular file format? Is a movie not open data if it’s encoded in a patent-encumbered codec? Does it become open data if it’s re-encoded?
  5. What constitutes onerous attribution in OKD #5? If you get open data from somebody, and they have an attribution page, is it sufficient for you to comply with the attribution requirement if you point to the attribution page?

Can open business practices survive an acquisition?

In a recent case study about the company, the New York Times details how, almost immediately following the deal, friction emerged between the two companies. In an effort to stay the course of their mission statement, Honest Tea added a “no high-fructose corn syrup” label to the packaging of its Honest Kids line of children’s drinks. Coke saw this label as disparaging and potentially damaging to its other product lines and asked Honest Tea to change or remove the claim from its labels.

Wave Goodbye To Google Wave

Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly, but Google is saying today that they are going to stop any further development of Google Wave.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• How WikiLeaks Is Changing the World

  After dumping 90,000 documents from the war in Afghanistan, and with a treasure trove of millions of files on other topics from around the world waiting to be released, everywhere-and-nowhere Internet leak hub WikiLeaks is once again the center of a discussion about the changing landscape of investigative journalism and the relationship between the media and the state secrets it reports. Nobody questions the importance of WikiLeaks, but not everyone is pleased.

• Surprise! Feds stored thousands of checkpoint body scan images after all

  US agencies have long defended the use of body scanning devices at airports with the promise that all images will be discarded as soon as security staff have viewed them.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Hadopi’s Secret Internet Spying Spec Leaked

    As a part of France’s three strikes law, the organization in charge of implementing the program, Hadopi (which, we should remind you, was caught infringing itself in using a font it did not license for its logo), has been tasked with figuring out a way to actually block people from the internet, or to stop them from using certain file sharing programs. While there were public consultations on how to do this, the actual technical spec was supposed to have been kept secret.

  • Flattr: A Social Micropayment Platform for Financing Free Works

    The idea is pretty simple. Flattr functions very nearly like a social networking or social bookmarking site — but with money. Sites that support Flattr provide a button that members of Flattr can push to signal their appreciation. When they do, the Flattr site gets a notification.

    At the end of each month, each member’s clicks are added up. Their monthly balance is then divided up equally among all of the clicked “things”. These are paid out, micro-payment style, to the recipients. The total amount spent by the donor, though, is constant — they set this choice from their Flattr account. So the amount they spend is totally predictable, no matter how many times they click.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Unruly Customers

M$, too, had a lot of willing and unwilling customers who have now seen the light and broken out of their jail. Fortunately there is no doubt in most people’s minds that it is legal to migrate to GNU/Linux. They know PCs are somewhat more open than an embedded thingie. That wasn’t always so. I have met people who thought it was against the law to replace the OS, but lately, folks have been installing GNU/Linux on their own or with some help and a few are buying PCs installed with GNU/Linux.

Instructionals

• Open Source Software Shortcuts for Doing More with ‘Less’

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • how to get more people wikiing?

    Today’s blog entry is a simple question:

    What would motivate you to contribute to KDE wikis such as Techbase or Userbase?

    Within the Plasma team, developers put a fair amount of time and effort into writing tutorials, with some more taking shape on our Community wiki pages. We’re about to start on content on Userbase, starting with documenting how Actitivies work from a user’s point of view in the 4.5 release. Other teams within KDE are doing similarly.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Red Hat Is The Top GNOME Contributor

  • Ubuntu To Get Ayatana Sound Indicator

    Ubuntu’s next version, code-named Maverick Meerkat, is slated for the November release. Mark Shuttleworth once again emphasized the ongoing work on improving the art-work of Ubuntu.

    Ubuntu is planning to add a new sound indicator to enhance the ‘music’ experience under Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth is toying with the artwork of the indicator.

  • GNOME Commit-Digest Issue 95

    This week… 1817 commits, in 202 projects, by 221 happy hackers (and 396 were translation commits).

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat appointments to boost APAC growth

    Red Hat, provider of open source solutions, today announced six senior management appointments to boost its Asia-Pacific management team and position the company for growth in the region.

• Debian Family

  • Debian developer conference under way in New York City

    The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City, marking the first time the event has been held in the U.S. The event will explore the latest developments with the Debian Linux distribution, which is popular among embedded Linux developers, and also offers the foundation for Linux distros including Ubuntu Linux, Xandros, and Google’s Chrome OS.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Introducing Lubuntu

        A light-weight version of Ubuntu Linux has hit download mirrors everywhere. While it is not yet officially supported by Canonical, the company behind the world’s most popular Linux distribution, this version of Ubuntu has in the last three months wormed its way up the Linux charts to become the twelfth most popular version of Linux. The name of this light-weight version of Ubuntu is Lubuntu,

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola Open Sources Droid X

      It appears Motorola may have finally given us what we wanted: the open source software for the Droid X. That’s right, now developers can mess around with the 4.3-inch beast even more! This isn’t quite as exciting as the 1-Click Root that came to the Droid X just a few days ago, but it’s still news. And I’m sure some crazy dev will have Froyo up and running on the Droid X in no time.

    • Droid X: More Athlete Than Aesthete

      With the Droid X, Motorola’s slapped a huge hunk of screen onto a stone-cold slab of a phone that still manages to sit comfortably in the hand and in the pocket. It’s got processor muscle, sharp screen resolution, and an interface that looks kinda ugly even after you customize it. Those widgets and controls might be worth a little homeliness, though.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Negroponte’s OLPC Offer Shows Staying Power of Open Projects

    Now that is a friendly, charitable letter, and it illustrates something that the many nay-sayers didn’t realize when criticizing the OLPC effort: It’s extremely common in the open source world for an initial idea to find itself without wings, and then flourish and fly in a metamorphosized new version. It’s entirely likely that the OLPC assets are exactly what Indian developers need to deliver a good device at a low price point.

Datamatics Migrates Core Solutions To Ingres

Within the framework of this partnership, Datamatics has expanded its BSS portfolio and migrated its core solutions to Ingres Database, including its main applications in the ‘Order to Cash’ sector and ‘DSS Document System Solution’ for template-based mass document generation.

OpenChrom: a cross-platform open source software for the mass spectrometric analysis of chromatographic data

The software is independent of the operating system, due to the fact that the Rich Client Platform is written in Java. OpenChrom is released under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 (EPL).

Facebook Meets Open Source Diaspora

Since Diaspora is based on Open Source, it will be easier to be scrutinized by authorities and by you to see if it is compromising your data. Another major fact is open source technologies are much more secure than proprietary technology. The simply rule was given by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, “Given enough eyeballs, every bug is shallow.” In common man’s language. ‘If every one in your neighborhood is aware and cautious, criminals can never succeed there. ‘

Pacific Fibre man, open source champ elected to InternetNZ

Lance Wiggs, Don Christie, and Dave Moskovitz were elected councillors.

Corporates have an appetite for open source software, says Deloitte

Large companies are increasingly using open source software to conduct pilots, according to Deloitte consultant Mark Lillie.

I met up with Mark today, who is a consultant in Deloitte’s technology group. We were talking about the IT market in general and some trends.

Metasploit To Get More Powerful Web Attack Features

Events

• SPLASH To Unite Open Source Leaders

  The inaugural SPLASH Conference, to be held in Sydney on Tuesday, August 10, 2010, will unite leaders from Ingres, Jaspersoft, Liferay, Sugar CRM, Pentaho and Red Hat to share insights with Australian technology companies.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Brief Update — CEO Search

    A while back we announced that we were starting to look for a new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation as John Lilly moves to Greylock Partners sometime later this year. Here’s an update of what’s going on.

SaaS

• DuraSpace Introduces DuraCloud Open Source

Oracle

• Oracle Demostrates Great Community Support and Fixes Eclipse

  Every once in a while I am reminded of the lunacy of the Internet, especially headline writers. On Monday of this week, Oracle released an update to the Java 1.6 update 21 that fixes a problem in a previous version that broke Eclipse. All the details can be found in the bug or Neil’s good summary. The good news is that Eclipse is no longer broken!!

  The irony however is that the issue just yesterday shows up on Ed Burnette’s ZDNet blog ‘Oracle Rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse‘ and the pillar of all Internet lunacy, slashdot Oracle Java Company Change Beaks Eclipse . Credit to Ed for actually reporting and testing the fix.

CMS

• Building a Website – Smart and Easy

  Joomla! – One of the pioneers of the open source CMS software programs, constantly up dating their options, and thousands of programmers world wide offer all sorts of special apps.

  Drupal – Drupal is an amazing piece of technical engineering, simple to use and lots of options to make wonderful websites.

  WordPress – WordPress is not so much a website application but more in the form of a blog, many different options are offered and all the templates look really beautiful.

Business

• Nagios Enterprises Gains Over 200 Nagios XI Customers In First Half Of 2010

  Nagios Enterprises gained more than 200 Nagios XI customers in the first half of 2010, setting the stage to become one of the fastest-growing Open Source technology companies in the market. Interest in Nagios continues to gain strength as more companies around the world look to deploy effective IT infrastructure monitoring to ensure operational continuity and minimize the business impact of IT outages.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Open Core is Dead

    I was wanting to take a break from Dev-Jam to put down some thoughts I’ve been having during this recent renaissance of the “open core” debate when I realized something:

    Open core is dead.

    At least as a business model. While I don’t expect it to go away overnight, I do expect to see very few new companies using the model and those commercial software companies that tout themselves as open source reframing their marketing to de-emphasize it.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Hackers Meeting in the Hague 2010

  This GNU Hackers Meeting took place on Saturday 24 July and Sunday 25 July. We organised a hacking space on Monday 26 July and Tuesday 27 July and encouraged people to stay for the extra days. The main GUADEC conference was on Wednesday 28 – Friday 30. This meeting featured a workshop on GNUnet, free secure networking and decentralised applications.

Openness/Sharing

• Open science is, to some, humanity’s best hope

  Jackson says open science will speed innovation in the same way the open source code movement revolutionized Internet applications. He also wants transhumanists to support the thousands of backyard tinkerers, known as citizen scientists, who are already studying microbes, mapping genomes, and seeking cures for diseases. He calls himself a citizen scientist. At Humanity+, he described the LavaAmp — a pocket-size device for amateur DNA researchers — he is helping to develop.

  Jackson recently hosted the Open Science Summit in Berkeley, Calif., which again highlighted the importance of sharing data. One of the speakers was Alexander Wait Zaranek, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School who is working to build bridges between open-science organizations, citizen scientists, and industry.

• CacheFlowe releases open-source robot vocal software to welcome our digital overlords

• Open Access/Content

  • Open source book publishing gets a boost

    One that I found rather amusing was via FLOSS Manuals (a project I’ve written about before – a group effort to get good manuals written for all the amazing FLOSS out there). The Amsterdam-based foundation has been working on another project: Booki.cc. Booki’s a new book production platform, which takes the same concept as FLOSS Manuals – collaborative online book writing – and expands it beyond the realm of just manuals.

Programming

• Global Tech Company Contegix to Sponsor Open Source Language Project Clojure

  Contegix, a privately held technology firm specializing in Internet infrastructure and hosting services, announced their agreement to provide sponsorship to Clojure development language project.

• Open-source ‘R’ gets Hadoop integration

  Lately, you can’t talk about business without talking about “big data,” which, incidentally, is the focus of the latest package from Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics, which commercialized the open-source R statistics language, emphasizes expanding the use of R beyond its academic roots to business.

Consumers v Intel

What bugs me about government regulation of monopolists is that while after a decade or so of investigation, complaints and courts, the consumer is usually left out of the picture and the monopoly gets to keep its ill-gotten gains by paying off the government and other businesses. Previously Intel paid AMD to go away instead of compensating them for the many years when major portions of the market were closed for no other reason than that Intel bribed OEMs to avoid AMD. Who knows how much AMD’s business could have grown in those years?

New wave of evictions threatens Gypsies

Human rights campaigners have condemned a wave of evictions and court actions against Gypsies and Irish Travellers which they say are threatening to extinguish a whole way of life.

Dozens of families face the prospect of being pushed off plots of land they own and forced to move back into illegal “side-of-the road” and wasteland camping. Children will be unable to go to school and the elderly and infirm unable to access health services, say the campaigners.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change

  Life can be hard in Moscow. The Russian capital is sweltering in temperatures that reached a record 37.7C last week. Vast stretches of peat bog surrounding the city have dried out and caught fire covering Moscow with choking smog. The changing of the horse guard in Cathedral Square was cancelled as sentries wilted in traditional woollen uniforms. Elsewhere, more than 2,000 Russians – many drunk – drowned trying to cool off in lakes and rivers and at least 10 million hectares of crops have been ruined. States of emergency have been declared in 23 regions.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Facial recognition technology and CCTV – a potent mix

  You may have noticed recent television advertisements plugging holiday cameras with facial recognition technology good enough to pick out your loved ones in crowds and keep them in focus in holiday snaps.

• More spys in the skies

• Surveillance Commissioner issues whitewash report

  I’ve written elsewhere about the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, who issued his Annual Report into surveillance in the United Kingdom this week. It shows that the level of covert surveillance in this country is shocking – these operations are now part of our nation’s everyday life.

• UAE to block BlackBerry web features

  The United Arab Emirates is to block key features on BlackBerry smartphones because of national security concerns.

  The move could prevent thousands of users from accessing email and the internet on the handsets starting in October, putting the federation’s reputation as a business-friendly commercial and tourism hub at risk.

• Stealthy Government Contractor Monitors U.S. Internet Providers, Worked With Wikileaks Informant

  A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers,” researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Game copiers for Nintendo DS ruled illegal in UK

  A High Court has ruled that devices that allow gamers to play pirated video games are illegal in the UK.

  The ruling specifically targets a range of popular devices which can be used to store and play copied games on the Nintedo DS handheld console.

• Copyrights

  • UK music industry revenues up 4.7% to £3.9bn in 2009

    This morning, PRS for Music is launching its annual Adding Up The Music Industry report, which puts numbers to recorded music, live music and B2B music revenues in the UK.

  • Dear Jeff Zucker, Whether You Like It Or Not, Content Will Stay Free

    Sorry, Jeff, but you don’t get to decide that. The technology and the market have already decided that the content is or will be free online. It might not be authorized. It might not be legal. But the content is free. “Should” has nothing to do with it, because the technology and the market don’t care about “should.” Yes, this sucks for those who only understand how to run a business when they’re a gatekeeper who controls things, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t really good businesses built on free content. NBC should know this, since an awful lot of its history was built on exactly that… And I don’t recall Zucker’s predecessors whining about that darn “free” broadcast TV.

• Devices/Embedded

Plug n’ Serve

The members of this community aim to popularise Linux and encourage people to develop their own versions of the free software

They do not come across as your regular geeky computer guys who toil away endlessly to code and develop softwares for various business solutions, nor do they aim to overwhelm people about the work that they do, but for members of the Pune based organisation PLUG (acronym for Pune Linux User’s Group) spreading awareness, about the freedom that Linux as an operating system offers, is a cause that they have been promoting since the last 12 years.

Desktop

• INQ readers’ Windows XP views are on the money

  According to our poll, one in five readers are considering moving over to Linux. That’s quite a swing and a damning result for Microsoft’s latest operating system. By dumping Windows XP, without doubt the most popular piece of software to come out of Microsoft in recent times, the firm may have inadvertantly given Linux the boost it needs on the desktop. Desktop oriented Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Open Suse and Mandriva should take note and capitalise on growing disillusionment among Microsoft users.

Server

• NoMachine Reseller Achieves Value Partner Status

  Flowsoft is a software and systems solution provider specializing in Linux consulting and support for server-based solutions and mobile environments.

• Intel Hybrid Cloud: Small Businesses Meet Linux?

  But that’s not all. Sources say Intel has approached ClearFoundation and ClearCenter about leveraging ClearOS — a Linux-based solution — for the Intel Hybrid Cloud. It sounds like Intel plans to leverage ClearCenter’s expertise in VMs for network, gateway and server services, at times replacing and/or integrating with Microsoft Active Directory. Plus, ClearCenter Products (such as ClearSDN Cloud Services) may be sold via the Intel Hybrid Cloud offering, the sources add.

• Isilon Wins UCLA Lab

  Isilon said the UCLA lab is using the storage alongside a 5,000-plus compute-core Linux cluster and repository of 2D and 3D neuroimages.

• UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging Simplifies Data Management With Isilon

• Linux skills more in demand than Unix for the first time

  Demand for Linux programming skills has exceeded that for Unix programming skills for the first time ever, according to Richard Nott, director of recruitment site CWJobs.co.uk.

  Possible reasons for this include the fact that more mobile platforms are supported by Linux, as are HD boxes, Nott said. In addition, the increasingly popular open source operating system Ubuntu also runs on Linux.

• Cloud Linux Inc. Goes Global as 16 New Hosting and Data Center Partners Come Online

Instructionals

• Best Screen Capture Apps for OS X, Windows and Linux

• Linux tip: How to unlock the Gnome keyring at login (and get “almost-hibernation”)

• User switching in the Linux desktop

• How do I join a Linux machine to a Windows Domain?

• How to get Windows and Linux to cooperate on the network

Games

• Chronic Logic releases Gish version 1.6 for Win, OSX and Linux

  Chronic Logic announces Gish v1.6 with five new community campaigns totaling over forty new levels and five new VS. levels. Best of all the full version of Gish for Windows, OSX and Linux is now offered at a price of your choosing!

• 24 Addictive Free Linux Games (Part 1 of 3)

  Many of the LinuxLinks crew grew up playing games on the ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit personal home computer. By today’s standards, the games were simple with basic graphics plagued by attribute clash and primitive sound generation. However, this did not stop the best games being incredibly addictive. The famous Crash magazine (a monthly publication devoted to the ZX Spectrum) used to rate games by their addictive qualities. This was often the rating that interested us the most.

Devices/Embedded

• WAGO Updates 758 Series IPC Line

  WAGO Corporation’s updated 758 Series IPCs pair CoDeSys V2 software, Linux OS, IEC programming languages and multiple onboard fieldbus protocols for real-time control applications.

• ARM9 module comes with smartphone-aware web server

  SSV announced a new member of its “DIL/NetPC” computer-on-module (COM) family, offering a web server designed for remote access via smartphones. The Linux-based DIL/NetPC DNP/9265 incorporates an ARM9 Atmel AT91SAM9263 processor with 32MB SDRAM, 32MB flash, Ethernet and other I/O, and is offered with an “SK30″ starter kit.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Video of Nokia’s and Intel’s MeeGo OS Leaks Out

      Earlier this year, Nokia and Intel announced that they are combining their Linux-based operating systems. Nokia’s Maemo is currently available on the N900, while and Intel’s Moblin was created for netbooks and tablets.

    • VIDEO: MeeGo in mobile action

    • Bursting Your Bubble: That “secret” Nokia MeeGo video doesn’t mean anything

    • Nokia’s MeeGo smartphone OS ‘appears’ on YouTube

    • MeeGo Smartphone Interface Nokia Style

    • Nokia Showcase MeeGo OS in new Video

    • Meego in-vehicle infotainment remix now available for download

      Meego — the Linux effort headed up by Intel and Nokia — recently scored a fairly major win, with GENIVI selecting it as the platform of choice for in-vehicle infotainment. In case you’re not familiar with GENIVI, it’s a consortium comprised of several high-profile companies including GM, BMW, Hyundai, Intel, Nokia, NVidia, ARM, Freescale, and many others.

    • MeeGo for IVI version 1.0 released

    • MeeGo Summer Seminar: Trip Report

      The MeeGo Seminar Summer 2010 edition took place on July 26th, 2010 in Tokyo, Japan. The event was packed. More than 530 registrants, 21 sponsors, 16 speakers, 3 tracks (Business, Technology, Qt+Atom), multiple demos and the announcement that the GENIVI Alliance has selected MeeGo as its future in-vehicle infotainment center.

  • Android

    • Things You Should Know About Android

      At the same time (i.e. the beginning of 2009), Internet search giant Google also made an entry into the mobile space. Known as Android, they wanted to play their game differently. Following their “Don’t be Evil” corporate slogan, they made their Linux-based mobile OS Open Source. This meant anybody was free to download the source code from Google and change it to their liking, and put it in the device of their choice. But its not like you can download Android and install it on your Nokia in a few clicks, the way you would download and install Linux on your PC. It meant manufacturers, big or small, could easily take Google’s OS and put it in their hardware.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Google Search in Firefox Bar Alone Is Bigger Than Bing, Yahoo; Bidding War Coming Soon

    That little search bar at the top right of your Firefox browser is driving 9.18% of searches, according to research by advertising network Chitika, Inc.

    That’s a huge chunk in a market where Google handles more than 80% of searches and its competitors Bing and Yahoo! handle just 8.56% and 6.69%, respectively – suggesting a huge bidding war may be brewing for November 2011 when Google’s contract with Mozilla is up.

  • Fresh Candy for Firefox: Tab Candy Makes Tabs Managable

    I’m writing this column about Tab Candy while I also have my Webmail open, Twitter and Identi.ca, a page showing flight information and travel plans, and the Linux Magazine backend open. That’s a light load, because I’m traveling. In my home office I usually work on three or four writing projects at a time, plus social media sites, mail, and so on.

SaaS

• Open-Xchange CTO Encourages Data Ownership

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Ecuador pledges no oil drilling in Amazon reserve

  Ecuador has agreed to refrain from drilling for oil in a pristine Amazon rainforest reserve in return for up to $3.6bn (£2.26bn) in payments from rich countries.

  Under a pioneering agreement signed with the United Nations, the oilfields under the Yasuni reserve will remain untapped for at least a decade.

  The money is about half of what Ecuador would make by selling the oil.

Finance

• Beyond State Capitalism

  Although peopleʼs rights to their commons are often recognized and validated in smaller
  communities, scaling these lessons to the global level will require a new dimension of
  popular legitimacy and authority. The world community is rapidly evolving a sense of
  social interconnectivity, shared responsibility and global citizenship, yet the sovereign
  rights of people to the global commons have not been fully articulated. In declaring our
  planetary rights for these commons, we shall be confronting many decisive questions:

  (1) Are modern societies prepared to create a framework in which the incentives
  behind production and governance are not private capital and debt-based
  growth, but human solidarity, quality of life and ecological sustainability?

  (2) How soon — and how peacefully — will the subsystems of the Market State
  integrate their structures of value-creation and sovereign governance with the
  greater biophysical system of ecological and social interdependence?

  (3) Can the global public organize effectively as a third power to develop checks
  and balances on the private and public sectors and establish the resource
  sovereignty and preservation value needed for a commons economy?

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• DRM and Other Forces Overriding the Three Laws of Robotics

  Globally, consumer rights and even human rights are eroding as some vendors infect their consumer electronics with Digital Restrictions Management mechanisms and as DMCA — the law that tries to protect DRM — is being secretly negotiated by a few strong countries and to be forced upon the rest of the world as treaties (ACTA 1, 2). These strong forces are overriding the three laws of robotics (if there ever will be at all) with something else.

  As Asimov pictures it, a robot should give highest priority to (L1) protecting human beings (L2) obeying human orders (L3) protecting itself, in that order, above anything else. Any robot in Asimov’s Sci-Fi is equipped with a positronic brain that will go nuts, so to speak, if it ever breaks these laws. This is to a society heavily dependent on robots what a fuse is to an electronic device. Imagine the threat one faces living in a world full of robots without these laws.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • A Guide to the Digital Economy Act – Part 5

      Summary

      * The measures on copyright infringement will not come into effect until January 2011 at the earliest.
      * All these measures will involve (initially) is sending letter to those accused of infringing.
      * ISPs are under no obligation to monitor their subscribers’ Internet use.
      * Technical measures cannot come into force until further consultation has been done and the regulations have been approved by Parliament.
      * It is up to the copyright owner to prove the infringement happened and an IP address was used.
      * It is up the the accused to prove that they did not commit the infringement if “their” IP address was allegedly used.
      * The government could put in place a method whereby websites and content could be blocked by ISPs due to alleged copyright infringement.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Welcome: One Thing to Know Before You Migrate to GNU/Linux

  The silly article goes on for lots of pages/clicks until five things are listed to denigrate GNU/Linux. The truth is there is only one thing to know about migrating to GNU/Linux. Any problems you encounter will be solvable and once solved will not recur.

• Is Linux Really Harder to Use?

  When North Americans learn to drive a car, they learn to drive on the right side of the road. Those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, of course, learn to drive on the left. Neither option is “more difficult,” per se, they’re just different. Once you’re used to one approach, however, it can feel awkward at first to do the other.

  So it is with computer operating systems. Desktop Linux is simple, elegant and logical, but it works differently from Mac and Windows.

  In Linux, the graphical user interface (GUI) is optional, for instance. The desktop environment can be completely customized, and package managers let you install software in just a few clicks, no surfing the Web or searching for serial keys required.

• If Linux is not for Everyone, Neither is Windows

  When contrasting Linux and Windows, one frequently hears the fallacy that Linux is not an OS anyone can use. Read this reaction about it. That recurrent argument is based on several misconceptions that I would like to discuss but, first, let us clarify something: there exists no such a thing as an easy, perfect OS. There is always a learning curve when using a system and the more you get exposed to an OS, the more “manageable” it seems. But easiness of use is only a perception, a mirage. Now, let us take a look at the misconceptions.

Server

• July 2010 Web Server Survey

  Microsoft also experienced a loss this month, serving 648k fewer hostnames worldwide and also losing 265k active sites. A big contributor to this was a loss of 388k hostnames due to lower activity on Microsoft Live Spaces.

• Desperately Seeking LAMP 2.0

  Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation. Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation.

Kernel Space

• Enterprise Management Vendor Zenoss Joins The Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that open source enterprise IT management company Zenoss is its newest member.

Applications

• Microsoft Exchange Alternatives for Linux

  Looking for a Linux-friendly groupware suite that can take the place of Microsoft Exchange in your organization? You’ll find a wide range of alternatives for Linux that offer most (if not all) of Exchange’s functionality.

  If your organization has standardized on Microsoft Exchange, switching may be a bit tricky (but can be done). But if your organization hasn’t started down that path, it’s a good habit to avoid. The good news is you’ll find several robust Exchange alternatives for Linux.

• Bibble 5, DAM for Linux, and data portability

  So I’m evaluating Bibble 5 Pro (version 5.1f). I had to process over 1,000 images this weekend and LightZone was killing me. I really like LightZone. But, damn… it is slow. It does have batch processing capabilities but they’re not particularly robust (there’s no way to apply some adjustments but not others, for example).

• Gloobus Preview + Nautilus Elementary = Absolutely Beautiful!

  Gloobus Preview is a beautiful file preview application for Linux. Select a file and click space bar to have a quick preview of the file, as simple as that. And when I say file, they include music, videos, images, documents and everything else!

• Instructionals

  • Latex editors and rubber

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Workstation Benchmarks: Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux

      As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks — with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks — are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.

    • Ubuntu 10.10’s New File System: btrfs by Christopher Tozzi

      As far as production goes, btrfs is not yet an appropriate choice; as its documentation makes explicitly clear, it is “not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review.” So while the Ubuntu installer might provide btrfs as an option, I wouldn’t go putting it on the root partition of any production system until it has matured a little more.

      All the same, the new file system promises a number of significant advances on both Ubuntu desktops and servers. In my experiments with it, it’s also worked pretty well, and I’m excited to explore the new possibilities it offers to Ubuntu users as it continues to develop.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android is Awesome

        The question becomes “Why do OEMs not push GNU/Linux?”. The answers are many. OEMs have a tight margin. If unit sales were to drop even a little, their margins and income could drop seriously. They do not want to take the risk so, at best, they want GNU/Linux to be a sideline as Dell has made it. That seems quite unwise in view of the performance of Android. Margins can increase quite a bit per PC if the licence for the OS is taken out of the total. An OEM can either increase share by cutting prices a bit more than competitors selling that other OS or an OEM could charge what they would charge for that other OS and keep the change, increasing margin. Combinations are also possible, cutting a bit in price while cutting out payments to M$. The fact that no large OEM has done this suggests that M$ is paying them handsomely to keep out GNU/Linux.

10 things traditional software customers want to know about open source

I talk to many customers who have installed what I’ll call “traditional” or “commercial” software but what some people call “closed” or “proprietary” software. The most savvy customers understand that most traditional software contains a lot of open source software, and you need to think about open source not just at the application but also at the library level. These customers usually have enterprise installations and either run or outsource huge data centers, have multiple hardware and software platforms, and care a lot about quality of service, service level agreements, maintenance, support, and cost.

Oracle

• Will Illumos Bring OpenSolaris Back To Life?

  Today sees the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution.

• Illumos sporks OpenSolaris

  If you were hoping that someone would fork the OpenSolaris operating system, you are going to have to settle for a spork. You know, half spoon and half fork. That, in essence, is what the Illumos, an alternative open source project to continue development on the core bits of OpenSolaris, is all about.

  The disgruntled OpenSolaris community has been ignored by Oracle since it acquired Sun Microsystems back in January, and the project’s governing board has threatened to commit ritual suicide by the end of August to try to get Oracle participating in the open source Solaris development effort.

• OpenSolaris’ child, Illumos, goes forward without Oracle

  Nexenta, an open-source organization that’s been trying to “combine the OpenSolaris kernel with the GNU/Debian user experience has announced a new open-source effort called “Illumos”. Illumos, Nexenta proclaims “is a 100% community-driven and owned effort that aims to provide an alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution, freeing it from dependence on Oracle’s good will.”

  This effort, Simon Phipps, former chief open-source officer for Sun and an Illumos supporter, said is not meant to be a fork of OpenSolaris. Still, as the group said in their announcement, “Oracle has significantly reduced their support for OpenSolaris as a distribution.” Actually, that’s too kind. Oracle has essentially ignored OpenSolaris and paid no attention to the OpenSolaris Governing Board.

• Illumos launched as OpenSolaris derivative

Funding

• Status.net Gets $1.4M to Take Open-Source Twitter Into the Enterprise

  Status.net, which distributes open-source microblogging software similar to Twitter, has closed a round of financing that it plans to use to take its services into the enterprise market. The Montreal-based startup has raised $1.4 million from New York venture fund FirstMark Capital, along with BOLDstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up, and FirstMark partner Scott Switzer — founder of the open-source advertising platform OpenX — will join the company’s board of directors. The new round brings the total amount raised by Status.net to $2.3 million.

Government

• EU: Practical Guide to using Free Software in the Public Sector

  Thierry Aimé, member of the team of the French Ministry for the Budget, Public Accounts and the Civil Service, has authored a “Practical Guide to using Free Software in the Public Sector”.

Licensing

• BusyBox and the GPL Prevail Again

  I thought you’d want to hear about what’s just happened in the Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy, et al case. It’s another BusyBox case regarding infringement of the GPL, mostly about high definition televisions with BusyBox in them, and while the case is not finished regarding other defendants, it’s certainly set another precedent. One of the defendants was Westinghouse Digital Technologies, LLC, which refused to participate in discovery. It had applied for a kind of bankruptcy equivalent in California. Judge Shira Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York has now granted Software Freedom Conservancy, a wing of Software Freedom Law Center, triple damages ($90,000) for willful copyright infringement, lawyer’s fees and costs ($47,865), an injunction against Westinghouse, and an order requiring Westinghouse to turn over all infringing equipment in its possession to the plaintiffs, to be donated to charity. So, presumably a lot of high-def TVs are on their way to charities.

Openness/Sharing

• How Lawyers Can Help Us to Share

  Berkeley attorney and Shareable.net contributing editor Janelle Orsi is the co-founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which aims to help social enterprises, worker-owned co-ops, and other mission-oriented enterprises sort through legal red tape. The co-author of The Sharing Solution, published by Nolo in 2009, Orsi also has a private legal practice focused on mediation and helping people share housing, cars, land, and other commodities. We talked to Orsi about the legal gray areas that social entrepreneurs can find themselves in, and what SELC is doing about them.

UK.gov smiles and nods at commentards

More than 9,500 comments were published on the Programme for Government website, which was launched on 20 May, days after the formation of the coalition.

Whitehall departments published their responses late last week to no fanfare, revealing as they did that not one policy will be changed as a result of the exercise.

Change is good. But show your work!

An anonymous bug filer noticed that the Times seemed to have changed a statistic in the online version of a front-page story about where California’s African Americans stood on pot legalization. As first published, the story said blacks made up “only” or “about 6 percent” of the state population; soon after it was posted, the number changed to “less than 10 percent.” There’s “>a full explanation of what happened over at MediaBugs; apparently, the reporter got additional information after the story went live, and it was conflicting information, so reporter and editor together decided to alter the story to reflect the new information.

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s good — the story isn’t etched in stone, and if it can be improved, hooray. The only problem is the poor reader, who was reading a story that said one thing at one time, and something different when he returned. The problem isn’t the change; it’s the failure to note it. Showing versions would solve that.

New online business model will succeed, says Rupert Murdoch

The Politics of Email: Son of Reagan liberally attacks Apple, Google and Microsoft

Michael Reagan, the eldest son of former US President Ronald Reagan, has accused people who use email services from Apple, AOL, Google, Hotmail and Yahoo! of “supporting the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda” and ultimately “hurting our country”.

No Wonder it Sold for a Dollar

Newsweek is running an amazingly bad story today titled “Taliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks”. Granted, I have my own beef with Julian Assange but how can an editor let that article go out when the author admits there is no known correlation or causation…

Why we can’t ditch 3D glasses just yet

This is the first in a series of blogs based on a seminar given at the BBC by Buzz Hays, chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center in Culver City, California – where they teach the professionals how to make better 3D. The series starts with an answer to the most common complaint about 3D.

The Ghosts of World War II’s Past (20 photos)

Environment/Wildlife

• Fires still spreading in parched Russia

  Russia is mobilising more forces to fight hundreds of wildfires still raging across a vast area east and south of Moscow amid a record heatwave.

• Rand Paul: Mine safety regulations aren’t needed since “no one will apply” for jobs at dangerous mines

  In April, two miners were killed at the Dotiki Mine in Western Kentucky after the mine’s roof collapsed. The non-union mine had been cited for 840 safety violations by federal inspectors since 2009, and the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing issued 31 orders to close sections of the mine or to shut down equipment during the same period. But when asked about the incident, Kentucky’s Republican Senate candidate, Rand Paul, said “maybe sometimes accidents happen.”

Finance

• Why not Elizabeth Warren?

  Whether Elizabeth Warren heads the nascent Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has become the first pitched battle in how the recently passed financial reform laws are put into practice. If the episode so far is any indicator, the battle between interests and reformers is far from over.

  Detractors say that Warren lacks experience, that she’s not impartial, and that she could make it so expensive to extend credit that only the richest Americans and biggest businesses could get a mortgage, a credit card, or a loan. But these knocks against Warren obscure the likely impact that she would have on the bureau. And mostly, they are straw men.

• Why We Really Shouldn’t Keep the Bush Tax Cut for the Wealthy

  From a strictly economic standpoint — as if economics had anything to do with this — it makes sense to preserve the Bush tax cuts at least through 2011 for the middle class. There’s no way consumers — who comprise 70 percent of the economy — will start buying again if their federal income taxes rise while they’re still struggling to repay their debts, they can’t borrow more, can no longer use their homes as ATMs, and they’re worried about keeping their jobs.

• Geithner defends Obama policy on tax cut extension

  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday it would be “deeply irresponsible” for the Obama administration to support a wholesale extension of Bush era tax cuts, including breaks for the wealthy.

  Geithner said in a nationally broadcast interview that President Barack Obama strongly believes those reductions should be retained for the “95 percent” of taxpayers with individual incomes under $200,000 a year and families below $250,000.

• Geithner tells bankers not to fear new financial regulations

  Timothy F. Geithner, traveling salesman, swept through Manhattan on Monday making a pitch to skeptical bankers, business leaders and even the mayor.

  His central message: Far-reaching financial regulations signed into law by President Obama last month aren’t something to fear. Rather, they are the foundation of a stronger economy for the months and years ahead.

• In devising punishments, SEC faced with competing interests

  What’s $75 million?

  For Citigroup, it’s a week of profits, less than 0.1 percent of its market value, a rounding error on a balance sheet worth more than $2 trillion.

• Countrywide settlement pays fraction to investors

  Former shareholders of fallen mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corp. are in line to recoup a fraction of their investments now that a Los Angeles judge has approved a settlement worth more than $600 million settlement.

  The payoff doesn’t come close to compensating for the money lost by investors. But it could prompt more lenders to settle legal disputes at the center of the housing bust.

• 99 Weeks Later, Jobless Have Only Desperation

  Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Julian Assange Responds to Increasing US Government Attacks on WikiLeaks

  It’s been ten days since the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published the massive archive of classified military records about the war in Afghanistan, but the fallout in Washington and beyond is far from over. Justice Department lawyers are reportedly exploring whether WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange could be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing the classified Afghan war documents. Meanwhile, investigators in the Army’s criminal division have reported

• Secretive group seeks recruits, finds skepticism

  A secretive volunteer group that tries to track terrorists and criminals on the Internet went to the Defcon hacker conference this past week in hopes of recruiting information security experts, but it will first have to overcome some skepticism.

  That’s because most information security professionals have never heard of the group, called Project Vigilant. The group’s director, Chet Uber, came forward Sunday at a press conference run by Defcon organizers to try to recruit volunteers from among the show’s attendees. “We need more people,” he said. “By increasing the numbers, we increase the likelihood that we will get the work done.”

Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

• No, The Fifth Amendment Does Not Complicate Net Neutrality

  Lyons then tries to twist this into a claim that it’s like an easement on physical property. Again, this is simply untrue. The third parties are not proactively going onto anyone’s network. They have set themselves up and connected directly to the open internet (via their own ISPs to which they pay handsomely for bandwidth) and the only times their content crosses those other networks is when the end users (i.e., the customers of these ISPs) reach out and request that the content be sent to their computer. That’s how the open internet works. If the ISPs don’t like it, they shouldn’t have offered an internet service. To twist this and claim that the internet is somehow a “private network” of these ISPs and service providers who connect to the open internet are somehow “invading” that private network is the height of sophistry.

Intellectual Monopolies

• FBI claims no-one may publish its seal

  The FBI ordered wikipedia to remove its seal from the article there about the bureau. It threatened to litigate. Unfortunately for the FBI, the law it cited is the one that forbids making counterfeit badges, and Wikimedia’s lawyers mocked them in its response.

  John Schwartz in the NYT: “Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal. Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. ‘While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version’ that the F.B.I. had provided.”

• Wikipedia and FBI in logo use row

  A row has broken out between Wikipedia and the FBI over the use of its seal.

• Copyrights

  • Pirate Bay Founder Appeals “Political Gagging” Court Order

    Early 2010, a Swedish court banned Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site. Last month, the site’s former spokesperson Peter Sunde was also banned and faces a heavy fine for non-compliance. He has now appealed that decision, with his lawyer describing the court ruling as “political gagging”.

  • Digital Economy (UK)

    • Hadopi’s secret 3-strikes security spec leaked

      Government certified security software: the French government’s Hadopi wants to spy on everything on your computer, every time you log on, otherwise you cannot defend yourself against breach of copyright allegations. How far does this breach our right to privacy or freedom of expression?

      [...]

      Although the consultation is supposed to be public, the details of the specification that Hadopi is requiring were kept secret. The leak is significant because it reveals a proposal for surveillance on Internet users’ own computers.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Learning – Taking a Step Forward

One of the biggest challenges we face when we get on site is in familiarizing the child with their new Linux system. Most kids have had Windows exposure from the first time they touch a computer. Getting them through the initial system shock of a new environment has had its challenges.

In some cases, we’ve done a 30 day check-in to see how the child is doing with their new computer and have found the parent or guardian has put Windows on it. Maybe because the child wasn’t familiar with it…

[...]

I am soliciting researchers, ideas, coders, artists, volunteers, and bloggers to help us move this project forward. Sure, the current parameters are pretty loose but that’s why I have put this in front of you.

Guy spends $1500, makes system that can listen in on your mobile phone calls

And of course he used Linux to save on the Windows license fee.

Migrating From XP to “7″

A recent poll found 20% or respondents indicate they would switch to GNU/Linux as a result of the ending of support for SP2.

Server

• VoIP Week in Review

  Vox Communications, which offers a feature-rich, low-cost, high-quality alternative to traditional phone services by providing VoIP and smartphone applications, has exceeded 20,000 VoIP lines on its award-winning Voice over Internet Linux-based server clusters.

Google

• Google and the culture of participation

  With the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh the first week of May, a slew of open source rock stars were in our hometown. Chris DiBona, Public Sector Engineering Manager at Google, was able to visit the Red Hat office and talk with us during his trip. The focus of his talk was the enormous culture of participation that companies like Google and Red Hat—and technologies like the internet—attempt to embrace and extend, despite naysayers and proprietary business habits.

Kernel Space

• Patch turns Transmeta Crusoe into a full i686

  A rather simple kernel update released recently is all what it takes to turn a ten-years old Transmeta-powered computer or appliance into a functional computer again.

  By “functional” we mean one which is able to run the latest Linux software without crashing. And that happens because of the work of one stubborn Arch Linux contributor. The main problem is that Transmeta´s original Crusoe CPUs really implement the full i586, which is the Pentium I, or more appropriately, a “crippled i686” implementation, that lacks one particular processor instruction “long NOPs”.

• New Linux Kernel Borrows Google Packet Speeding Tech

  The technique is one of a number of new features that come with the latest update of the open source operating system kernel, Linux version 2.6.35, which Linus Torvalds released on Sunday.

  In addition the usual round of bug fixes and optimizations, the new version has a number of new features to make it more usable in today’s bustling multicore, networked environments.

• http://chromeossite.com/2010/08/02/chrome-os-vs-jolicloud/

• Vanilla Linux 2.6.35 Goes Turbo

• Next Linux kernel is out

• New Version of the Linux Kernel Arrives

• Linux kernel 2.6.35 released

• Linux 2.6.35 Includes Speedy Google Code, Less Bloat

  The 2.6.35 release also includes new improvements to the Btrfs filesystem, continuing efforts begun by the previous Linux 2.6.34 kernel, which debuted in May to add and enhance support for additional filesystems.

• Linux 2 6 35

• Linux 2.6.35 arrives bearing network, multicore gifts

Applications

• 5 of the Best Free Linux Educational Music Software

  Music education is a field of study connected with the learning and teaching of music. Music is an essential part of the fabric of our society, and the intrinsic value of music is widely recognized. Human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals.

• Instructionals

  • Work the Shell – Simple Scripts to Sophisticated HTML Forms

  • Set up Ubuntu Lucid Server PV DomU at Xen 4.0 (kernel-xen-2.6.34.1-0.0.19.40d88ce) on top of opensuse 11.3

  • Camera LED As Flashlight on Non-Rooted Android Phones

• Wine

  • HOWTO: Starcraft 2 on Linux with Wine

  • Bordeaux 2.0.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD Released

  • Wine 1.3.0 Released

    The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available.

    Whats new in this release:

    * Beginnings of a user interface for the builtin Internet Explorer.
    * Support for cross-process OLE drag & drop.
    * New builtin wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program.
    * Open/save dialogs remember the last used directory.
    * Translation updates.
    * Various bug fixes.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KRunner Dictionary Plugin Finally Available

    KRunner is one of the reasons (but not the only one) that I love KDE SC. With this new plugin, it just become a lot better. It will not be included in KDE SC 4.5 (since it is supposed to be released tomorrow :p), But, hopefully, it will make it to KDE SC 4.6.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Tenth Annual Debian Developer Conference – World’s Largest GNU/Linux Distribution Developers’ Conference about to start

    The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian GNU/Linux operating system, would like to invite you to participate in the upcoming Debian Conference which will take place from August 1 to 7, 2010, at New York City’s Columbia University in cooperation with the Columbia Computer Science department. This year’s conference is the first DebConf to be held in the United States in the 11-year history of the event. This year, more than 300 developers from all over the world, including Brazil, Argentina, Bosnia, Mexico, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Venezuela, and Latvia, will participate.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Kernel 2.6.35 available for Ubuntu 10.04

      The Ubuntu kernel developers tagged the 2.6.35 kernel as Ubuntu-lts-2.6.35-14.19 in their repository. For a step by step article to to compiling the 2.6.35 kernel follow my how to compile article.

Devices/Embedded

• Barnes & Noble Doubles Down on the Nook

  B&N plans to free up room for Nooks in part by shrinking space devoted to CDs; in this era, you gotta think that it probably would be deemphasizing sales of music on shiny discs no matter what. It says it’s not going to carry fewer dead-tree books.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • Cinemo Announces Support for MeeGo

      Cinemo, developers of performance enhanced embedded multimedia technologies for in-vehicle infotainment, consumer electronics, and industrial embedded computing, have announced full implementation of its solutions for the MeeGo open source Linux platform.

    • MeeGo to Power In Vehicle Infotainment, Joins Host of Linux Running Your Life

  • Android

    • Android Handset Sales Beat iPhone Amid Froyo 2.2 Update Frenzy for Evo, Droid

      Two separate reports today place sales of Android handsets ahead of Apple’s iPhone for the first time amid a frenzy of Froyo, or Android 2.2, update news for major smartphones including the Evo 4G and Droid.

      Verizon’s Android 2.2 update for the Motorola Droid — and perhaps Droid X — should begin by next week, and news of the upgrade comes on the heels of Sprint’s announcement that Android 2.2, dubbed Froyo, is going to start rolling out tomorrow for the HTC Evo 4G.

    • Android Deployments Up 886% Over Q2 2009

      International smartphone trend reporting firm Canalys released its Q2 2010 report today highlighting the growth of Android compared to the previous year and the continued success of Nokia, though the release was quick to point out that the competition is closing the gap.

• Sub-notebooks

  • Can’t wait for Chrome OS? Jolicloud’s cloud-based OS hits v1.0

  • Chrome OS vs Jolicloud

    As Google continues to twiddle it’s fingers over Chrome OS a rival ‘cloud OS’ called ‘Jolicloud’ has been making waves for the last few months. Jolicloud Operating System was developed by a company which was started by the founder of Netvibes; the OS has been gaining popularity and already seems like a viable alternative to Google’s Chrome OS.

• Tablets

  • Will Amazon Turn The Kindle E-Reader Into A Fully Fledged Tablet?

    Looking at the Kindle more closely, one can see the similarities with existing tablets on the market; Freescale ARM-11 CPU running at 532 MHz, 4GB internal memory, Wi-Fi and running a Linux-based OS. The only things missing are a decent colour touchscreen and a clear commitment from Amazon to proceed further.

10 Experimental PHP Projects Pushing the Envelope

As the saying goes, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” But in the world of programming, stretching boundaries is just part of the fun. The PHP community has never been one to shy away from bending their favorite language more ways than a shopping mall pretzel, and as the ten wild projects introduced in this article indicate, the fervor for experimentation is as strong as ever!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox To Make History, About To Surpass IE in Europe

    August has arrived. Time for a browser market share update. There is quite a bit of news this month, which, depending on your view, can be modified in virtually any direction you prefer. Microsoft likes the version in which IE has gained market share and pushed back Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla may like the one that embarrasses Microsoft and shows that it is about to overtake IE in Europe and Google will most likely state that there is a very good chance that it has now more than 10% of the market.

Databases

• Happy 10th Birthday, Firebird!

Oracle

• The Illumos Project decloaks on August 3

  A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we’re just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public.

• Sun takeover latest – Oracle still painfully silent

  OpenSolaris is far from alone in the orphanage. However, there are several organisations showing an interest in helping Oracle’s unwanted stepchildren. Since the takeover was completed, Sun’s former chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has been involved in setting up ForgeRock, a company which provides a new home for a host of Oracle’s apparently unloved and unwanted open source projects.

Project Releases

• An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.

  An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.

Openness/Sharing

• Marketing Software Skills

  Here’s the thing, software isn’t the only Open Source industry. In fact, many other open source businesses are very profitable and are generally skills that have been around for quite some time.

  Let’s think about Open Source for a moment. The first line of the Wikipedia article states…

  Open Source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials.

  To me, it’s just the way we’ve always done things.

• Open Access/Content

  • Copyright and Open Access for Academic Works

    In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds.

Do Not Call List Tops 200 Million, Some Scammers Still Ignore It

The Federal Trade Commission announced a milestone this week: its Do Not Call registry has just passed 200 million numbers.

It’s quite amazing that any of this came to pass, really. When the registry was being considered back in 2002, telemarketing opposition was fierce, and for obvious reasons. The industry was large, powerful, and willing to be unbelievably annoying. It also saw quite clearly that a tough Do Not Call rule would chop off its business at the knees.

Man faces jail for videotaping gun-waving cop

Police officer Joseph Uhler was caught on film charging out of his unmarked car and waving his gun at a unarmed motorcyclist pulled over for speeding. When the footage was uploaded to YouTube, authorities raided Anthony Graber’s home, seized his computers, arrested him, and charged him with “wiretapping” offenses that could land him in jail for 16 years.

Security/Aggression

• Bad guys could read RFID passports at 217 feet, maybe a lot more

  Radio frequency ID tags embedded in U.S. passports can be read hundreds of feet away, potentially making it inexpensive and easy to pick American tourists out of crowds for illicit purposes, a demonstration at Black Hat 2010 showed.

• Trust, transparency, and WikiLeaks: Who gets to have control?

  I’m not willing to argue that involuntary transparency–or as we’re calling it in this case, a leak–is by definition wrong in all cases. And leaks are hardly new–think of the WWII military refrain, “Loose lips sink ships.” History has been changed, sometimes clearly for the better, by involuntary transparency. If you’d like to consider it further, George Mason University has a webpage devoted to the history of leaks. And more than one person, including Daniel Ellsburg, has noted that it’s difficult not to think of the WikiLeaks story as the 2010 version of the Pentagon Papers.

• Mozilla Employee Hacks into Black Hat Video Stream

  The Black Hat security conference attracts the creme de la creme of the security industry. This year the organizers even offered a paid live stream for those unable to make the trip to Vegas. Called Black Hat Uplink, the service carried a $395 price tag. But as security expert Michael Coates found out, the price could be waived entirely, thanks to “a combination of logic flaws and misconfigured systems which provided access to a testing login page that could be used with user credentials that were not fully “registered” (e.g. no payment received). “

Environment/Wildlife

• How Sinar Mas is expanding its empires of destruction

  Sinar Mas group is notorious for its destruction of millions of hectares of Indonesian rainforest, peatland and wildlife habitat. Two divisions within the group lead the destruction: pulp and palm oil. Recently, the group has diversified into coal.

Finance

• Goldman’s Expensive Tastes Anger N.Y.C. Neighbors

  Local New York City residents are up in arms over a plan by Goldman Sachs to replace a discount shoe shop, a pizza joint, a recently closed New York Sports Club gym and a budget inn outside its new $2.1 billion headquarters with a string of designer restaurants and a luxury hotel. The Telegraph reported that the bank is being accused by denizens of “breaking promises.”

• Lenders Freeze Global Assets of Ex-CEOs by Using U.K. Courts

  Iceland’s failed Glitnir Bank hf and other lenders claiming they were stung by internal fraud during the financial crisis are winning U.K. court orders freezing the worldwide assets of ousted executives with ties to Britain.

  Glitnir in May froze the assets of Jon Asgeir Johannesson, its former principal shareholder, and won a second court victory last week after he violated the order by paying bills. Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, which defaulted on $12 billion of debt, and Intercontinental Bank Plc, the bailed-out Nigerian lender, won similar orders against former executives in the past year.

• Goldman Defends Its Collateral Calls to AIG

  Goldman has long been criticized for benefiting from the U.S. taxpayer bailout of AIG. Taxpayers pledged up to $182 billion to address problems at AIG’s financial products division.

• Financial News: Fund Sues Goldman Sachs Over Oil Bets

  An emerging markets hedge fund affiliated to Citigroup (C) has sued Goldman Sachs (GS) for its alleged failure to uphold its part of a trade involving Venezuelan oil warrants.

  Emerging Markets Special Opportunities Ltd, a hedge fund managed by Citigroup affiliate EMSO Partners, claims that over a three-year period Goldman failed to deliver oil warrants it had paid for.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Anti-P2P lawyers accused of copyright hypocrisy

    Have the copyright enforcers been caught with their hands in the cookie jar? The blog TorrentFreak today published its claim that the US Copyright Group, which has filed more than 14,000 lawsuits against anonymous P2P movie sharers, ripped off another copyright settlement group in crafting its own settlement website.

  • US Copyright Group Caught Red Handed Copying Competitor’s Website

  • What About Creating A Digital Transmission Right

    As soon as you set up this bureaucratic structure, what really happens is that much of the money that could have gone directly to the artists (or to the artists’ business partners) goes instead into the massive overhead required to keep the “collection society” working in the middle. This isn’t a solution that helps musicians. It’s a solution that helps bureaucratic middlemen.

  • DMX Wins Major Direct Licensing Royalties Case; May Fundamentally Change Performance Royalty Landscape

    A court decision this week may fundamentally change how composers, songwriters and publishers are paid royalties for public performances of their music, as the precedent created has laid the groundwork to shift many more music performances out of the hands of ASCAP, BMI and SESAC and into direct license deals with publishers and writers.

  • Marvel Issuing Takedowns Over Thor Trailer; Hey Marvel: Trailers Are Advertising

    It’s a trailer. The whole idea of it is to act as advertising for the movie and get people more interested in seeing the movie. And having people put it online for you makes it free advertising, which is even better. So why take it down at all?

  • ACTA

    • Protecting Pizza, Port and Parma™

      The latest round of CETA negotiations took place last week in Brussels, with the GI issue (along with protections for industrial designs that cover the fashion industry) a top priority for the European delegation. The Canadian government unsurprisingly faces some opposition to the demands from domestic producers.

      Similarly, the ACTA negotiations, which have become increasingly acrimonious, have hit a major roadblock with the Europeans demanding extensive new enforcement powers — including criminal and civil penalties — for GI violations. The U.S. and Canada have been resisting the demand, leading Karel de Gucht, a European commissioner, to warn last week that this was a “red line” issue that could cause the EU to rethink the merits of the entire treaty.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Journal Insider – September 2010

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

As Michael said, proper use of a credit card requires a level of discipline. Some people get along very well with credit cards, while other people have difficulty in budgeting their purchases. If you’re the sort of person who feels comfortable maintaining a credit line, the Linux Fund (or BSD Fund) card is one way in which you can support open source without making a direct donation. Simply buying groceries, purchasing clothes or paying bills with a Fund card will help, in a small way, to support community events and various open source projects.

Consider open source appliances for backup

Backup used to be simple in SMB environments: You slapped on your tape and autoloader, scheduled backup in the backup application, and set it to run. Occasionally you would test to see that it actually did run. Most of the time it worked; when it didn’t you could troubleshoot the problem and make sure backup ran that night. No harm, no foul.

Kernel Space

• What’s new in Linux 2.6.35

  Measures to support the power saving mechanisms of AMD graphics chips, network code optimisations for multi-core processors, features for de-fragmenting the working memory and an improved support of the power management and turbo features offered by modern processors are KL 2635 Logo among the highlights of the new kernel version.

• Intel Releases PowerTop 1.13 With New Features

  While it may have seemed like PowerTop was idling by for a while without a new release or any major advancements to this open-source utility for analyzing power consumption to find programs causing more wake-ups than necessary and to provide other power savings tips on Intel-based Linux systems, a new release has emerged. Intel released PowerTop v1.13 recently and it adds a few new features to the power table along with a number of bug-fixes.

Applications

• Top 10 Avant Window Navigator AWN Themes #Part 2

  Been a long time for changing Avant window Navigator theme, found really cool collection on deviantart, you will find many themes appropriate for your desktop and installed themes you have even it was dark theme or bright theme.

• Cloud-based RSS reading with Google Reader and Liferea

  The other day, my normal desktop RSS feed reader decided to cause me more grief than not, so I started looking for another client. At the same time, I decided to give Google Reader a try (I had looked at it briefly when it had initially come out but didn’t do anything with it, satisfied as I was with my desktop client). I liked what I saw and, more importantly, now see the value of a cloud-based service like Google Reader, that can be used and integrated with other applications on other operating systems.

• Puppet – server management made easy

  If you have more than a handful of servers, maintaining them by hand becomes a tedious task. Of course, you can automate this with shell scripts, but this is an ad hoc solution. Puppet can help you to reach a more consistent way of managing your servers. All your configuration changes are made in a central repository and pushed to your various servers, which can be Linux, BSD or Solaris. There are lot of ready-made Puppet modules to configure various system components, and everyone can write their own Puppet modules.

• Christine – Small media player based on Gstreamer

• Proprietary

  • Convirture Aims to Be VMware for Linux Data Centers

    Relative newcomer Convirture holds that it is plugging a major hole by specializing in managing open-source Xen, KVM virtualization and private cloud deployments.

  • [Opera] Second release candidate for 10.61

• Instructionals

  • Linux data recovery:GRUB Error 17 and Recovery Options

  • Build Linux Apps from Source with Checkinstall for Fewer Problems

  • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 13

  • Get to know Linux: Grub2

  • Load Balancing using the CUPS Print Queues

  • Changing screen resolution at the command line

  • Compile VLC 1.1.2 on Fedora 13

  • How to set static or fixed IP address using DHCP

  • Conky Colors Makes Your Conky Beautiful In Seconds (Version 3.20 Released)

  • Dual Boot Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13 Goddard with Shared /home

  • The New Ubuntu (10.10) Font Available For (almost) Everyone

  • Dial-up Internet Access With A USB Modem in Ubuntu

  • Debian and Plymouth

  • How To Use Single Monitor, Keyboard and Mouse To Access Multiple Computers

  • How to convert MP3 to OGG using VLC

  • Solving the Freeze Problem with APT-GET / Synaptic

  • How To Load Multiple Desktops on One Linux Distribution

  • Get all the required Process Information and Statistics – Psinfo

  • How to create a free audio link over the Internet using an old PC, Ubuntu Linux and Icecast streaming software.

  • useful uses of OpenSSH

  • Protect Linux Against Overflow Exploits

  • Creating UI Mockups in Inkscape Video Tutorial

  • Linux Scratch Ebook Avialable for Free Download

    Linux from Scratch available for free is a project that describes all information for creating your own customized Linux operating system. It can be customized as your choice using the source of software code which has more control capacity for the system.

  • Using Checkinstall To Build Packages From Source

• Games

  • HoN Free2Play Week For Everyone !

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • [Plasma] in case you missed it …

    # tons of work on Plasma Mobile, which can not only make phone calls now but which has an innovative and common sense approach to interacting with desktop widgets even on those tiny screens. Marco is doing some amazing work, including screencasts. It’s Sunday today and guess what I see on the commit logs as they roll past my screen? Yep, Marco hacking on Plasma Mobile. Commitment, baby, commitment!

  • writing a plasma shell

    We get asked from time to time “Why Plasma?” or “What is the purpose of libplasma, exactly?”. Or we get compared to other projects out there, even though there are only passing similarities. (I have yet to find another single project that approaches this problem space in the same way Plasma does; either Plasma is fairly unique or I’m just not looking hard enough. I have my stock answer about a scalable, repurposable interface component system with a high degree of data/visualization separation that emphasizes scripting, etc.

Distributions

• 4 Educational Linux Distributions

  Today, we’ll review 4 different desktop distributions specifically designed for educational and academic use.

• Ubuntu vs. Red Hat: Who really contributes the most to Linux

  I also think that for a long time there’s been too much emphasis on coding. The people who popularize Linux, the people who write about Linux, the people who run LUGs (Linux User Groups) and community Linux shows, and the businesses that have committed to Linux also deserve credit.

  Yes, the people who write Linux are vital, and Red Hat is the clear leader in producing code — but it’s not just about who writes the code. If you look at the bigger picture, I think Canonical deserves a lot of the credit as well for Linux turning into a grown-up family of operating systems.

• Healing old wounds

  Red Hat’s success in proving a viable business model around a distribution was a very significant milestone in that quest, for all of us. I don’t mean to diminish that achievement when I point out that it’s come at the cost of dividing the world into those that buy RHEL, and those that can’t or won’t. Red Hat’s success is well deserved, and our work at Canonical is not in any sense motivated by desire to take that away. Red Hat is here to stay, there will always be a market for the product, and as a result, we all have the reassurance that our contributions can find a sustainable path into the hands of at least part of the world’s population.

  Canonical’s mission is to expand the options, to find out if it’s possible to have a sustainable platform without that dividing line. We know that our quest would not be possible without your pioneering, but we don’t feel that’s riding on anybody’s coat-tails. We feel we have to break new ground, do new things, add new ingredients, and all of that is a substantial contribution in turn. But we don’t do it because we think Red Hat is “wrong”, and we don’t expect it to take anything away from Red Hat at all. We do it to add to the options, not to replace them.

• GNOME Study Shows Red Hat Desktop Development Lead

  At last week’s GUADEC (GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference), held in The Hague, Netherlands, Neary Consulting published the results of a very interesting GNOME Census study exploring “who develops GNOME.” Of course, readers will already know that GNOME is the default desktop environment for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as it is for many other desktop Linux distributions, such as Debian and Ubuntu.

• Reviews

  • Distro Hoppin`: Pinguy OS

    Pinguy gained a deserving spot inside my Distro CD/DVD wallet. I will not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wants a fresh, friendly and featureful Linux OS. More experienced users will most likely diss it for shoving all these applications down their throat, but if they’ll give it a look or two, they might appreciate the effort.

  • Benchmarks Of The Gentoo-Based Calculate Linux Desktop

    The benchmarks we ran across Calculate Linux Desktop, Ubuntu, Sabayon, and Fedora were OpenArena, World of Padman, 7-Zip, LAME MP3, FFmpeg, x264, OpenSSL, GraphicsMagick, Himeno, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, Apache, C-Ray, PostMark, Gzip, and Parallel BZIP2. All of this testing was done by the Phoronix Test Suite, which supports automated testing on the aforementioned distributions plus plenty of other distributions and Unix-like operating systems.

• PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva paywalls

    As this video suggests, trying to get users to pay for things which in other distros “just work” is the sign of a bad business model. Technically they’re perfectly within their rights to charge for Gstreamer or other software components, since it’s kosher to charge for free software if that’s what you want to do. However, they would be much better off if the paying element was concentrated on product differentiating applications or services.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Developer Conference Under Way in New York City

    The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City. DebConf 2010 is the first time the event has been held in the United States.

  • DebConf 10: Day 1

    The first day of DebConf is known as Debian Day. While most of DebConf is for the benefit of people involved in Debian itself, Debian Day is aimed at a wider audience, and invites the public to learn about, and interact with, the Debian project.

  • Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 204

      In This Issue

      * The Open Source Community Responds to Dave Neary’s GNOME Census Work Presentation at GUADEC
      * Ubuntu Global Jam: Start Your Engines!
      * Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha-3 coming next week
      * 10.04.1 Release Schedule Update
      * Fixing Ubuntu Software Center Descriptions
      * New Kubuntu website is live!
      * Ubuntu Font Beta: now with added Bold
      * Ubuntu News Team – Needs You!!
      * Ubuntu Stats
      * Monthly Reports
      * LoCo Council meeting time change
      * Ubuntistas, the magazine of the Greek LoCo
      * Ubuntu Q&A community in Shapado – progress
      * Ubuntu Hour in Bangalore
      * Became members of Ubuntu Colombia
      * Come to the Ubuntu side, we have badges
      * Limerick Ubuntu hour a success
      * Second San Francisco Ubuntu Hour
      * Ubuntu China LoCo Team resigning and nomination meeting
      * Launchpad News
      * Dear Ubuntu Community – Thank You
      * My Motivation for Doing Opensource
      * Cleansweep Update!
      * This week in design – 30 July 2010
      * Design by enthusiasm
      * In The Press
      * In The Blogosphere
      * 10 reasons why your kids should be using Linux
      * Canonical fluffs one-click Ubuntu cloud stack
      * GNOME 3 not ready yet, release pushed back to 2011
      * Using ALSA to Control Linux Audio
      * Try Out Opera Mini In Ubuntu
      * Latest ATI Video Driver Has Support for Ubuntu 10.04
      * Ubuntu Server makes gains at SUSE Linux’ expense
      * bzr-svn 1.0.3 announced
      * bzr-git 0.5.2 announced
      * Whitelisting Advances with New Bouncer App
      * Dell to Continue to Sell Ubuntu Systems, Just Not on Its UK Website
      * TurnKey Linux: GNU high school: teaching kids by contributing to open source
      * Full Circle Magazine Issue 39 is available
      * Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
      * Monthly Team Reports: July 2010
      * Upcoming Meetings and Events
      * Updates and Security
      * UWN Sneak Peek
      * and much much more!

    • Ubuntu Needs a New Sound Theme

      We want to reduce the number of sounds you’ll hear on a default Ubuntu installation, with an emphasis on making sound a usability feature instead of an annoyance. So we’re clipping out things like ‘button-pressed’ and ‘service-logout’, and working towards shorter and less intrusive, more refined audio set.

    • Ubuntu 10.10 To Ship With Firefox 3.6

    • Ubuntu Business (Part Two)

      Matthew Barker, of Canonical’s Corporate Services told us that Canonical, a private limited company, has offices in London, Boston, Montreal and Taiwan, and well over 300 staff in twenty-five different countries. Some of their customers who have deployed Ubuntu include Qualcomm, University of York, NHS, T-Mobile, French Gendarmes and LVM Versicherungen.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • In Search of the Perfect KDE4 Distro – 3 Linux Mint 9

        Part three of this series, and I am writing this from Linux Mint 9 KDE4. Already I am feeling very at home with it, and already after working heavily with quite a few KDE distros in a short timeframe I begin to realise some things that I find wrong with them are KDE specific.

        Is Linux Mint 9 the KDE nirvana I am looking for?

        This will only be a short writeup, my full review on Linux Mint 9 KDE will follow later in the week…

      • Jolicloud: The future is HTML 5

        Tariq Krim, the co-founder of web portal company Netvibes, has a new project that takes open source and the cloud into the ever-expanding portable-computing market.

        The French entrepreneur’s latest venture is Jolicloud, a Linux distribution that bears as much resemblance to a modern smartphone operating system (OS) as it does to a traditional desktop OS. Jolicloud, which targets the netbook market in particular, has a launcher that is built in HTML 5 and a core cloud-based service that allows the user to back up and synchronise chosen apps between multiple installations.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo

    • MeeGo 1.0 IVI For Your Car Is Released

      MeeGo 1.0 for netbooks was released back in May (and an update already released to that) while a month ago there was an early release of MeeGo 1.1 For Handsets released with the official release coming later in the year with MeeGo 1.1 for netbooks. Today “MeeGo 1.0 IVI” has been released and this is designed for in-vehicle infotainment systems.

• Sub-notebooks

  • One Laptop Per Child Finds New Partners in Sri Lanka Test Run

    One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has had its fair share of critique and controversy, but if any of that is putting a damper on the project, someone forgot to tell its founder, MIT Media’ Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte–now he’s partnered with IT consulting group, Virtusa, which has decided to run user scenarios and tests to help improve the software and hardware behind OLPC.

BSD

• Welcome!

  Welcome to the PC-BSD blog! Here we hope to keep you up-to-date with what’s happening with the PC-BSD operating system and what features are in the works. We also want to hear your comments and feedback so we can find out what is useful and interesting to PC-BSD users and become aware of any pain points or requests for new features.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• LibrePlanet 2010: Eben Moglen on the current state of free software

  At this year’s LibrePlanet conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center gave a keynote speech on the current state of free software and the free software movement.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Arduino: The Documentary, a Movie About Open Source Hardware

    The Arduino is a type of open source hardware that we covered in The Atlantic in January. “Using an Arduino is fairly straightforward: buy a board (ranging from about $19 to $65) and attach it to a personal computer via a cable. Then load instructions into the Arduino’s processor via the personal computer,” William Gurstelle explained. “Once programmed, the Arduino makes decisions based on the information transmitted by whatever sensors you’ve hooked up, and does something corporeal, such as turn on or off the motors, displays, valves, and lights attached to it.”

Programming

• August Project of the Month: Wireshark

  We’re thrilled to honor network protocol analyzer Wireshark as August’s Project of the Month, one of SourceForge’s longest-lived projects. Originally named Ethereal, its been under development for more than 12 years and is used by companies like Google and Citigroup.

• Too Smart for Git

  Gerrit acts as an intermediary between developers and the origin repository. You send commits to Gerrit and it holds them in purgatory until they are signed off on by another developer. Then, if the commit applies cleanly to the branch, Gerrit applies it. Otherwise, it asks you to upload a merge commit, which is where the fun really starts.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy

  Uber is the Executive Director of a highly secretive group called Project Vigilant, which, as Greenberg writes, “monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers” and “hands much of that information to federal agencies.” More on that in a minute. Uber revealed yesterday that Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning to the federal government for allegedly confessing to being the WikiLeaks leaker, was a “volunteer analyst” for Project Vigilant; that it was Uber who directed Lamo to federal authorities to inform on Manning by using his contacts to put Lamo in touch with the “highest level people in the government” at “three letter agencies”; and, according to a Wired report this morning, it was Uber who strongly pressured Lamo to inform by telling him (falsely) that he’d likely be arrested if he failed to turn over to federal agents everything he received from Manning.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Ubuntu’s Wild Ride on the Dell Roller Coaster

  There are many occupational hazards associated with being a fan of FOSS, but one Linux Girl never expected to have to endure is what’s afflicting her now: whiplash.

  Yes, after all the unexpected twists and turns in Dell’s (Nasdaq: DELL) approach to Ubuntu, another surprise maneuver came up last week that was simply too much.

  The move in question, you ask? Well, just days after the news broke that Dell had removed all Ubuntu-preloaded machines from its site, reports emerged that the company is actually *expanding* its desktop Ubuntu selection.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE SC4 Architecture and What it Means for the Future

    KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly (August 4th, 2010), roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals. The critical shift KDE SC took in this series is abstracting the desktop from the underlying system through three pillars, phonon, plasma and solid making the desktop some sort of a virtual platform environment and easily portable to other operating systems.

  • Sports Activity Tracking App: The Baby Needs a Name

    This one’s an activity and sports tracking application similar to the .NET-behemoth Sport Tracks or Garmin Training Center.

    It’s not a hundred percent complete yet and has its share of rough edges, but to give you an impression of what works already,

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Ubuntu Studio 2.1 (Puppy Edition)

  • Frenzy 1.3 (just update)

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Leads Corporate Contributions to GNOME Desktop Project

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today highlights its leadership in open source desktop development with its ranking as the top corporate contributor to the GNOME project. In a census study published by Neary Consulting at GUADEC, held last week in The Hague, Netherlands, Red Hat placed first among the total 106 companies that have contributed to GNOME development over the past 10 years with nearly 17 percent of the total code commits. The study also showed that nine out of the top 20 contributors are Red Hat employees.

Devices/Embedded

• Android

  • ARM Powered Android LEGO MultiCuber 777

Is The “Open Source Bubble” Over?

Usually it’s a desire for control or exclusivity in some form, but the outcome is always to negate the “open source effect” by limiting the ability of every participant to get what they want and thus give what they can. While there’s clearly a niche for one or two expertly-balanced businesses, the propensity of commentators to focus on these colourful exceptions has created the perception this is the norm.

Can Day Software Propel Adobe Towards a More Open Business Strategy?

As most involved in the broad content management market, I’ve seen the news of the week: Adobe acquires Day Software, the hot WCM vendor.

[...]

Adobe could concentrate on monetizing global service offerings: Omniture, Livecycle, end-to-end workflows for medias, acrobat.com on steroids, more online services, etc. Commoditizing the core WCM technology would keep the competition busy and let them make money where they hardly have any meaningful competition, innovate more with new services spanning and leveraging the wide reach of their offerings. We also would see an ecosystem thrive on CQ5, providing the ignition — for free — Adobe needs to enter the market. Kinda the Google way, after all.

Actually the more I think to this and after having read Adobe’s plan for Day, I think it’s the best way to achieve it. If they truly want to create a platform for customer engagement management, this is the way. This is how the industry builds big platform nowadays, by open source software.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• German ministries flout IT open interoperability requirements

  Research published this week suggests that the majority of federal government departments in Germany are ignoring requirements to implement Open Standards.

  A survey was conducted by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to investigate the state of government adoption of ODF, and to promote wider uptake of Open Standards. “Although federal policy has wisely embraced Open Standards for interoperability, accessibility and security, it is clear that most government bodies are still using inefficient proprietary formats” said Karsten Gerloff, President of FSFE. “Ultimately citizens will end up paying the price for this lack of conformity through higher bills for public IT contracts, and slower services due to interoperability problems” he added. “They will also pay a price in freedom, as they are forced to use proprietary software and standards to communicate with government authorities”.

Project Releases

• OTRS 3.0 Beta 1 includes new GUI

  OTRS Inc. has announced the release of the first beta of OTRS (Open source Ticket Request System) version 3.0, the company’s open source help desk system. According to OTRS Research and Development Director Manuel Hecht, the latest development version results in “up to 30% quicker ticket turnaround under demanding high-usage scenarios, on top of enhanced features and accessibility.”

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Open data and the voluntary sector

    Here at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) we’ve recently started taking an interest in open data, and its implication for charities and the voluntary sector.

    We know that some voluntary organisations which specialise in open data have been leading the charge – the Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit company, mySociety is a registered charity – and often the most exciting and innovative uses of open data are made by volunteers in their spare time. But we know that many voluntary organisations find it difficult to find the time and skills to develop their ICT capabilities, and can find the challenge of implementing new technologies in their organisation daunting. This is daunting not just because of the time and resources required, but also because it requires a change in organisational culture.

  • Can You Make Money from Open Source+Open Data?

    By contrast, the data underlying Google’s search engine is public – anyone can go out and crawl the entire Web (indeed, companies like Microsoft do that). But for all its support of free software, Google does not make the key part of its code – its PageRank algorithm – public.

    So, it’s definitely true that some of the most important players in the digital world offer either open source or open data, but not both: is it *necessarily* true, though?

  • From journalists to interpreters – is data changing the way we work?

    Well, the last year has answered that question for us. It has been an incredible one for public data. Obama opened up the US government’s data faults as his first legislative act (http://www.data.gov/), followed by government data sites around the world – Australia (http://data.australia.gov.au/), New Zealand http://www.data.govt.nz/, the British government’s Data.gov.uk and of course the London datastore.

• Open Access/Content

  • $200 Textbook vs. Free. You Do the Math.

    “We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”

    The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.

Financial Times chief sees paywalls as ‘morally’ necessary to protect journalism

Taken in the economic context of the rest of the interview, it makes him appear ignorant of the fact market forces, not the opinions of free culture advocates, are what’s hurting his traditional industry. Not a smart impression to give, even if you are turning a profit.

Science

• Department Of Outlandish Ideas: Build Solar Roadways

  If you want to change the world, you have to think big. Say what you want about the feasibility of Scott Brusaw’s idea to replace asphalt roads with miles of solar ribbons that cars and trucks can drive on, it is a very ambitious idea. Brusaw is the co-founder and CEO of Solar Roadways, a bootstrapped startup in Idaho. He is an engineer, and is building prototypes of solar panels that could be used as roads.

• Quantum memory may topple Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle

  A quantum memory may be all scientists need to beat the limit of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, according to a paper published in Nature Physics. According to a group of researchers, maximally entangling a particle with a quantum memory and measuring one of the particle’s variables, like its position, should snap the quantum memory in a corresponding state, which could then be measured. This would allow them to do something long thought verboten by the laws of physics: figure out the state of certain pairs of variables at the exact same time with an unprecedented amount of certainty.

Environment/Wildlife

• Negative Equity in Underwater Homes

  Calculated Risk gathers the data on underwater homes:

  * There are 14.75 million underwater homes and 4.1 million of these have more than 50% negative equity (the homeowners owe 50%+ more than their homes are worth).
  * The total negative equity is $771 billion.

• Garbage islands threaten China’s Three Gorges dam

  Thousands of tonnes of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so think people can stand on it, state media said on Monday.

  Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that 3,000 tonnes of rubbish was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up. “The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam,” Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.

• Radioactive Boar on the Rise in Germany

  As Germany’s wild boar population has skyrocketed in recent years, so too has the number of animals contaminated by radioactivity left over from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Government payments compensating hunters for lost income due to radioactive boar have quadrupled since 2007.

Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

• Give & Take: Fifth Amendment Complicates Net Neutrality

  Opponents of net neutrality, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, have pointed to numerous grounds upon which the detrimental scheme could be challenged. These include its deterrent effect on investment, its unsatisfactory grounding in FCC statutory authority, and that it violates the First Amendment.

  A forthcoming paper from Boston College Law Professor Daniel Lyons offers an even stronger basis for challenge: The Fifth Amendment. Under Prof. Lyons’s theory, net neutrality would run afoul of eminent domain. It would constitute a regulatory taking, requiring just compensation.

Intellectual Monopolies

• NAMCO Demands Takedown Of Pacman Game Created By Kid Using MIT’s Scratch Programming Language

  An anonymous reader sends over the story, found on Reddit of how Namco Bandai sent a letter complaining that a kid recreated Pacman online using Scratch. If you’re not familiar with it, Scratch is a very simple programming “language,” basically designed to teach kids how to program (or think about programming) from a young age. And what’s one of the best ways to learn to program? It’s to recreate an app that already exists.

• Copyrights

  • Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

    At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.

  • Hey NY Times: Can You Back Up The Claim Of $200 Billion Lost To Counterfeiting?

    It’s getting really frustrating watching the supposedly professional press repeat stats that have been thoroughly debunked as if they’re factual, so I think it’s about time that people started calling out the publications and reporters who make these mistakes directly. So, Stephanie Clifford, reporter for the NY Times, can you give any evidence whatsoever to support the claim that you made in your article this past weekend that counterfeiting “costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year?” I don’t think that Clifford can, because that number has been thoroughly debunked time and time again.