05.11.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Desktop
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I mentioned this before: desktop computers are quickly becoming an endangered species seen only on corporate campuses. Laptops, which are still the mainstay of the industry are slowly losing ground to ultra-portable tablet devices. Everyone seems to agree that future is mobile computing. We are boldly moving into a new era where consumer facing devices are portable, wearable and touch controlled – and era that some started to call “post-PC”.
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While every *buntu and *edora moving towards Unity, Gnome3, Cinnamon or MATE, only two distributions remain practical for desktop productivity and fun, they are CentOS 6.* and Debian 6.*. They both will support the good old gnome2 line at least couple years more. However, they are a lot different from each other. Here’s a short description on each of them vis-a-vis desktop use.
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Jack Wallen found many people had strong opinions about his claim that Ubuntu 12.04 nailed the desktop to near perfection. As a result, Jack questions whether the “perfect desktop” is attainable.
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What is it that web developers want? That’s what Dell is trying to find out with its just-launched Project Sputnik, an “experimental” laptop bundled with Ubuntu Linux plus utilities, and with an easy on-ramp to github repositories coming soon. Sputnik looks like Dell’s attempt to wrest the attention of the many web developers that have defected to OS X, but chafe at the restrictions Apple’s walled garden imposes on them.
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Server
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In New York’s Financial District, Linux is your MAMA. The Linux Foundation (that’s Greg Kroah-Hartman in the center and to his right is Jim Zemlin) rang the closing bell at the NYSE yesterday.
The Linux Foundation is in NYC for their End User conference, which also served as a backdrop for an OpenMAMA announcement.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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If you’re in the UK this Saturday, why not head over to Manchester for the fantastic UCubed open source unconference. There are only 40 tickets left!
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Kernel Space
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Btrfs will work faster and handle errors better, Linux 3.4 already supports chipsets that Intel won’t release until next year, and Greg Kroah-Hartman is putting pressure on Zcache developers to finally improve their staging code.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Linux MultiMedia Studio is a remarkably feature-filled application for creating music and sounds. It has tools to go beyond just creating musical sounds. It lets me re-arrange sounds and rhythms with a click-and-drag action. I can layer the tracks to create songs. In fact, it’s so packed with possibilities that newcomers may be a little intimidated by its interface.
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At first glance Linux Live USB Creator looks much like UNetbootin, theUniversal USB Installer, and every other tool that aims to help you download and create a bootable Linux environment for your PC. And as those existing tools are generally very good it’s not immediately obvious why we might need another.
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It’s been quite a long time since Microsoft first unveiled Windows Media Center. The entertainment tool catered to a special group of users who wanted to convert their computer into a full-fledged media center. And though Redmond’s ambitious endeavor never really got the expected response, the idea of having a media center on a computer appealed to many users.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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After a week of interesting Valve Linux news on Phoronix, Friday afternoon there was a special Linux delivery at Valve’s offices for their “Linux cabal” — the team of Valve developers that are working to provide the Linux versions of the Steam client and various Source Engine-powered games natively on Linux.
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Linux Game Publishing is a software company specialized in porting games to the Linux platform. Since 2001, LGP has accomplished many great things on a field that very few people had the guts to explore and invest in. On this interview, we talk with the new CEO of the company in an attempt to learn more about the difficulties of the past, as well as the plans for a brighter linux gaming future. Enjoy!
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Speed Dreams is an open source, multi platform (works on Windows and Linux) motorsport simulator that was forked from the open racing simulator TORCS with the purpose of adding new features such as new cars, tracks, AI opponents and making the game more enjoyable and realistic.
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Desktop Environments
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The developers of the Xfce desktop environment have released the newest version of their suite of applications. Xfce 4.10, which was released roughly fifteen months after its stable predecessor Xfce 4.8, comes with new orientation modes for the panel, a rewritten application finder and more fine tuning to its overall look and feel.
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Choice is one of the best parts of the desktop Linux world, where there’s a distribution to suit virtually every taste and purpose.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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It has been several years since I spent any significant amount of time with the productivity suite known as KOffice. The project, designed to work hand-in-hand with the KDE desktop, has maintained a small niche over the years by being an office suite with a small foot print that features an interface designed to fit in with other KDE/Qt software.
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May 4, 2012. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.8 series. 4.8.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.8 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.8.2 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.
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ROSA, on the other hand, has unveiled its new release candidate of Marathon EE (EE is the version including non-free stuff, like the extinct Mandriva ONE). I downloaded, gave it a run in Live mode, and this is what I found:
ROSA presents some animated bars as the Live environment is becoming ready to launch. After a while of waiting (the wait was shorter than with Mandriva Desktop 2011, I must say), you are greeted by this desktop:
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There is wide variety of Linux Distros in the market. Each one differs in size, design, support and layout, although the basic function is the same. Each distros offers several unique features apart from main features. There is a heavy competition among distributors to create and develop unique features. Each of these distros offers different types of support systems such as forums, live chat, and other means. That is why it is necessary to select the distributor based on your requirement.
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It is the mystery of mysteries, the one that ranks up there with the Gordian Knot, crop circles, and how many licks does it take to get the center of Tootsie Pop: what is the greatest Linux distro of all?
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This is part one of a multi-part series about my experiences creating a LFS system for the first time.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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In his usual man-of-a-few-words manner today, Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, announced that enough funds have been secured to allow Mandriva to keep its doors open and continue development. With Croset saying little else, users at least have a nugget of good news to sustain them.
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Mageia 2 RC was planned for today but tests and debug are still going on to finalize it. We hope to deliver it in coming days.
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Gentoo Family
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I have been running Sabayon Linux (Xfce) for the past couple of months and figured I would throw a post up on here describing my experience with it.
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Red Hat Family
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As previously announced, Red Hat has open sourced its OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. The community version of the product, which has been named OpenShift Origin, can be downloaded as a Fedora-based live CD that may be used to set up an OpenShift instance on a spare machine or using VirtualBox.
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Her responsibilities with the open source technology provider include overseeing the system integrator community that provides services to the public sector.
Corddry is a well-versed technology veteran, serving with companies including NetApp and systems integrators firm Unisys. She recently spoke with ExecutiveBiz about her experiences at each firm, Red Hat’s subscription model successes and market opportu
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Fedora
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Some of you may have noticed that Fedora 16 and Fedora 17 basically have the same kernel. The astute of you might have also noticed F15 does as well [1]. All three main Fedora branches are currently sitting at the Linux 3.3.2 release, with Linux 3.3.3 already committed to the git repository. So if they’re all based on the same kernel version, that means they’re all identical, right? And if so, why bother upgrading, right? Well, not quite. There are some differences, and I thought I’d take a minute to explain what those are and why.
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Tatica broke the news about the Fedora 18 release name in Vienna to Emichan and me and we have been discussing it tonight. We all have some concerns with it.
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There’s one feature In the upcoming Fedora 17 release that is immensly useful but very little known, since its feature page ‘ckremoval’ does not explicitly refer to it in its name: true automatic multi-seat support for Linux.
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Debian Family
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The primary version of Linux Mint uses Ubuntu as its source, but to think that it is the only source would be wrong; there’s also the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE).
Apart from its Debian roots, LMDE differs from regular Mint versions by being a rolling release; meaning that the system is constantly and gradually updated, rather than having a massive update every six months bundled into a new release of the distro that demands a new installation or comprehensive updating sequence. Hence, LMDE should only ever need be installed once.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) has just been released. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is a long-term support release, which means it is supported for five years. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 11.10 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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My first experience with it dates back to testing Ubuntu 5.10. I made the switch not too long afterward with the Ubuntu 6.06 release. Coming away from a KDE-centric distribution, I found the switch to a Linux distro offering GNOME as its preferred desktop to be interesting. Previously I had used KDE almost exclusively, so having an opportunity to spend some time with GNOME piqued my interest.
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buntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, was released last week, and I’ve been updating my Linux boxes to the shiny new version of the operating system. The upgrade system has gotten a lot smoother in recent years, but I still like to do a fresh installation for each release on my PC and netbook. In this short roundup, I’ll look at some great third-party applications that you can get from the Software Center to augment your Ubuntu installation.
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Well, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an Ubuntu 12.04 review, with pictures, videos, step-by-step instructions and everything else imaginable. So rather than write yet another, I am going to take a different approach – a quick result run-down and a few comments about installing it on the various computers around here. As I have a fairly wide variety of hardware, in both configuration and age, this should cover a lot of different situations, and perhaps offer hope and encouragement to those considering upgrading (or especially those considering installing for the first time), and consolation to those who might have tried and run into trouble.
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So what is/are Ubuntu Accomplishments? To keep it short, imagine achievements on console games that get added to your profile when you complete a certain action in a game. Its a nifty idea that extends the playability of game and surprisingly (though I would not have thought it before) acts as a very inspiring means to get people involved with Ubuntu.
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This morning Matthias Klose announced Quantal open for development. While it has not even been a week since the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, with the six-month release cycle it’s already time to get working on the Ubuntu Quantal release. Coming up next week is also the Ubuntu 12.10 Developer Summit where some of the new features will be discussed for this release expected to land in mid-October, per the Ubuntu 12.10 release schedule.
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The release of Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) hasn’t exactly made critics warm to Ubuntu’s Unity interface. However, Unity having gone through several versions, a definite tone of acceptance — or maybe resignation — colors discussion of the new release. Although Unity isn’t a critical favorite, the pundits are at least resigned to the fact that it isn’t going away.
Partly, this change is simply the result of the passage of time. Obsessive outrage is hard for most of us to maintain for more than a few months. A couple of years of testing and use is also enough for the shock of the new to be blunted and replaced by a closer approximation of objectivity.
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With roughly 98 percent of the desktop and laptop market spoken for, you’d be forgiven for thinking your only choices for powering your computer were Windows or Mac OS X. There is another way, though. Linux may only run on a tiny sliver of consumer PCs, but the number is growing and one of the biggest players propelling its popularity is Ubuntu. Since bursting on the scene eight years ago, the distro has grown to dominate the desktop Linux market and made plenty of fans (and a few detractors) along the way. Truth is, Ubuntu is completely unique and, at least compared to other distros out there, very user-friendly. It also happens to have a very active community of developers and users willing to lend help to those in need, which makes it appealing to Linux vets, enterprise users and *nix n00bs alike.
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Ubuntu spans the whole open source ecosystem. I think it’s convenient for Ubuntu’s competitors to talk about a split between Ubuntu and GNOME. But I know lots of GNOME developers who don’t see things that way at all, they write apps because they want them to be used, and Ubuntu is an amazing conduit for their work to millions of users.
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He’s the founder of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical, and is the creative force behind not on the Unity desktop but its expansion to new form factors.
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It seems to be quite a common belief among potential Ubuntu contributors, that it is very difficult to contribute source code to Ubuntu. I have met with such opinion many times, in bug reports, comments at OMG!Ubuntu!, at AskUbuntu. There is quite a lot of people who might help and write some real code, but are not willing to do so, because they are overwhelmed by the size of the project.
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I’m confident that any version of Ubuntu released in the last five years will have absolutely no problem beating [Windows 8],” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. Of course, “after the success of Windows 7, this is Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory,” she added. “What’s the logic? Did Steve Ballmer secretly invest a fortune in Apple stock or something? Off his meds? Run out of chairs?”
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I am officially kicking off the start of the spring hunting season with a long review of Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin. ‘Tis a silly name, but it’s a five-year Long Term Support (LTS) release. Previously, Ubuntu would only offer three years, and anyone using RedHat or CentOS would laugh at this. Not anymore, five years is a respectable figure, by all means.
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The new version of Ubuntu–12.04, codename “Precise Pangolin”– is officially here, meaning two things: I get to be really happy about new features, and some people get to complain about Unity in the comments. Horray!
It’s been a year since Ubuntu made Unity the default interface, and man: many of you were not happy. I was thrilled, however: in my opinion Unity is better looking and easier to use than any other Linux user interface. Sure: there were some rough edges in that release, but overall I got the Linux desktop I’d been trying to hack Gnome into becoming for years.
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The arrival of Ubuntu 12.04 attracted a lot of attention just over a week ago, both from users and critics alike. In fact, Ubuntu’s new long-term support tempted attracted so many people that I was unable to connect to the project’s download servers on the day of the release and had to turn to the torrent files to get the latest version.
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In this phenomenal times for Linux Gaming there are even more great things to come for Linux soon. As some of you know, Ubuntu Developer Summit is going to take place in California on 7–11 May this year. As usually it is going to be an event for discussing new ideas, plans and solutions for the next Ubuntu release. However this time there will be a special guest talking to the audience, one of the biggest video games publishers – Electronic Arts.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu’s new financial backers – Blue Systems – have ‘no plans’ to change the way Kubuntu is run or built.
The Kubuntu Community will continue to decide and manage the direction of the KDE-based distro as they have done in the past.
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Kubuntu is the second child in the line of Canonical kings, hence it gets less attention compared to the royal heir and favorite son, Ubuntu. Now, to add to the drama, starting and ending with Precise Pangolin, the company decided it will no longer officially support Kubuntu from its own resources, and it will become a community distro, like the other flavors. This means Kubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin will be the last in-house Ubuntu spin with the KDE desktop.
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Xubuntu 12.04 is the only lighter weight distribution that is getting Long Term Support (LTS) from Canonical. Support for Xubuntu LTS will be for 3 years compared to the life-cycle of 18 months and shorter than the 5 years given to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
Xubuntu uses the XFCE 4.8 desktop which is less resource hungry than Unity or KDE and comes in two flavors, 32 bit and 64 bit. It is also an installable Live distribution and is based on Linux kernel 3.2 series.
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The Raspberry Pi is one of the most eagerly-awaited computers of 2012. With more than 350,000 people on the Raspberry Pi waiting list, it’s an enthusiasts’ machine with mainstream appeal.
The computer provides exceptional value. It’s a $40 computer with a range of intuitive programming tools and the capability of an average PC – browsing the web, running office software or playing HD video. The Pi is also suited to projects as diverse as controlling robots and building an in-car computer.
But in its present form novice computer users – weaned on the simplicity of Windows PCs, smartphones and iPads – may struggle to get to grips with the Raspberry Pi.
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Phones
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Android
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I am encouraged by the the release of ebook readers and their massive popularity. As readers of this blog and listeners to the audio-cast will know, I am not a big fan of TV & Film, infact if it wasn’t for the PS3 and the once a year tradition of Doctor Who, I’d happily throw the insidious device away. Maybe the book will start to gain more ground on the film? You are probably wondering where I am headed with this article, but all will be revealed.
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Has the Apache Software Foundation overextended itself by taking open source projects like OpenOffice and Cloudstack off the hands of proprietary giants while its famed HTTP web server continues losing ground to NGINX?
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 12, which streamlines the update process and improves on the numerous developer tools that are now part of the popular open source browser.
If you’re already using Firefox there’s no need to do anything; you’ll be automatically updated later today. If you’d like to give Firefox 12 a try, head over to the Firefox downloads page and grab a copy.
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After taking a second look at Firefox 13, it is time to look at the current aurora version of the Firefox browser. Mozilla plans to introduce many new features in Firefox 14. Some of the features had been announced for previous versions of the browser but were postponed for a variety of reasons.
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Just as the company pledged it would early last year, Mozilla is marching ahead with its rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser. Version 13 of Firefox is out in beta now, and while it is a testing-focused version, it adds a number of notable features. Meanwhile, silent updates–a controversial feature disliked by those who like to tightly manage their own browsers–have arrived in Firefox 12, and Mozilla is taking steps to move people away from Firefox 3.6. Here is more on what to expect in Firefox 13.
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Mozilla is working on a revamp of Firefox to synchronize its various versions — desktop, tablet, phone and Windows 8 Metro — into a single visual style, according to documents posted by members of its user interface (UI) design team.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Michael Meeks is a long-time OpenOffice, now Libre Office, contributor and employee of Novell, now Attachmate.
We caught up with him to get the inside perspective on the massive changes they, and desktop Linux as a whole, have gone through in the past few years.
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The very short form: WPL created a re-implementation of the SAS Language, using the original documentation of SAS and a freebie version for personal and educational use. SAS claimed they thus infringed on copyright etc.
Seems SAS lost big time.
Now you can almost directly compare this case with Oracle v Google. Simply replace SAS Language with JAVA and watch this drama unfold. Note: IANAL but it seems Oracle wouldn’t have a chance in the EU with the current set of arguments used in the US case.
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CMS
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hardware
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In a 1965 paper, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years. This prediction has proven to be uncannily accurate over the years and has come to be known as Moore’s Law. But it’s not going to hold true forever, is it? Well, it’s believed that like all things good, Moore’s Law too will come to an end one day. The question that remains, though, is when. Noted theoretical (and often theatrical) physicist Michio Kaku feels he has the answer.
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Security
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Censorship
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We’ve just learned that issue 154 of Linux Format, the one with ‘Learn to Hack’ on the cover, was removed from Barnes and Noble bookstores in the US after a complaint was made. We’d like to apologise if you were affected and couldn’t find a copy.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Pirate Party UK has hosted a proxy (tpb.pirateparty.org.uk), allowing people to connect to the Pirate Bay via Pirate Party servers since the 19th of April 2012. We provided the proxy as a tool for users on networks where the Pirate Bay is blocked through filtering, and in support of our sister party in the Netherlands. It continues to be a legitimate route for those affected by court orders issued to some (but not all) UK ISP’s requiring the site to be blocked. Whilst some providers continue to allow access to the web in an unfiltered manner, others are limiting access to specific parts of the internet.
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04.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The community debate around Linux Australia possibly changing its name has soured this week, with some community members badmouthing a key conference associated with the peak Linux organisation.
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Desktop
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The new desktop paradigm originated on the very successful Linux desktop designs of the early netbooks: the ASUS Desktop OS (developed with Xandros) introduced the current style of desktop on the ASUS Eee PC in 2007. Those sold like proverbial hotcakes. Linpus Lite on the Acer Aspire One followed after that. It was Microsoft who suddenly realized they couldn’t ignore that market. In response they began pushing the aging Windows XP instead of Linux. Microsoft also successfully used strong-arm tactics to get retailers and OEMs to drop Linux, including Android. In the meanwhile millions of netbooks with Linux and the current desktop paradigm were sold.
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Server
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While Red Hat and SUSE are throwing their support behind IBM’s new Linux POWER servers, Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has opted to sit this one out.
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Kernel Space
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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a couple of hours ago, April 27th, the immediate available for download of the fourth maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.3 kernel series.
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Applications
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Text editors that get out of the way and minimize complicated features can be desirable, depending on what you’re doing and how you like to work. But Advanced Easy Editor takes “bare bones” to a painful extreme. Both strains of the app are reminiscent of sitting at a terminal running Unix. Perhaps they’re just what’s needed for a certain kind of job, but without so much as a text wrap feature, their appeal is highly limited.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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It’s all over the news. Steam for Linux is real and not another cruel April Fools prank. The gamer inside me is extremely excited about this, and after re-reading Phoronix’ article a dozen times, about how Gabe Newell is now a Linux Evangelist, it makes sense. If you believe the rumors, anyway.
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Followers of Linux gaming have known that Valve had a few employees dabble in Linux before, but not make commitments or investments in it. So a CEO saying “We want to fix this.” Is a major change and improvement.
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Gameplay 1.2, a cross-platform, C++ game framework designed for learning and writing mobile and desktop games, has been released.
Gameplay is an open source project hosted on Github and developed by Sean Paul and Steve Grenier, both graphics and game developers at Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry® smartphone and PlayBook tablet computer.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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After another long “getting the details sorted” session on the phone with our manufacturing partner this morning, it looks like I’ll be able to sign the purchase order sometime next week so that the first shipments of Vivaldi tablets can be put together. Which in turn means orders will be turned on shortly thereafter.
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When I first started this blog, I tended to write mostly about pocket-size distributions. SLAX and Puppy Linux were my first ones. And I still love them.
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New Releases
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ClearOS Community 6 has arrived! A lot of time, resources and development have gone into making ClearOS the best next generation small business server and gateway. The underlying framework was redesigned to make it easy create new and innovative apps. The new Marketplace now provides a quick way to install both open source and paid apps. There’s also 64-bit support, a shiny new graphical installer, improved usability, better VM support, a modernized build system, and the migration to the latest upstream 6.x version. Whew.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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It took me literally hours to figure out which Linux distributions I would want to download and test. The choices are so varied and there are so many features each distribution offers that it was difficult just choosing. In this little article I will try to go over some of the basic features of one of my favorites, Mandriva.
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Red Hat Family
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Just over four months after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2, Red Hat has made a beta of version 6.3 available. The developers have added Virt-P2V to the distribution; this is a new tool that enables physical Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems to be converted into virtual images that can then be run as KVM guests under RHEL or RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation). In 6.3, it will also be possible to allocate up to 160 virtual processors to a guest system (an increase from the present limit of 64); in addition, KVM guests can now be configured with up to a maximum of 2TB of memory rather than 512GB.
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If you read the Red Hat website, you’ll find pages describing their attitude toward open source, collaboration, and more. It reads pretty much like every other marketing spiel from every company online today. There’s something different about Red Hat, though: they actually believe this stuff. Not only do they believe it, they live it every day.
I spoke to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recently about the open source culture at Red Hat and he told me it is a journey, not a destination. According to Whitehurst, the tenets of open source permeate all aspects of the culture at Red Hat.
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Red Hat announced yesterday, April 24th, that the Beta release of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 operating system is ready for download and testing.
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Debian Family
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A few weeks ago, when Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 4 was released, Clement Lefebvre said that a new set of ISO images including the latest update would be available “in the coming days/weeks”. Today he made good on that, with the release of LMDE 201204, with both Gnome and Xfce versions. This removes the final hurdle to my whole-heartedly recommending LMDE to anyone interested in Linux. There are a lot of good Linux distributions available, no doubt, but in my opinion this is one of the best because Clement and the rest of the development team think about their users first, all the time.
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The Debian Project produces an entirely Free operating system that empowers its users to be in control of the software running their computers. These days, more and more computing is being moved away from user computers to the so-called “cloud” – a vague term often used to refer to Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. We are concerned that, without the needed care, this trend might put in jeopardy most of the freedoms that users enjoy when running (on their computers) software that is Free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The wait is over. The final version of Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin is out. To download your copy of this popular Linux distribution head to the Ubuntu download page. If you’re already using the last version, Ubuntu 11.10 you can now upgrade automatically upgrade to 12.04 with Update Manager. If you need more help with your upgrade see the Upgrade from Ubuntu 11.10 to 12.04 LTS page.
LTS, you ask? That stands for long term support. This is the Ubuntu version that will be supported for five years, through April 2017. If you have a business, and you’ve been thinking about using Ubuntu on your desktops or servers, this is the version you want.
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Making money — or trying to, at least — in the Linux world became just a little bit easier recently with simplified settings for creating commercial projects in Canonical’s Launchpad software-development portal. That’s all good and well, but the news got me wondering: How many commercial projects are actually using Launchpad? With some quick-and-dirty bash scripting magic, I was able to gain an idea. Read on for the results.
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The latest version of Ubuntu brings significant improvements to the stability and speed of the Unity interface. On the server side of things, the developers have clearly concentrated on trying to make Ubuntu a serious contender in the cloud computing space.
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Ubuntu 12.04 is released on 26th April, and Canonical’s Precise Pangolin will be the biggest Ubuntu yet. Here are five reasons why…
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With today’s updates, Canonical upgraded the default web browser in its just released Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system to Firefox 12.0.
The Mozilla Firefox 12.0 web browser was officially released on April 24th, brining some interesting features, such as:
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Flavours and Variants
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I tried the 64-bit version (because I also want to seriously see whether it could reside on the hard drive of my 64-bit computer full-time) using a live USB made with MultiSystem, and I did not test the installation procedure. To be honest, I would have liked to have tried the GNOME 3/Cinnamon and Xfce editions too, but I only have time for the MATE edition now. Follow the jump to see what it’s like.
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When it comes to Linux distributions, it’s truly different strokes for different folks. Some folks want software that is truly free, meaning that they can do with it as they please. That’s where distros like Trisquel come in. Trisquel is based on Ubuntu, but it provides only free software. You will not find proprietary software included with it.
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Canonical announced yesterday, April 26th, that the highly anticipated Precise Pangolin upgrade of its popular Ubuntu operating system, including the Kubuntu 12.04, Xubuntu 12.04, Lubuntu 12.04 flavors and Edubuntu 12.04 LTS, is available for download.
Edubuntu 12.04 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, which means it will be supported for five years.
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Canonical unleashed yesterday, April 26th, the highly anticipated Precise Pangolin upgrade of its popular Ubuntu operating system, including the Kubuntu 12.04, Xubuntu 12.04 and Lubuntu 12.04 flavors.
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Phones
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The reasons for Nokia’s decline in recent years are well known. The company invested heavily in operating system research, and spent far more on software R&D than any of its competitors, but appeared to lack the focus and direction to make its investments pay. Nokia suffered not from a lack of imagination or innovation, but a failure to tie the ends together and bring product to market.
The fall from grace was accentuated by the leaking, in early 2011, of the “burning platform” memo written by Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, which prepared the way for the adoption of Windows Phone and the redundancies that were to follow.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Events
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With all the recent hubbub about OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and other open source cloud computing platforms and tools, it’s no secret that the open source community will help drive cloud computing for years to come. Perhaps with that idea in mind, The Linux Foundation has just announced a brand new event: “CloudOpen, a technical conference that will bring together in a vendor-neutral environment the open source projects, products and companies that are driving cloud and big data ecosystems.”
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Licensing
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The vote followed the debate on amendments, several of which were passed. Among them was an absolutely terrible change (pdf and embedded below—scroll to amendment #6) to the definition of what the government can do with shared information, put forth by Rep. Quayle. Astonishingly, it was described as limiting the government’s power, even though it in fact expands it by adding more items to the list of acceptable purposes for which shared information can be used. Even more astonishingly, it passed with a near-unanimous vote. The CISPA that was just approved by the House is much worse than the CISPA being discussed as recently as this morning.
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CISPA authors and supporters have tried everything they can to avoid another SOPA protest – except tell the truth about their bill.
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Send this to a friend
04.25.12
Posted in News Roundup at 9:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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There have several calls for help to the readers, but this post being one of them is targeting the entire Linux community. Every user who wants to install Linux on his computer starts at the scenario where he needs to boot from the CD or USB. This is something that has become natural to us, the Linux users. But it has the potential to make/break the experience for new users who want to try Linux. This is because an ordinary Windows or Mac user has never had the need to access the BIOS to set CD or USB as the boot device. Most likely Windows or Mac came pre-installed on his system.
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One of the oldest and best sources for news regarding Linux powered devices, LinuxDevices, is worryingly silent today. Attempts to reach both the main page and the forums return database errors. This comes a few months after its publisher, Ziff Davis Enterprise, was acquired by QuinStreet.
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Linux Australia president John Ferlito has asked the community of Australia’s peak Linux body whether it’s time to change its name, eliciting a strong response.
“We think it is time for us to change the name of our organisation to have it more accurately represent the focus of our community,” Ferlito wrote in a message to members last night.
Ferlito added that the organisation is now over a decade old, and its day-to-day operations are no longer accurately defined by the name Linux Australia.
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There is no move to get rid of the Linux Australia brand (15-odd years old right now) and the linux.org.au domain. These are deemed to be far too valuable.
Then why change? The organisation has now expanded its activities – it sponsors conferences on other open source topic – Python, Drupal and WordPress as of this year.
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Desktop
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Most often than not, the brand has an abstract name. General Electric, FIAT, Airbus, Pepsico, RedHat – all these companies have names which have nothing to do with names of their founders. Although, there are still some cases when person’s name becomes a name of the brand. Let me introduce a person who’s name became a brand. At least, in the Linux world. Please meet: Artyom Zorin.
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Despite all the good work in */Linux and efforts by government to restrain the largest excesses of M$, it is still a growing cancer in IT. The growth in the client division is radically curtailed but there’s still some. Until it quits growing, there is no hope of salvation from the cost and complexity in IT that M$ causes. I hope M$’s recent numbers are just some accountants’ tricks, but I will not declare the battle over until retail shelves are jammed with GNU/Linux everywhere.
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Server
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Big Blue has not made any huge proclamations to date, but it is not exactly a secret that the people in charge of IBM’s Systems and Software Group want the Power7 processor and its follow-ons to grab a larger share of the systems racket.
To that end, Big Blue is reviving a Linux-only variant of its Power Systems lineup with cheaper hardware and software pricing that it says gives better value on Linux workloads than an x86 setup.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that five new companies from Japan are joining the organization: Ashisuto, Aisin AW, JVC KENWOOD Corporation, NTT DATA MSE, and Turbo Systems.
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These are results collected by OpenBenchmarking.org from the thousands of results and over a million component configuration statistics (there’s statistics on more than 1,506,821 computer components as of Sunday and more than 155,872 test results that are publicly available). With these statistics being from OpenBenchmarking.org, these trends are not of the “normal” Linux user-base but rather more representative towards Linux/hardware enthusiasts, the tweaking/benchmarking crowd, and enterprise users. Regardless, they provide a very interesting look at the popularity of various brands and software components on Linux.
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Ben Hutchings has confirmed that he will maintain Linux kernel version 3.2 as a long-term kernel at kernel.org for an indefinite amount of time. While this was announced by the developer last weekend, it has now also been mentioned by the primary stable and long-term kernel maintainer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, in the release email for Linux 3.2.16; with the release of this version on Monday morning, Kroah-Hartman has discontinued the maintenance of Linux 3.2 and handed it over to Hutchings.
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Graphics Stack
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One week ago following the committing of the major libdrm re-write for the Nouveau project, the “NVFX” Gallium3D driver was dropped and succeeded by a new “NV30″ driver for the GeForce FX/6/7 series GPUs. Unfortunately, for at least some hardware, this Nouveau support is still a busted mess.
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There’s now the first tiling manager for Wayland. Called ADWC, this open-source tiling manager can already start applications using XWayland. There’s some videos showing off this Weston fork, including the Opera web-browser and KDE’s KWrite running on Wayland.
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Applications
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Reinventing the wheel is frequently cited as a barrier to the development of open source software. Critics point out if developers worked together on projects, instead of duplicating software that already exists, this would help to simplify matters for users, and actually significantly advance the development of established open source projects. There is an element of truth that development time is wasted, and it is not hard to identify examples of developers reinventing the wheel in their code, rather than contribute their development skills to projects with broadly similar objectives.
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Sunflower is a twin panel File manager for Linux. Sunflower is use to view or browse , cut, copy and paste several files from different directories using graphical user Interface. It also supports drag and drop functionality between different directories. The light weight and small size make it more attractive among users. It can be highly customized with handy hot keys. Moreover it can be improved and enhanced by with the help of plugin. The different tasks can be performed with sunflower like add or edit bookmark, empty history and more.
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Paolo Bacchilega proudly announced last evening, April 23rd, the immediate availability for download of the gThumb 3.0.0 image viewer and browser utility for the GNOME environment.
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Oliver McFadden, the developer that wrote the Radeon Revenge reverse-engineering utility, was thinking about writing an open-source BIOS for Radeon GPUs, and brought ioquake3 to the Nokia N900, decided to write a new GL Shading Language (GLSL) renderer back-end for the id Tech 4 engine.
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New Humble Indie Bundle yaddda yadda blah blah blah, you’ve heard it all before, so a link to the webpage and a video. Go out and buy it and enjoy it.
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Update: We mentioned before that the blog mentioned belongs to reader Dugan Chen. Dugan was nice enough to update us, rescinding OUR foolish and supposed assumption that he was its owner. Sorry Dugan, and thank you for the update!
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Confirmed yesterday was a new version of a popular but proprietary game engine that will work on Linux with its next release.
The crew at Terathon Software yesterday working on the C4 Engine tweeted, “The next version of the C4 Engine (version 2.9) runs on Linux.”
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If you’re not busy with going through the extensive Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge Linux test results (the Ivy Bridge Linux Mesa graphics results will be out in the next few hours), here’s some Linux gaming news for today.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Dr. Mathias Klang is a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. His research revolves within the field of legal informatics with particular interest in copyright, democracy, human rights, free expression, censorship, open access and ethics. He holds Master of Laws and Ph.D. degrees.
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Latin America is a big place with many opportunities for KDE; major deployments of KDE software are proof. Over the years, groups of KDE developers have emerged in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and probably other places. These groups work together to make a better KDE. As we know, meeting and talking in person is important to strengthen the bonds in a community. So we decided to organize a Latin American meeting of KDE contributors following the lead of the first Akademy-br in 2009. Like Akademy-br, the first LaKademy will be similar to a sprint for developers and one for people interested in promoting KDE in this part of the world.
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Plasma Active is coming together nicely and quickly. When I watched the first videos published just a few months ago, I thought a lot of hard work was needed, but I was not the only one. Those videos were simply proving that Plasma Active was running successfully, but not even close to displaying the finished product. Today we are very close to seeing Vivaldi become available, and with it, the first official version of Plasma Active preinstalled on a device. It’s a serious thing, and Plasma Active developers are hard at work improving things like maniacs. A testament of that is the following video, which captures the Plasma Active file browser in action.
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On April 11, Calligra Suite announced its first release, version 2.4. This release takes Calligra several steps closer to being an alternative to LibreOffice, especially in its graphical applications.
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Google has published the list of 60 student proposals that have been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012 for KDE. It means that 60 students will be able to work full-time on changing the world this summer! A big thank you to Google for making this possible.
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GNOME Desktop
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Whether you’re a beginner or you’ve been using Linux systems for years, you probably have an opinion on what the best distribution is. “Best,” is obviously a relative term, and we understand that what’s best for beginners may not be best for advanced users, and so on. Still, Linux distributions come in all different shapes, sizes, complexities, styles, and types. We asked you which ones you preferred, and now we’re back to take a look at the top five distros based on your nominations.
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Chakra Archimedes-2012.04, the second iteration of the latest stable edition of Chakra, a desktop Linux distribution forked from Arch Linux, was released just this week. April 16 to be exact.
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Concerns about the apparent health of Slackware Linux were eased after the community Linux distribution’s web site was back up and running, after several days of being dark.
The site’s unexpected unavailability led to lengthy and at times heated discussions about the overall life expectancy of the project on both LinuxQuestions.org and DistroWatch.
The focus quickly shifted from the problems with the website to worries that Slackware itself was experiencing financial problems, when top Slackware contributor Eric Hameleers responded early in the LinuxQuestions thread with a brief “Old hardware, lack of funds…” statement.
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New Releases
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I just release RapidDisk 2.2b which can now be pulled from the rxdsk-2.x git repo. Also the tarball has been added to the Sourceforge project page.
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Lars Torben Kremer proudly announced this weekend, on April 21st, the immediate availability for download of the final version of the Snowlinux 2 operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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If you have not been following the saga of the Mageia Linux distribution then you are unaware that Mageia 2 is slated to be released on May 15th. At this point the distribution is in Beta 3 testing and then will have a Release Candidate out right around May 2nd.
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Another Linux distribution with an upcoming release I have been looking forward to made a Beta release. Mageia Linux 2 is on a fast track now, with the final Beta released a few days ago, the Release Candidate due in less than two weeks, and the final release due two weeks after that.
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Again PCLinuxOS delivers a release of impeccable quality in the face of a community that demands the highest standards. This distribution is becoming increasingly user-friendly, and the features continue to mount up.
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Red Hat Family
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Software giant Red Hat(RHT), a leader in open source technologies as well as cloud computing has now become one of these names that have placed me in the predicament of trying to justify its lofty valuation to potential investors. I’m not going to pretend that this a “rock and hard place” type of situation, but how do you rationalize taking a position in a stock sporting a P/E of 80 after it has already gained 50% on the year? It gets even more remarkable when you consider that a competitor such as VMware(VMW), which by many standards already qualifies as expensive but trades at a multiple that is 14 points less
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Fedora
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Calling all Fedora users and developers. Please visit the official poll to choose the future of Fedora release names.
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We are restarting the monthly LUG meetings and I planned to deliver a presentation about the imminent GIMP 2.8 release (there is a lot of disinformation about it). But since GIMP 2.8 RC1 cannot be installed on older Fedora releases due to missing dependencies, I had to move with the times and upgrade the OS on the netbook. Following are my candid impressions, as a person who skipped the last two Fedora releases, so part of it may be really old and known.
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After Red Hat Legal caused a delay in the Fedora 18 code-naming process, the list of possible code-names for this “Beefy Miracle” successor have been narrowed down to eight. As expected by now, all of the names are quite peculiar and the Fedora board is trying to decide whether to even continue this code-naming process.
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Well this Thursday I made my mind to install beta release of f-17. I had to make a boot able usb because my dvd drive gave up long back. So I used livecd-tools to make bootable usb. I started installing, it was going smoothly but suddenly I got notification for access Network for installing repo .. bad ah because you screwed :). Later found out there was bug in livecd-tools :(, even fedora wiki was not updated about use of livecd-tools that time (Now updated, thanks to FranciscoD). Well I install fedora in my office laptop VM, made again usb bootable with correct steps and finally able to Install.
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Debian Family
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Samuel Thibault is a French guy like me, but it took years until we met. He tends to keep a low profile, even though he’s doing lots of good work that deserves to be mentioned.
He focuses on improving Debian’s accessibility and contributes to the Hurd. Who said he’s a dreamer? 
Checkout his interview to have some news of Wheezy’s status on those topics.
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Next on my list of open source NAS platforms is OpenMediaVault, a Debian-based project.
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I recently received an Arduino Uno board as a gift and I needed to run the Arduino software on my Debian 6 + KDE machine in order to interact with this little beast. This should work on other desktops as well, such as Gnome or XFCE.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu has touched the lives of many among us in different ways. I can’t speak for everyone here and hence I will share a few of my experiences with Ubuntu. For me, Ubuntu was the gateway to Linux and the whole open source way of thinking. Ubuntu taught me that computers are not all about Windows OS and that there are far better alternatives than the “default” Windows desktop which you have been made to see and learn from a younger age. Lets go back in time and see how Ubuntu evolved over the years to become what it is now – a totally awesome, user friendly and fast changing Linux based distro for human beings.
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Besides Ubuntu 12.04 on ARMv7 being much faster, thanks to hard-float and other improvements, the Texas Instruments OMAP DRM driver is also available to provide a KMS experience for some hardware.
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Alpha 1 – 7 June
Alpha 2 – 28 June
Alpha 3 – 2 August
Feature Freeze – 23 August
UI Freeze – 30 August
Beta 1 – 6 September
Beta 2 – 27 September
Kernel Freeze – 4 October
Ubuntu 12.10 Release – 18 October
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The world is moving increasingly towards environments where consumers and employees download apps from sanitized app stores and use software that is native to the devices on which they run. This is happening as a result of the increasingly important role of mobility in business and consumer life, and the security threats that lurk in the World Wide Web. Not only are app stores becoming more prevalent in both corporate and personal contexts, but companies are using virtualization technology that allows them to serve employees virtual images of software, with the effect that data is isolated from the web, and servers are insulated from unknown intruders. So does the emergence of these closed systems mean the web is losing relevance?
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One of the great Linux desktop myths is that it’s hard to use. People still think that you need to be some kind of mad computer wizard to use Linux. What nonsense. Desktop Linux has been as easy to use as any of the mainstream desktop operating systems for over a decade. How easy is it? My 79-year old mother-in-law, Hulvia, can use it.
She arrived a few weeks ago with her Windows laptop, but without her power cord. So, she needed a computer of her own. As I went down to garage/server room/spare computer storage locker, “What the heck, if Jason Perlow’s father-in-law could pick up Ubuntu Linux in 2007 at the age of 71, why not my mother-in-law at 79 in 2012!”
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The latest Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is going to be released in (28 April 2012), that is less than a week! The latest features of Precise Pangolin are:
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There is a lot riding on Ubuntu 12.04 (aka “Precise Pangolin”) — this is a make or break moment for Ubuntu as a desktop platform.
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Ubuntu has done great things for the Linux community. Indeed, many of us many not be here if it wasn’t for Ubuntu and it’s newbie-friendly ways. However things have gradually changed over recent years. First the brown colour scheme changed to purple, as it seemed that Ubuntu was adopting a ‘Mac look’ (are the window maximise and minimise controls still in the top left hand corner?). Then last year, the Gnome 2 desktop evironment was dropped and replaced with Unity. Many users struggled with 11.04 as Unity was unstable, and as a result that release was for some (me included) unusable. Hwever it has been reported amongst Hull LUG members that Unity has been improved since its introduction last April, and the stability issues for the most part resolved in the last release in October 2011.
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The Linux world is preparing for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS official release to use and evaluate the next “big” version of the world’s most successful Linux distribution. Much has been said about the last Ubuntu versions and Canonical’s strategies. Many expressed delight with the new technologies introduced lately by Canonical, while others expressed disappointment with some of the changes. This week, we talk to Jono Bacon who is the community manager of Ubuntu, in an attempt to disentangle the thoughts of the linux users community, and understand how a big community is organized and guided the Ubuntu way.
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Most Popular Linux Distribution: Ubuntu (and Its Variants) There are Linux distributions of all shapes and sizes, with varying levels of complexity and difficulty. Some are super-easy to install, and can be installed like any other OS, with minimal knowledge of the command line—you click “OK” a few times and you’re up and running. Others require you get your hands really dirty with the underpinnings of the system you’re building, making sure it’s just right for your specific needs. So which do you prefer? Well, earlier last week we asked you what you thought the best overall Linux distribution was, understanding that “best” is a relative term. Then we took a look at the top five Linux distros, based on your over-400 nominations, and put them to a vote. Now, we’re back to crown the overall winner.
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Ubuntu captain Mark Shuttleworth said the next cycle of Ubuntu releases, code named Quantal Quetzal, will incorporate new font and icon innovations to further dazzle the Linux client as well as the Quantum virtualized networking and possibly a new form factor
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin final is almost out. The final release it scheduled to be out in the 26th of April 2012. After you actually get done with the installation, there would likely exist a heap of things you still need to take care of. This post will share some interesting insight and ideas about what you can and should do after a successful installation.
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Flavours and Variants
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While my own interest in KDE is waning presently, that has nothing to do with Kubuntu itself, or what I feel was entirely needless panic by some over its continued status and development. I continue to think Kubuntu will be fine, and I believe being freed of direct Canonical sponsorship may offer tangible benefits for it. With GNOME 2 now essentially gone (there is that Mate fork though), Kubuntu was the only Ubuntu variant remaining that I felt had any serious enterprise desktop potential. In fact, I think it is potentially a more interesting distribution freed of it’s Canonical connection, where it seemed such possibilities were blocked. I also do like that their new sponsor, BlueSystems, which calls NetRunner, itself derived from Kubuntu, a GNU/Linux distribution. Say it loud, say it proud!
Personally I hope they could eventually merge their work with upstream Debian directly. One advantage Kubuntu offers over Debian KDE presently is that they package and adapt KDE stable releases much quicker. Or maybe thier work could also enable KDE on Trisquel, which I recall converts the Ubuntu foundation into a fully free as in freedom core distribution by removing all non-free parts and offers it with a linux-libre kernel. As a KDE mother distribution, Kubuntu by itself is easy to rebrand to target commercial entities and other kinds of institutions, as well as to provide a base distribution for other projects.
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I’d like to thank all the people who tested the RC release and sent us feedback. We identified 68 bugs in this release and we’re currently down to 19 bugs left.
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The device sports an E-Ink display with a resolution of 144 x 168 , Bluetooth 2.1, a teeny-tiny vibrating motor for alerts, and app installation via the dedicated Pebble app store which is accessible on both Android and iOS. It also features a three-axis accelerometer which third party apps will be able to make full use of using the Pebble SDK. This is Allerta’s slimmest device to date and reduces some of the uber-geek stigma which came with its predecessors bulk.
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Networking giant Cisco Systems has remained an industry leader by understanding and leading industry transitions. One such transition occurring is the emergence of software defined networking (SDN) and the OpenFlow protocol and it’s a transition that Cisco doesn’t plan to miss.
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As I told in a previous post, I came with the idea of a panel about design in the FOSS world at the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting but then chickened-out and resumed to photography stuff, still the panel will happen anyway. I think is a good idea to write-down my thoughts on the matter, since the outcome of the panel is going to be a direct opposite of what I envisioned (that’s what I expect, giving the panelists).
So, what’s the problems? while proper Free and Open Source Software happens in the bazaar, traditionally design is done the opposite way, in the cathedral, an unavoidable conflict. On top of that, there is also the problem of the designers being primadonas, considering their work dark magic, voodoo, incomprehensive by mere mortals. It doesn’t help a lot of volunteer developers participating in communities have big egos too, as they are doing the work for free, so they expect at least that.
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Those are the things you should tell people first, if you want to spread Free Software. And you should do it in a balanced way, mentioning software as such just en passant. You should explain that problems like those above are tales of stupidity and incompetence that waste mountains of public and private money, at levels where it almost doesn’t matter what the license of the involved software is. Let’s help people to fight software-related wastes and proprietary standards, without caring at all if they do not give back to the “Free SW community”! This will create an environment much more conducive to Free Software than we could ever obtain by continuing to repeat ad nauseam the GNU Manifesto.
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I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years of the role that critics play in the course of free/open source development.
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The free-market capitalistic definition of companies’ goals was, for a long time, very simple: to make as much profit as possible. With that in mind, the only difference between a success and a failure was the investor’s return on investment. Short-term profit became priority number one. However, this classic definition of capitalism hastransformed the way companies are perceived in the population over time.
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Recently I was on the task of getting some scripts together for handling FTP commands to run several time a day to move files around. Unfortunately, the platform that was already in place is a Windows 2008 R2 server. But, being optimistic we moved forward on the project. After digging around we soon found out that the list of options is slim on solutions for doing FTP transfers from scripts on Windows. There are really no known good solutions that are free that offer extensible scripting abilities. We ended up selecting CuteFTP Professional which was purchased by somebody else a few years back so a license was already owned for the software. I’ve used the client for CuteFTP in the past so I felt fairly comfortable with this selection. I also thought about installing Perl for Windows and trying to script something in there, which might still be a viable option.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The first devices with Mozilla’s Boot to Gecko OS will arrive in Brazil sometime between the end of 2012 and early 2013.
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You may have noticed that the usual suspects are already reporting that a new stable version of the Mozilla Firefox browser has been released by Mozilla. While it is true that a build has been moved to the release server, we have seen in the past that this version can get replaced in last minute if the build does not pass the company’s quality controls.
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The same day as Firefox 12 is released, Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker is being inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Getting Started with OpenOffice.org was a handy user guide chocked full of information on the care and feeding of the Open Source office suite. But like the suite itself, it has been superseded by the efforts of The Document Foundation. With updates, rewrites, and the addition of illustrations and images for 3.4, reading up on the popular application is easier than ever.
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Healthcare
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It is sometimes said that computer scientists worry about only three numbers: 0, 1, and N, where N tends to get very large. Sometimes such oversimplifications can lead to astonishing insights, such as the one that I had 25 years ago in June of 1987.
Do you remember 1987? Greed was good, junk bonds were king, and zero was the biggest and most important number on Wall Street. Zero drove all the arbitrage equations, because both sides of the arbitrage are supposed to sum to zero. Arbitrage is a special case of the zero-sum game, a prominent theory promulgated by all respectable business schools of the day. Zero-sum logic made it a moral imperative to ensure that success was not just about winning, but about making sure that everybody else lost. You were not forced to like the terms of the game, but you were damn sure forced to accept them as they only way to play.
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Open source is powering a revolution in medicine and health care in multiple ways. Open source software and methods make large-scale collaborative research projects feasible, multiplying the brainpower applied to a project, expanding the data pool, and creating transparency and accountability. This is a huge win for the advancement of new treatments and cures, and cutting the costs of research. Open source practice and records software cut the costs of running medical practices, and puts practitioners in charge instead of software vendors.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Here’s my wishlist. I think there is plenty of good software in FLOSS so it is not a high priority to create more unless someone has the urge. I think the highest priority of the Free Software movement should be to educate people about Free Software.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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French president Nicolas Sarkozy says that 15 percent of the IT budgets of the country’s public administrations is spent on purchasing services on free and open source software and that this amount is growing by 30 percent per year, reports CNLL (Conseil National du Logiciel Libre), a trade group representing IT companies providing free and open source software services. Sarkozy told the group that free software is “strategic for the development of France’s digital sector.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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I asked to see the library and found there mostly old Windows books, clearly “decommissioned”: technologically old, useless books. Can it be that, even when it comes to books (and, by extension, knowledge), underdeveloped African countries are just a landfill for the Global North?
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My latest career was teaching and it was natural to use IT to collect and analyze data on the performance of students but also to use IT for teaching and later to teach students how to do IT for their lives. Before I used GNU/Linux I owned a variety of PCs, some home-built but I used DOS and Lose 3.1 on them. After a few years I was using Lose ’95 in a classroom and the damned machines were frequently crashing, just like Bill Gates’ experience (He laughed. I didn’t.). I switched to Caldera GNU/Linux and was suddenly and dramatically free of crashes.
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I think Smári McCarthy, a fellow transnational citizen, Uberhacker and admired activist, touched a special nerve when he recently twittered:
Ours is a world where @ is replacing ©. Attribution, not restrictions.
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Over the past decade, Asia’s transition to the leadership position in global oil consumption is well known. Starting in 2002, OECD countries slowed their consumption growth for oil and subsequent to 2005 actually saw their consumption decline. This process freed up limited oil supplies to Asia, which now accounts for 31% of total global oil use, as of the latest data. | see: Regional Share of Total Global Oil Consumption (as of Q4 2011).
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Finance
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The Needmor Fund, a small foundation based in Toledo, Ohio, wants Goldman Sachs to lift the veil on its lobbying activities and the advocacy groups it backs financially.
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Amid new regulation, lower profits and a dreary market for mergers and acquisitions, several banks are planning to trim investment-banking units that were built for an era of deals aplenty.
Having already slashed bonuses, banks including Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley are preparing to cut dozens of jobs, including some held by senior bankers, according to people familiar with the matter. As they pursue this targeted round of trims as soon as next month, they and rivals are also revisiting profit expectations for their advisory businesses, people familiar with the matter said.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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A Chinese official said on Tuesday that Apple does not have ownership of the iPad trademark in China, signaling that authorities could be favoring local company Proview in its battle with the U.S. tech giant over rights to the iconic brand name.
Fu Shuangjian, the vice minister of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), made the comment as Apple faces an ongoing court battle with Proview for ownership of the iPad trademark.
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Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.22.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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There’s more improvements building for Suldal that yield greater CPU and GPU verbosity when detecting graphics and processor comparisons under Linux.
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ARM-based chips are all the rage these days in tablets, smartphones, set-top-boxes, and other low power computing devices. But while many of the latest chips can support HD video, 3D graphics, and other high-performance graphics, you generally need to use supported software to get all the benefits — because chip makers don’t offer open source graphics drivers.
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TI’s ARM man Rob Clark, who is famous for Texas Instrument’s OMAP DRM driver, has spent his spare time building a natty open sauce driver for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.
Clark’s open-source Linux graphics driver for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon / Adreno is getting a lot of attention as it is a reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver for an ARM-based SoC.
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It’s no secret that this year’s candidates for the Millennium Technology Prize are set to be controversial outside scientific circles. On the other hand, the prize committee at the Technology Academy Finland are quite sure of themselves: Linus Torvalds and Dr Shinya Yamanaka are this year’s laureates. The prize this year for this prestigious award will exceed a a lovely 1 million Euros – certainly a pot to be sought after.
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Graphics Stack
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Committed to the Mesa and libdrm Git repositories last week for Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver, was the “major libdrm rewrite” designed to step-up this reverse-engineered driver. What impact did these invasive changes have on the Nouveau driver’s performance? Here are benchmarks comparing before-and-after as well as how the Nouveau driver compares to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The latest Humble Botanicula Bundle is out, and for Linux users, it’s an extreme disappointment. As with all Humble Bundles, the same sales trends apply. Linux users are still paying the highest average dollar amount which is over $2 more than the encouraged, total average dollar amount. Windows users pay the least and Mac users fall right in the middle. It’s an economic phenomenon for sure, but even doubly so for this one.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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(Matthias) Kalle Dalheimer is the President and Founder of KDAB, and also one of the founding members of the KDE project and KDE e.V. He hasn’t personally been very active in KDE lately, but some of the old-timers will remember that he served as President and Treasurer of KDE e.V. for a few years. He also wrote the first C++ class ever used in kdelibs (KConfig) even though it’s doubtful that any of the code is still left in today’s codebase.
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During this Ubuntu cycle I have been working on-and-off on LightDM, mainly helping out David Edmundson on liblightdm-qt (the Qt wrapper for LightDM library), and the LightDM KDE greeter. The initial, quite ambitious, plan was to try to ship Kubuntu 12.04 with it by default. We quickly realized that would not happen, but we wanted to at least ensure LightDM KDE would be in a usable-enough state to be included in Ubuntu 12.04 archive.
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New Releases
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The team is proud to announce the release of Snowlinux 2 “Ice”.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It appears that Aliexpress is selling a small ARM-based device that runs Android 2.3, but can be easily hacked to run the popular Ubuntu operating system.
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The Millennium Technology Prize is awarded ever two years for a technological innovation by Technology Academy Finland. This year, Linus Torvalds, Linux’s creator, and Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, maker of a new way to create stem cells without the use of embryonic stem cells, are both laureates for the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize. The two innovators will share over a million Euros and the final winner will be announced by the President of the Republic of Finland in a special ceremony on June 13, 2012.
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Mentor Graphics intends to place the front-end UML editor of its BridgePoint xtUML environment into the open source domain.
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Research In Motion, which makes BlackBerry phones, may be looking at making the operating system open, which will allow other manufacturers to make smartphones using the platform.
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Phys.org is reporting on a recently published paper that suggests all scientific journals should require the full disclosure of source code as a condition of publication. The paper states that only 3 science journals currently require source code.
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Consulting and systems integration firm Rivet Logic has released Crafter Rivet V. 2.0, an open source Web experience management (WEM) offering built on Alfresco 4. The WEM solution is the latest addition to Rivet Logic’s suite of solutions for content management, collaboration and community leveraging open source software.
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A Department of Energy (DOE) lab is taking research done to develop a host-based security sensor and open-sourcing the software to encourage community feedback and participation.
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Ghent University and nanoelectronics research center imec of Leuven have launched IPKISS, an open source software platform for designing photonic components and complex photonic integrated circuits, they announced.
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In a recent press release from Stockholm Sweden the software developer Cubeia Ltd, has announced its launch of the first open source multi-player server focused on the online gambling industry.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Cloud computing has been described by some of the more radical thinkers as a profound challenge to the heart of software freedom. There’s some justification to this accusation.
First, you need more than your software’s source code to take your cloud activity into your own hands. Although open source gives you the freedom to use, study, modify, and distribute the software, it doesn’t necessarily allow the use of the place it runs or the APIs needed to access that place. As such, considering your software-freedom-derived business flexibility in the area of cloud computing is more complex than for in-house desktop or server solutions.
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Former NASA CTO and Nebula founder Chris Kemp says private clouds will need to be based on a flexible, general purpose set of open source code that can work with public clouds.
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The familiar debate of open source vs. proprietary IT offerings now seems in full swing in the cloud, and the rhetoric shooting back and forth between some of the major vendors is intensifying. The most recent round really picked up a few weeks ago when Citrix announced it would bring its CloudStack cloud building platform to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competing model to OpenStack. Before that, OpenStack had been gaining momentum in the open source cloud worlds. While Citrix’s move was initially seen as a competition to OpenStack, both companies have more recently taken aim at a common foe: VMware.
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Databases
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SkySQL, a company that helps businesses use open-source databases MySQL and MariaDB, has raised $4 million in first round funding. SkySQL consults with businesses to set them up with MySQL and MariaDB services. It will also train employees to use the database services. OnCorps led the round with Finnish Industry Investment Ltd., Spintop Ventures and Open Ocean Capital.
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CMS
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The organization behind the Joomla open source content management system (CMS) says downloads of its product increased by almost 40 percent over the past year, and now rests at 30 million total downloads since it started tracking the statistic in 2007.
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Funding
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that GoDaddy, one of the largest domain registrars worldwide, and Chinese networking and telecommunications specialist Huawei have become its newest Silver sponsors. Huawei and GoDaddy join Basis Technology, Cloudera, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, PSW Group and VMware’s SpringSource at the third level of sponsorship, for which the ASF requires an annual donation of $20,000 to help fund its work.
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Big Idea: Mifos is an open-source, back-end operating system — built and backed by a community — to track the many loans and payments involved in microfinance.
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BSD
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Public Services/Government
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The openness of the web needs to be protected and “digital handcuffs” need to be removed, Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European commission with responsibility for Europe’s digital agenda, has said.
Speaking at the World Wide Web (WWW2012) conference in Lyon on Thursday, Kroes examined the idea of an open web and spoke of its benefits. “With a truly open, universal platform, we can deliver choice and competition; innovation and opportunity; freedom and democratic accountability,” she said.
Holding up a pair of handcuffs sent to her the previous day by the Free Software Foundation along with a letter asking if she was “with them on openness”, she said: “Let me show you, these handcuffs are not closed, not locked. I can open them if and when I want. That’s what I mean by being open online, what it means to me to get rid of ‘digital handcuffs’.”
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Malaysia should take the lead and implement policies to transform the country into an international open-source software (OSS) hub, Consumer Association of Penang (CAP) said here today.
CAP president SM Mohamed Idris suggested that the government form a specific agency to formulate policies to make Malaysia the leader in the promotion and development of OSS.
He urged the government to take the initiative to make the country an OSS hub that would save millions of ringgit for Malaysian consumers and companies.
He said it would create jobs and develop skills for local manpower, providing the competitive cutting-edge expertise and support services for the huge OSS market worldwide.
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Linux admin Richard Harvey has made an impassioned plea for support in influencing UK government policy on open source.
The government is currently consulting on the use of open standards and open source as an alternative to proprietary software. Corporations that stand to lose out are lobbying the government in an attempt to discredit open source and open standards, he claimed on his Support Open Standards website.
“As the open source community, we have generally not responded to the consultation because we may have read it and thought ‘that’s really good’,” said Harvey on the site. “We need to feed this back, otherwise this will become a one-sided debate. Don’t let large corporates buy UK policy.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Sometime at the beginning of the year I mentioned in post that once stepping into the age of Terahertz electromagnetic waves (T-rays), which can penetrate any molecule and and then interpret it for identification, we will come to know a slew of new, grand applications, from surveillance , to medical, but possibly the most interesting prospect would be the passing of Star Trek’s iconic handheld device, the tricorder, to the realm of reality. It might take a while for a full fledged tricoder to be created, not until T-ray scanner/emitters become reasonable enough, however Dr. Peter Jansen, a PhD graduate of the Cognitive Science Laboratory at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, has come up with the best working tricorder-spin off so far. His handheld device is capable of sensing temperature, pressure, humidity, distances, location, motion and even electromagnetic measurements to test magnetic fields, and is open source available – anyone has access to the device’s plans and can build one at home.
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Stakeholders in the development of multiple sclerosis drugs have taken their fight against the neurodegenerative disease online with the launch of a virtual community intended to connect researchers of MS and related disorders. The effort has emerged after earlier crowd-sourcing and open source efforts to discover new treatments.
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Open Data
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Raleigh is talking the talk and walking the open-source walk. In a 6-to-2 vote, city councilors agreed Tuesday to provide $50,000 annually for an open-source data catalog.
The funding will be included in next year’s budget, which will be presented by City Manager Russell Allen next month. Councilor and Technology and Communication Committee Chair Bonner Gaylord, who originally proposed the idea, said the catalog is a necessary step for a more open and transparent government.
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One of the most fascinating impacts of the open data and open source (software code that’s available to the public to improve and reuse) movements has been the influx of new web tools, developed by private companies and nonprofits, that help people better engage with, and navigate, their city.
In March, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed a law mandating that all city agencies put their data online over the course of the next six years.
The Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), which oversees how new technologies are being used by other city agencies, began putting city data online in a Socrata site — technology created in Seattle — in 2011, and will enforce the city’s new requirements.
The benefits of open data can be seen in the work of the nonprofit company OpenPlans, which has been at the forefront of the open source movement in New York City. The products and services it creates using data and code from the MTA and other city agencies illuminate how New Yorkers might live in the near future, as the physical and digital versions of the city merge together.
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Open Access/Content
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An open source textbook library that would be available to students free of charge is a promising step toward the future.
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Open Hardware
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Inspired by the success of the open-source software movement, a group of technology enthusiasts is looking to unite the fragmented open-source hardware community in an effort to promote hardware innovation.
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Standards/Consortia
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The European Commission released a ground-breaking study on shared access to radio spectrum. The study, conducted by SCF Associates Ltd, calls for a sweeping reform of wireless communications policies, so as to free up more airwaves and pave the way for “super-WiFi” networks. The EU is severely lagging behind the US when it comes to adapting spectrum policy to new needs and possibilities, and this study should sound as a wake-up call for policy-makers.
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Security
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Finance
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Corporate America, with help from the Obama administration, has struck yet another blow against the scary financial regulations it claims will hurt the economy.
On Wednesday they undercut new regulations on derivatives, which the detail-obsessed among us might point out didn’t just hurt the economy but nearly destroyed it. Just a few years ago.
It’s just the latest in a growing string of defeats and surrenders by regulators to the same financial industry that helped nearly destroy the economy, and needed massive bailouts as a result. Just a few years ago.
Under heavy pressure from the energy industry and other corporate interests, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission are retreating from a plan to regulate many reaches of the U.S. trade in financial derivatives known as swaps, including the credit derivatives that nearly brought down the financial system.
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04.21.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The operating system of all the official computers in Southern Naval Command (SNC) at Kochi is switching over to an exclusively designed Linux from Windows.
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Kernel Space
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The Millenium Technology Prize, awarded every two years, is a Finnish award designed “to improve the quality of life and to promote sustainable development-oriented research, development and innovation.” Sir Tim Berners-Lee won the prize in 2004. The finalists this year are Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, who has been contributing to the area of stem cell research, and Linux creator Linus Torvalds. The 2012 Grand Prize winner will be announced on June 13 in Helsinki, Finland.
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As has been widely reported now by various publications, Intel is expected to launch their next-generation Ivy Bridge processors on Monday, 23 April. On the day that Ivy Bridge launches, you can expect to see a load of CPU and graphics benchmarks for their next-generation Core i7 processors under Linux on Phoronix. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS they will be compared to the AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer and various Sandy Bridge processors.
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There’s already a number of changes building up when it comes to the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) sub-system for merging into the Linux 3.5 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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In what will certainly be controversial and disappointing to some Radeon Linux desktop users, AMD will soon announce that they will effectively be discontinuing support for several Radeon product families from their proprietary Catalyst driver. After that point, for future Linux distribution updates, the open-source Radeon Linux driver will be your only option for accelerated graphics. This is likely happening with the Windows Catalyst driver too, but at least there they have a better-maintained legacy driver process.
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Keith Packard has been working on the X window system since the early days, but more recently has been doing lots of work to enable its replacement. X has long held the position as the way that graphics is done on Linux (and other Unix) systems, but that is changing. He came to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held April 3-5 in San Francisco, to talk about the Wayland protocol and the Weston server, and how they could interoperate with X. Wayland looks to be an interesting change for desktop graphics on Linux.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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US Linux operating system provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) expects to see 50% revenue growth in its Latin American operations in fiscal year 2013, regional sales manager for Spanish-speaking South America, Germán Soracco, told BNamericas.
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Fedora
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Fedora has a long history of release names. Some have been serious (Verne, Goddard, Cambridge), while others have been a little less so (Werewolf, Moonshine, Zod). Perhaps the silliest of them yet, Fedora 17 will be “Beefy Miracle,” a release name that’s been floating around for quite some time. Apparently, some consider Beefy Miracle to be offensive, because it refers to food made with beef. Given the complexity of selecting a “safe” release name, should Fedora drop names altogether?
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Linux distro names started to get ‘weird’ when Ubuntu arrived on the scenes with Weirdly Wacky African-inspired Animal names. Other distros, notably Fedora have taken a more democratic approach where community members vote on the release name, but that could soon change. “
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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With the release of Ubuntu 12.04 due out next week, Mark Shuttleworth will soon be announcing the codename of the six-month successor to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which carries the codename of Precise Pangolin.
Following in past tradition for Ubuntu codenames, the Ubuntu 12.10 should be a codename that’s two words with each letter beginning with a Q for the 12.10 cycle. The first word is generally an adjective followed by the name of an animal. This name is decided internally by Canonical / Mark without a community voting process like what happens with Fedora.
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Canonical has put out a call for more Ubuntu application developers, possibly highlighting a lack of traction in this area just one day before such a gap was pointed out by a competitor.
Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon put the word out on his blog Wednesday, stating his team’s intention to start working on an application developer community that would be fundamentally different from all the other communities that have been built up around the Ubuntu distribution of Linux.
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Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS will have an optional fast track for future OpenStack releases available alongside the OpenStack Essex release that the operating system ships with. The plan, dubbed the Ubuntu Cloud Archive, was announced in a blog post by Robbie Williamson, Canonical’s Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Server.
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HP will certify Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server, due to land on 26 April, for selected ProLiant servers, making this the first time users of the Linux distro can receive HP’s hardware warranty support. Newer ProLiant servers will be added to the list after the launch.
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June 7th, 2012 – Alpha 1 release
June 28th, 2012 – Alpha 2 release
August 2nd, 2012 – Alpha 3 release
September 6th, 2012 – Beta 1 release
September 27th, 2012 – Beta 2 release
October 18th, 2012 – Final release of Ubuntu 12.10
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Mozilla
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There are still Firefox users out there that are using the Firefox 3.6 branch of the browser. Motivation to do so differs, from disliking the design and interface of newer versions of the browser to using add-ons that are not compatible with never versions of Firefox. And then there are users who have turned updates off, or not enough privileges to run the updates. With Firefox 3.6 reaching its end of life this month, Mozilla and Firefox 3.6 users are in a predicament.While there are currently no known security vulnerabilities for version 3.6 of the browser, Mozilla fears that criminals will exploit the end of support to attack Firefox 3.6 users on the Internet.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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So the new GIMP 2.8 release is currently in the Release Candidate stage, the final release may come any time now (wild guess: the Libre Graphics Meeting conference is taking place in a couple of weeks and it will bring together a number of its developers), previews and reviews are starting to appear, is a big deal since this release is about 1.5 years late – it was expected since December 2010 but got delayed again and again – probably it was not sexy enough for the developers, who are excited about the next release, 2.10, which is going to deliver more meaty stuff.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Finance
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A telling taboo in elite circles is the issue of corruption. At INET last year, after a panel discussion on the financial crisis, Jamie Galbraith said he was astonished that there was not a single mention of fraud. His observation was met with a resounding silence.
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The answer is a ‘cold’ inflation, marked by a steady loss of purchasing power that has progressed through Western economies, not merely over the past few years but over the past decade. Moreover, perhaps it’s also the case that complacency in the face of empirical data (heavily-manipulated, many would argue), support has grown up around ongoing “benign” inflation.
If so, Western economies face an unpriced risk now, not from spiraling deflation, nor hyperinflation, but rather from the breakout of a (merely) strong inflation.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The two companies “owning” the drugs, however, are refusing to enter serious negotiations. Instead, they seem to be guarding their current patent monopolies and the profits generated thereby, while offering the public pablum justifications for not getting on with a deal that seems obvious and hugely in the public interest.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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A leaked G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and USA) document gives the strongest indication yet that the leading countries behind ACTA are working on the basis that the Agreement is now in serious trouble and needs to be fundamentally re-thought and re-worked – and in its current form even abandoned.
The leaked document, apparently prepared in the context of law enforcement working groups, appears to consciously address some of the criticisms that have been made of ACTA. In particular, the document avoids repeating the most obvious failure in ACTA – seeking to propose a “one size fits all” solution for every IPR issue from counterfeiting to unauthorised copying of digital goods. Instead, it narrows its focus wholly to counterfeit goods and medicines.
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04.20.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Links 20/4/2012:
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SPYRUS announced a new version of Secure Pocket Drive that allows end users to build and distribute their own secure bootable Linux OS image. In addition to offering secure access to corporate networks, the Linux edition gives users the freedom to install and run their own applications and productivity software locally.
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Hardware security company Spyrus has created a pocket drive that allows users to build and distribute their own secure, bootable Linux OS image.
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Its creators call it the “iPod For retro games”. GameGadget from Blaze Europe is a new Linux-based portable games console designed as a platform for games released on now-defunct consoles.
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I remember those days when newbies often get ‘bullied’ by experienced users in the forums or mailing lists. Ubuntu changed the trend by having zero tolerance policy against such behavior. Now, CentOS community is facing the same problem. The project has made a call for its users.
Johnny Hughes of CentOS posts on a mailing list, “… some members of the community in the areas provided by the CentOS Project are rude to users who are coming in for help. This happens much more often than it should. These complaints are not coming from newbies … I would expect that to happen. The complaints are coming from people who are very knowledgeable in the open source community and who are involved in other open source projects.”
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Desktop
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Digitimes reports that China is a hotbed of PC production and consumption and that OEMs are jockeying for share, betting on “8″ and “ultrabooks” to advance their businesses.
Reality could be different than those expectations. The “others” category in China is huge and they are not shy to produce and ship GNU/Linux systems.
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Google is revamping its Chrome OS platform with a new desktop environment and window management system. We took a close look at the user interface improvements earlier this week in a detailed hands-on report. In our review, we explained how advanced users can install the experimental new interface on a Chromebook by enabling the developer update channel.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation has released many slides and video recordings of the presentations given at the recent Collaboration Summit, which ran from 3 to 5 April in San Francisco. Topics covered include virtualisation and cloud computing, licensing, desktop software and the Tizen mobile operating system. A number of these presentations offer insights into current developments in the kernel environment.
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Applications
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As Clint Eastwood would say, “There are two types of text editors in the world, the ones for coding and the others”. Well, Qute (pronounce “cute”) is certainly among the others. it’s a text editor with some advanced features in terms of eye candy. In other terms, not only does it support Tex and Markdown, it’s also a pleasure to work with its visually-appealing interface. If you are tired of the console or just want to test something different, you can try Qute for Linux (or Mac or PC).
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s time for another Humble Indie Bundle… This time it’s called The Humble Botanicula Debut and features three games plus bonuses.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Best Linux Distribution? Whether you’re just getting your feet wet with Linux or you’re an old hand at it and have tried a half-dozen distros before finding the one you fell in love with, you probably have an opinion as to which Linux distribution is the best. This week we want to hear which one you think is the best.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The third and final beta edition of Mageia 2, a desktop Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Desktop, has been released. The first and only Release Candidate is expected on May 2, with the final, stable edition slated for release on May 15.
So, what does this release has to offer? Aside from the usual new features and bugfixes, Mageia 2 beta 3 features a new desktop design. And I think it is actually very good. The most important behind-the-scenes new feature, is the adoption of systemd for booting the system, instead of the old initscripts.
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Gentoo Family
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From time to time, there are some posts about leaving Gentoo or suggesting it is dying. A leave is really up to the user, when he or she feels it is not the distribution they like, then that’s what it is. I never got to understand what those leaving posts were for. If you want to leave, then just do it, why do you show up and mumble things without much constructive effect added to community? It’s not like you would be able to give more feedback sine you were not be using Gentoo anymore.
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Red Hat Family
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When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison started poking around the Linux market way back in 1998 or so, he turned to Wim Coekaerts for help. Fast forward to the present, and more than 8,500 customers run Oracle Linux. But how did Oracle get to this point? And what’s next for Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel? The VAR Guy tracked down Coekaerts and gained some candid insights — plus some strong opinions about Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and even Cisco Systems. Here’s the update.
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Red Hat has become the first open source company to exceed US$1 billion in annual revenue.
The 17-year-old software vendor posted revenue of US$1.13 billion for its fiscal 2012 year, up 25 percent over the previous corresponding year. Non GAAP adjusted net income for the year was US$216.4 million.
“The bulk of the $1.13 billion was done on the subscription model, which proves the level of adoption of open source,” says Craig Neilson, Red Hat New Zealand general manager.
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Red Hat, Inc. is the clear leader in the Linux market. It has the strongest, commercially supported Linux distribution and the best-performing virtualization solution for servers and desktops. It is the first billion dollar open source company in the world and is the most successful Linux company thanks in part to its dedication to the open source community and free software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), its flagship Linux product, is the one to watch in the data center for enterprise-level workloads including databases, application delivery and virtualization.
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Fedora
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If you’re called Beefy Miracle, you better pack a punch. And when the Fedora crew christened their next Linux desktop, that was certainly the plan.
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Debian Family
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I’ve been distro-hopping/shopping lately, and last night it was time for Crunchbang Linux, a Debian-based distribution that uses a very nice implementation of the Openbox window manager.
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People are always talking about how long they’ve had a particular Debian installation, some upgrading the same box through many subsequent releases.
On the desktop anyway, restless, tinkerish people such as myself have a habit of blowing out their OSes for one reason or another — usually extensive modification/experimentation that breaks things. Others can’t go more than a month without either distro-hopping to the next new release.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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For many years now we have been building a comprehensive Ubuntu contributor community. Across our many different sub-communities such as Packagers, Translators, LoCo Teams, Forums, AskUbuntu, Documentation Writers, Ubuntu Women, QA, Accessability, and elsewhere, we have worked hard to help everyone put their brick in the wall to help Ubuntu be the best it can for everyone and within our core values of the platform being Free Software, in your language, and available for everyone irrespective of disability.
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Flavours and Variants
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Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, announced a few minutes ago, April 19th, that the codename for the upcoming Linux Mint 13 operating system will be Maya.
Linux Mint 13 (Maya) will be available for download at the end of May 2012, and it will be shipped with separate MATE and Cinnamon editions. However, it has not yet been decided which desktop environment will be the default for Linux Mint 13.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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There are three fondleslabs in the set: 7in, 8in and 10in models, with resolutions of 480 x 800, 600 x 800 and 768 x 1024. They all use ARM Cortex A8-class processors, the 7in and 10in running at 1GHz, the eight-incher at 1.2GHz.
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A Forrester analyst warns that enterprises must evolve their IT systems of record into systems of engagement which allow customers, partners, suppliers and machines to engage seamlessly with corporate data — or fall prey to digital upstarts.
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Last month we had the chance to review Yubico’s YubiKey, a low cost, high accessibility authentication token that is aiming to change the way individuals connect with their online services. We came away very impressed, and with the distinct impression that Yubico was really on to something with not only their product, but their business model and goals: Yubico offers their services for free and released their server and client APIs as free software.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google’s $12.5 billion offer to purchase Motorola Mobility isn’t a done deal yet and some are still wondering how the Google will best benefit from the acquisition without upsetting partners. Motorola’s patents are surely a huge boon to Google and it’s possible Google keeps those and spins off Motorola; that’s what I predicted in December.
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Mozilla
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SaaS
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Today’s opening of the Amazon Web Services Marketplace will give cloud customers a lot more convenience in cloud deployment, while sending up clouds of dust for the still-behind OpenStack to inhale.
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Open source puts the customer in control and can free them from the technology decisions and business practices of any single vendor. This is important because even the best-intentioned vendors have to ultimately make choices about product roadmaps, pricing approaches, and target markets that may or may not align with the needs of a particular customer. Vendors get acquired, go out of business, and shift technology focus. That’s life. And, with proprietary software, you as a customer ultimately may not have many options if your vendor isn’t willing or able to support your needs or, indeed, to continue selling you software at all. Your only recourse may be to shift to another vendor, even if that means overhauling a large chunk of your infrastructure. Open source can crack open this lock-in.
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While many in the tech industry and the media have been touting the benefits of various “As-a-Service” models, there are also still concerns that such remote computing models will ultimately harm a fundamental core principle of free software: the ability to truly possess the software in all forms.
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Education
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wo state Senate bills that aim to help college students save significant money on textbooks recently passed at a Senate committee hearing.
The two bills — introduced by Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento — passed April 11 at a hearing of the Senate Education Committee, where public higher education representatives spoke in support of creating a library with open source textbooks for the 50 most popular lower division courses. Between now and Aug. 31, the bills will move through the committee hearings and Assembly floor, where they can be amended or defeated, according to Steinberg’s spokesperson Alicia Trost.
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Funding
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Twitter’s open source office announced today that it has become a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As a sponsor, the social networking company will contribute financial resources to the ASF to help support the organization’s mission.
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Public Services/Government
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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In his latest book, a longtime University of Houston-Victoria professor delves into how a computer operating system can help people overcome difficulties with mobile learning.
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Open Hardware
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Spanish company TheCorpora is now accepting pre-orders for its Q.bo open source and open hardware robot. TheCorpora founder Francisco Paz spent several years working on the rolling robot, which is about 45 cm tall and can be used both in research and around the home.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Finance
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By December 2011, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi, former vice president of Goldman Sachs Europe, was able to approve a 500 billion Euro bailout for European banks without asking anyone’s permission. And in January 2012, a permanent rescue funding program called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was passed in the dead of night with barely even a mention in the press. The ESM imposes an open-ended debt on EU member governments, putting taxpayers on the hook for whatever the ESM’s Eurocrat overseers demand.
The bankers’ coup has triumphed in Europe seemingly without a fight. The ESM is cheered by Eurozone governments, their creditors, and “the market” alike, because it means investors will keep buying sovereign debt. All is sacrificed to the demands of the creditors, because where else can the money be had to float the crippling debts of the Eurozone governments?
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Privacy
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Have you heard about CISPA? It’s the acronym for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act.
CISPA is being likened to the now-moribund SOPA and PIPA bills smothered by Congress after widespread public opposition.
However, only opponents see similarities. Advocates see it as completely different.
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04.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Daniel Pop: Well hello there, Dmitry! My name is Daniel Pop (not complete, I have two extra “secret” names). I am 26 years old. I write to you from the extraordinary (that’s not necessarily a good thing 
) country of Romania.
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Desktop
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The association ESOP from Portugal made available two papers of original research. They concern what they call an “artificial exclusion of Linux-based laptops”. I had the opportunity to see the study earlier. Both studies can be freely accessed from ESOP. It is not easy to calculate economic effects but ESOP applies their own innovative approach for calculating losses.
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Marseille, France is known for a lot of things, among them bouillabaisse stew, hostility toward centralized government and a flourishing drug trade. Yet on a recent trip there I discovered something unexpected: Ubuntu Linux running in a commercial environment. Here’s what I found, with some thoughts on where desktop Ubuntu might be headed among small businesses more generally.
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Lately, I’ve been talking to several people who want to give Linux a try but they lack some confidence or have heard several myths about this OS. That reminds me of myself back in the times prior to my migration. Thus, I guess other computer users out there may be in the same situation. If you are one of them, feel free to keep reading. You might find useful information here. This is for simple, plain computer users who feel like giving Linux a chance.
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Server
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Historically, Check Point has run two operating systems (OSes), the Nokia IPSO OS and the SecurePlatform (SPLAT) that was on its own appliances. But Check Point acquired Nokia’s network security appliance business in 2009, and has now, at long last, merged the two OSes into a new unified OS release.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Yesterday I reported on it appearing the 295.40 NVIDIA Linux driver effectively fell off a cliff with a range of performance regressions, stability issues, and other problems. This issue has been confirmed by NVIDIA and they’re working to address the situation.
Last week NVIDIA released the 295.40 Linux driver in order to address a high-risk security vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain access to the system memory via the GPU and the un-patched graphics driver. It turns out that the security fix is responsible for these weird issues now being experienced by a number of NVIDIA GeForce Linux users.
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While the NVIDIA 295.40 Linux graphics driver closes a high-risk security vulnerability, there’s many reports coming in that the proprietary driver’s performance has effectively fallen off a cliff and also caused stability issues.
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Patches were published today that introduce pinging support for Wayland clients, in an attempt to determine if a client is dead or alive. Should a client not respond to the ping request, the Wayland client’s surface is faded-out.
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Intel’s Ian Romanick has made progress in his long side-project of compiling OpenGL assembly shaders to GLSL IR. He’s now up to the point of being able to run the Doom 3 binaries with this conversion work for Mesa.
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Applications
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Ever wondered what other music players are there in Linux world that can replace your default one? Believe me, you are pampered with choices. While the popular ones receive many coverage, there are several lesser known music players that are equally powerful. Here I have compiled a list of lesser known (and good) audio players available for Linux operating systems along with their salient features.
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Xournal is an app that lets you input data your way — through a keyboard or through a stylus if you prefer to hand-write your notes. It’s a great tool for taking notes that involve text and drawings. However, it lacks the ability to import a graphic or text file, which could limit its use for some people.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In what is seen as a major overhaul to the cross-platform application and user interface framework, Qt 5 Alpha has been released in advance of the full-blown iteration, which is expected later this year.
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Swapnil: Can you tell us more about you? Where are you from and what do you do?
Daniel: I’m from Brazil, working as system analyst in a big company and a software geek in free time.
Swapnil: How did you come in contact with Free Software?
Daniel: I always hated having to re-install windows for every time it started to be slow or didn’t boot up. I also hated the user interface. When I was younger I wanted to build an OS but of course I had no idea of how hard would that be. So in high school I found out about Linux but without Internet (and with dial-up) it wasn’t a good alternative at time, so later at university with high speed Internet I brought a notebook and started to use Linux daily.
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The open source model at its core is all about freedom. The freedom for users to choose and the freedom of not being locked in. That freedom also can be a lifeline for projects that otherwise wouldn’t survive. Just ask the Kubuntu project, which found new life this past week after Canonical decided it wouldn’t support it anymore.
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GNOME Desktop
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A review of GNOME 2 seems redundant at this point. After all, the first release was almost a decade ago, and it’s been a year since GNOME 3.0 was announced.
However, a review of Mate 1.2 is not quite the same thing. Mate is Linux Mint’s fork of GNOME 2, designed to fill the ongoing demand for this GUI that simply refuses to die.
Announced as “the traditional desktop environment,” the point of Mate is not so much what new features it introduces as how well it preserves GNOME 2 while remaining compatible with GNOME 3 — and how these efforts compare to similar efforts, like GNOME’s current fallback mode (aka “Classic GNOME”) or Linux Mint’s Cinnamon.
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The GNOME Project has released version 3.4.1 of its open source Linux and Unix desktop environment. The first update to the GNOME 3.4 series offers the small improvements and bug fixes that are customary for such minor GNOME releases; the developers also updated and extended the support for different languages.
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The development team behind the MATE desktop environment proudly announced last evening, April 16th, that the stable 1.2.0 version of the popular project is now available for download and upgrade.
MATE 1.2.0 is a fork of GNOME 2, providing a traditional desktop environment for Linux operating systems and low-end machines.
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New Releases
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The Chakra Development Team, through Anke Boersma, proudly announced yesterday, April 16th, the immediate availability for download of the Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.04 operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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If you have not been following the saga of the Mageia Linux distribution then you are unaware that Mageia 2 is slated to be released on May 15th. At this point the distribution is in Beta 3 testing and then will have a Release Candidate out right around May 2nd.
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Red Hat Family
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Facebook’s efforts to seek the most cost-effective ways to operate its fast-growing, No. 1 social network has led it to Red Hat’s door.
In March, a Facebook engineer joined the advisory board for Gluster, an open-source software-only storage system firm Red Hat (RHT) bought in October for $136 million.
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Jason Andersen, Director Middleware Product Line Management at Red Hat, explained to that the starting point for people to consider the Data Grid is when they have a performance or latency issue with their Java apps. The Data Grid is a key-value store that is embedded in-memory, providing a performance boost to disk-bound applications.
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Fedora
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The final Fedora 17 beta has just been released. Fedora is Live CD distro, so you can boot it up on a CD or in a virtual machine to check it out before doing an install. I went with the default version that uses GNOME 3 for this Sneak Peek.
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Debian Family
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This is the first time the project has had a leader for so long, apart from the time when its founder Ian Murdock was in charge from August 1993 till March 1996,
Zacchiroli’s re-election is an indication that the members of the project are happy with the initiatives which he has launched in the last two years.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Back at the last UDS Orlando summit I mentioned that Canonical was looking at finally recomending the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux by default for new installs rather than 32-bit. This issue is again being discussed at the last minute for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” release due out next week.
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Canonical has added a feature to the upcoming long-term support release of Ubuntu 12.04 that alleviates cloud lock-in.
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Martin Stadtler, director of global support and services at Canonical said his company would be working within the partnership to “help deliver enhanced engineering, online and professional services to Ubuntu partners and customers worldwide.”
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Linux and Open Source is going main stream. Earlier we noticed LibreOffice in ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
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Canonical has unveiled a beta version of AWSOME (Any Web Service Over ME), an open source proxy service that helps users who currently use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate to OpenStack’s cloud computing platform. AWSOME will be included as an install option in the server edition of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS which is scheduled to be released later this month.
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Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution is making a big push into the enterprise and cloud, where it will go head to head with long-time enterprise Linux incumbent Red Hat and its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. However Shuttleworth is not sure that Red Hat’s pricing structure will make the firm competitive.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi Linux is a very interesting Linux distro. It is generally based on Ubuntu but unlike the other Ubuntu-based distros which usually try to give users a newbie-friendly and work-out-of-the-box experience, Bodhi is very minimalistic. By default, Bodhi comes with very few necessity applications pre-installed so users will have to choose the other applications to install. Beside the simplicity, another special thing about Bodhi is Enlightment – the desktop environment. I myself have been using Linux for serveral years but I never tried Englightment before ( as I just recently heard about it) so 2 days ago, I decided to try Bodhi Linux on my Sony laptop. This article is my review about Bodhi Linux after 2 days of playing and testing it.
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The Trisquel project has announced the release of Trisquel 5.5, code-named “Brigantia”. This is the first version of the distribution that is based on the GNOME 3 desktop environment, although it is using the 2D fallback mode option by default. Trisquel GNU/Linux is approved by the FSF as a Free Software distribution and as such cannot rely on a 3D composited desktop like Gnome Shell, as many 3D drivers for Linux are proprietary in nature. Trisquel 5.5 also uses version 3.0.0 of the Linux-libre kernel, which is a parallel distribution of the regular Linux kernel that aims to remove all non-free components and firmware.
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I believe that what ever a computer users requirement are the Ubuntu Family (official derivatives) have them covered and one such beautiful member of the family is Xubuntu. Xubuntu comes with lightweight and highly customisable Xfce running at the current stable release 4.8.1. The default look of Xubuntu 12.04 is quite appealing.
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With the first shipment of Raspberry Pi computers, a new wave of computer programming may just be born. A group of schoolchildren in Leeds, U.K. will be the first to get a batch of the tiny computers, followed by fulfillment of the first orders by April 20.
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It’s been the most highly anticipated launch in the history of development boards, but one of the most problem-ridden too. Originally unveiled early last year with a suggested launch schedule of September 2011, the Raspberry Pi single-board computer has proven a beast to get out of the door – but the first retail models are finally landing in customers’ hands this week.
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Phones
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Android
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SAN JOSE – Google is expected to boost its support in Android for cores from MIPS Technologies, giving the company a badly needed boost in the hot smartphone and tablet sector.
The Android native developers’ kit is expected to start bundling a GNU compiler for MIPS within weeks. Google is expected to bundle full support for the MIPS application binary interface in all Android code and libraries, starting with a future Android release in the next several months.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I was surprised by the beginning of the Economist’s article “Error Message” (based on the IADB study) that says the Peruvian Una Laptop por Niño project “did not accomplish anything in particular”. The IADB study clearly stated that the project “substantially increased use of computers both at school and at home”, “positive effects were found in general cognitive skills” and improved “competence in operating laptops in tasks related to core applications (like a word processor) and searching for information on the computer”.
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With the frequent focus on mobile machinations and desktop deliberations here in the Linux blogosphere, it would be easy to assume that all else in the FOSS fiefdom is relatively conflict-free.
Easy, perhaps — but dead wrong, nonetheless.
Case in point: cars. There’s a growing movement to apply the open source model to the design and manufacturing of electric cars, as described in a recent Txchnologist article on the Tumanako project.
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In 2010, Guido Appenzeller left his professor’s job at Stanford University, to start up a new company that would expand the OpenFlow networking technology he helped to create. This week, Appenzeller is taking the stage as a presenter at the Open Networking Summit in a session titled, Opening Up Your Network to Cloud Innovation with SDN.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google attempted to introduce a new approach to computing when it first launched Chrome OS in 2010. The operating system consists of little more than a fullscreen Web browser perched atop a rigorously-hardened Linux environment. The platform makes some unusual trade-offs, eschewing conventional native applications in exchange for bulletproof security and low-maintenance stateless computing.
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SaaS
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In the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and more can be found in large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.
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For programs, we make a distinction between free and nonfree (proprietary). More precisely, this distinction applies to a program that you have a copy of: either you have the four freedoms for your copy or you don’t.
An activity (such as a service) doesn’t exist in the form of copies, so it’s not possible to have a copy or to make copies. As a result, the four freedoms that define free software don’t make sense for services.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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News about the lawsuit between Oracle (which owns Java) and Google (which uses aspects of Java in Android) are resonating far and loud at the moment. At this point in the article, I should summarise the story: the trouble is that a summary at this point is impossible. The main problem is with Oracle, and their inability to understand free software.
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Education
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BSD
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In the 1980s, BSD was just another leg of the Unix table. DEC used it as the basis for Ultrix, and Sun Microsystems based its SunOS on it. But BSD today is more about open-source development than it was in the 1980s. When Unix System V version 4 shipped in the early 1980s, the BSD community began to focus more on the desktop than on the server, and the many varieties of BSD were born.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In my past several articles, I’ve looked at various packages to do all kinds of science. Sometimes, however, there just isn’t a tool to solve a particular problem. That’s the great thing about science. There is always something new to discover and study. But, this means it’s up to you to develop the software tools you need to do your analysis. This article takes a look at the GNU Scientific Library, or GSL. This library is the Swiss Army library of routines that you will find useful in your work.
First, you need to to get a copy of GSL and install it on your system. Because it is part of the GNU Project, it is hosted at http://www.gnu.org/s/gsl. You always can download and build from the source code, but all major distributions should have packages available. For example, on Debian-based systems, you need to install the package libgsl0-dev to develop your code and gsl-bin to run that code. GSL is meant for C and C++, so you also need a compiler. Most of you probably already are familiar with GCC, so I stick with that here.
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We have done a lot of refactoring in GIMP over the last ten years, but its innermost pixel manipulating core was still basically unchanged since GIMP 1.2 days. We didn’t bother to do anything about it, because the long term goal was to do all this stuff with GEGL, when GEGL was ready. Now GEGL has been ready for quite a while, and the GEGL porting got assigned a milestone. Was it 2.10, 3.0, 3.2, I don’t remember. We thought it would take us forever until it’s done, because nobody really had that kind of time.
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GEGL in GIMP is finally going to be going full-speed. For GIMP 2.10 the open-source imaging program’s core will be 100% ported to GEGL, the Generic Graphics Library.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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In the Czech municipality of Grygov open source is used almost everywhere. It covers most of the applications used by the administration, offers public Internet access across the entire village and it is the basis for an SMS gateway linking the regional fire department with the volunteers in the village. The software even keeps parents up to date on changes in school schedules.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently announced one of the most progressive open source policies in the US government. They reiterated the current OMB and DOD guidance by making open source commercial software, but they also went one step further: code they write is open by default. I am totally impressed.
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Programming
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The Dart team has announced the first global Dart hackathon. The event will taken place between the end of April and the beginning of May in fourteen cities worldwide. Locations include Mountain View in the US (27-28 April), and London and Prague (27-29 April) in Europe. A date for the London hackathon has not yet been announced.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Ever since 2010, when the Transportation Security Administration started requiring that travelers in American airports submit to sexually intrusive gropings based on the apparent anti-terrorism principle that “If we can’t feel your nipples, they must be a bomb”, the agency’s craven apologists have shouted down all constitutional or human rights objections with the mantra “If you don’t like it, don’t fly!”
[...]
Anyone who rode the bus in Houston, Texas during the 2-10pm shift last Friday faced random bag checks and sweeps by both drug-sniffing dogs and bomb-sniffing dogs (the latter being only canines necessary if “preventing terrorism” were the actual intent of these raids), all courtesy of a joint effort between TSA VIPR nests and three different local and county-level police departments. The new Napolitano doctrine, then: “Show us your papers, show us everything you’ve got, justify yourself or you’re not allowed to go about your everyday business.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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North America has a number of LNG export projects underway, mostly in Kitimat, British Columbia. But yesterday the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the first application for such a facility in the lower 48. Until these projects are operational, North American natural gas will continue to be trapped by geography. And, given that prices here are near $2.00 per million btu, I thought it would be enlightening to pull the most recent data chart from FERC, showing what customers pay for the same amount of NG, in liquified form, around the world. | see: World LNG Estimated April 2012 Landed Prices.
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Finance
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Robert Lantos, the canny, creative, and famously combative movie producer who once stood atop the Canadian film and television business as the chairman and CEO of Alliance Communications, has filed suit in a bitter custody dispute over six of his films which he says were sold to an international distributor without his permission.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s compensation increased 14.5 percent to $16.2 million in 2011 despite a sharp decline in profits and share price during the year, leaving the bank open to more attacks on its pay policies.
Blankfein’s pay boost includes stock awards from previous years that vested in 2011, and therefore does not reflect the amount that Goldman’s board awarded him strictly for the company’s performance last year.
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The sweetheart deals just keep coming. Lawbreakers at one bank after another are let off the hook as their shareholders write a check. And then they go out and repeat the illegal behavior they promised not to do in the last settlement.
It shouldn’t be surprising that this keeps happening over at the SEC — especially as long as Robert Khuzami continues to serve as Director of the Commission’s Division of Enforcement.
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Privacy
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Die Danish EU Presidency is on the scrouge. For the EU Future Internet Assembly they raise fees from lobbyists. Makes me wonder if they fear EU presidency conferences become the new food stamps. I find it unpleasant that even a low walled garden would exclude parts of the Dutch population e.g. students from participation.
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DRM
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While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can’t freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They’ve even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission. It continues to be a major issue in the area of movies and video too.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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David Martin, the rapporteur of ACTA at the EU Parliament, has issued his draft report recommending the Parliament to reject ACTA. This is an important step toward effectively killing this dangerous agreement. But while denouncing ACTA, the rapporteur nevertheless supports the 15 year-long war on culture sharing. He also carefully avoid to stress the need for a positive reform of copyright, so as to protect fundamental freedoms online and fostering access to culture and knowledge.
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In the next few weeks, the EU Parliament will continue to work on ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, ahead of its final vote around the summer. This is a crucial moment for the citizen mobilization against ACTA, which will have to resist the growing pressure that the copyright lobbies put on the Parliament. Beyond the rejection of ACTA, the whole EU copyright enforcement policy needs to be revised. Only a reform of copyright can protect once and for all fundamental rights online of EU citizens and push the online creative economy in a new direction, away from blind repression. Here is a state of play on the next steps of the mobilization in the European Parliament.
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04.17.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Based on that incredibly important criteria, I hereby declare that Linux has reached the pinnacle of true success. Send the marketing folks home, ladies and gentlemen, we’re done here, because everyone and their brother is now officially trying to the “the Linux of” whatever the sector within which they are seeking to succeed.
The latest company to hang this label on their product line is VMware, which has declared via CTO Steve Herrod that their new Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will be the “Linux of the cloud.”
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The truth is you are thousands of times more secure with GNU/Linux than that other OS. The count of malwares proves that. The incidence of malware infections proves that. The prevalence of GNU/Linux servers on the web proves that. The fact that M$’s servers are becoming more like GNU/Linux machines with time is another. Heck, M$’s 2008 server can even run GUIless and uses scripting. Where have we heard of that? Oh, GNU/Linux back about 1995.
It is a standard military manoeuvre to seek out an enemy’s weakness and exploit it. If you are trying to run IT are you charging the enemy’s centre with it’s heavy artillery, enfilade fire and mines or are you going to flank him and cut his supply lines? We must do the same in IT. M$ has proven thousands of times that its software is insecure. We should run GNU/Linux. It’s the smart thing to do.
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Server
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According to survey results released earlier this year, Ubuntu still has a lot of room to grow in the cloud space. But it seems to be doing just that, the latest indicator being HP’s release of cloud products based partially on Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters for the Ubuntu world in particular.
Last week, HP announced the public availability beginning May 10 of its HP Cloud platform, which began life as a private beta about six months ago. Most of the HP Cloud features are not very unique — it’s the same basic deal as other popular hosted cloud infrastructures, like Amazon EC2 — but one of the characteristics HP seems to be pushing is the open-source technologies on which its solutions are built, freeing users from vendor lock-in.
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Kernel Space
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Say what you will about the mainstream viability of Google Plus, but anyone who has spent even a few days on Google’s rapidly developing social network can tell you that the userbase seems unusually knowledgeable and tech-savvy. There have been numerous posts and articles attempting to explain this phenomena, but the most common theory seems likely enough: the early invitations were given out to primarily technical users (developers, tech journalists, etc), and they predictably shared their invites with like-minded individuals.
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Ubuntu and Canonical have done quite a bit in expanding the ecosystem and market for Linux, which used to be practically unusable on the desktop. By aspiring to a better, easier and more polished UI, Ubuntu has lifted other Linux distributions and their UIs along with it. This does not absolve Canonical of the responsibility to engage in upstream kernel work and contribution, though, and the company stands more to gain than lose by putting resources toward Linux.
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Graphics Stack
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There is another new open-source Linux graphics driver entering development and it has already showed signs of success with basic 2D acceleration working. This new open-source driver is for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon / Adreno and who is leading the development of this driver is also quite interesting.
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The Nouveau Kepler Gallium3D code that was published yesterday does indeed work for allowing OpenGL acceleration on the GeForce 600 series using this reverse-engineered open-source code. In an odd story to end out the weekend, the Nouveau Kepler graphics driver consumed nearly 120GB of hard drive space while running this open-source driver on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680.
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Applications
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Transcoding is the process of the conversion of digital data (typically video and audio files) from one format to another. It involves extracting tracks from a digital media file, decoding the tracks, filtering, encoding, and then multiplexing the new tracks into a new container. Transcoding will reduce the quality of the tracks unless lossless formats are used.
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RSSOwl is a free and powerful news feed reader. RSSOwl lets you organize, update, gather,save informations and search news in a convenient. RSSOwl easy to use interface with endless flexibility.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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In the Indie game “The Great Jitters Pudding Panic“, done by the German developers kunst-stoff, you are a Green pudding and your goal is to exit from an haunted house without fainting from fear, while at the same time trying to scare the monsters in the maze.
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0 A.D. is a free and open source ancient warfare real time strategy game, that has drawn a lot of attention around it for a good reason. This game started as a very ambitious project which is always good, but also very difficult. This Monday we meet Aviv Sharon, in an effort to learn more about the details behind this fantastic game, that many people already “love” although it is still in alpha state.
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When it comes to ioquake3, the open-source id Tech 3 game engine, it’s almost always being used for powering a first-person shooter. However, released on Friday was a major update to an open-source multi-platform game running on ioquake3 but is not yet-another-FPS title. However, it’s also arguably the oddest game to be powered by this engine that was originally designed for Quake III.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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/li>
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KDE Plasma Workspaces provide a graphical interface and lots of eye candy for the desktop Linux experience. Many would argue that it is equal to or even better at this than Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. KDE, however, is not only a graphical frontend for Linux. It comes with a set of applications and also with a set of system administration tools that can help power users take control of their desktops or laptops without dropping to the command line.
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For Slackware, it’s been no exception. Some of you faithful Slackers may have noticed lately that the Slackware home page has been offline. I posted about this at Jeremy’s Linux Questions forums. Alien Bob (Eric Hameleers) replied stating that it was an old hardware/lack of funds issue. This is sad. 
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New Releases
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A new sets of Slackel KDE 4.8.2 edition. A collection of four KDE iso images are immediately available to our users, including 32-bit and 64-bit installation images as well as 32-bit and 64-bit live images that can be burned to a DVD or used with a USB drive.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last week, I received, in CC:, an email from a Mandriva Linux developer. This email was entitled “A foundation for Mandriva Linux *NOW* or Mandriva Linux to *DIE*?”
That suggested to me that maybe Mandriva was not going very well. This, of course, hurted me. At the same time it leads to the interesting question of a Foundation for a project like Mandriva Linux.
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Red Hat Family
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There were a number of points in Cormier’s blog post, however, that could be interpreted as being less complimentary toward the Redmond giant. A reference to Red Hat having attained its current status “not without opposition” may well be a veiled dig at Microsoft, as could a line asserting that “some of the new entrants [to the open source world] are surprising.”
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While Red Hat might be one of the largest open source providers in the world, Jim Totton, vice president for the company’s platform business unit, is surprisingly coy about mistakes the company has made and learnt from in the decade since it launched.
Coming up to its 10-year anniversary in May, Totton is in Australia from the US to celebrate. However, discussing mistakes Red Hat has made over the years doesn’t appear to be on the agenda.
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Debian Family
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* Debian project leader elected
* Registration open for DebConf12
* Personal BSP initiatives
* The state of Debian s390x
* Interviews
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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Siduction 11.1 is a fork of the Aptosid distro. Siduction comes in KDE, Xfce or LXDe spins. You can get 32-bit or 64-bit versions of each spin. Siduction is based on Debian Sid and includes Linux Kernel 3.1-6 and X.Org server 1.11.2.902.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Windows is great, but after a while, it can get cluttered up with too many programs and become intolerably sluggish. Backing up your files and reinstalling it can help, but an alternative is to try the free Ubuntu operating system. Ubuntu isn’t too demanding and can make even a lowly netbook seem sprightly compared with running Windows on it.
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Ubuntu GNU/Linux has been global on the web but Canonical/Mark Shuttleworth has a larger project in mind. So far they have created business relationships with most of the large OEMs and provided cloud services and content-distribution portals.
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Two weeks ago a Linux Foundation report showed that since version 2.6.32, Microsoft had committed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical. Since then, Canonical has faced claims from rivals that it does not contribute to Linux as much as it should given its popularity.
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We need to ensure we get total coverage of our different ISO images; the different images that you can download and install from. Each of these images has a small set of mandatory tests that we need to run through to ensure everything is working. We want to ensure all of these mandatory tests are run so that we can find any problems before the release and get them fixed.
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Flavours and Variants
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Y’all should know by now that I’m a Linux user. I write in Linux, I game in Linux, heck, my house has been Microsoft-free for about three years and I’ve never looked back. (The only exception being my day-job laptop. I’m stuck with Windows there.) The only thing that really bugs me about Linux is the uncertainty of upgrades.
I’ve been using Linux Mint for a while now. Since version 8, I believe, when I changed over from Ubuntu. I find Linux Mint more user friendly than just straight Ubuntu and this is important. I’m a very plug-and-play kind of person. I don’t want to sit around installing drivers and slogging away at software installs. I want to plug it in, turn it on, and have it work. When I installed Linux Mint 8 for the first time, it did just that.
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Raspberry Pi, the $35 Linux system about the size of a credit card, is fully baked and ready to eat… er, ship.
The system was designed by a British nonprofit with the idea of encouraging people everywhere, particularly young people in developing countries, to become more interested in programming.
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Free Software is resilient, Raspberry Pi has proven it again. After a month full of challenges and hurdles whether it be wrongly soldered LAN port or requirement of getting a CE mark the tiny devices are now shipping. For those who missed to order, the Raspberry Pi boards from RS and Allied are priced at £21.60 plus a shipping charge of £4.95 to any destination worldwide, plus VAT and import duty as applicable.
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Phones
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Android
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This screenshot tour was created to accompany DeviceGuru’s forthcoming post describing how we rooted and tweaked an Amazon Kindle Fire. The tour comprises more than 100 screenshots, which showcase the Kindle Fire’s standard homescreens and settings, the utilities and process we used for rooting and tweaking it, and the overall end result.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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When Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and other executives take the stage at this week’s Cisco Partner Summit, The VAR Guy wonders: Will Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) executives be armed with Cius tablets? The answer to that question could reveal how Cisco is feeling about its purpose-built tablets, which run Google Android and leverage the Cisco AppHQ app store.
Cisco Cius tablets don’t seek to compete in the consumer tablet market. Rather, the devices are designed for corporate executives who leverage unified communications and video applications. Cisco Partner Summit 2012 (April 16-19, San Diego), could provide a prime stage to update partners on the Cius.
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One of the most exciting up and coming trends in the world of networking in the last few years has been emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN). At the core of the SDN revolution is the open source OpenFlow protocol which has helped to define the entire SDN space.
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The hits just keep on coming for the Android mobile operating system–albeit this time from European telecom vendors that are insisting the Linux-based operating system would help prop up the flagging Lumia smartphone sales… if only the Lumias ran Android instead of Windows Phone 7.
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Web Browsers
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Databases
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MontyProgram AB, the company formed by MySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius in the wake of his break with Sun Microsystems, has released the latest version of MariaDB, a “drop-in replacement” for MySQL built on the MySQL 5.5 codebase. MariaDB 5.5.23, which according to developer Colin Charles has “1.5 million additional lines of code compared to MySQL,” pushes forward the development of an open-source database with features that aim to match those of Oracle’s commercial-only MySQL releases.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice/OpenOffice//Calligra
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For home and enterprise users alike, software like LibreOffice has made desktop Linux a whole lot easier. A reliable office suite is a key part of using a modern computer for most people. Given that important, it’s worth noting that a new Koffice fork has been developed. It’s called Calligra Suite.
Unlike LibreOffice, which doesn’t reflect the styles of one desktop environment over another, Calligra Suite is based on Qt and was definitely designed with the KDE user in mind.
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It’s here at last! oi_151a_prestable2 AKA oi_151a3 is the third update since OpenIndiana 151a was released in September and the first since then to be available as freshly pressed ISOs.
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BSD
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A few weeks ago I asked if readers would be interested in seeing reviews of network-attached storage (NAS) projects. The feedback was really positive and so I present the first of what I hope to be a series of reviews covering NAS solutions. This week we will be looking at FreeNAS, a FreeBSD-based project sponsored by iXsystems.
Before we get started I think it’s only fair that we address the question of why we might want to run a dedicated NAS operating system rather than a generic server system. For instance, this week we’re looking at FreeNAS, what motivation do we have for using it instead of FreeBSD or a popular Linux server distribution? The answer is largely one of specialization. People looking at network-attached storage are looking for a place to store files (usually a lot of files) and aren’t interested in other features a server operating system might provide. A NAS box will be focused on storing and transferring files, it’s probably not going to serve up e-mails or websites or provide DNS services. With that in mind, a NAS should come with all the tools we might need to easily add new disks, take snapshots, perform backups and, being focused on these tasks exclusively, it can cut out any extras, providing a lightweight solution.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Cyber attacks on IT systems would become a criminal offence punishable by at least two years in prison throughout the EU under a draft law backed by the Civil Liberties Committee on Tuesday. Possessing or distributing hacking software and tools would also be an offence, and companies would be liable for cyber attacks committed for their benefit.
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Civil Rights
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Congress’ latest attempt at a bill that affects the way people use the Internet has many scared, with some calling the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is “worse than SOPA,” the bill that caused widespread Internet outrage and blackouts before ultimately being shelved. Experts say the danger level associated with CISPA depends on the answer to one question: Which Constitution amendment do you care about more, the First or the Fourth?
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”
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