05.03.11
Posted in News Roundup at 8:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
A few weeks ago, the Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin openly said that bashing Microsoft is ‘like kicking a puppy’, every Linux user saw some amount of truth to that. If some disagree, they can always look at Android, Amazon’s Kindle, and a bucket load of Linux-based gadgets that have sprung up in the market recently. Also, when it comes to servers, Linux has managed to beat Microsoft hands down. The conformation came straight from the horse’s mouth when Steve Ballmer admitted that Linux’s server share is 60% as opposed to Microsoft’s 40%. Having said all that, Linux desktop’s market share stands at a meager .71 % in the United States, which is even less than Apple iPad’s userbase. So, what are the reasons why the Linux desktop is still far behind its server counterpart? Why the Linux desktop still isn’t winning? Let’s take a deeper look at the problem.
-
It may be true that “the clothes make the man,” as the old saying goes, but can anything similar be said of a user’s computing preference?
Indeed it can, at least if a recent Hunch survey is anything to go by. Mac users are generally a much more interesting bunch, according to Hunch’s “Profile of a self-described Mac person vs. PC person,” which was published recently as an infographic.
In fact, Mac users are younger, more liberal, more urban, more educated and more likely to eat Shawarma than PC users are, according to the report. Oddly, they’re also more likely to consider themselves “computer-savvy gearheads.”
-
Desktop
-
Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is released finally and it is getting some rave reviews from around the web(Recommended read: top things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal). Eager to buy a laptop or a netbook pre-installed with Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal? Here is a quick list of Ubuntu 11.04 pre-installed laptops and netbooks from prominent manufacturers.
-
Here’s a powerful super compact Nvidia Tegra2 ARM Cortex-A9 Dual-core 1Ghz based Desktop box, for now seems to run something like Ubuntu 11.4 (ARM netbook edition?), but the software support is a process that is a work-in-progress. Their pricing starts at $199 for the basic model, I will try to get a review unit, what do you think about this type of compact ARM Powered desktop?
-
Kernel Space
-
For those that use the Broadcom Crystal HD adapters for video acceleration under Linux, their open-source driver has received a number of improvements just recently.
-
Applications
-
Whether you are moving to Ubuntu or just require an affordable (in this case free) alternative to Adobe Photoshop, you should be considering GIMP as your primary image editing tool
Short for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP comes pre-installed with certain open source operating systems such as Ubuntu, and allows designed to help you crop images, resize and edit, convert between image formats and even create basic GIF animations.
-
I know that a handful of people value lightweight programs, especially after I read some comments on my previous articles. I must admit, it’s a great thing when a program is light on resources and does the job right every time. In today’s feature I’ve found another very lightweight program for your personal enjoyment called Leafpad. Leafpad will more than likely remind you of other programs, but we’ll get into that in just a bit.
-
burg is a brand-new boot loader based on GRUB. It uses a new object format which allows it to be built in a wider range of OS, including Linux/Windows/OSX/Solaris/FreeBSD, etc. It also has a highly configurable menu system which works in both text and graphic mode. In this post we will show you how to install Burg in Ubuntu 11.04 natty Narhwal.
-
Proprietary
-
-
The JACK audio server/master transport control system is the cornerstone of the modern Linux sound production studio. That’s certainly true in my own studio, and given JACK’s complexity I also employ a number of useful “friends of JACK”, i.e. software that reveals and extends JACK’s capabilities. This article looks at some of those friends most commonly in action here at Studio Dave.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
So whilst we are in 2011 and a very different market to 1997, one indi software house is producing a title which not only lends heavily on the charm of the original GTA but also is supporting Linux.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
If you were to pass by Sebas’ house these last few days of Tokamak 5, you’d see a window full of post-its that contained tasks that we plan to do (can be seen on Kevin’s blog).
[...]
The theme is rather simple – black/white KDE logo with rotating gear that fades into the logo that can be seen in the screenshot. If you are wondering why the text says ‘Friday’, it is because we are recognizing the fantastic song made popular by our idol Rebecca.
Tokamak 5 is approaching the end – only Marco and I still linger around (and Sebas, naturally) – and that is going to end tomorrow around noon.
-
How to-ish:
Basically you add the Window Menu bar widget to a panel. Then you move the panel to the top. You add a second panel to the left with a task bar widget in it. Tweak the size and make it autohide. Also, notice that the Title Bar disappeared in the full screen window. Well you can do that with any window manually but with a little handy work, you can actually have kwin hide the title bar when you maximize the window. (This is one of the areas that would require work to reach unity’s level of functionality though as no window controls go into the panel.
-
In the old KDE PIM Platform applications owned the data and provided a scriptable access interface to it over D-Bus. In the new platform however, applications only provide a user interface to the data, and the data interface is provided by Akonadi. That makes the applications themselves far smaller, making it easy to split them up and create more purpose-built applications to fit with what the user wants. Newspeak centerward make easy newapplications indeed.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
GNOME 3 has been designed to ensure that it can be used by those who have a low level of pointer control, either because they are not well practised at using pointing devices or our software, because they might not have good control over the hand and fingers, or because they are using low quality hardware. This is one way in which GNOME 3 is easier to use than GNOME 2.
-
My wife has a Dell laptop that normally runs Windows 7 on it. I don’t push or whine about that, it’s her machine and she can run whatever she wants. I very very rarely have to do tech support on it, which is a good thing because at this point all of my Windows skills are gone. However, a minor catastrophe recently caused her hard drive to go bad (she dropped it), and Windows would constantly warn her, then BSOD, then the machine wouldn’t even boot and the BIOS would say it couldn’t find the internal hard drive. In short: it was totally screwed.
-
When GNOME 3.0 was released some weeks ago, I finally switched to gnome-shell by default. Performance is quite good in my laptop, so the only problem was getting used to the new user experience.
-
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.
-
A while ago we had a poll here and a review of Mageia came second just after Scientific Linux. Mageia is a new distribution and this is only the second beta, but it’s due for release in around 30 days so I thought we’ll take a sneak preview now. No doubt there will be more reviews coming all over the web once this is out.
The old Mandrake Linux, before it became Mandriva which of course Mageia is a fork of, was the first Linux distribution that mostly worked for me. The first actually was Corel Linux 1.0 (the one and only), but it was slow on a 266MHz Pentium 2. So I’m approaching Mageia with a lot of good will and high hopes but realistic expectations.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Red Hat has announced Director of Open Source Consulting at Emergent LLC Quint Van Deman as the 2011 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.
The award recognizes and honors the hard work, skills and creativity of those holding Red Hat certifications.
-
Debian Family
-
-
Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? We want to guide you in the basics.
We are convinced that there are a lot of people out there that want to get involved with Free Software but don’t know where to start. For Debian, the most common task you’ll do as a contributor is rebuilding a package.
-
A discussion has begun in the quiet corner of Debian testing about offering a rolling release branch in addition to its current line-up. Well, sort of. Lucas Nussbaum has posted details of the intriguing discussion on his blog.
Nussbaum recognizes that rolling releases are quite popular and offers the numbers of those using Debian testing and the growing popularity of Arch Linux as evidence. Some others may remember PCLinuxOS as well. He states that many users find the software in stable Debian perhaps a bit too stale or old. So a rolling release could be possible with little extra effort based on the testing branch.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Ubuntu 11.04 comes with a new theme namely Unity. It is a 3D theme that requires 3D display driver.
-
-
Ubuntu is a popular Linux-based distro but, like everything in life, it isn’t perfect.
There’s plenty that could be improved, both in terms of software and the way it goes about doing things.
Here’s what we think would improve it.
-
Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is here, yep, 11.04 has landed. (Is it just me or is there less Internet fanfare than before?) Along with Natty came the much discussed, loved-hated, maligned-adored, yet universally greatly expected Unity Interface.
-
Last week, Canonical released the latest version of its desktop Linux operating system, Ubuntu. Affectionately nicknamed “Natty Narwhal,” Ubuntu 11.04 is notable not just for being the most recent step along the company’s six-month development cycle, but it could very well also be the one that catapults Ubuntu—and Linux itself—into the same pantheon of popularity as Windows and Mac OS X.
-
This was a big week for Ubuntu Linux with the release of new version 11.04, ‘Natty Narwhal’ of the popular GNU/Linux operating system. There’s been loads of discussion over the last few months leading up to this, primarily over the decision to use the new Unity desktop interface instead of Gnome Shell. Some people like it; some hate it. Well, I just had to see for myself what all the fuss was about. I tried out Ubuntu 11.04 Beta about a week ago and found it a little too simplistic and not easily configurable. The final release just came out a few days ago, so I decided to install it on my experimental HP Compaq computer. I believe the only way to really see how an operating system works is to install it and use it for a while. Here are my impressions of ‘Natty Narwhal’ after two days.
-
A few days ago Canonical Ltd. released the newest version of the company’s popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu 11.04. featuring a completely new user interface called “Unity.” The Unity interface is aimed at mainstream computer users, not just Linux geeks. Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical founder, says that the Unity interface’s beautiful graphic design elements represent a new direction for Ubuntu and, hopefully, one other free software developers will follow. This Linux has long been one of the more aesthetically-pleasing distros, but Unity takes it up a notch. Is tempting mainstream users the only motivation, though?
-
This alternative to Windows has a strong identity of its own that is easy to use and makes good use of widescreen monitors
-
The newest version, 11.04, features a radically different interface called Unity that had its roots in the now-discontinued Netbook Edition. With 11.04, also known as Natty Narwhal, everybody uses the netbook interface by default.
-
The latest edition of Canonical’s free operating system brings a new front-end to the popular Windows alternative
A new edition of Ubuntu arrives every six months, bearing a new zoological codename. The latest is version 11.04 (reflecting its April 2011 release), known to its friends as the Natty Narwhal.
You’ll notice one change before you even download the installer: the Netbook Edition has been retired, so there’s now only one ISO for all home computers. It’s a wise move; one standard installation makes life easier for beginners and developers alike.
-
When Canonical last week issued the stable Ubuntu Linux 11.04, the build has brought out a bunch of new features and interface tweaks that’ve freshened up the overall aesthetics while improving usability. One of the most striking changes is the new Unity desktop environment (requires 3D acceleration) that puts a Dock-like application launcher to the left edge of the screen.
-
Microsoft isn’t exactly the most-loved company in the world, and part of that arguably has to do with its dominant position in the OS market. Its flagship product, Windows, has improved recently, but frustrations caused by its checkered past are, for some, hard to forget.
For years, many computer industry professionals have hoped that strong Windows alternatives would emerge. Much of this hope was based on the idea that highly-polished GUIs for Linux-based operating systems could offer consumers Windows-like experiences and give Microsoft a run for its money.
-
Ubuntu 11.04 has come out for few days, if you choose to upgrade from a previous Ubuntu edition you may encounter no wallpaper displaying problem in Unity. There’s only a white background and wallpaper chosen in Appearance window won’t display any more.
-
Over the weekend, I made the painful mistake of upgrading to Natty Narwhal 11.04, the newest release of Ubuntu Linux. I was previously running 10.04 and realized I was stuck with Qt 4.6 and I desperately needed a feature in 4.7. After starting the upgrade process, I realized I actually had missed the last upgrade 10.10, which was required before upgrading to 11.04. I installed that and realized it contained Qt 4.7. I could have stopped there and be content, but I didn’t.
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Few releases of any distribution have received as much attention as Ubuntu 11.04 (codenamed Natty Narwhal). Most of the buzz is about the switch to the new Unity desktop — and deservedly so, since it is radically different from the GNOME desktop it replaces. However, Natty also features some changes to widgets, the installer, and the Ubuntu Software Center, many of which — like Unity itself — reflect Ubuntu’s ongoing concerns about usability and design issues, while having mixed levels of success.
This concern has always loomed large in Ubuntu. However, it became even stronger several years ago, when Shuttleworth decided that usability and design were areas where Ubuntu and its corporate arm Canonical could “make a significant contribution” to open source software. Since then, Ubuntu has introduced such innovations as the app indicators, the repositioning of title bar buttons, and a new color-coded default theme reminiscent of Apple’s.
-
Ubuntu’s new Natty release is out but does the new Unity interface live up to its billing?
Right now I am at a loss as what to think of Unity, Ubuntu’s new desktop interface.
Like many long-time Ubuntu fans I was eagerly awaiting Ubuntu Natty, the latest release of Ubuntu. Most of all I wanted to try out Unity, the new interface that Mark Shuttleworth has been promoting as the next big step forward for Ubuntu Linux. I’d tried various versions of Unity during its development but was mostly disappointed, a fact I put down to it being early testing software. When Natty was released Unity would so much better, I rationalised.
-
-
Sandia National Laboratories is demonstrating its latest mini supercomputer at ESC Silicon Valley this week, incorporating 196 TI OMAP3530-based Overo Tide modules running Linux. Being used for botnet research as part of Sandia’s MegaTux project, the “StrongBox” product combines 28 Gumstix Stagecoach boards, each with seven Gumstix Overo Tide computer modules.
-
Mozilla
-
So, as the result of an extremely small, unforeseen glitch, I find myself a satisfied user of the Chromium browser. Despite my initial frustration, I still have Firefox on my machine, and it’s still my main browser, but the experience has made me wonder how many other people hit these apparently small obstacles, and are driven to download Chrome or Chromium, say – and like it so much that they do switch? Could that explain the current rise of Chrome, and the gentle decline of Firefox’s market share?
Obviously, Mozilla can’t test every add-on when it upgrades Firefox. But perhaps there is something that can be done to the architecture so that this kind of thing simply doesn’t happen for such minor upgrades. Alternatively, maybe there should be a roll-back feature so that you can always undo such upgrades when you find they have problematic consequences.
-
Many cynical users assume Web browsers do little more than dutifully render HTML. The content is the most important part, they say, so it makes little difference which browser you use.
This may be true for basic tasks, but for all their similarities, browsers differ in subtle and significant ways, thanks to the hard work of vendors looking to establish any edge that might attract more users to their stack of code. There are even some features that make each browser unique, and in the technology world, unique functionality often points the way forward.
-
-
Mozilla is trying to establish a new 6-week product cycle for its Firefox web browser and has just posted the first build of Firefox 5, not quite six weeks after the release of Firefox 4, which crossed the 10% market share mark over the weekend.
It feels as if Firefox 4 was just released, at least if you did not crawl along the seemingly never ending beta process of the browser last year. The next version is already knocking on your door and due for a first beta release on May 17. The first build has made its way out of the Aurora channel and was promoted from version 5.0a2 to 5.0 beta (build1).
-
I’ve been running various builds of Firefox 4 on Linux since the betas were beginning, months ago. They were very stable. And then 4.0.0 was released, and recently 4.0.1, and with both I’ve had a lot of crashes.
-
While Firefox 4.0 is no faster than the Google Chrome web browser, 4.0 is certainly faster than Firefox(es) 3.5 and 3.6, all of which I’ve run extensively on both the Linux and Windows platforms.
And while there’s a lot to like about Chrome/Chromium (I run the one in Windows, the other in Linux — currently Debian Squeeze, if you want to know), I lean toward Firefox/Iceweasel because one of my key web-accessed applications not only prefers it but pretty much demands it. (It could be worse; the same app used to prefer Internet Explorer and begrudgingly work in Opera).
-
In a random bar about two years ago, a Google Chrome developer asked me why Torbutton didn’t just launch a new, clean Firefox profile/instance to deal with the tremendous number of state separation issues. Simply by virtue of him asking me this question, I realized how much better off Chrome was by implementing Incognito Mode this way and how much simpler it must have been for them overall (though they did not/do not deal with anywhere near as many issues as Torbutton does)…
So I took a deep breath, and explained how the original use model of Torbutton and my initial ignorance at the size of the problem had lead me through a series of incremental improvements to address the state isolation issue one item at a time. Since the toggle model was present at the beginning of this vision quest, it was present at the end.
I realized at that same instant that in hindsight, this decision was monumentally stupid, and that I had been working harder, not smarter. However, I thought then that since we had the toggle model built, we might as well keep it: it allowed people to use their standard issue Firefoxes easily and painlessly with Tor.
-
In Firefox 3.x, there used to be an option in about:config called “browser.tabs.tabMinWidth” which you could change to specify the minimum tab width. And changing that to “0″ would allow you to have all the tabs visible at all time, without having to scroll through them.
-
This trend was observed in stats revealed by StatCounter Global stat for Browser usage in April 2011. The graph shows that in April 2011, the usage share of Firefox 4 is less than half of Firefox 3.6; despite that Firefox has been around for more than a month!
-
Mozilla is working on a number of improvements for Firefox that they are developing as extensions, some of which might actually make it into the Firefox code in the future. Some previous Mozilla add-ons to have received this treatment are Personas, Panorama and Sync.
Firefox has maintained a distinction between the search bar and the location bar till now because of the privacy implications of having a combined bar, and Mozilla’s staunch pro-privacy stance. However the advantages of having a combined bar are quite clear.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Herein lies the difference between a ‘‘technology activist’’ and ‘‘an activist who uses technology’’ – the former prioritizes tools that are safe for their users; the latter prioritizes tools that accomplish some activist goal. The trick for technology activists is to help activists who use technology to appreciate the hidden risks and help them find or make better tools. That is, to be pessimists and optimists: without expert collaboration, activists might put themselves at risk with poor technology choices; with collaboration, activists can use technology to outmaneuver autocrats, totalitarians, and thugs.
-
British Telecom is a leader of telecommunication and digital content markets, and has a reputation for product innovation. Plans recently reported for a new not-for-profit music download service [1] for BT’s 5.5 million broadband customers have sparked much discussion, and once again placed BT at the fore of the future of digital content delivery in the UK.
Amongst those speculating about the nature of the new service are the growing number of BT customers who use Free Software [2] web-browsers, operating systems, and multimedia players. Currently these and other Free Software users are unable to enjoy many popular content delivery systems such as Spotify, Steam, and iTunes, because they are not compatible with Free Software, or require the waiving of users’ rights and freedoms in order to use them [3] [4] [5]. The nature of BT’s new service, and the extent to which it respects the freedom of it’s users, are therefore of particular concern.
-
Project Releases
-
So Midori is going full speed ahead, we support the new libSoup cache now (WebKitGTK+ 1.3.11 or greater required) which supersedes the old extension, support for F6, F7 and Ctrl(+Shift)+Tab and Tab in completion and a faster speed dial, which is still in the middle of even greater improvements, so stay stuned for more goodness in the future.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Open Hardware
-
Over at Make: Online last week, Phillip Torrone posted “If You’re Going to Kill It, Open Source It!”–his wish list of dead products that he’d like to see given to an open source community for new life. It’s a great suggestion–freeing the knowledge that went into a product gives it a little life after death and could give a unprofitable or seemingly useless project a better reason for existence.
-
Hardware
-
Intel may be poised to announce its 22nm “Ivy Bridge” Core processors on May 4, with improved, DirectX 11-capable graphics. Meanwhile, model numbers and power consumption details for the chipmaker’s upcoming, 32nm “Cedar Trail” Atoms have been leaked by the AnandTech website.
-
Security
-
After Flaming retort, I have another rebuttal. Another piece of scaremongering, with overhyped drama and sensationalism, wrapped in tech lingo to make the crowds shudder with fear and reverence. While the general rule says: don’t feed the trolls, as in I’m merely bringing attention to an article that does not merit any, I think it’s important to show the other side of the spectrum.
Today, I want to talk to you about a short article called Botnets exploit Linux owners’ ignorance, which presents a grim picture of botnets actively engaging in cyber warfare against Linux [sic] and its owners. Naturally, there’s always the not so subtle hint that the solution is in your pocket. Let’s digest the original report, see what it says and what it means, and how thing relates to the average computer user.
-
Cablegate
-
Arnulfo Aguilar, the director of Radio Uno, an educational radio station based in San Pedro Sula, narrowly escaped an armed ambush outside his home on the outskirts of the city on the night of 27 April which he blames on the army. A station that supports the opposition National Front for Popular Resistance, Radio Uno has often been targeted by the security forces since the June 2009 coup d’état.
Ten masked gunmen were waiting for Aguilar as he arrived home after leaving the station. After spotting them, he managed to elude them by taking a different route into his house. Some of the gunmen nonetheless got into the yard but fled after hearing him call his neighbours and the police for help. The police reportedly waited more than an hour before responding.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB
-
Although the below image has been circulating the internet as a satirical warning for some time now, Dutch telco KPN recently announced that it’s actually going to implement something like this due to declining revenue.
-
DRM
-
2) Since August 2009 you joined Identi.ca, the free microblogging platform. Social networks can be overwhelming due to their great amount of messages and friends. How do you manage to stay updated without burning up?
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
The East Side Gallery is one of Berlin’s most popular tourist attractions, a 1.3km-long brightly painted stretch of the wall which divided east and west for almost 30 years.
But now the outdoor exhibition space is embroiled in an expensive copyright controversy after Berlin council destroyed some artworks painted on the wall and reproduced others without the permission of the original artists.
The city of Berlin, which owns the wall and the land around it, is being sued by 21 artists over the way the council handled recent renovation of the gallery.
Unity Interface – Craptastic Mac Wannabe – Ubuntu 11.04
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 3:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Tasmania’s Department of Education has gone to market for anti-virus software for its 40,000 desktop PCs and 1,000 servers, specifying solutions must be able to secure not only Microsoft Windows, but also Mac OS X and Linux, in a move that once again raises the question of whether the alternative platforms require dedicated security software.
-
Server
-
Netcraft reports that, of the top 40 hosting providers, one used F5-big_IP, 6 use FreeBSD, 24 use GNU/Linux, 2 use 2003 and 2 use 2008. I believe the market has spoken. GNU/Linux provides great performance/price. The same advantages seen running applications on the server present themselves running applications on the personal computer: low price, reliability, ease of administration, less malware, etc. Use Debian GNU/Linux.
-
Google
-
With the current raging controversy over the delayed release of the source code to Android Honeycomb by Google, many an analyst have questioned whether the Google of today is really as opened as they’d like us to believe. As a stauch Google fanboy, I set out to find out what the meaning of “open” is in the first place, and what better place to seek that answer than from Google itself.
-
Kernel Space
-
A clean installation of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS was done on two systems and the boot time of every Linux kernel release from 2.6.24 to present (2.6.39-rc4) was measured using Bootchart. The kernel was the only change made each time to the system.
-
Applications
-
If you follow news sites or blogs probably you are using some online service or a program to aggregate all the news into one more convenient point. This is doable thanks to RSS feed.
-
This article focuses on selecting the best free software for performing data mining. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who needs to make strategic decisions when confronted with large amounts of information.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
Slackware 13.37 is out. So what do you do if you need or want a light weight desktop environment for an old machine and LXDE is your favorite? You could wait for Salix to catch up and release their own spin as they always do because they are fully compatible and you could just pull it in with slapt-get from their repos. You could build it yourself using the scripts at SlackBuilds.org, but they need a bit additional work and you need to figure out the build sequence.
-
Games
-
In conclusion, I think Trine is a great game. It’s flexible in that a person can spend just ten minutes bashing undead foes or get lost in an hour of solving puzzles or pass the time exploring. The controls are intuitive and the difficultly curve is gradual. The levels are varied and well laid out and I’ve encountered no serious problems with the game play. In short, Trine is a lot of fun.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
-
I’ll be leaving Tokamak 5 and Nijmegen in just over an hour, but before I head out the door some good news by email arrives: it’s time for a new OS image according to the Plasma Active OS track schedule, and so there it is: v 1.0.70.
-
-
If you ever need to partition or edit the partitions on your hard drives without an existing OS on the computer, then GParted Live should be in your PC toolbox. The free GParted Live is based on a live version of Linux, (i.e. one that will boot from a disc or USB drive), and the Gnome Partition Editor, a.k.a. GPartEd, or more commonly GParted. GParted Live boots quickly, and handles virtually any partition type, including nearly all Linux, OS X, and Windows types.
-
Reviews
-
Those who regularly follow the Black Hat briefings probably remember Joanna Rutkowska who presented a novel attack against Windows Vista (and any Operating System running on an x86 architecture, in general). She was the first researcher to demonstrate a piece of malware (bluepill) that could run in root or host mode in a current x86 architecture and push the Operating System one layer (ring) below.
-
New Releases
-
-
Much improved Tiny Core Installer, now offering a GUI for both USB and frugal hard drives. Updated critical system module, squashfs. Many updates to improve error handling, large files, and auditing / updating the extensions. Many user interface improvements and additional supported options in: ab, appbrowser, appsaudit, cpanel, flrun, fluff, mousetool, tc-install, tce-load, and wallpaper.
-
The current release is OpenBSD 4.9 which was released May 1, 2011.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Crossroads Systems, Inc. (PINKSHEETS: CRDS) today announces significant new support for SPHiNX, the industry’s most cost-effective virtual tape appliance that serves as a disaster recovery solution for mid-range servers.
-
-
Fedora
-
Fedora is a traditionalist distribution. That means its packages and desktop are as close to the default as you might expect from a distribution that isn’t Gentoo.
Its KDE desktop is particularly interesting, because there are none of the niceties like a customised menu or re-themed panel that you’d expect from a more KDE-centric distribution. You get the original KDE experience, which isn’t always a great thing.
-
Debian Family
-
I tried out the Fedora 15 Alpha. GNOME Shell wasn’t working on my hardware for some reason. I also tried Ubuntu 11.04, and Unity does work. OpenBSD 4.9′s release is imminent.
-
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Here we are! Long awaited and much discussed version of Ubuntu is here. It is Ubuntu 11.04.
This version was long awaited because of one 2 main reasons:
1) As of 11.04 Canonical stopped free distribution of CDs with Ubuntu via partner Shipit. It’s a pity, because that was a way how I got my first ever Ubuntu CD.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Summary Table:
Product: Ubuntu 11.04
Web Site: http://www.ubuntu.com/
Price: Free
Pros: New Unity interface; user ratings and reviews in the Software Center; easy install routine that includes the ability to upgrade from the Live CD.
Cons: Unity interface is a “love it or hate it” affair that will either bring people to Ubuntu or drive them away, the jury is still out on that and we won’t know for a while which way things will go.
Suitable For: Beginner, intermediate and advanced Linux users.
Rating: 4/5
-
-
Yesterday, I read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ discussion with Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on the merits of Unity, and saw an interesting point that Vaughan-Nichols raised, but did not follow as far as I would have gone. Citing another blog lamenting GNOME 3.0, the “official” new GNOME shell that’s out and about, as “Defective by Design,” Vaughan-Nichols states:
“GNOME 3.0, like too many Linux/Unix interfaces, was designed by software developers for software developers..”
Unity, on the other hand, was built with Canonical’s usability testing and performance goals in mind. Which is why, we have heard Canonical reps explain ad nauseum, Canonical chose to take a different path with Unity rather than stick with a pure GNOME 3.0 environment for Ubuntu.
-
No, this is not going to be a post about Ubuntu 11.04′s specific implementation of the Unity desktop. I’ll be trying 11.04, but not for a little while. Rather, this is about the Linux desktop in general, and how it’s maturing.
-
Ubuntu Natty 11.04 is officially released! Some of us have already upgraded either during the development stages of natty or now after the stable release. However there are still a few who would like to hang on to their dear old gnome 2.x.
This could be either due to fear of the new Unity interface or a general tendency to stay in the comfort zone of Maverick Meerkat. However I hope this article would help change that.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not going to fight with Kubuntu or KDE to try to make it stable the way Gnome is. At this point it’s fairly obvious that the problem relates to the Nvidia proprietary drivers, but I’m using the same drivers with Gnome, and having no trouble. If the current Nvidia driver breaks Kubuntu, then Kubuntu’s not ready.
-
-
Those who question the relevance of open source or Mukt (free) Software need to look at Motorola, a company which was broken down by the attack from corporate raider Carl Icahn.
The company was forced to split its business. But is now back as one of the giants of the mobile world. The credit goes to only and only one element — Linux. It was Linux-based Android which saved the company.
Motorola has reported its financial results registering net revenues of $3.0 billion, up 22 percent from first quarter 2010.
-
Phones
-
Android
-
Google recently launched Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones. With the service, users will be able to video or voice chat with their friends and family directly from an Android phone. Calls can be placed over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi connections. According to Google, the new features will first roll out to the Nexus S phones over the next few weeks as part of the Android 2.3.4 over-the-air update. Google Talk with video and voice chat will launch on other Android 2.3 and higher devices in the future.
-
Events
-
First day of LFNW is going well. We gave away lots of CDs and DVDs. Lots of positive feedback on Gnome 3. Jesse, Adam, Tom and Robyn all stopped by to help. OLPCs were a hit. One of the cool thing about the OLPC was when a five year old complained about speak not pronouncing her brother’s name correctly, I noticed her mother was speaking a foreign language, so I set speak to use that language and it pronounced the brother’s name correctly! The mother got real interested in the OLPC and explored Scratch while her daughter moved on to mazes.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
All in one solutions can be very appealing. Since I have multiple communication methods online and SeaMonkey is touted as an “all in one Internet solution”, I simply had to put it to the test against my browser of choice and the associated packages I use. With the release of 2.0.14 what better time?
I’m sure SeaMonkey will be available for many in their respective repo’s, but since I wanted the latest version and wanted it now, I downloaded direct from the site. The comparison for this review will be with Chromium 11.0.696.25 (and I suppose X-Chat & Thunderbird too) which are currently installed on my system. Presently I am also running Compiz with the desktop cube effect, I have 4 available desktop spaces with each desktop space being given to Chromium, Thunderbird and X-Chat. The remaining workspace is left empty for anything else.
-
As linux users ourselves, we have been frequently fed up with the sluggish nature of the Firefox browser on Linux. Some time back,we told you about Opera 10 which was a bit less sluggish on Linux but then Google Chrome changed everything. However, for many Linux users Firefox is still the most preferred web browser and things are gonna change for sure for Firefox on Linux.
Mozilla’s Mike Hommey has announced on his blog that his team at Mozilla has finally managed to get the Linux builds of Firefox to use GCC 4.5 with aggressive optimization and profile guided optimization enabled. All this simply means that we can now expect a faster and less sluggish Firefox browser on Linux (both 32 bit and 64 bit systems). The experience is going to be much closer to the Windows builds of Firefox.
-
One of the biggest features and strength of the Firefox web browser is its extensions engine and the support it receives from the Firefox community. Users find thousands of different add-ons for virtually any purpose in the official extensions gallery over at Mozilla. Mozilla tries its best to promote popular and interesting add-ons, but the sheer amount makes that attempt more or less futile.
The best Firefox security add-ons is a guide for Firefox users who want to improve their web browser’s security and protection from attacks on today’s Internet. That does not necessarily mean that you need to install all of the add-ons to protect your browser from malicious attacks, as some may only be useful if you visit specific websites or types of sites regularly.
The list concentrates on security related add-ons, not privacy related. Only extensions that are compatible with at least Firefox 4 have been included in the list.
-
Have you tried Firefox 4 on Linux and then tried Firefox on a friend’s Windows 7 PC? The experience isn’t the same and that’s not good news for Linux users.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Programming
-
Although not originally conceived as such, PHP has over the years evolved into a very capable object-oriented language, with countless enterprise projects and a number of powerful frameworks such as Symfony taking full advantage of these mature features. Of course, the advantages of object-orientation can only be fully exploited when implemented in conjunction with best practices such as encapsulation and inheritance. One such “implementational” best practice is dependency injection, a design pattern that facilitates the decoupling of otherwise dependent components.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
Government must be better connected to the people it serves and partners who can work with it – especially small businesses, voluntary and community organisations. Government ICT must play a fundamental role in making life easier and I want to ensure that it does.
One of our first goals is to organise Government data and systems using an agreed set of standards that make our ICT more open, cheaper and better connected.
-
Requirements for the service including conforming to the OpenSearch protocol and support for compressed and uncompressed versions of non-HTML documents like PDF, RTF, CSV, Microsoft Office formats and Open Document formats.
-
Defence/Police/Aggression
-
It’s rare that the president addresses the country without giving any details about what will be discussed, but the topic of last night’s address became known well before President Obama spoke. The military forces of the United States had finally found Osama Bin Laden, we were able to put boots on the ground, and in a firefight that lasted 40 minutes, the world’s most wanted terrorist was killed. In an often ill-defined war on terror, this was a dramatic win.
-
Cablegate
-
-
i4u points out an interview with Julian Assange in which the controversial WikiLeaks spokesman calls Facebook “the most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.”
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
The US Energy Information Administration’s January oil production figures are out, and they show record oil production. Where are we headed from here?
-
Finance
-
n the 1860s, when the clothing merchant Marcus Goldman offered cash, at a suitable discount, for bills yet to be paid by others, he used to stuff the accumulated IOUs under his top hat.
Goldman’s clients could tell how busy Marcus was by the tilt of his headgear, a degree of transparency that would not always be displayed in the decades that followed.
-
Privacy
-
South Korea’s Korea Communications Commission is now asking Apple questions about the location data being stored on iPhones and iPads and backed up to users’ computers. South Korea joins the governments of France, Germany, and Italy, which late last week notified Apple that they also had questions about location data collection. These investigations follow stern letters from US Sentaor Al Franken (D-MN) and US Representative Ed Markey (D-MA), both of whom asked Apple to answer why the data is retained on users’ devices, how it is collected, and what Apple does to protect users’ privacy.
Last week, a news firestorm started after the public revelation by researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden that iPhones and iPads keep a log of location data based on cell tower and WiFi base station triangulation in a file called consolidated.db. The news led many to believe that Apple was using or could use the information to track iPhone and iPad 3G users, and raised privacy concerns that the information could make it into the wrong hands.
-
Sony has revealed that 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed two weeks ago when a hacker broke into the company’s computers in San Diego and stole data from 77 million PlayStation Network accounts.
During a news conference in Tokyo on Saturday, Kaz Hirai, Sony’s executive deputy president, offered the company’s first public apology by an executive and promised to compensate customers.
-
Your iPhone’s tracking you. Your game network just surrendered all your personal data. And your mom is posting your potty-training videos on Facebook. Like many of us, you’re laboring under the delusion that privacy matters–that there’s such a thing as too much (public) information. It’s time to get over it! Soon we’ll all recognize the positives of exposing every aspect of our lives. What a relief it will be when we’ve finally revealed everything and have nothing left to hide. Herewith, the potential benefits of our upcoming, privacy-free utopia:
• Better security, plus entertainment, 24/7: Tune into the airport security “Grope-cam” channel.
-
Civil Rights
-
Hundreds of Wisconsinites lined Madison’s Capitol Square Saturday to welcome bikers from all over the Midwest and to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on Wisconsin unions. Just when Walker thought he had memorized all the chants and signs, Wisconsinites revved it up a notch.
Every kind of bike, from Harley-Davidsons to Huffys, descended onto the Square from Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd and South Hamilton Street. Eric Hartz, the organizer of the event, complemented the thunderous entrance with songs from the Raging Grannies, a social justice organization made up of older women. Other speakers included Sen. John Erpenbach, Sen. Mark Miller, Rep. Cory Mason, Rep. Peter Barca, Milwaukee Public School Teachers and the City of Middleton Fire Fighters.
-
May Day, or May 1st, became International Workers’ Day in 1886, when it was the beginning of a multi-day general strike in Chicago in which workers demanded an eight-hour work day. On May 4, 1886, the strike ended in what became known as the Haymarket Affair.
-
DRM
-
Clear your schedule for a worldwide day of action against DRM. On Wednesday, May 4th, we will be taking action to raise the stakes and increase awareness about the threats of Digital Restrictions Management — in a very significant way!
Awareness is a key part of defeating DRM. Whether protesting outside Apple Stores in Hazmat suits as we have done in years past, handing out leaflets in front of public libraries, or sending direct complaints to senior executives at Sony, action gets attention, and creates space for change.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
The mass infringement lawsuit shakedown plan is looking shakier and shakier these days as more and more courts keep hitting back on these cases. More and more judges (with one notable exception) are recognizing that these lawyers are just using the court system to pressure people into paying up… and they don’t seem to like it very much. The latest involves Chicago divorce lawyer-turned-porn P2P shakedown lawyer, John Steele. Steele has already had some trouble with judges buying his arguments. Steele is also the guy trying to set these lawsuits up as reverse class actions — a strategy that failed miserably the first time around.
However, despite that loss, Steele has tried again for another reverse class action. Earlier, the judge denied Steele’s motion for expedited discovery. Expedited discovery is a pretty standard thing that almost every court grants as a matter of course, but we’ve now seen a few courts in these mass infringement lawsuits refuse, after realizing the only purpose behind expedited discovery is to get the names/addresses of people in order to hit them up with settlement offers. In this case, the judge specifically ordered the court clerk not to issue subpoenas in the case, to stop Steele from getting the info he needed to pressure people into settling. Steele still pushed forward, trying to get the court to approve things so he could send out the subpoenas and get the names.
Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal uses Unity Desktop by Default! [UDS N Day 1]
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.02.11
Posted in News Roundup at 10:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Linux is like an ocean. Water keeps coming from the rivers, and there are a lot of rivers around. There is much to see if you want to, while doing all your regular swimming activities. You can travel the ocean far and wide and be wiser, or you can stick to your school and enjoy your locale. You take the call. You can migrate to a different part of the ocean in search of peace/adventure. You take the call. Typical of an ocean, you find big fish, small fish, medium fish, etc. You can be lost and ask for directions or befriend them and swim more of the ocean. You take the call. This is freedom. With so much freedom, comes so much power. With that much power, comes that much responsibility. You can use it according to the book and be safe, or take a few wrong steps and learn lessons the harder way. Of course, nowadays there are nicely laid out paths in the ocean for new fish to start out, cutting the intimidation. So, you can learn a few things about the ocean and, if you want a little more, the adventure is limited only by your imagination.
-
Desktop
-
It has been a long time if ever that Linux has been described as a desirable OS but it is happening now. A survey of smartphone-lovers finds that more intend to buy Android/Linux next rather than iOS or worst, Phoney 7. Underneath it is the same stuff that consumers have not been choosing for a decade but the change is understandable. While the forces of evil denigrated GNU/Linux as “communism” and “cancer” and their multitudes of “partners” repeated the chants until the media believed them and common wisdom in the retail trade was than no one would buy GNU/Linux, the makers of smart phones have been uncontaminated. You can see ads on television for smart phones with Android/Linux from the manufacturers, ISPs, banks, etc. and many millions of people are showing them to their friends. The “partners” have been bypassed. The monopoly is now irrelevant.
-
-
With six guys, plus Skip and me, we got the sheet rock to the new HeliOS building and got it unloaded. We will probably start hanging it this evening or tomorrow, then the fun part starts…we get to find someone who knows how to tape, mud and float.
-
Muktware: What is System 76? Can you tell us something about how and when you conceptualized the company and what was the driving force behind it?
Carl Richell: We started discussing System76 back in 2003 but not seriously until 2005. We felt that GNU/Linux had come a long way and deserved an OEM building high quality pc’s backed by dedicated support.
There was also this newfangled distro called Ubuntu. It clearly had traction. There was already a great community and a unique and attractive business model behind it. Shortly thereafter, we shipped our first laptops and desktop with Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger.
-
Kernel Space
-
Applications
-
When I recently started my new side project, Read Feeder, I wanted to do some quick UI mockups before I started coding. Normally I would do this with a physical pen and paper, but I wanted to move into the 21st century and find a way to efficiently make mockups on the computer (also, there wasn’t a pen and paper nearby, and I didn’t feel like getting up to find one).
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
After recently adding support for scanning through a virtual filesystem interface in libferris I thought I’d complete the cycle and add printer-as-filesystem too. This of course allows the neat trick to “copy” a document from your scanner and dumping it to a printer:
-
-
Games
-
Earlier in the month we reported that Gamestop would be aggressively moving in to digital download services, and might be releasing its own gaming tablets. Now news is emerging that the company intends to bring its streaming service to Android-based devices.
-
Wildfire Games upcoming epic RTS game 0 A.D. is approaching the next Alpha version!
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
The KDE Edu Team is proud to present its new website at http://edu.kde.org as the central place to start to discover KDE Edu.
With this new website, we are also officially presenting the new KDE Edu logo as the stamp for KDE in Education. The logo emphasizes the opportunity for people to grow their knowledge freely in various fields with KDE Edu programs. The concept was started in May 2010 by Alexandre Freitas and finalized by Asunción Sánchez Iglesias.
-
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have the whole world at your fingertips? How about cradling it in a single hand, putting it in your pocket and taking it with you wherever you go? With KDE’s Marble Virtual Globe on your mobile phone, you can do just that.
-
For a long time I’ve been a big fan of kdenlive. I’ve written a two articles about it. One is a general overview of video editing on Linux and the other is more specific to kdenlive. For a number of years, video editing on linux – at least at a consumer level – has been patchy at best. This is somewhat ironic given the heavy use of linux in major Hollywood block film production. However, with the advent of kdenlive, things are looking pretty good and with the release of version 0.8, there have been some great features added for the more advanced users, while still retaining a simple and easy to use UI.
-
Now with the GSoC application timeline ended, I feel like blogging about some more ideas what I want to see in KWin in our next releases, but are not enough for a GSoC. Nevertheless most of it is in the scope that it can also be handled by new developers. But some parts have to be done by KWin/Plasma developers.
-
A few days ago, Jeremy explained how to add your Google calendars to Kontact, how about doing the same with your Yahoo calendars ?
-
GNOME Desktop
-
So now that GNOME 3 is out, and I am excited about the future progress of the “Finding and Reminding” feature. My design philosophy is that design should be an evolutionary process with multiple prototypes tested for effectiveness along the way, not a “design everything upfront” process.
-
-
Due to the high priority of Unity in the Ubuntu 11.04 development cycle, the inclusion of GNOME3 into Ubuntu were postponed until 11.10, and Unity was shipped in Ubuntu 11.04 as a shell for GNOME2 instead.
-
The GNOME 3.0 release has far more contributions by women than any previous release in GNOME history. This is largely thanks to the hard work of the first round of the Outreach Program for Women interns, who participated in the program from December 15, 2010 to March 15, 2011. All eight participants had their work included in the main branches of their projects and therefore included in GNOME 3.0. Following on the heels of the successful first round, the GNOME Project is delighted to announce the participants of a new round of the Outreach Program for Women internships.
-
-
-
-
After months of development, one of the most important Linux distributions was released today. Of course I’m talking about Slackware 13.37. Oh, and the Ubuntu Project released 11.04 today too — though by reading the press release you’d never know Ubuntu was actually a Linux distribution.
-
-
Reviews
-
Chakra is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. It evolved from a hobby project to what is now, from my initial assessment, a very solid desktop distribution with features not yet available on established Linux distributions. The developers warn that, “This is alpha software, it could eat your hamsters.” It did not eat my hamster, but the time I spent installing and reinstalling it on multiple machines and in a virtual environment was very eventful.
For this review, the first for Chakra on this website, I will let the screenshots do most of the “talking.” I like this approach better because, as they say, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. A screenshot with one or two paragraphs conveys more than a dozen paragraphs of colorful descriptions.
The version of Chakra that is the subject of this review is Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.04, code-named Aida. It was released on April 27, 2011.
-
New Releases
-
-
Version 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) of the very best Free-Libre Open-Source data recovery software toolkit based on Ubuntu is out.
This version features and up-to-date infrastructure and several new packages including Dump, a backup and restore solution as well as Clamav, the best in free-libre Antivirus software.
Ubuntu-Rescue-Remix features a full command-line environment with the newsest versions of the most powerful free/libre open-source data recovery software including GNU ddrescue, Photorec, The Sleuth Kit and Gnu-fdisk.
-
Right after the announcement for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Andrew Zajac proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the Ubuntu Rescue Remix 11.04 operating system.
Ubuntu Rescue Remix 11.04, the rescue and computer forensics Linux distro, is based on the most recent Ubuntu 11.04 release. It comes with lots of updated packages and an up-to-date infrastructure.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
The Java packaging in Mandriva 2010.1 (from which Mageia was forked) was just unusable. Many of the packages were obsolete and not really maintained. The task of updating packages had become very difficult as Maven, a now very common Java project build tool, was not properly integrated in the distribution. Many Java libraries installed using the old packages would not be usable by Maven. Moreover the version of Maven was obsolete and would not allow building recent software. This was a serious problem for maintaining the Java stack.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Fedora
-
Latest beta release from Red Hat-backed project makes the switch to Gnome3
The big issues in the world of Linux right now are the Gnome3 desktop interface and Ubuntu’s pending Natty release which will use the Unity desktop interface by default. The tried and tested Gnome2 desktop is finally making way for a new generation of desktop effects and most users will find the change jarringly different.
-
The next version of Fedora, Version 15 is available for download as a beta version. The beta version was released and a reworked boot loading system will be featured by this OS. The major changes for the Linux distribution are hopefully taken care of and the complete release is scheduled for May 2011; it is to be noted that this period of release is approximately a month after the release of Ubuntu 11.04. New releases of Fedora can usually be expected about once every six months.
-
Debian Family
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Ubuntu Software Center in 11.04 has got a really nice ratings and reviews system in place that allows us to review our favorite applications and install top rated applications in one click. So here is a list of 17 highly rated applications not installed by default in Ubuntu 11.04.
-
Canonical released Ubuntu 11.04 this week, giving the operating system a dramatically new user interface as well as some new features and performance tweaks. The company also recently launched an updated version of the Ubuntu One music app for Android.
Ubuntu One allows Ubuntu Linux users to store music online and access it from a computer or mobile device. The service is free to use for 30 days, but you’ll have to sign up for a subscription after that.
-
-
-
-
Canonical yesterday released the final version of Ubuntu Linux 11.04. For quite some time Ubuntu will get a new release twice per year – one in April and one in October. As usual with updated distributions, the release comes with updated software. In this case however, the software responsible for the appearance of the desktop was changed. While previous Ubuntu releases relied on Gnome as a desktop manager, with 11.04 Ubuntu makes the switch to the Unity desktop environment.
-
As you should know, Ubuntu 11.04 was released yesterday. I have used the development builds of Ubuntu 11.04 on and off during the development cycle. However, it is not a very good idea to do to do a review during the development phase. So, as soon as the final release of Ubuntu 11.04 was available, I downloaded it and installed it on my laptop. (I actually used zsync to update the image of Ubuntu 11.04 beta that I had.) So, after using it for one whole day, here are my thoughts on Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”.
-
-
-
-
-
Despite its runaway popularity when compared to other Linux distributions, Ubuntu still struggles to capture the attention of the general computing public. With recent releases, Canonical has clearly been looking at ways to make Ubuntu more appealing to the average Joe — and Natty Narwhal offers plenty of features that could make it an appealing alternative to Windows and Mac OS X.
-
-
I did an in-place upgrade of the Ubuntu 10.10 running on my mother’s netbook to Ubuntu 11.04. I had it run overnight, and by morning, voila!, I had Natty Narwhal on the computer. The upgrade went by without a hitch; real sweet, considering this was a Wubi installation.
I can’t say I’m too fond of the new Unity interface yet, though. I like the simplicity, but I’ve just gotten far too used to the old way of working. Unity just hides several icons so it was at first confusing to look up applications. That said, I’ll keep this on for a month or so and see how this works out for me.
-
It’s here. The newest version of Ubuntu sports an entirely new user interface: Unity. It also includes a much-improved Software Center, alongside the usual updates for the thousands of free programs Ubuntu offers. Download it now at Ubuntu.com.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, is a known frequent blogger. If Steve Jobs personally replies to the emails of users, which the company later denies as Jobs’ comments. Shuttleworth, the guy who has been to the space, shares his views in public and allows comments. Of course his blogs are not proprietary.
-
-
Ubuntu 11.04, also known as the Natty Narwhal, arrived on April 28th, 2011 and is the 14th release of the Ubuntu operating system.
Even if the Ubuntu 11.04 operating system includes a smarter installer, we’ve created the following tutorial to teach both Linux newcomers and existing Ubuntu users how to install the Ubuntu 11.04 operating system on their personal computer.
-
I’ve been playing around with Ubuntu 11.04 on a couple of machines for almost a week now. Ubuntu 11.04 has an entirely new user interface to it making doing even the simple things very difficult. Even opening a shell is a major task. You have to click on an apps icon. Then carefully maneuver the mouse to a little triangle that will display all the apps and wait 5 seconds for the interface to respond. Then you must slowly and carefully scroll down. If your mouse deviates outside the area you must restart from scratch because the window will close. In another 5 seconds you’ll find the terminal app. Now if you want a second terminal, shell that is, you can’t get it. The menu only lets you open a single shell. The final kick in the nuts is the color scheme the shell uses. It’s very hard to read.
-
Fast paced, 3D top down shooter, Steel Storm : Burning Retribution a.k.a. Episode II will soon land into Ubuntu Software Center where users can easily buy this game in one click.
Kot-in-Action, the game development studio behind Steel Storm has already successfully delivered Episode I which is featured in Top 100 indie games for the year 2010 by IndieDB. They are now coming up with Episode II which packs in more features, more action and more adrenaline rush. With 25 full missions and a multiplier mode that allows upto 16 players to play together, this is surely an action you would like to watch for this year.
-
Shuttleworth opened by saying that the main point of Ubuntu 11.04 with Unity was “to bring the joys and freedoms and innovation and performance and security that have always been part of the Linux platform, to a consumer audience.”
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Before I get on with the rest of this post, I need to apologize for not having posted anything this week. It turned out to be a good deal busier than I anticipated, and even otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot to write about, at least at the beginning of the week. I did say in the latest “Featured Comments” article that I would review the latest release of Ubuntu — version 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”. That is still happening, but for reasons that will become clearer, I will not write reviews of Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu just yet, but will wait a day or maybe a little more.
-
Right after the announcement for Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), Mario Behling proudly announced last night (April 28th) that Julien Lavergne has released the lightweight Lubuntu 11.04 operating system.
-
After years of giving Kubuntu releases unfavorable reviews, that time has finally come to an end. I’m proud to say that Kubuntu is back, and us KDE fans have a distribution to root for now. I hope that going forward, Kubuntu continues with this level of quality. I’m not sure if Kubuntu will remain my main distribution forever, because I prefer the rolling release style of Arch, but that’s just a personal preference. But I can say this, I know first hand how hard it is to get Linux to work with this laptop considering the current state of Intel’s drivers, so I applaud whatever the developers did to make the latest Kubuntu work so well. The distribution as a whole is amazing. Give it a try when it’s released on April 28th, you’ll be glad you did!
-
Along with Ubuntu 11.04, Xubuntu, Kubuntu and Lubuntu were also release. In this post I’ll try to cover the changes in Xubuntu 11.04 – a very interesting Ubuntu flavor based on Xfce.
-
Peppermint is another Ubuntu derivative distribution, in a similar vein to the likes of early CrunchBang and Mint.
It has two unique selling points. The first is speed without feature compromise, as the entire system has been tuned for lightening-fast operation.
-
Two years ago to the day was the first time I installed Linux on my computer. Sure, I had seen other people use it and had used it on other people’s computers (though not so frequently), but I had never before put an OS other than Microsoft Windows on my own computer until that day. I had talked to a friend of mine about it before because I was planning to do it for a while; I thought of installing Ubuntu, but he suggested Linux Mint, as it would be easier for me to get used to and work with. I took that advice, and on 2009 May 1, as I took a break from studying for AP exams and felt quite fed up with Microsoft Windows XP, I downloaded the Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” GNOME ISO file, got InfraRecorder for Microsoft Windows XP, burned the live CD, and went on my way.
-
-
-
The buyer (me) acts as the investor for this project since their pre-order money will be used to fund the project. It was originally pre-ordered for $330, but after over a year of waiting for the production to take place I canceled it. Now in addition to pre-ordering, the Pandora can be bought and shipped in a week for a premium price of $500 which I took the opportunity, but is it worth the cost? Let’s find out..
-
Phones
-
Tablets
-
In one of his boldest pronouncements since joining HP last November, CEO Leo Apotheker told Fortune this week that HP doesn’t intend to release new Windows 7 tablets anytime soon. “HP smartphones and tablets will be running WebOS, only WebOS, at least that’s for the near future, that’s the plan,” Apotheker in an interview published Monday.
While it’s premature to interpret HP’s decision to focus exclusively on WebOS tablets as a sign of strain in its Microsoft partnership, there’s no denying that mobile industry competition is a notoriously savage beast. At the very least, we could be witnessing a shift in how HP and Microsoft compete in the mobile space.
-
The Nook Color is simultaneously disappointing and pleasing. Why? At $249, the Nook Color does a lot of things pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that you think “the Nook Color would be perfect if only…” — if only it had Bluetooth and supported an external keyboard, or if only it supported a wider range of apps, or if only Barnes & Noble were willing to let customers install any app, like the Amazon Kindle app.
But for the price, the Nook does quite a bit. I would recommend it without hesitation to anyone that wants a eBook reader with a little bit extra. If you’re on a limited budget, the Nook Color is also a really good choice. For heavy readers who also want a tablet and a decent app selection, the Nook is not a good choice.
-
Toshiba may finally be set to bring their tablet out as the FCC has given them the green light to sell it. This one only has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth inside of it, but we expected as much.
-
UK-based OpenGamma has been developing a unified platform for financial analytics which will allow financial services firms to combine their data management, calculation engines and analysis into a single framework. The platform, which is still in development, has now been released as a open source developer preview, dual-licensed under an Apache 2.0 licence or a commercial licence. The preview is described as a “beta-quality release” that has been through OpenGamma’s testing and QA processes.
-
The role of application servers has grown significantly in IT architecture over the past few years as the cloud becomes the new frontier for application development–a frontier that offers more opportunity and challenges than the Web ever did.
That’s not to say that the Web space is over and done. We have come a long way from simple CGI requests, and Java-based application servers dominate the application server space on the Web, handling everything from interfaces and data access to availability and scale.
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
-
According to an update at the Mozilla releases page, Firefox 5 looks like it’s headed for a release on June 21, less than two months away. We haven’t heard anything about what new features the next version of Firefox will have, but when Mozilla said that Firefox 4 would be the last time they waited months between major releases, they meant it.
-
Six engineers from San-Francisco-based tech group Mozilla, the developers of the Firefox browser, will meet Indonesian users at the Firefox 4 Launch Party, which will be held in six cities from April 29 to May 7.
Viking Karwur, the manager of Mozilla Indonesia Community, said this delegation was twice as large as the delegation to the previous launch party.
-
You blame Firefox 4 to be a memory hog? Check it out first by typing about:memory in the address bar. You’ll get a nice detailed report of your browsers memory usage. While it’s not guaranteed you’ll understand every statistic available in the report, you can at least peek at the overall memory use, and see how much it’s fragmented by comparing “memory mapped” and “memory in use” numbers.
-
Several weeks ago, we had an article that taught us how to restore sane browsing configurations in Firefox 4 after switching over from Firefox 3.6, including look and feel and addons compatibility. Now, we will talk about several more tricks and changes that should make your Firefox 4 experience even more pleasant.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Oracle has won an early round in what is sure to be an epic battle against Google over Android’s use of Java.
This week, Judge William Alsup issued a “claims construction” order in which he sided with Oracle on the definition of four out of five patent terms that will help determine outcome of the company’s lawsuit against Google and Android. On the fifth term, he sided with neither company, choosing to lay down his own definition. Oracle and Google have until May 6 to respond to the order.
-
Oracle has released Java SE 6 Update 25 (6u25); this update contains no security updates to the Java runtime, but does include wider platform support with Windows 7 and SP1, Windows 2008 R2 with SP1, Oracle Linux 6 and Oracle Solaris 11 Express 2010.11 added to the supported list. Also supported by the update are Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 4, Google Chrome 10 and VirtualBox 4.
-
The parties in Oracle v. Google have been asked by the judge to reduce the number of claims, so the case can actually be reasonably tried. So they have each filed their suggested cuts. Also the judge has issued a *tentative* claims construction order, asking for reaction from the parties and saying he may well make changes on his own initiative as more evidence is on the table.
-
CMS
-
When we began this interview, Dries was on a Drupal tour in Australia, calling from a hotel room in Sidney. For Dries, trips like this are becoming more and more common, allowing him to meet an increasing number of the people all over the globe using and developing Drupal. He listens to success stories and challenges faced in adopting or migrating to Drupal. “It helps me as the project lead to talk to as many Drupal people as I can”, he explained. Later this year he’s planning an around-the-world tour, literally flying around the world visiting as many countries as he can to talk about Drupal.
-
Education
-
The United Kingdom’s institutions for higher and further education are increasing their use of free and open source software, concludes OSS Watch, a public service organisation, following a survey. Most needed are tools to accurately determine the total cost of ownership (TCO) for software, both proprietary and open source.
-
BSD
-
Below some links to some FreeBSD resourses that you guys may be interested in, and other BSD related items I’ve come across.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
I am pleased to announce that GNU gv 3.7.2 has just been released. It is available for download in the GNU ftp, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gv
-
We asked you to email Sony CEO Howard Stringer during our last call to action
and Sony responded by shutting off his email address. Many of you then sent
emails to the next email address we posted, Nicole Seligman, Sony Executive VP and General Counsel. Your action was effective — it was an important part of the overall public pressure put on Sony to back off.
And back off they did. Sony ended up settling its lawsuit against George Hotz (aka geohot). Hotz has agreed to not use Sony devices in an ambiguous “unauthorized” fashion — in fact, he’s boycotting Sony anyway — and the accusations brought up in the case by Sony remain unproven.
-
Government
-
Free software developers in France can soon write and compile their solutions using computer hardware donated by a French national computer science research institution. The institute, which preferred not to be named, is donating a hundred computers to the French chapter of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
-
Programming
-
Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm which focuses on modularizing system-level concerns (like logging, transaction management, security, performance monitoring, etc.) in the applications. In AOP language, these system-level concerns are called “crosscutting concerns” because they crosscut all the layers of the application.
AspectJ, a compatible extension to the Java programming language, is one implementation of AOP. AspectJ is very widely used in a lot of Java frameworks (like Spring), but still most developers do not know AspectJ. Developers often think that AspectJ is difficult to learn or it makes your code complex, and they decide not to learn this very powerful and useful technology. In this article, I will write down five reasons why I think Java developer should learn and use AspectJ.
-
-
Standards/Consortia
-
We released the Simple Java API for ODF version 0.5.5 today. In this version, we provide high level methods for image and text span. Now you can add images to text, spreadsheet and presentation documents. The position of the image can be specified by a rectangle, a paragraph or a cell. With text span, you can set a different style to a small unit of the text content. An interesting demo has been upload to website to demonstrate how to add a 2D barcode image to a presentation slide.
-
# Events-wise the month of May will be busy. I will attend the OASIS Board of Directors’ meetingin Berlin and meet with the Bitkom. The week after that Ars Aperta will join a session on the political and legal issues pertaining to Free Software development during the Linux Solutions 2011 event in Paris. I will also give another talk during the same event as part of the Document Foundation and our experience with forks. Spoons shall come next year.
-
Amazon’s cloud failure, Oracle’s open source success and Instapaper decides that free doesn’t pay the bills.
-
-
Yahoo is selling off its delicious social bookmarking site, after nearly five years of ownership.
Technology startup AVOS, founded by YouTube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, is acquiring delicious for an undisclosed sum from Yahoo. Hurley and Chen sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in October of 2006.
-
Finance
-
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and 14 other investment banks face the first-ever European Union antitrust probes into the swaps market, following investigations by U.S. regulators.
The EU is examining whether 16 banks, including Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG, colluded by giving market information to Markit Group Ltd., a data provider majority-owned by Wall Street’s largest banks. It will also check if nine of the firms struck unfair deals with Intercontinental Exchange Inc.’s European derivatives clearinghouse, shutting out rivals.
-
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein and other top executives at the firm may not have understood the positions they were taking in the mortgage market, according to a report released today by the Senate Investigations subcommittee.
The report—which runs to 635 pages—details how Goldman built up a massive short position in mortgage-related assets following the collapse of two subprime Bear Stearns hedge funds. This was referred to as “the big short” within Goldman.
-
-
There is perhaps no more telling detail about what kind of person works at Goldman Sachs than the story of the Memorial Day weekend meeting William Cohan relates in his book “Money and Power.”
-
“How did Goldman Sachs take over the world?” Jon Stewart asked William Cohan, the author who is spilling all of Goldman Sachs’s secrets in a new book.
“Spoiler alert,” Stewart said last night, “Goldman did it by going short on the world. They bet against the world and they won.”
“No matter what firm I worked for, they always wanted to be Goldman Sachs.”
-
Contrary to the silly subtitle his publisher no doubt foisted on him, William D. Cohan does not argue that Goldman Sachs rules the world. A judicious author, Cohan avoids hyperbole in “Money and Power,” a definitive account of the most profitable and influential investment bank of the modern era.
-
Frederick Kaufman’s piece for Foreign Policy examines how the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI) is responsible for the increase in food prices.
-
Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and 14 other investment banks face a European Union antitrust probe into credit-default swaps for companies and sovereign debt, regulators said Friday.
The European Commission said it opened two antitrust probes. It will check whether 16 bank dealers colluded by giving market information to Markit, a financial information provider.
-
-
Six New Zealand-based Goldman Sachs partners are expected to cash in when Goldman Sachs US takes full ownership of its Australian and New Zealand operations, with senior partners expected to clear up to $40 million.
According to the Australian Financial Review, local partners include Byron Pepper in the investment banking division, Duncan Rutherford in the securities division and Rebecca Cottrell in federation legal division.
Local managing director Andrew Barclay is also a partner, and the Star-Times understands other local partners include executive director David Goatley and Bernard Doyle, a New Zealand-based strategist.
Barclay, Cottrell and Rutherford are also listed as directors of the New Zealand business.
The exact shareholdings of each partner is not known and Goldman Sachs was not prepared to comment.
-
In my paper, Conflicted Gatekeepers: The Volcker Rule and Goldman Sachs, I consider the conflict of interest restrictions in the Volcker Rule provisions. These provisions, namely Sections 619 and 621 of the Dodd-Frank Act, purport to impose fiduciary-like standards on banks in their arm’s length relationships with sophisticated counterparties. Section 619 generally prohibits banks from engaging in proprietary trading and affiliating with certain private funds; it permits some activities as exceptions to this general prohibition, but subjects such activities to the requirement that they not give rise to material conflicts of interest, including conflicts between banks and their “counterparties.” Section 621 purports to ban material conflicts of interest between banks (in their capacity as underwriters) and investors in offerings of asset-backed securities.
-
-
Privacy
-
The San Jose Mercury News landed some leaked emails from Google CEO Larry Page, as well as other top Google executives, which show how important gathering location data is for its mobile plans.
Last year, Motorola, one of Google’s biggest mobile partners, was planning on using Skyhook Wireless’s location data for its handsets over Google’s location data.
-
Civil Rights
-
The Supreme Court of Canada has abandoned Ontario’s farm workers and the charter of rights has failed them, UFCW Canada national president Wayne Hanley said Friday after the union lost a 16-year court battle to allow agricultural workers to unionize.
-
DRM
-
One thing that hasn’t changed — things that I’ve always read on my computer — are GNU manuals. GNU manuals are written in an ingenious format called TeXinfo which enables the author to produce appropriate output for several different ways of reading: PDF, HTML and the online info format, most easily read in Emacs. If you’re running GNU/Linux, you will find tons of manuals in this format by typing “info” into a terminal. Within Emacs, type “F1 h” (that’s press and release F1, then press and release ‘h’). Either way you should get a menu of topics, each covered by its own info manual.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
This week I published multiple posts Wikileaks cables revelations on the U.S. lobbying pressure on Canadian copyright including attempts to embarrass Canada, joint efforts with lobby groups such as CRIA, and secret information disclosures from PCO to U.S. embassy personnel (posts here, here, here, here, here, and here). Wikileaks has also just posted hundreds of cables from U.S. personnel in New Zealand that reveal much the same story including regular government lobbying, offers to draft New Zealand three-strikes and you’re out legislation, and a recommendation to spend over NZ$500,000 to fund a recording industry-backed IP enforcement initiative. Interestingly, the cables regularly recommend against including New Zealand on the Special 301 list, despite the similarities to Canadian copyright law that always garner vocal criticism.
-
Michael Geist sez, “Wikileaks has just posted hundreds of cables from U.S. personnel in New Zealand that reveal regular government lobbying on copyright, offers to draft New Zealand three-strikes and you’re out legislation, and a recommendation to spend over NZ$500,000 to fund a recording industry-backed IP enforcement initiative. For example, an April 2005 cable reveals the U.S. willingness to pay over NZ$500,000 (US$386,000) to fund a recording industry enforcement initiative. The project was backed by the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand (RIANZ) and the Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society (AMCOS). Performance metrics include:”
-
ACTA
-
-
In January 2011, prominent European academics issued an “Opinion of European Academics on Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA). The academics invite the European institutions, in particular the European Parliament, and the national legislators and governments to withhold consent of ACTA, “…as long as significant deviations from the EU acquis or serious concerns on fundamental rights, data protection, and a fair balance of interests are not properly addressed”.
In April 2011, the European Commission’s services put on-line comments to the European Academics’ Opinion on ACTA. The Commission denies ACTA is incompatible with EU law.
Obama’s Speech: Osama Bin Laden dead HD CTV NEWS
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.30.11
Posted in News Roundup at 9:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Names matter in free software. Just think of the number of electrons that have been spilt arguing over whether it’s “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”.
-
I have just read among one of the pc news articles which I browse every day, that gartner has finally, officially, stated that Linux is one of the fastest growing operating systems available today. Faster than microsoft even. According to gartner, Linux is rising while windows is falling.
What this means is that more and more programmers will be attracted to the Linux platform as another revenue stream for their programs. When they do decide to stick their toe into Linux waters they will be very pleasantly surprised.
-
If you’re new to Linux and free/Open Source software, or even if you’re a more seasoned user, then you’re often looking for more information. Not just documentation, but also useful tips and tricks.
The team here at Make Tech Easier works hard to provide as much quality information as we can. But we can’t write about everything (though we’re trying!).
-
This issue of Linux Journal is all about how to get Linux in your pocket. In this article, I go one better and tell you how to get Linux on your fingernail. Now, before you get too excited, I won’t be discussing some new nano-computer being used by James Bond, unfortunately. Instead, I discuss how to put Linux on a micro-SD card (or any other USB drive, for that matter). Using this, you can run Linux on any machine that can boot off a USB device.
-
Desktop
-
Everyone’s heard of the year of the desktop, right? At least every new year a 100 or more people write about it too, no? Know why? Because someone did once and every other person has copied them since. It’s like a catch-phrase, it takes one person to say it so one person can hear it. Next thing you know the whole world is saying the same thing. It’s no different for all the people who think we need to do this or that to get people from other operating systems over to using a Linux Kernel based one. Someone wrote that once and everyone has run around saying the same thing since. You can see it in almost every comment area, forums, mailing list. People in the media within our community love it when they don’t have something else to talk about, it’s a good source for page hits. You can even see it from developers, even ones from well known professional projects. I look on in awe.
-
Linux has been with us for two decades now, but what would the technology world be like if Linus Torvalds had never gone about creating it? It’s impossible to know for sure, but lots of scenarios do come to mind: Microsoft may actually have been weaker, Apple may have ruled the smartphone world unopposed, and the enterprise would likely look very, very different.
-
Today is great day in the UK. Day of another Royal Wedding.
Not only because this is just another Bank Holiday in this country. But also because this day continues monarchy. Hopefully Prince William and Kate Middleton will have baby soon, who can inherit British throne.
I actually don’t know if William and Kate are Linux fans or not. Maybe they even have not heard about this great operation system.
-
Server
-
Searchlight Solutions Ltd. (PINKSHEETS: SLLN) announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement for the acquisition of the majority control of the common stock of Linux Labs International Inc.
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Simon Phipps
OpenCSW. The packaging system for Solaris.
-
-
On this episode, we interview Allison Randal about Project Harmony.
-
Kernel Space
-
-
So I read Lennart’s blog post entitled Why systemd?. In it, he makes a number of comparisons between systemd and the two other Linux init systems that are still in widespread use (this being the third init system some distributions have adopted within the last few years). Overall, he makes a good argument that systemd has many nice and exciting features, and I’m sure they are of interest to various people who want their init system to be SYSV on steroids. Here are some of them…
-
Graphics Stack
-
While AMD was very fast to provide open-source Fusion graphics driver support under Linux (along with official support in their proprietary Catalyst driver), the support has not ended up working out too well for us. It has regressed since the November push. As mentioned in March, the E-350 Fusion Linux support took a dive in terms of its graphics support with some outstanding bugs. Since then, the support has improved and is now largely usable, but there are still some big issues.
-
Applications
-
Sticky Notes is one of those features of Windows 7 which have impressed users big time. I have a friend who is a complete Linux fan, and always prefer working on Linux machines than any other. But, once he used Sticky Notes on Windows 7, he wished if he had similar Sticky Notes apps for his Linux machine.
-
Thinstation is based on Linux. However, users for Thinstation will hardly see the Linux with this sort of open source operating system. If you are trying to get direct connection for the Windows or Unix Server, then the user may feel a direct connectivity on the server.
At the same time users can have a local browser or also known as the desktop utility. Thinstation only support Windows like operating system and there will be hardly any need to have knowledge about Linux or UNIX in order to get the most of this application.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
OpenDungeons also jumped on the release wagon, with 0.4.8. This adds an actual menu system, a new gui, working traps, and normal maps. The team needs more modelers to add to the already large bestiary, there’s a lot of faction creatures still unimplemented. Also, a shoutout to Venn from LinuxGameCast for contributing voice acting snippets
-
Speaking of the Humble Bundle, as promised at the end of the last one, Puppygames has released the source code for Revenge of the Titans.
-
Developers are quite often gamers at heart. Until they get to core structure, there is no respite. Delving deep into popular games and rebuilding them are quite often the reason developers go on to develop the next generation of games.
Linux has had quite a challenging history of games and their development. These are notably due to technical and practical reasons. While sometimes the philosophy of Open source have been the hurdle for successful games development.
-
Desktop Environments
-
With Gnome and Ubuntu shaking up the Linux desktop market it might be time to look at an alternative desktop interface
With the Gnome project radically overhauling its desktop environment with Gnome3 and Ubuntu switching to the Unity environment, many Linux desktop users could be looking for alternatives this month. Here, then, are a few viable alternatives it you’re not sold on Gnome3 or Unity.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
The scripting system is still powered by QtScript, but is now handled in such a way that it is able to control many more aspects of the game engine, and generally much more consistent.
-
-
Yesterday, in defiance of the weather reports, the day was sunny and reasonably warm and set the stage for a very productive day 2 here at Tokamak in the Netherlands. We held four design sessions in the morning: 2 on libplasma2 (specifically the dual topics of isolating QGraphicsView from the core code and using Qt Components), one on plasma-desktop defaults (a button to show the activities, an auto-hiding pager when virtual desktops drop to one, some default launchers that track the default file manager and web browser, and much more) and one on a new first-boot screen designed with OEM style installs in mind.
-
We just finished our daily progress meeting here at Tokamak 5 where we take turns moving our (self-)assigned sticky notes on the kanban window into the “Done” category. We each share what we’ve done the previous day, what we’re working on now and what (if any) blockers we’ve encountered.
-
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Time for a new development snapshot release of The Board! I’ve just uploaded the 0.1.3 tarball. Get it while it’s hot! So, what are user-visible changes?
The main feature of this release is the webcam support in photo elements with Cheese. It’s fun, it’s magic! A couple of useful key shortcuts were added: Ctrl+N to add a new page and Delete key to remove selected elements. An important crasher fix—caused by an update in gobject-introspection—is also included.
-
-
-
I have to admit that it has been more years than I care to remember since I last installed Slackware on my desktop.
The slackware 13.37 release came out this week and due to its excellent timing, it’s now on my (multi-boot, thank GRUB!) desktop. You see, I also had Ubuntu on the multi-boot, but the Natty Narwhal doesn’t seem to like my graphics hardware, memory, hard-drive or CPU. So you could say that slackware 13.37 threw me a lifeline.
-
New Releases
-
-
-
-
Among all the posts announcing the release of Ubuntu 11.04 was the few that acknowledged the release of Slackware 13.37. Slackware continues to boast a loyal following because of its rock hard stability and security. It was once known as not the best choice for beginners, but has become quite easy and carefree over the years. Perhaps Slackware’s most notable characteristic is its practice of providing a turn-key system that doesn’t alter the original developers’ work.
-
A quick call for anyone who has created a Sabayon derivative or spin that is publicly available.
-
Today it’s the day, Ubuntu 11.04 has been officially released and they server are now under “attack” by all the Ubuntu users that are trying to download the new release or update a former version, for me it took around 3 hours to finish the download of the 1400 packages needed to upgrade from Xubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 with two disconnection.
But Ubuntu is not the only thing released in these days; yesterday, has been released Slackware 13.37 ( codenamed leet ) and today it was also released version 2011.04 of Chakra Linux. Really a lot of news.
-
The ZevenOS-Neptune Team is pleased to announce the release of ZevenOS-Neptune 1.9.9.
This release comes with a couple of changes and new features. See the changelog for a full changelog.
-
Red Hat Family
-
There’s something to be learned from every great case study, thought piece, theory, and brand story.
-
Fedora
-
Yum is package manager used on several RPM system, used for update and install/uninstall additional packages on your distributions, also used for updating currently installed packages in your system.
-
Debian Family
-
-
Today I resigned from the Debian project.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
A few of us in the business of supporting Ubuntu near here have reached the consensus for the new Ubuntu release for users to not attempt an upgrade of Ubuntu to 11.04 without someone very technically competent there to fix things should they go wrong.
-
It’s been just a few hours since the release of Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’, and the buzz about it just won’t die down. Even though it brings along a slew of new features and changes, the reactions have been somewhat mixed. There are a lot of users who’ll switch to Natty, but there are some who absolutely won’t. Here are some reasons why upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 is a good idea, and sometimes, a bad one too.
-
-
-
The Ubuntu 11.04 desktop isn’t the only thing with a new look in Ubuntu today; as Inayaili León points out on Canonical’s blog site, the Ubuntu website gets a new look as well.
-
-
As anyone who has any interest in Linux at all knows (and most of those who don’t have an interest, for that matter), Ubuntu released version 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” yesterday. The Internet is overflowing with reviews and screen shots of the new release at the moment, so I am not going to bother posting YANR (Yet Another Natty Review). I have made a few notes while installing and testing it on various of my notebooks and netbooks, which might be of interest to others or might save someone else some time and frustration, so I will post them.
-
-
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and if you have questions related to your ubuntu system post question to our forums. Thanks for visiting!
-
Don’t worry about the cold and rainy weather sweeping through parts of the country, it’s okay to bust out your open source swimming trunks anyway. Canonical today invites you to dive into Linux with the release of Ubuntu 11.04, otherwise known as Natty Narwhal. This latest Linux distro, which has been in beta form for about the past month, supports laptops, desktops, and netbooks, and supersedes Ubuntu Netbook Edition for all PC netbooks, Canonical says.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Ubuntu developers are wasting no time gearing up for the next Ubuntu release; Matthias Klose of Canonical announced today on the Ubuntu-devel mailing list that Ubuntu 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot, is now open for development. Below is the announcement in full:
-
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and if you have questions related to your ubuntu system post question to our forums. Thanks for visiting!
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Ubuntu 11.04 has been released and many of you may have already upgraded or installed the latest version. While trying the new Unity interface, you may be wondering how to customize and optimize it to suit your needs. So here is our Ubuntu 11.04 Customization Guide.
-
-
Advantech announced an “infotainment terminal” for hospital patients that includes a 15.6-inch touchscreen and a single- or dual-core Intel Atom processor. The PIT-1502W offers a resistive touchscreen with 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, a two megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, RFID, and a smart card reader, according to the company.
-
-
Phones
-
Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
-
Nokia has finally nailed the coffin for Symbian and MeeGo by announcing it will cut R&D staff dedicated to those two platforms, with some being transferred to Accenture, obviously to get them out of sight till Symbian dies a slow death.
-
LG is holding a session at the MeeGo Conference next month where the company will show off devices running MeeGo, including tablets, phones, and in-vehicle entertainment systems. It’s not clear at the moment if this means that LG will definitely be bringing these devices to market, but it at least shows that the company is putting some of its research dollars into MeeGo.
-
Android
-
While these phone’s list prices blow the competition out of the water (as they range from $100 to free with a new contract), you can still find high-end phones on Amazon for just as cheap. Instead of grabbing a $100 phone, for example, you might be better off snatching up the slightly-old-but-still-awesome Droid Incredible, for example, a mere $80 on Amazon or the slightly less old HTC G2 for $100.—and it’s probably a better phone than even the $100 midrange phones. These deals aren’t permanent, but every few months Amazon seems to have a slew of steep discounts on high-end phones that make buying midrange phones unnecessary.
If you don’t want to be beholden to when Amazon or other outlets have deals on certain phones, or you want to get a phone for free, the lower-end phones are probably a fine buy, as Tested notes. But with a bit of patience and hunting around, you can almost certainly get just as good a deal on a higher-end phone—thus avoiding the sacrifice of a slow processor or the latest version of Android. Hit the link to Tested’s article on midrange phones, and share your thoughts on the subject in the comments.
-
-
Verizon says it is happy with Motorola Xoom tablet sales, despite a Global Equities estimate that only 25,000 to 120,000 units — a small fraction of the 500,000 to 800,000 units said to have been manufactured — have actually sold. Meanwhile, increasing frustration with Android fragmentation, as well as a rough-edged Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) release, has tipped mobile developer interest back toward the Apple iPad, claims an Appcelerator/IDC survey.
-
MIPS Technologies says it’s working on a port of Android 3.0 (“Honeycomb”) to the MIPS architecture, and also announced a 15 percent year-to-year increase in revenues for its fiscal third quarter. Meanwhile, MIPS and new licensee Ali Corp. of Taiwan announced Ali’s Linux-compatible, MIPS32-based “M3701G” chipset, designed for triple-play set-top boxes.
-
-
Dropbox – the San Francisco startup that offers a free service for sharing files over the net – has suppressed a fledgling open source project that lets anyone use the service outside of its control, saying the project exposed Dropbox’s proprietary protocol and could be used for piracy.
The open source project is called Dropship, and it provides a means of sharing files via Dropbox using only their hashes. It saves hashes of a file in JSON format, and anyone can then use the hashes to load the file into their Dropbox account. This could be used to share, yes, copyrighted content, which is officially barred by the company. “Dropship is a tool that attempts to access the Dropbox servers in an unauthorized manner,” a Dropbox spokesman tells The Register.
-
-
Yesterday morning I woke up much earlier than I wanted. Instead of lying in bed, wishing I was asleep, I decided to get up and check out Hacker News. Better to waste my time reading industry news than lying around. One headline in particular caught my attention: “Dropship — successor to torrents?“. The name was an obvious reference to Dropbox and the suggestion it could replace torrents was enticing. Data storage and distribution has been a long time interest of mine and I can’t resist reading about the industry. I had no idea that by the end of the day I’d have received a fake DMCA takedown notice, correspondence with Dropbox’s CTO, and witness the near killing of an open source project.
-
-
Events
-
-
BELLINGHAM – It’ll still have the robot demonstrations and Web developers talking about new software applications, but LinuxFest Northwest is adding a business component this year.
This is the 12th year for the tech event, which features a variety of demonstrations and speakers. The event is free and takes place 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, April 30 and May 1, at Bellingham Technical College.
-
Web Browsers
-
Every article presented here about browsers always generates some controversy about which browser is the best? With the arrival of new browsers market leaders, a series of 14 tests held to know the most comprehensive and impartial browser as possible.
-
Chrome
-
Google has released the stable version of Chrome 11. After the update, users will have version 11.0.696.57 of Google’s web browser. As previously reported, Chrome 11 features the addition of a new logo that drops the previous 3D bubble look for a flatter and more simple look.
-
The latest stable release of Google’s Chrome browser features speech input through HTML. What this simply means is that you can now translate your voice input into other languages using Google Translate right in the browser.
-
Google paid out a record $16,500 to developers for plugging 27 Chrome Web browser vulnerabilities, paving the way for the launch of the Chrome 11.
-
Mozilla
-
As appealing as Firefox 4 is, it could be better at searching, keeping information secure, and performing other important tasks. Each of these freebies adds to the browser’s functionality and ease of use.
-
-
-
Linux users have always been a big part of Firefox‘s vocal fan base, and today a group of Mozilla developers has repaid their devotion with some good news. Mozilla’s Mike Hommey reported this morning that his team of coders finally managed to get both 32 and 64-bit Firefox builds for Linux to compile with GCC 4.5. The updated compiler has been available since April 2010, but Hommey’s team tried twice last year without success to make the switch. Now that they’ve been able to pull it off, Firefox on Linux should perform every bit as well as it does on Windows — with the possible exception of hardware acceleration, where Firefox’s utilization of Direct2D still gives Windows Vista and 7 a performance edge.
-
SaaS
-
Yahoo! may spin off its Hadoop engineering division, creating a startup offering support and services around the open-source distributed number-crunching platform, according to a report citing people familiar with the matter.
-
-
-
Databases
-
CUBRID 8.4.0 is coming out very soon, so is the CUBRID Manager. In this article I would like to explain briefly how we gathered the user requests for the CM 8.4.0 and which of them have been implemented.
-
Our development team has just released the User Specs for the Sharding feature which we are going to implement this year in CUBRID. In this blog I will explain the overall plan and how the database sharding will work in CUBRID.
-
This year marked my fifth year at the MySQL Conference. With some distance between the Oracle acquisition, this year’s show provided an interesting glimpse into the status of MySQL, both the project and the ecosystem. Let’s get to the questions.
Q: Before we begin, do you have anything to disclose?
A: Yes. Prior to its acquisition by Oracle, Sun was a RedMonk client. And prior to its acquisition by Sun, MySQL was a RedMonk client. In addition, multiple entities that compete directly or indirectly with MySQL are RedMonk clients, including Akiban, Basho, IBM, Lucid Imagination, Membase, and Microsoft.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
The Document Foundation on Friday announced a second beta for LibreOffice 3.4, the offshoot of the OpenOffice.org codebase, one week after Oracle said it would no longer sell a commercial version of the productivity suite.
“Please be aware that LibreOffice 3.4 Beta2 is not yet ready for production use,” the Document Foundation said on its website. “You should continue to use LibreOffice 3.3.2 for that.” Release 3.4.0 is currently scheduled for delivery on May 31, according to the site.
-
The Document Foundation today announced another developmental release on the way to LibreOffice 3.4. Release candidates will be delivered throughout May with the final expected May 31.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
We are pleased to announce GNU Guile 2.0.1, the first and overdue maintenance release of the brand new 2.0.x stable series.
-
Version 6 is a major change of GNU Chess, because it is based on Fruit v2.1, a completely different chess engine. Fruit was written by Fabien Letouzey, thus he is the primary author of GNU Chess v6.
-
We are looking for volunteers to help write code to convert a free software project’s documentation wiki pages and associated history from a proprietary format to MoinMoin, a free software wiki written in Python.
-
Licensing
-
The Free Art License grants the right to freely copy, distribute, and transform creative works without infringing the author’s rights.
The Free Art License recognizes and protects these rights. Their implementation has been reformulated in order to allow everyone to use creations of the human mind in a creative manner, regardless of their types and ways of expression.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Open Hardware
-
Buoyed by sales of smartphones and tablets, ARM Holdings reported a 35 percent increase in year-over-year profits. The company added that shipments of processors based on its designs were up 33 percent, while 39 different licensees signed up during the first quarter of its financial year.
-
Programming
-
If you sometimes find yourself needing an open wireless network in order to check your email from a car, a street corner, or a park, you may have noticed that they’re getting harder to find.
Stories like the one over the weekend about a bunch of police breaking down an innocent man’s door because he happened to leave his network open, as well as general fears about slow networks and online privacy, are convincing many people to password-lock their WiFi routers.
-
When David Eagleman was eight years old, he fell off a roof and kept on falling. Or so it seemed at the time. His family was living outside Albuquerque, in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. There were only a few other houses around, scattered among the bunchgrass and the cholla cactus, and a new construction site was the Eagleman boys’ idea of a perfect playground. David and his older brother, Joel, had ridden their dirt bikes to a half-finished adobe house about a quarter of a mile away. When they’d explored the rooms below, David scrambled up a wooden ladder to the roof.
-
Private Eye editor Ian Hislop has accused the BBC’s Andrew Marr of hypocrisy after he admitted taking out a controversial super-injunction while working as a journalist.
-
Very interesting petition from a French citizen. What strikes me is that the petitioner asked for regulatory changes while the Commission in its answer restricts itself to positive law, positive competition law.
-
Hardware
-
Security
-
Discrete Geometry Viewer may not be useful to everyone, but it will surely delight geeks and geek artists, who have gained a powerful new tool for image manipulation. Apart from its immediate scientific value, DGV also has educational aspects and can be used for stunning visualization effects that are otherwise virtually impossible to achieve.
Personally, I think DGV is a great project. Whether it’s ever going to hatch from its infant phase depends mainly on the interest of the author, who could be pursuing other ideas once he completes his PhD. One thing is sure, this can be a smart ice breaker for all those terrified physics students, expecting years of boredom at the university. Lure them in, make them feel safe and comfy, thinking they are going to enjoy themselves. Well, they might actually get amused pasting pictures of Stalin and Mark together, even if they fail at the solid state physics exams.
-
Finance
-
Yet the stock is stuck, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its May 2 edition. It closed at $26.38 yesterday versus its average of about $27 since the start of 2001. The shares, which first surpassed $26 in 1998, have lost about 7.1 percent including dividends in the past decade while the S&P 500 returned 30 percent.
-
As the jury continued to deliberate in the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, the government notched another guilty plea in its investigation of insider trading at hedge funds.
Donald Longueuil, a former portfolio manager at SAC Capital Advisors, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud before Judge Jed S. Rakoff in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
-
The calls for the bankruptcy of the Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) are getting louder. The post told readers that:
“The job market was a bright spot in the first quarter … with the unemployment rate falling and job growth coming in strong.”
-
The European Union’s competition watchdog is investigating the practices of some of the world’s largest banks, as well as a clearing house and a financial data firm, in the market for credit default swaps.
The two probes home in on a market that has come under fire for lacking transparency and allegedly worsening market turmoil during the financial crisis.
-
Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell reported huge increases in their first-quarter profit on Thursday, helped by higher oil prices and earnings from refining.
Exxon Mobil, the largest American oil company, said net income rose 69 percent to $10.7 billion, or $2.14 a share, in the first three months of this year, from $6.3 billion, or $1.33 a share, in the same period last year.
-
The average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. is now within a dime of $4.
Drivers in 22 states are paying more than the national average of $3.91 per gallon. In Alaska, California and Connecticut they’re paying $4.20 or more.
With one day left in April, gas prices are up 30 cents for the month. On average, the increase has been slightly more than a penny per day. At that rate, the national average for gas would reach $4 on Sunday, May 8. In 2008, when gas hit a record of $4.11 per gallon in July, it didn’t cost $4 until June 8.
-
Wisconsin/PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
The “World’s Largest Brat Fest,” which will take place over Memorial Day weekend at Willow Island at the Alliant Energy Center, will serve brats donated by Johnsonville Sausage of Sheboygan Falls, WI. Johnsonville owners (the Stayer and Stayer-Maloney families) and other principals of Johnsonville Sausage contributed a total of $48,450 to Scott Walker’s gubernatorial and other 2010 Republican state campaigns, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign’s Campaign Finance Database.This prompted Madison activists such as Sam Hokin to call for a boycott of Johnsonville and other corporations that contributed to Scott Walker. Tim Metcalfe, president and co-owner of Metcalfe’s Market and organizer of the “World’s Largest Brat Fest,” issued a statement on March 20th that “Brat Fest has, and continues to be, truly apolitical… My hope is that these traditions and civil accord can continue.”
-
Rumors have been circulating about a little-known initiative to subject Wisconsin local governments to “stress tests” and other new constraints. Many believe the proposal resembles the “martial law” bill that was recently passed in Michigan, which allows the state government to dissolve local governments in a “fiscal emergency,” and worry that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or his friends in the legislature could be cooking up a similar plan.
-
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s op-ed in the New York Times last week advocated for a Medicaid that promotes innovative, self-managed and flexible care that would allow individuals to stay in their own homes. Despite these statements, Governor Walker is eliminating a Wisconsin Medicaid innovation that worked toward these stated principles, a newly-created and relatively inexpensive statewide registry that helps vulnerable people with disabilities stay out of assisted living facilities and control their home healthcare.
-
Privacy
-
The Sony security breach is serious. Obviously it is hugely distressing if you are one of the huge number of people affected but it also raises questions on when should we, the public, be told about a serious security breach? Also what constitutes a security breach?
In most US states, companies are required to report data breaches as soon as they happen. Let me be clear, I have no doubt whatsoever that Sony would have acted as quickly as possible once the full extent of the security breach was known, but the fact that it appears that a whole week went by before a public announcement was made has raised a few eyebrows. We do know that the EU is already looking in detail at a Data Protection Directive which will potentially introduce a mandatory reporting process for all organ
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Europe’s highest court has been urged to declare stem cell patents immoral and therefore illegal. Researchers warn this will destroy prospects for stem cell treatments in Europe, driving potential investors to patent-friendly China, Japan and the US. New Scientist explores what is at stake.
-
We find it extraordinary that Hong is apparently unaware of the IEEE publication. Although Hong does cite Phillips’s paper, we find that he does so in a somewhat misleading way and makes only cursory references to Bose. In particular, he does not refer to the crucial papers of Bose cited above.
We hope you find these observations useful. We believe that they not only serve to debunk the claims of Marconi’s priority, but also to provide another illustration of the fact that inventions do occur without the protection of intellectual property.
-
Copyrights
-
A federal judge blasted Righthaven’s copyright-collection business model in a ruling that says an Oregon nonprofit was justified through fair use to post an article by the Las Vegas Review Journal.
“[Righthaven's] litigation strategy has a chilling effect on potential fair uses of Righthaven-owned articles, diminishes public access to the facts contained therein, and does nothing to advance the Copyright Act’s purpose of promoting artistic creation,” U.S. District Judge James Mahan ruled Friday.
-
-
-
ACTA
-
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Trade has released a working paper that responds to a February “Opinion of European Academics on the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.“ The Opinion signed by 182 academics, argues that ACTA conflicts with both EU law and the enforcement provisions of the TRIPS Agreement.
-
Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI
-
As no doubt you have heard by now, four out of the five judicial review claims on the Digital Economy Act brought to court by BT and TalkTalk have been dismissed. BT and TalkTalk argued that the Digital Economy Act was illegal under privacy and e-commerce laws, that the impact on business was disproportionate, and that the UK failed to notify the EU of the impending implementation of the law. Mr Justice Parker ruled today that all of these issues were not feasible reasons to deem the Digital Economy Act illegal except for the cost order which mandates that ISPs pay 25% of the charges incurred in implementation. A review of this cost order will now take place.
We at Big Brother Watch are disappointed in this ruling. Our very own Dan Hamilton said today,
-
After only three weeks, Mr Justice Kenneth Parker has handed down his judgment in the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. In summarising thousands of pages of evidence and submissions and the four-day hearing, the judge rejected nearly all of the grounds for the review, only allowing the challenge to part of the allocation of costs. The full text of the judgment can be found here and summaries of the hearings here.
The first point to note is the number of parties. While the case was between BT, TalkTalk and the government, there were thirteen interested parties involved, including six notorious pro-copyright lobby groups and four unions. This gives an indication of the intense lobbying pressure behind the Digital Economy Act, and why the previous government felt compelled to act the way they did.
How Apple Genius Bar Works – South Park
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.29.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Some people might be surprised at the numbers of organisations that are now employing open source, says Jack Wallen. But which areas of activity could most benefit from its greater adoption?
Some industries with few outward signs of open source are already taking advantage of it, while in others it has no presence whatsoever. What is certain is that they could all benefit — in ways ranging from cost-effectiveness to reliability.
-
Kernel Space
-
-
systemd is still a young project, but it is not a baby anymore. The initial announcement I posted precisely a year ago. Since then most of the big distributions have decided to adopt it in one way or another, many smaller distributions have already switched. The first big distribution with systemd by default will be Fedora 15, due end of May. It is expected that the others will follow the lead a bit later (with one exception). Many embedded developers have already adopted it too, and there’s even a company specializing on engineering and consulting services for systemd. In short: within one year systemd became a really successful project.
-
Applications
-
-
We know that there are numerous open source programs that find their home in both Windows and Linux. Many of these turn out to be among the apps that we use daily. However, did you know that you can get certain plugins only for Linux? Plus if a plugin exists for Windows, Linux lets you easily install them. Let’s find out what they are.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
In 2005, the year it was published, I bought the first edition of A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming by Mark Sobell. The title reads like a nutshell description one might find in the Product Description section of its Amazon page, rather than like a book title. If you think the title is a handful, you should pick up a copy of the book; it is huge, a hefty tome filled from cover to cover with explanations of a wide range of topics relevant to the operation of a Unix-like operating system via the command line interface.
-
Games
-
Vertigo is a new fun arcade game for Linux which is based on Ogre3D and BulletPhysics Engine. The game is completely free, open source and cross platform.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
The Kdenlive Team has announced the release of version 0.8. The latest version of the popular film-editing software has some cool features which include: Multi track editing; Realtime effects and transitions; Image, color, titles, video and audio clips; customizable layout and ability to export to various formats.
-
A couple of weeks ago, I’ve been attending 2011 user experience Sprint, in Berlin. That was interesting and nice and productive and everything, and above all it was my first live encounter with other KDE people, including Nuno.
There’s been (notably) quite some discussions about how information and functionality should be presented to users, organized and formulated, in order to be complete but not overwhelming, sexy, gratifying, and elegant.
[...]
Things one notices:
* more visible pressed tool buttons at the top
* new slider at the bottom
* and new folder icons (quite unrelated with this post actually), on which Nuno has been working lately (and I’m sure he would blog better than I about it).
Things one does not notice (but with which we are happy):
* improved holes for the scrollbars, progressbars, and main view (note notably how the main view bottom corners are better rounded)
* improved (well, bug fixed) rendering of the capacity bar at the bottom.
To give proper credit to whom it belongs, some of the improvements above have been primarily instigated by Peter Penz, Dolphin dev.
-
-
-
I got my “Linux start” with Slackware way back in 1995. I even bought my first home computer in order to do it. Before that time, I figured any computer use at home was probably going to be for work, so I figured that my employer should – and did – provide something, usually a terminal and a modem.
-
New Releases
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Today I installed the Beta 2 of Mageia interested in running one simple test: Japanese IME support with Libre Office.
Since I could not solve the issue myself with the approach I used in Mandriva 2010.1 (Open Office), I posted a cry for help in the Mageia forum. I got prompt, friendly, and helpful answers, for which I feel most thankful.
-
Debian Family
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
After the usual 6 months of development, Ubuntu 11.04 has finally been released. I usually start these posts with “there haven’t been any major or ground-breaking changes” but this time pretty much everything is new with the introduction of Unity as the default interface. Since we’ve been writing about the new features in Ubuntu 11.04 constantly, in this post we’ll only talk about the major new features. Read on!
-
The latest release of Ubuntu 11.04, the world’s most popular desktop Linux is out today. But, this is not just a one step forward update. No, it’s a giant leap to a new kind of Linux desktop thanks to its Unity desktop interface. Here’s what you need to know today about it.
First, as before, you can download Ubuntu 11.04 from the Web to your PC. In the next few weeks, you’ll also be able to run the Ubuntu 11.04 desktop from the cloud, but that’s not available yet. You can, however, give Ubuntu 11.04 server a try from the cloud today though.
-
-
Shawn rants a bit about Ubuntu’s new Unity interface, and gives us a couple tips on how to adjust.
-
-
Natty Narwhal isn’t the only thing new today in Ubuntu. Along with it, and as you may have already noticed, we have updated some areas of the Ubuntu website, including a fresh new homepage.
-
-
With Ubuntu 11.04 nearly upon us, it’s time to take a look at the features which headline this latest and greatest version of the world’s most popular open source operating system. Here’s a look, broken down by Ubuntu flavor …
First, though, some quick notes for those in the dark: Set to be officially released April 28, Ubuntu 11.04 represents the midway point between the last longterm-support release of the operating system in April 2010 and the next one, a year from now. If you’re a normal person you’re probably content to stick with the LTS releases, but geeks — and those curious about the latest development trends in the open source channel — will want to upgrade their Ubuntu installation.
-
-
-
Now that you have finished installing the new Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, what do you do now? In this post we list some of the things that you might want to do after installing Ubuntu 11.04.
-
-
-
-
Ubuntu 11.04 is the most ambitious Linux desktop version ever, with what may be a ground-breaking user interface and major changes from previous versions that come together nicely.
-
Canonical has released Ubuntu 11.04, née Natty Narwhal. But this release is not your ordinary update with a handful of new features in the same basic Ubuntu you know and love. No, this marine mammal is an entirely new beast, with the Unity shell replacing everything familiar about the Ubuntu desktop.
-
-
Tablets
-
Barnes & Nobel announced that NOOK Color’s update to Android OS 2.2/Froyo offers system improvements, enhanced browser performance and a more complete Web experience giving customers access to enjoy even more video, interactive and animated content.
-
Modo Labs, a provider of open-source content-delivery solutions for mobile, has debuted its Kurogo Mobile Framework for developers.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (April 27th) the stable release and immediate availability for download of the Google Chrome 11.0.696.57 web browser for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.
-
Mozilla
-
I contend that it’s not necessary nor even desirable to upgrade an entire Linux distribution or BSD installation just to get some shiny newness like Firefox 4.
-
The main change is that now it requires firebird2.5-dev instead of firebird3.0 headers and decided that is better to have a flamerobin 0.9.3 in the distros released for the next 1-2 years with a stable firebird 2.5.x and add firebird 3.0 requirement when is ready and stable ~1-2 years
-
Different teams and individuals are working on the Firefox web browser. Some are improving the web browser’s core, others are working on the interface or experimental extensions that may one day be added to the web browser’s core.
One of those experimental spin-offs is the AwesomeBar HD which is now available as a beta release for Firefox 4 and newer versions of the web browser. As the name suggests, it has something to do with Firefox’s address bar.
-
In the quest for better browser speed, Mozilla has begun work on new Firefox engines for running JavaScript programs and displaying graphics.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
In a bid to further consolidate its server business in general and mission-critical server in particular, Oracle may in future cease support of popular Red Hat and SUSE Linux operating systems, according to an analyst. This currently seems to be a problem for a lot of customers using Intel Corp.’s Itanium-based systems from HP, who are unsure about the future of Itanium in general and HP-UX in particular.
-
BSD
-
A while ago back in January I came across this announcement on OSNews.com and made a mental note that this was something I had to try.
VirtualBSD 8.1 was released on or around 4/01/2011 and it basically gives you a pre-defined FreeBSD 8.1 installation with Xfce 4.6 and a range of applications in a virtual machine. It is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE in the form of a VMware appliance but can also in a few steps be made to run with VirtualBox. Read the instructions for that here.
As I already had VMware Player installed I went for using it as intended. Most of what I’m going to write you can also read on the VirtualBSD site so feel free to skip over.
-
The US Supreme Court has granted a whopping victory to AT&T, the US Chamber of Commerce, and supportive corporations, by reversing previous court decisions that had prevented corporations from requiring individual arbitration of customers’ complaint.
By issuing its 5-4 decision on Wednesday, the Court has essentially stripped away individuals’ rights to band together in class-action lawsuits should a corporation choose to include an arbitration requirement in its contracts or licensing agreements.
-
Finance
-
The Senate report calls for tighter regulations so that banks can’t play these games ever again. It calls for more effective regulatory agencies and rules, and it wants major reforms on the way the rating agencies work — much of this already contained in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. But in addition, the subcommittee obviously wants more federal prosecution of Goldman Sachs and others as it asks that “Federal regulators…. identify any violations of law…” (p 638).
-
Reputation is dead on Wall Street.
This is not to say that financiers and financial institutions still do not commit foolish misdeeds. Rather, so long as the authorities do not find law-breaking, the penalties are few.
The list of examples is long.
-
With crises mounting daily—wars, deficits, debt limits, natural disasters—it’s tempting to forget the cataclysms of the past. In particular, America seems to have amnesia about the Wall Street-induced catastrophe that destroyed so much of our economy. We still haven’t learned its lessons, and if we don’t pay attention, we’re soon going to pay again for its perpetrators’ callous disregard for the public interest.
-
Lorin Reisner ’83 and Kenneth Lench ’84 were about to take on perhaps the most important lawsuit in the history of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It was April 2010, and Reisner, the deputy director of the SEC’s enforcement division in Washington, D.C., and Lench, head of a key unit in the division, were preparing a civil fraud suit against Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs.
The Brandeis graduates had helped successfully convince the SEC’s five commissioners to vote for the suit, arguing that
Goldman misled investors about complex securities at the heart of the mortgage meltdown. But opposition within the agency was so fierce that it led to a nonunanimous vote to pursue the suit.
-
The American International Group, the giant insurer rescued by the federal government during the financial crisis, on Thursday will file the first of what could be a series of lawsuits against Wall Street firms, contending that it was the victim of fraud.
-
A new report by economists at the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research looks at House Republicans’ plan for privatizing Medicare from a new angle, and finds that it could increase Health Care costs for beneficiaries by a staggering $34 Trillion over 75 years.
-
Total output grew at an annual pace of 1.8 percent from January through March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, after having expanded at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.
When the year first began, economists had been expecting a much more robust growth rate of about 4 percent, only to be barraged by bad report after bad report as the days wore on. Turmoil in the Middle East set off a jump in oil prices. Winter blizzards shuttered businesses and delayed construction, causing investments in nonresidential structures like office buildings to fall by 21.7 percent compared with an increase of 7.6 percent at the end of 2010. Imports, which are subtracted from output, surged, and military spending sank.
-
-
More people sought unemployment benefits last week, the second rise in three weeks, a sign of the slow and uneven jobs recovery.
Applications for unemployment benefits jumped 25,000 to a seasonally adjusted 429,000 for the week ending April 23, the Labor Department said Thursday. That’s the highest total since late January.
-
Berkshire Hathaway directors have accused David L. Sokol, once considered a possible successor to Warren E. Buffett, of misleading the company about his personal stake in a specialty chemicals manufacturer that Berkshire recently agreed to acquire.
Mr. Sokol, who resigned in March, never told Mr. Buffett that he had bought his stake in Lubrizol after Citigroup bankers had pitched the company as a potential takeover target, according to a report by the audit committee of the Berkshire board that was released on Wednesday.
-
Ben Bernanke’s first press conference wasn’t much for pomp and circumstance. Bernanke sat, he didn’t stand. The few cameras in the room didn’t hunt for the dramatic angles or work to heighten the tension between the chairman and his interrogators. Very few jokes were cracked, and Bernanke made no major missteps. It looked like what it was: an economist talking to econowonks about the economy. But tucked inside the talk of “anchoring inflation expectations” and “the economy’s central tendency” was perhaps the most important economic policy statement that Americans will hear this year: the Fed, Bernanke admitted, has chosen a side.
-
Under the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation (Title II of that Act), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is granted expanded powers to intervene and manage the closure of any failing bank or other financial institution. There are two strongly-held views of this legal authority: it substantially solves the problem of how to handle failing megabanks and therefore serves as an effective constraint on their future behavior; or it is largely irrelevant.
Both views are expressed by well-informed people at the top of regulatory structures on both sides of the Atlantic (at least in private conversations). Which is right? In terms of legal process, the resolution authority could make a difference. But as a matter of practical politics and actual business practices, it means very little for our biggest financial institutions.
-
The economy slowed sharply in the first three months of the year. High gas prices cut into consumer spending, bad weather delayed construction projects and the federal government slashed defense spending by the most in six years.
The 1.8 percent annual growth rate in the January-March quarter was weaker than the 3.1 percent growth in the previous quarter, the Commerce Department reported. And it was the worst showing since last spring when the European debt crisis slowed growth to a 1.7 percent pace.
-
Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell reported hefty increases in their first-quarter profit on Thursday, helped by higher oil prices and earnings from refining.
Exxon Mobil, the largest American oil company, said net income rose 69 percent to $10.7 billion, or $2.14 a share, in the first three months of this year, from $6.3 billion, or $1.33 a share, in the same period last year.
The earnings beat some analysts’ expectations, and marked the fifth quarter in a row that Exxon reported an earnings increase.
-
Privacy
-
Hoping to put to rest a growing controversy over privacy, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, took the unusual step of personally explaining that while Apple had made mistakes in how it handled location data on its mobile devices, it had not used the iPhone and iPad to keep tabs on the whereabouts of its customers.
-
DRM
-
You see, another really annoying feature of the PS3 is Sony’s removal of the Other OS option, which made it possible for people who bought a PS3 to install Linux if they were so inclined. The removal of this option was something that happend basically as soon as I got my PS3. Shame on your Sony for telling people they could use your device for a specific purpose then taking that feature away from your paying customers. To make matters worse on this front, Sony thinks it’s okay to harras, sue, and otherwise make their customers’ lives a living hell for trying to return the functionality customers paid for. Ask George Hotz how reasonable Sony is when their legal thugs come knocking. In case you haven’t been following this, George Hotz, aka geohotz, figured out a way to jailbreak the PS3 and got sued for doing so.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Trademarks
-
Quick: When you hear the phrase “app store,” what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
That’s the question a couple of tech’s biggest players — Apple and Amazon — are fighting over right now. Apple says “app store” is synonymous with its iOS App Store alone; Amazon says the term is generic and can be used by anyone.
You’ve heard about this battle, right? Apple is suing Amazon for using the term “app store” (or, more specifically, “Appstore”) in the name of its new Android application store. Apple claims it owns the trademark and has exclusive rights to the term.
-
Apple had filed a lawsuit in March against Amazon’s use of “App Store” in their newly launched Amazon AppStore. Apple had informed Amazon that using the term “App Store” was unlawful because they owned the rights to the term itself. In the lawsuit Amazon indicates that the term “App Store” is too generic for Apple to lay claim to the name itself.
-
Copyrights
-
A new Wikileaks cable confirms that the Conservative government delayed introducing copyright legislation in early 2008 due to public opposition. The delay – which followed the decision in December 2007 to hold off introducing a bill after it was placed on the order paper (and the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group took off) – lasted until June 2008. The U.S. cable notes confirmation came directly from then-Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who told U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins that cabinet colleagues and Conservative MPs were worried about the electoral implications of copyright reform…
-
The museum is rushing to digitize the collection (much of which has deteriorated or was destroyed), but the only way to hear it is to make an appointment at the museum. They insist they’re going to try to tackle the copyright issues to release the music, but it’s clear that’s going to be an incredibly difficult task. What’s really unfortunate is how all of these works should be in the public domain, if we just went by what the law said when they were made. Yet, thanks to copyright maximalism, the world and our culture suffers completely unnecessarily.
-
ACTA
-
-
On August 7, 2008, Stewart Baker, the Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security, sent a one page letter and a three page “Policy Position on Border Measures of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.”
Stewart Baker was the General Counsel of the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1994, and was appointed the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by George W Bush.
HTC Desire Z running Gingerbread/Cyanogenmod 7 (And debian linux with lxde)
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.28.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
While most of the world has been ignoring Linux on the desktop, it appears that the makers of Ubuntu have managed to score a lucrative deal with German insurance giant LVM Versicherungen.
Canonical, which makes Ubuntu, will convert 10,000 PCs to use Ubuntu Linux across the entire company.
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana’s talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.
-
-
Ballnux
-
Verizon Wireless will begin selling a 4G LTE-ready 4.3-inch “Droid Charge by Samsung” Android phone on April 28 for a whopping $300 plus contract. Meanwhile, Verizon says the 4G- and Android-ready HTC Thunderbolt has been a hot seller, and Motorola has confifmed that the Verizon launch of its Droid Bionic phone will be delayed until summer.
-
For example, the Optimus 2X (right) — claimed on its December 2010 launch to be the world’s first dual-core smartphone — and Optimus Pad tablet both employ Nvidia Tegra 2 processors, as does the LG-manufactured G-Slate (below) promised by T-Mobile. Meanwhile, the similarly Android-based Optimus 3D phone uses a Texas Instruments OMAP4 processor, likely the OMAP4430.
-
-
Kernel Space
-
The recently held Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (LFCS) had its traditional kernel panel on April 6 at which Andrew Morton, Arnd Bergmann, James Bottomley, and Thomas Gleixner sat down to discuss the kernel with moderator Jonathan Corbet. Several topics were covered, but the current struggles in the ARM community were clearly at the forefront of the minds of participants and audience members alike.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Applications
-
-
HomeBank is a personal financial management application that’s a lot like keeping a ledger. This banking tool does not dwell in the realm of accounting techie talk. Instead, it is easy to enter money you spend and track money you deposit. Installing is easy, but the setup process can get quite tedious. However, once you’re finished, it’s benefits become clear.
-
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine
-
PlayOnLinux is a collection of free software for installing games and other applications that were developed for Microsoft Windows on Linux systems.
-
Games
-
It’s been a while since I had a chance to post up some news, but I just nabbed myself a copy of the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle and wanted to remind those other late comers (like myself) that there is currently less than a day left on this bundle!
-
Desktop Environments
-
At some stage the seminal KDE vs Gnome paper vanished from its original home, and while it’s still available in a few places (such as here) it set me thinking. What are the fundamental differences between Gnome and KDE development? There’s lots of little differences (2006: Gnome parties on a beach. Akademy has melted ice cream in the rain) but they’re both basically communities made up of people who are interested in developing a functional and interesting desktop experience. So why do the end results have so little in common?
Then I read this and something that had been floating around in my mind began to solidify. KDE assumes a platform and attempts to work around its shortcomings. Gnome helps define the platform and works on fixing its shortcomings.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
The first preview release for KDE-Telepathy is getting closer. Our release-tracker bug now only has 9 bugs blocking it and many of these already have patches on reviewboard. Our first release will be made separately from the KDE Software Compilation, and should be compatible with installs of 4.6.x or trunk. It will be suitable only for people who like to try out new technologies before they are ready for the mainstream. It will not be feature complete (although we hope many of the basic features will be implemented). It will not be polished (although we do want to know about any bugs or issues you find – that’s why we’re making this release). It will also not be especially deeply integrated with the rest of the KDE S.C. or the Plasma workspaces. There will be a plasma applet for bringing accounts on and offline, but the rest of it is much like a traditional Instant Messaging application.
-
KWin Desktop Effects in past releases of KDE 4 were lacking in comparison to Compiz. After installing KDE 4.6.2 recently I decided to see if there has been any progress, and was pleasantly surprised. Although KWin is still not quite up to the standard of Compiz in all areas (the behaviour of 3D windows, especially around the corners of the Desktop Cube, being one example), KWin’s Desktop Effects are now very pleasant and a viable alternative to Compiz. I’ll talk you though my Desktop-pimping exercise using KWin on my main laptop running KDE 4.6.2, and then I’ll describe briefly a similar exercise using Compiz on the same machine.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
-
GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell were finally released, after years of development, just a few days ago. Their release was obviously raising enormous expectation, so it should come as no surprise that so shortly after it took place there are already tons of material both positive and negative about it. Exciting times, if you ask me.
-
The Gnome project announced that the Gnome 3.0 release included more contributions by women than any previous release, an increase the project attributes its new internship program. The Outreach Program for Women, which ran from December 2010 until March 2011, paired eight interns with Gnome project mentors. The Gnome project also announced that it accepted seven women to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Check out the press release for a complete list of the new outreach program and female GSoC participants, mentors, and projects.
The Gnome project announced that the Gnome 3.0 release included more contributions by women than any previous release, an increase the project attributes its new internship program. The Outreach Program for Women, which ran from December 2010 until March 2011, paired eight interns with Gnome project mentors. The Gnome project also announced that it accepted seven women to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Check out the press release for a complete list of the new outreach program and female GSoC participants, mentors, and projects.
-
With 15 female interns accepted for the Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code, GNOME 3.2 will be in a good position to beat this record.
-
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE OUTFIT Red Hat out-performed its rivals in operating system revenue growth with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution.
-
Fedora
-
Fedora 15 boots fast, but I want it to boot faster. The login is also quicker than before, but I want it to be faster.
-
Debian Family
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
This chapter introduces the Ubuntu project, its distribution, its development processes, and some of the history that made it all possible.
* A Wild Ride
* Free Software, Open Source, and GNU/Linux
* A Brief History of Ubuntu
* What Is Ubuntu?
* Ubuntu Promises and Goals
* Canonical and the Ubuntu Foundation
* Ubuntu Subprojects, Derivatives, and Spin-offs
* Summary
-
-
-
Now that we have looked at the Ubuntu power consumption going back as far as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (and found serious power regressions), the next round of testing is providing the Bootchart results for five different systems also going back as far as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.
Following a clean install of each operating system and leaving the system in its clean state with stock settings (and packages) aside from installing Bootchart, the Bootchart result was gathered after two reboots. For all releases it was the time measured to the automatic log-in. Again, the key mobile test systems included…
-
-
-
-
-
-
Canonical announced that the Ubuntu Open Week for Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04) will take place between 2nd to 5th May, 2011, on the Ubuntu IRC, in the #ubuntu-classroom channel.
-
A new edition of Ubuntu arrives every six months, bearing a new zoological codename. The latest is version 11.04 (reflecting its April 2011 release), known to its friends as the Natty Narwhal.
You’ll notice one change before you even download the installer: the Netbook Edition has been retired, so there’s now only one ISO for all home computers. It’s a wise move; one standard installation makes life easier for beginners and developers alike.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Linux Mint signed a new partnership with HELLOTUX. The Linux clothes specialist produces the official Linux Mint T-Shirt and Pique Polo Shirt. The company ships Worldwide and gives $5 to our distribution for each shirt sold.
Both shirts are of very good quality and feature a simple yet elegant design, with the Linux Mint logo embroidered on the front:
-
-
-
Phones
-
Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo
-
-
After a lot of bug-wrangling both by upstream and by our Qt and KDE teams, we now feel confident that Qt 4.7.2 and KDE 4.6.2 are ready for stabilization. If you are a stable tree user (amd64, ppc, x86), the upgrade from current Qt 4.6.3 and KDE 4.4.5 will arrive at your machine soon, with lots of new features. (The KDEPIM applications such as kmail, kontact, or akregator will stay at trusty version 4.4 since development there is still ongoing.)
-
Android
-
Recently, many reports have arrived showing the open source Android mobile OS beating Apple’s iPhone and iOS in market share terms, with some over-enthusiastic observers pronouncing the iPhone “dead in the water.” We’ve already cautioned that some of the market share numbers for Android should be taken with a grain of salt, because Android is becoming hugely popular as a consumer smartphone OS, but is not accepted as secure or standardized by many businesses and organizations. Furthermore, in Apple’s recent quarterly financial report, the iPhone was shown to have gigantic momentum. In the latest Nielsen survey, Android once again comes out on top in terms of being the “most wanted” smartphone platform, but that–again–is among consumers.
-
Verizon Wireless announced two new Android 2.2 phones, led by HTC’s four-inch, global-roaming Droid Incredible 2 phone, which features dual cameras, including an eight-megapixel model. The ruggedized Casio G’zOne Commando, meanwhile, offers a 3.6-inch WVGA display, a five-megapixel camera, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, as well as special field-ready apps linked to the phone’s sensors.
-
Your Android device is not only good for snapping photos and sharing them with others. Using the right apps, you can turn it into a handy photographic companion which can handle a wide range of photography-related tasks. And the best part is that some of the best photography-related apps won’t cost you a dime.
-
Nielsen reports that 31 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers said they would prefer Android for their next phone, compared to 30 percent for the iPhone. Overall, Nielsen estimates that 37 percent of smartphone subscribers and 50 percent of recent subscribers use Android phones, up sharply from January.
-
Sub-notebooks
-
Tablets
-
Lenovo is readying an Android 3.0 tablet that offers a pen option and plugs into a keyboard dock, says and industry report. Meanwhile, Archos announced its seven-inch, Android-based 7c Home Tablet, and Samsung is rumored to be building Amazon’s first Android tablet.
-
One of the major hardware players that have been quiet until now is Acer. The company jumped feet first into the netbook market with its Aspire range and got some good traction in that area. Now Acer is reportedly ready with its first real tablet device: the Acer Iconia Tab A500. The Iconia will run Android Honeycomb and sports a 10.1-inch screen. Official pricing and release dates for South Africa have not been announced yet.
-
Ask many IT managers and business owners why they don’t adopt open source software, and a common answer will be “lack of support.” After all, many projects don’t offer formal support, relying on wikis and forums for answering questions. That’s why it was big news in 2009 that Credativ, Europe’s largest service and support company focused on open source, was expanding its operations in the United States. Its Open Source Support Center is positioned as a one-stop shop for support for almost all significant open source applications and platforms, including the many flavors of Linux distros, development languages, and databases. Credativ has expanded its efforts to provide comprehensive open source support around the world since 2009, and its efforts appear to be working.
-
I’ve been writing about the Google Summer of Code since 2005 when the program debuted. It’s a program that I’ve seen grow and excel every year since.
The Summer of Code is an effort to bring students into the open source world, matching them up with mentoring open source organizations. The students work on a project with the open source group, helping both the project as well as themselves.
-
Dropbox is not getting much in the way of good news lately. First the company was caught out over changes to its terms of service (TOS), now the company is fending off a open source project called Dropship.
According to Dan DeFelippi, Dropbox is trying to deep-six Dropship. What’s Dropship? It’s an application, under the MIT license, that makes it possible to use Dropbox sort of like a file-sharing network. If you have a hash of a file that’s stored in a public folder on Dropbox, anybody can copy the file into their own folder. So if you have, say, a couple of MP3s by Jukebox the Ghost, you could provide the hashes and suddenly Dropbox is automagically propagating the MP3s to a bunch of accounts.
-
According to Notch, Minecraft is moving to an Android-like model for its mods development. You will be able to sign up for free, accept a license, and get access to the complete source code via SVN (one can tell these aren’t F/OSS people… SVN, seriously?) to develop mods.
-
SaaS
-
Databases
-
Sun/Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
-
-
A U.S. judge has largely sided with Oracle Corp (ORCL.O) over how several technical terms will be defined in its patent fight over Google Inc’s (GOOG.O) Android software, according to a tentative ruling.
-
As part of the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Oracle inherited a long list of open source projects. Some of them, like OpenOffice and OpenSolaris have met with community opposition that have led to forks.
In the case of OpenOffice, the LibreOffice fork has emerged, while Oracle has now backed away from commercial support of the project. With OpenSolaris, Oracle has decided to focus on Solaris 11, while the community Illumos fork picks up the open source mantle.
-
Why? Simples, there are no ODF compatible products on Android for reading & writing. There is OpenOffice Document Reader which as the name suggests is just a reader, and also OOo is so 2009 
-
CMS
-
Doesn’t it give you a warm feeling when you’re asked to do a week’s work in twelve hours or less? It should. It should give you a warmer feeling when you can do it in far less time. Give your C-Level suitors this one in under an hour and they’ll think you’re as magical as Mr. Scott aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Mr. Scott often surprised the always demanding Captain Kirk with his ability to fix just about anything within the very tight time constraints placed on him. Instead of dilithium crystals and altered phaser electronics, you’ll have to work with Ubuntu and Drupal.
As of this writing, the latest version of Drupal is 7.0 and the version that installs to your system via the default Ubuntu repositories is 6.18. The speed of setup should sufficiently offset the fact that the software isn’t the latest available.
-
Who says there’s no money in open source? Demand for Drupal talent is growing, and opportunities abound for developers, designers and artists, and related disciplines such as database and system administration. Let’s take a look at what some Drupal consulting firms are doing, and get an inside view from a Drupal core maintainer.
-
Education
-
Jasig is launching a new open source project called uMobile and is calling on colleges and universities to contribute to the effort.
Jasig is a consortium of higher education institutions and commercial organizations from around the world dedicated to the development and promotion of open source software to benefit colleges and universities. It also holds an annual conference spotlighting open source in education. This year’s spring conference will be held May 23 to 25 in Westminster, CO.
-
Healthcare
-
The Veterans Affairs Department released last Friday its request for proposals for an outfit it calls a Custodial Agent to manage an “open source ecosystem” for development of its next generation electronic health record.
VA said it plans to use the Custodial Agent to set up and manage a code repository that will be used to update its current Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA) health as well as provide software to the entire health care community.
-
-
BSD
-
The DragonFly 2.10.1 release is now available! This release sports significant compatibility and performance improvements and many new features!
-
-
Project Releases
-
Over the next two months the developers will “keep working on finishing a couple of left-over 2.5 targets”, noting that if all goes well, the upcoming 2.58 release will be the final in the 2.5 series. After that, development on the 2.6x cycle will begin, targeting new updates every 2 months.
-
Government
-
Europe’s rules on public procurement should be improved to allow better access to free and open source software applications, according to advocacy groups and the OSOR project. They responded to a public consultation by the European Commission. The groups want the rules to request free and open source licencing terms.
-
Programming
-
Mobile app development for smartphones is hot. This is no more prevalent than in the Android space where the activity level oftentimes is frenzied. However, when it comes to building a “real” Android app, it seems there’s only one programming choice: Java (although it is possible with a lot more work to use C/C++ with Android’s Native Development Kit). That said, Google wisely chose the popular Java programming technology upon which to base its Android SDK, which runs a customized VM.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
As some of my past posts have mentioned, the OASIS group is currently working out how it wishes to extend support for change tracking in ODF. The change tracking feature allows you to have an office application remember what changes you have made and associate them with one or more revisions. There are many examples where governments might want such traceability, but small businesses are likely to find this functionality valuable too.
Late last year there was an ODF plugfest held in Brussels where it was decided that an Advanced Document Collaboration subcommittee should be formed to work out how to serialize tracked changes into ODF.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
The European Parliament’s Constitutional Affairs committee approved a report by Italian centre-right MEP Carlo Casini, which demands a single register of lobbyists, shared between the European Commission and parliament.
There has been a parliamentary register for many years, as lobbyists have to sign up to gain an access pass to the building.
The Commission introduced a ‘Register of Interest Representatives’ in 2008, under the guidance on then Administrative Affairs Commissioner, Siim Kallas, who remained adamant that the register be voluntary. The move was controversial as transparency campaigners wanted a mandatory register.
-
Privacy
-
We like it when the accumulated speed data from GPS devices helps us avoid traffic incidents and school zones. As it turns out, though, there are some other uses for the same stats. Dutch news outlet AD is reporting that such data captured by TomTom navigation devices has been purchased by the country’s police force and is being used to determine where speed traps and cameras should be placed. TomTom was reportedly unaware its data was being used in such a way, but if the police would only agree to sell the data on the location of its speed cameras and traps back to TomTom, why, this could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
Earlier this week, I wrote an analysis of some silly claims from Canadian IP lawyer James Gannon’s sarcastic suggestion that copying money is just like copying content. Gannon stopped by in our comments… and oddly did not respond to a single point that I raised about his faulty analysis. Instead, he only commented to claim that it was somehow rude or discourteous of me to link to his piece and to discuss it without first asking for permission. I found this somewhat shocking. I’ve never heard that it’s common courtesy to ask before you link to someone. Yet Gannon insisted that most people who link to him first ask his permission and he suggests, snidely, that his readership has higher “standards” in regards to how they view content.
-
ACTA
-
On April 26, 2011, Senator Wyden released a redacted version of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on ACTA that has been the subject to an ongoing Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA) dispute with USTR.
(More context here, here and here).
This is a link to the report that USTR claimed they could not release because of restrictions on its use by Senator Wyden.
SARKOZY : COUP de BOULE du pêcheur
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.27.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Disney & DreamWorks on Linux
To say that Hollywood dream studios are Linux playgrounds today, is most definitely not an understatement. Linux has won hands down on server technology as well as pure artwork. Believe it or not, entire renderfarms and artist desktops in these studios are Linux ecosystems.
Linux offers end-to-end graphic solutions, in most challenging and competitive of environments in these studios and has finally emerged a winner. It gives an opportunity for technologists, system engineers to delve into creative art using the most scalable, reliable and most importantly free software solution called Linux.
-
First off, the term “PC” includes Macs, so that’s a poor term to use for distinction.
Second, given the diversity of computing environments today, it is no longer accurate to assume that someone on a non-Mac PC is using Windows. Linux users are growing rapidly in number, and I doubt most would categorize themselves in the same group as Windows users.
That, indeed, is probably at least part of the reason a full 23 percent of respondents to the Hunch study didn’t classify themselves in either the PC (Windows) or Mac camps: the two camps are neither well-defined nor comprehensive, since they leave out Linux users altogether.
-
Always Innovating, the company that brought us a tablet/netbook hybrid that you could stick to a refrigerator is back. But this time instead of focusing on its own hardware, this time the company is showcasing software it’s developed which can run on the $149 BeagleBoard compact computing platform.
The software is called Super-Jumbo, and for good reason. Basically it’s a single disk image which combines four operating systems: Google Android 2.3, Ubuntu 10.10, Google Chromium OS, and AIOS, a custom operating system developed by Always Innovating.
-
-
-
Six years and over 1200 computers later, I believe that HeliOS has gained some significant insight into how people react to the Linux Desktop.
-
Kernel Space
-
Various internal changes to the block layer that were specifically mentioned by Linus Torvalds are designed to enhance performance and scalability. The Ext4 file system is also said to offer improvements in this respect. Still classified as experimental, Btrfs now offers Batched Discard functionality, and LIO (Linux-Iscsi.org) includes a loop-back function.
-
Landing in the Phoronix e-mail inbox last night was a question by a reader asking how hardware vendors determine the operating systems used by their customers and their respective market-share since there isn’t anything to “phone home” and report usage statistics. In other words, this reader had just purchased four desktop processors and he was wondering how to inform AMD that he’s a Linux user. This is in hopes of going towards their Linux tally and eventually increasing their Linux level of support.
[...]
Petition lists are also common for Linux users, such as OpenTheBlob.com for NVIDIA, but those tend to have little effect as well.
-
-
Applications
-
Bottom line: right now it’s a toss-up between BitDefender and F-Prot. I find them equally effective. F-Prot is faster, and so better suited for a regular, scheduled scan. But BitDefender with its GUI is easier for a newcomer to use, and I think provides a more informative report.
-
So, let’s explore the 5 caching systems at hand. For each application we have compiled its own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
If you work with important data on your Linux servers or desktops it is very important that you take regular backups. We have covered some backup tools and solutions that will help you do that.
Assuming you have a backup strategy and implementation in place, another important thing you need to worry about is the safety of your backups themselves. Safety includes two important factors. The first is the storage device or devices on which you store them. The other is to make sure that even if someone gets hold of your backups he can’t look at the data.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
The KDE community is excited to accept 51 students into the Google Summer of Code program this year. Their projects will touch KDE on almost every level, and integrate the students into our community. Some are likely to become longtime KDE contributors. The next month will be spent on community bonding, getting to know the people and the code behind the project they’ll be working on. From May 23rd until the end of August, they’ll be working with their mentors to complete their own projects.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Switching to GNOME 3 is both an opportunity and a distraction. On the one hand, it is the opportunity to put aside some annoying behaviors in earlier GNOME releases. On the other hand, GNOME 3 is a distraction because its changes can get in the way of long-established work methods.
As a result, you need to weigh GNOME 3′s pros and cons carefully before deciding to make the new desktop part of your everyday computing — unless, of course, you are the sort who automatically rejects or embraces change simply because it is new.
-
There are claims that Gnome 3 is too dumbed down for Linux users. I have to admit I’m a little frustrated at not being able to test Gnome 3 properly, because my CD drive is failing, causing my Fedora 15 beta live Gnome 3 session to crash regularly.
One of the main objections to Gnome 3 seems to be the lack of minimise and maximise buttons on windows. However, I have been able to try out the way Gnome 3 handles windows, and it seems intuitive and more efficient in a minimalist way than the previous method. “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler,”* said Einstein, and to my mind the Gnome team have done this: “Made of easy” indeed.
Of course there is no bottom panel to minimise windows to. Grabbing a window and bumping it up to the top panel will automatically maximise the window; grabbing it again and pulling it down will minimise it to the desktop.
Simple. And elegant.
-
Faenza icon theme for Natty PPA has already been updated and now its the turn of Equinox themes for Ubuntu 11.04 to be released. And the latest Equinox theme pack, created by Tiheum(who also created beautiful Faenza icon theme) comes with 3 brand new themes – Equinox Dawn, Equinox Dusk and Equinox Midnight respectively.
-
Linux desktop is on a roll. First came the revamped KDE 4.0 which took the level of User Interface(UI) fit and finish of Linux desktops to another level. Then came the GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Unity desktop interfaces. But one thing they all lack, especially GNOME Shell and Unity, are good looking and user friendly login screens. And here are some very interesting login screen mockups for GNOME.
-
-
Toorox is a Gentoo-based installable live CD that features your choice of KDE or GNOME desktops. It comes with lots of useful applications including system configuration tools, easy package management, and proprietary code installers.
-
New Releases
-
MEPIS 11 RC3 comes with Firefox 4 and Konqueror as its browsers, K3b for burning media, Amarok to play sound files and several video players (KMplayer and GNOME Mplayer.) It also has the GIMP to edit images and for its office suit, it includes LibreOffice 3.3.2. KDE partition manager has substituted GParted since MEPIS 8.5. Faithful to its tradition, MEPIS 11 can be used as a rescue CD or as a live OS should you decide not to install it.
[...]
Desktop effects are deactivated by default, but they work once enabled.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
oday the second beta of the inaugural release of Mageia was released. This release has received lots of bug fixes and software updates as well as a nice theme change. The development branch is now frozen until after final which is due in little over a month.
[...]
Overall, Mageia is looking good. Other than the package manager, all other software and tools seem to work fine – not that I tested everything for this quick look. I’m certainly looking forward to final release.
-
Red Hat Family
-
Although business headlines still tout earnings numbers, many investors have moved past net earnings as a measure of a company’s economic output. That’s because earnings are very often less trustworthy than cash flow, since earnings are more open to manipulation based on dubious judgment calls.
-
-
Debian Family
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
Before you proceed to download and install Ubuntu you need to check few things.
1. Your PC must have a working CD/DVD drive for installation through CD/DVD
2. If you have a netbook please check that there is a USB port which can be used to install Ubuntu 11.04.
3. Check if your PC (especiallay desktop) supports USB boot. Majority of laptops and netbooks support boot from USB. However, desktops usually don’t support USB boot. In case you have a desktop PC, we recommend using CD/DVD method.
-
The first step is to make some space in the system to install Ubuntu. So I booted Windows 7 and from the “computer management – disk management”, I managed to shrink the windows partition to 60 GB.
-
Continuing our series of articles on the benefits of open source software and how computing for free is a very real possibility that many users are engaging in right now around the world, it’s time to take on board the full implications of migrating from Windows to Linux, in this case the Ubuntu platform.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Clement Lefebvre and the community behind the Linux Mint project announced yesterday, April 25th, on their official blog that Linux Mint 5 LTS (Elyssa) operating system will reach end-of-life on April 28th, 2011.
Today we are sorry to announce that starting with April 28th, 2011, the Linux Mint 5 LTS (Elyssa) operating system will no longer be supported with security or critical fixes, and software updates. This comes right after the EOL (end-of-life) announcement for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), issued by Canonical two weeks ago, on April 11th.
-
-
Phones
-
OLPC
-
That makes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s decision to name a 44-year old Japanese venture capitalist who attended, but did not graduate, from two American colleges as the director of one of the world’s top computing science laboratories an unusual choice.
On Tuesday, the university plans to announce that Joichi Ito, known as Joi, will become the fourth director of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, which was originally founded by the architect Nicholas Negroponte in 1985 and has since become recognized for its willingness to take risks in developing technologies that are at the edge of the computing frontier.
-
Tablets
-
APOTHEKER Well, there is the app store, for which we will get something, there are some additional services for which we probably will be able to charge something for. And if we add additional features on top of WebOS, it’s a little bit early to talk about them right now, we might be able to charge something for that as well.
FORTUNE: If you’re going to enable your PCs to do more, yet you said your tablets and your smartphones will be purely WebOS, why not make that a heterogeneous experience as well?
-
If you must have a great tablet, and you’re willing to pay the price for it, Apple’s iPad 2 is still the one to get. But, if you’d like a good tablet at half-the-price, the newly firmware renovated Barnes & Noble Nook Color may be all the tablet you need.
Today, April 25th, as has long been expected, the Nook Color got its 1.2 update. This transforms the Nook Color from being an e-reader to being a low-end Android tablet by replacing its operating system with Android 2.2 (Froyo) and adding an App Store.
-
Sony announced a pair of Android 3.0 tablets that integrate Sony’s Qriocity video and audio, Sony Reader ebook content, and Playstation Suite games. Due to arrive this fall, the Sony Tablet S1 is a 9.4-inch model with a wedge-shaped design, while the S2 offers a folding clamshell format with dual 5.5-inch screens that can be viewed as a single display.
-
If you travel frequently, it can be frustrating to have to use a system that doesn’t have your favorite open source software already installed. Fortunately, many of the most popular open source applications come in portable versions that you can take with you on a USB thumb drive or other portable media.
What makes an application portable? These apps can run from any portable device (a thumb drive, CD, DVD, portable hard drive or other device) without needing to be installed directly on the hard drive of the system you’re using. They also don’t leave behind any files on the host system, and they don’t interfere with other software installed on that system.
-
Outsiders often criticize free software because it offers too much choice. Choice confuses people, they say, and free software would be more efficient if everyone concentrated on improving the best application in each category instead of developing alternatives. To me, this argument has always seemed conditioned by monopoly, but recently I found reason to believe that it couldn’t be more wrong.
[...]
This contrast shows the practical value of redundancy. Superficially, redundancy seems wasteful, and a common short-sighted view is that you can improve efficiency by getting rid of the redundancy. When all is well, that view may even have some validity.
-
Brazil, April 25, 2011—Last week, billions of people around the world celebrated their faith on a Nazarene liberator and his miraculous victory over death. On the 21st, Brazil also remembered the death of Tiradentes, martyr for the country’s independence, who survived only in memories and in history books. Our gift, hereby announced, doesn’t contain Easter Eggs, that symbolize rebirth, resurrection or the creativity of computer programmers, but it has to do with one of the two certainties in life. Although it doesn’t avoid death, it enables escaping from an unfair tax charged by the Brazilian government in the form of freedom. We offer IRPF-Livre, 2011 version, a Free alternative to the illegally privative software imposed on Brazilian taxpayers to prepare their annual Income Tax returns (IRPF).
http://www.fsfla.org/~lxoliva/snapshots/irpf-livre/2011/
IRPF-Livre, that we have maintained since 2007 as part of our campaign against the deprivation of freedom by governments through Imposed/Tax Software, was updated in accordance with changes in legislation and the undocumented file formats required by Receita Federal do Brasil (RFB).
-
Web Browsers
-
It wasn’t that long ago that things were as dull as used dishwater when it came to Web browsers. Then, along came Firefox and suddenly it wasn’t just an Internet Explorer world anymore. Today, in 2011, Google’s Chrome Web browser, not to mention Apple’s Safari and Opera Software’s Opera, are all good choices for your Web browser.
-
Mozilla
-
There is always a period of time after you requisition hardware that you are a little nervous about performance. Very happy to report that Firefox is scaling very well and we have jumped over the magic number of 100 concurrent users in FF.
The only open issue right now in regards to Firefox is that it still is having an occasional oddity in regards to NFS. From watching patterns, it seems like if you are downloading a big (1GB+) file and writing it over NFS, the server get’s sluggish. It never comes to a crawl, but has a noticeable slowdown. I was able to make this work better by downgrading from NFS4 to NFS3. I’ll see if I can figure it out and submit a proper bug report.
[...]
I believe this server could easily handle another 100 users, and can easily be upgraded in terms of RAM.
-
I doubt if many people will be convinced to use Firefox because it somehow makes the world a better place. Consumers and companies are far more pragmatic in their decision processes. We want something to work, and hope to get it at the lowest possible cost.
-
-
-
-
Healthcare
-
On the site linked below, you can listen to an interview with Dr. Karl Maret. Dr. Maret is the president of the Dove Health Alliance, a nonprofit foundation that focuses on the creation and promotion of global research and education networks in Energy Medicine.
Dr. Maret trained in both electrical and biomedical engineering before his medical studies. He has recently begun educating physician groups specifically on the biological impacts of communication technologies, such as cell phones and wireless technologies.
-
Business
-
Semi-Open Source
-
According to Alfresco, Activiti is an independently-run and branded open source project that will work independently of the Alfresco open source ECM system.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Here are the highlights of this month’s changes:
* Support has been added for the uCLinux port to the C6X target. Specifical support for the DSBT shared library format has been added to both gcc and the binutils.
* GCC now has a command line option “-std=c++03″ to enforce the ISO 1998 C++ standard revised by the 2003 technical corrigendum.
-
-
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Open Access/Content
-
A massive database cataloging the human genome’s functional elements — including genes, RNA transcripts and other products — is being made available as an open resource to the scientific community, classrooms, science writers and the public, thanks to an international team of researchers. In a paper published in the journal PLoS Biology on April 19, the project — called ENCODE (Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements) — provides an overview of the team’s ongoing efforts to interpret the human genome sequence, as well as a guide for using the vast amounts of data and resources produced so far by the project.
-
Programming
-
Standards/Consortia
-
Google is announcing a new community cross-licensing initiative for its WebM open source video format this morning, which includes backing from major CE makers like Samsung, LG Electronics and Cisco. Google open-sourced WebM about a year ago, hoping to establish an open and royalty-free video format for the web that could eventually replace today’s de facto web video standard, H.264. The cross-licensing initiative is meant to ensure that companies interested in using WebM aren’t scared off by threats of patent litigation.
-
Security
-
Privacy
-
Apple Inc. (AAPL) was accused of invasion of privacy and computer fraud by two customers who claim in a lawsuit that the company is secretly recording movements of iPhone and iPad users.
Vikram Ajjampur, an iPhone user in Florida, and William Devito, a New York iPad customer, sued April 22 in federal court in Tampa, Florida, seeking a judge’s order barring the alleged data collection.
-
Sony suffered a massive breach in its video game online network that led to the theft of names, addresses and possibly credit card data belonging to 77 million user accounts in what is one of the largest-ever Internet security break-ins.
Sony learned that user information had been stolen from its PlayStation Network seven days ago, prompting it to shut down the network immediately. But Sony did not tell the public until Tuesday.
-
Sony Corp. (SNE, 6758.TO) said Tuesday a hacker had obtained customer information, possibly including credit-card numbers, of members of its online PlayStation Network, a potential problem for the quickly growing field of online gaming.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
Copyleft crusader and Harvard professor Larry Lessig gave a new talk at CERN last week about copyright and how it has affected open access to academic or scientific information, with a bit of commentary about YouTube Copyright School. As usual, it’s blistering commentary. “It’s time to recognize that free access – as in ‘free’ as in speech access – is no fad, and it’s time to push this non-fad war broadly in the context of science,” says Lessig.
Whereas copyright tends to focus on protecting artists’ ability to make money from their work, scientists don’t use similar incentives. And yet, her work is often kept within the gates of the ivory tower, reserved for those whose universities or institutions have purchased access, often at high costs. And for science in the age of the internet, which wants ideas to spread as widely as possible to encourage more creativity and development, this isn’t just bad: it’s immoral.
Colbert Vs. Wikipedia
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
04.26.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
While following some links that I had received from a conversation on Diaspora* Alpha, I ran across the Smart Book, a great product from Always Innovating. While they offer them for sale, they do not yet have a shipping date. Reading their press release, it does not look like they plan to sell them in mass quantities. Imaging having a hand held Internet device, a tablet, a netbook, and screen that can be plugged into another computer, all in one device. Along with all of those features it runs multiple operating systems all at the same time. On top of everything else it is Open Hardware and Open Software.
-
There are a number of products currently available aimed to meet home storage needs. Rather than purchasing an entire computer to act as a file sever, these NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices are cheap, and you can typically stuff them in a corner and forget about them, using them to store backups or files that you want to share with other systems. They can be used to share files with those outside of the home network, or strictly for those inside.
One such device is the D-Link DNS-323, a two-bay NAS system that runs Linux. It is a small box, but large enough to store two 3.5″ SATA drives, so it can be stored nearly anywhere. By itself, the DNS-323 has a web-based administrative console, has multiple disk options (JBOD, RAID0, RAID1, or individual disks), gigabit Ethernet, allows for SMB (Windows file sharing) and FTP access. It has one USB port for a printer to allow it to be a print server as well, and it can also be an iTunes media server out of the box. All of this is available for roughly $200.
-
This is one of those very few manufacturers recommending the OS together with the Jolibook that has the JoliCloud preloaded already on the system.
-
-
-
And try as Microsoft might, the public cloud computing services are increasing their dependence on Linux operating systems that don’t require them to pay licensing fees to Microsoft.
-
Desktop
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
This episode is a recording of Richard Fontana’s talk, Open Source Projects and Corporate Entanglement from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.
-
Google
-
Google insists that Android will remain an open source platform and takes great exception to reports to the contrary.
That’s good news.
-
Kernel Space
-
-
There is also this Launchpad bug report from a Canonical software engineer that was created earlier this month but now with the attention of Phoronix, 33 others have officially confirmed being ‘affected’ by this bug in its entry. This morning, the Ubuntu Kernel Team has now confirmed it as being a bug of high importance for Natty (11.04) and Oneiric (11.10). It should also be acknowledged in the Ubuntu 11.04 release notes that there is a power issue.
It doesn’t appear that they are devoting any resources to getting the issue resolved but it looks like they will be waiting for a fix to appear upstream in the stable series or in 2.6.39 and then to have that back-ported into an Ubuntu 11.04 SRU update.
-
Since Friday there’s been a number of Phoronix articles about a very bad power regression in the mainline Linux kernel, which is widespread, Ubuntu 11.04 is one of the affected distributions, and has been deemed a bug of high importance. This yet-to-be-resolved issue is affected Linux 2.6.38 and 2.6.39 kernels and for many desktop and notebook systems is causing a 10~30% increase in power consumption. Nevertheless, this is not the only major outstanding power regression in the mainline tree, there is another dramatic regression now spotted as well that is yet-to-be-fixed.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Aside from political issues surrounding open vs. closed-source (graphics) drivers on Linux, the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is widely liked. The proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is relatively bug/trouble-free, has a performance parity to the Windows driver, supports new hardware right away, and has a near feature parity to the Windows driver. There’s not much more you could ask for from a closed-source driver, aside from a few missing features. One of the missing features that’s been widely talked about as of late has been Optimus.
-
Besides the obvious requirements and demands of needing to design a display server that can fully replace the needs of the long-standing X Server, and making all the tool-kits and major software support running natively on Wayland, another inhibitor to Wayland’s adoption has been its graphics driver requirements. In particular, Wayland requires kernel mode-setting, EGL (in place of a DRI2 requirement), in-kernel memory management (GEM), and 3D acceleration.
-
Applications
-
-
Proprietary
-
Yet look at how we describe the benefits of genuinely advantageous software and services. We don’t ask people about saving money on their computers, we ask them whether they want Linux or Windows. Free phone calls? Nah. Let’s talk to them about Skype, another brand name in a world full of them. And what’s all this OpenOffice and LibreOffice stuff? To the everyday computer user, it means next to nothing.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
It’ll feel like the future (albeit that lame, not quite awesome future as depicted in late 1980s hollywood films) but with one plugin you can use ‘clapping’ to control playback of media in Ubuntu’s default media player Totem.
-
Games
-
Addictive simulation and farming game Family Farm is now available for Linux. The game which focuses on building and maintaining your own farm has RPG elements to it as you can control your character with many RPG attributes like skills etc.
Players can create and put themselves in control of a small Family Farm inhabited by various characters, each with different skills and needs. As the family grows, the house can be upgraded and the farm expanded into the surrounding area.
-
Vertigo is a new fun arcade game for Linux which is based on Ogre3D and BulletPhysics Engine. The game is completely free, open source and cross platform.
-
-
The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle is well on its way to measuring up. In the first two days, it had sold $500,000. As of this morning, the average Linux user was paying the most at $11.68, while the average Windows user was paying the least at $4.02.
You’ve only got a day left, so get over there and show your support for games on Linux and for charity.
-
-
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
# Contour continues to develop, and the OS image track is similarly moving; so these will follow on nicely after the Active App announcement.
# Plasmate has seen renewed development and is polishing up nicely. We have a new contributor who has popped up recently, and both Sebastian K. and myself have been plonking away on it. I need to do a screencast soon! 
-
-
I’m super happy that KDE could accept 51 student for GSoC this year. It’s an impressive number and they’ll make a difference in KDE this year. But this number also means that we had to say no to many students. A lot of tough choices had to be made. Now I can’t magically make more GSoC slot appear unfortunately. But I can do something else. I can run another Season of KDE together with an awesome team of mentors and co-admins.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
I’ve made heavy use of the revelation-applet on my gnome 2 desktop panel to search for passwords inside my revelation password file. I’d like to restore that sort of quick password search inside the preferred mechanics of GNOME3 shell.
-
Diodon is a simple clipboard manager for GNOME with application indicator support. Aiming to be the best integrated clipboard manager for the Gnome/GTK+ desktop.
-
I’ve installed GNOME 3 ppa on my ubuntu natty last week, and have been using it exclusively since then. To be honest I’ve been ranting a lot against GNOME3 before using it for my day to day activities, so I feel I should share my observations now that I really know it. Here are all the good and bad things I’ve seen, with no particular order. I’ll try not being too polemic (that’s hard exercise for me), please keep in mind I’m not pretending being a normal user; I’m a developer so my needs probably are different.
[...]
GNOME3 is a good base for upcoming releases.
-
-
Reviews
-
Based on my experience with the Pardus 2009 series of releases I had very high expectation for Pardus 2011.
-
New Releases
-
-
-
The Bayanihan Linux 5 Revision 4 is now available for download! The newest Kalumbata revision now features LibreOffice by The Document Foundation, an Open Source office productivity suite greatly derived from OpenOffice.org. However, OpenOffice.org 3.3, the latest version, is still bundled in the installer. Also packed in the new ISOs is the latest release of BL5′s default web browser, Mozilla Firefox 4. Tons of security updates are also added.
-
Another Monday, another review. This week it’s Calculate Linux 11.3 Gnome Edition! Get ready for another wild and crazy ride into the ever changing landscape known as FLOSS! (Free Libre Open Source Software)
-
Red Hat Family
-
Fedora
-
-
Comparing to Fedora, Fusion Linux is a clear winner, as it only builds upon the existing without taking away.
-
Let me say, however, that this is a STRONG argument for Fedora to have something like the restricted drivers menu. Sure, I know they want to have a freedom-only desktop. But I see nothing wrong with looking for certain hardware and telling people they may get better performance in the non-free repos. They aren’t doing anyone any favors by making them thing their computer doesn’t work with Fedora. And they’re losing potential users.
-
During the past weeks I noticed how difficult it was to hack on a desktop environment that I am not using myself. And since most of my work now is about GNOME (and KDE) I came to the conclusion I have to use bleeding edge GNOME 3. Sadly Ubuntu 11.04 with GNOME 3 is pretty shaky for my taste.
I am a very impatient developer who really does not enjoy compiling stuff and playing with packages a lot. Mutter gave me some hard time on a Virtual Machine. So I chose to move to Fedora, luckily though this has given me a new perspective as I have been a long time Ubuntu user.
-
Except for the apparently broken Eclipse in F15—couldn’t get the Android ADT plugin to install—and a few glitches and rough edges here and there, the experience has been quite good so far.
-
For many years Fedora infrastructure has been running a talk.fedoraproject.org asterisk server. This allows contributors to talk to each other, or send voice mails, etc.
However, it gets very very little usage and also has no one really maintaining it or fixing issues with it. In the last 130days there have been a total of 95 calls using the server. There are a number of outstanding infrastructure tickets on the service that no one has dealt with. The server running it is running an outdated OS version and asterisk version.
-
Debian Family
-
Can’t remember all the Unity keyboard shortcuts? Then check out the AskUbuntu keyboard shortcuts thread – you’ll find two wallpapers (one is also available in German) with most of the Unity mouse tricks / keyboard shortcuts:
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Ubuntu is growing big – bigger than ever. And there is a price you have to pay when you grow big. The dust of Ubuntu vs Banshee just settled and here is another storm, in a tea cup.
Anthony Papillion, a blogger and quite a good writer, stirred the bee’s hive by posting an emotional blog about the shut-down of Sounder.
-
In GNOME 3 it was closer to an inch and three-quarters ( or close to 44.5mm), with close to half an inch(12.5-13mm) dedicated to the title bar. I know there are plenty of deeper differences between the two interfaces (which plan to get int in a later post), but given the minor superficial differences, I would take Unity any day just because of screen real estate.
-
Not too long ago, I wrote about Ubuntu’s embrace of the Unity desktop and what that would mean for Ubuntu users who might prefer a traditional GNOME shell.
At the time, I was called out by some readers regarding my belief that Ubuntu was limiting itself with its choice in relying on Unity. Now as we approach Ubuntu 11.04, it looks as if I might have been right all along.
While users can certainly select the older GNOME shell, the move to the Unity desktop has clearly not been greeted with unanimous applause.
Unity is not GNOME 3
One fact that ought to be made clear from the start is that in the name of Ubuntu seeking to make Unity their default desktop experience, the development team has indeed locked some users into a singular desktop experience. “But Matt, that’s nonsense! Users can install any desktop they choose! Besides, if they want GNOME 3 instead, users can just add the PPA repository for it!”
The above statement is what I feel makes this entire thing surrounding Unity so amusing. In the Ubuntu development team’s desire to make Ubuntu more “accessible,” they’re actually assuming new users even realize other desktop environments are possible.
-
Final beta release paves the way for this week’s final release of Ubuntu 11.04
It’s just a few days to go until the next major release of Ubuntu and the developers have issued a final testing version. Released late last week the second Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Beta will be the final pre-release ahead of a planned 28 April final release.
-
The latest and greatest release of Ubuntu — 11.04, or “Natty Narwhal” — is nearly upon us. To get a sense of how the new version situates Ubuntu and the rest of the open source community going forward, I recently spoke with Canonical VP Steve George. Here’s what he had to say about the new release and more:
For starters, anyone who reads Linux blogs at least once in a while knows by now that Natty’s major claim to fame is the Unity desktop interface, which will become the default in new installations. Traditional GNOME will remain available as an option, at least for this release cycle, as will a 2D version of Unity catered to users whose hardware doesn’t support the video acceleration demanded by the default interface.
-
-
-
The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the open source community has to offer.
-
What the Linux operating system needs, is for Canonical to really step it up, with the upcoming release of 11.04, and get that wonderful Unity desktop on retail boxes and tablet PCs, such that end users do not have to bother with the installation. That is the single biggest hurdle and, as much as it pains me to say it, Ubuntu and Canonical are probably the only shot Linux has of overcoming this monumental obstacle.
-
-
The final release of Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is almost out. It’s scheduled to be out in the 28th of this month. 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.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Biff Baxter, real name Ronald Ropp, is a technology consultant based in Portland, Oregon. He’s also the developer behind wattOS, an Ubuntu derived Linux distribution (see our overview). We were quite impressed with wattOS, so we got in contact with him for some Q+A.
-
-
Shane Remington, co-founder of the Peppermint operating system (OS), announced plans to merge the previous two Peppermint OSes into one OS to be released as Peppermint Two.
-
Repositories will remain open but no more updates or security fixes will be made available. Users of Linux Mint 5 LTS Elyssa are asked to migrate to Linux Mint 9 LTS Isadora (Long Term Release which will be supported until April 2013).
-
-
Texas Instruments (TI) announced a new single-core TMS320C6671 member of its multicore TMS320C66x digital signal processor (DSP) family, as well as enhancements to its TMS320C6670 radio system-on-chip (SoC). In addition, the company released a free multicore software development kit (MCSDK) update for its C66x DSPs featuring updated Linux kernel support, optimized DSP libraries, and support for the OpenMP programming model.
-
Tablets
-
Barnes & Noble announced an automatic update this week for its Nook Color e-reader that turns the device into more of a low-cost Android tablet. New features offered by the 1.2.0 update include 125 apps, an email application, and support for Adobe Flash, says the online retailer.
-
Simon Brock rounds up the open-source options for backing up your critical data
Everyone would like all their work securely backed up, with every version of every file instantly accessible, but few backup solutions come anywhere close to this ideal. And making backups is just boring.
-
Events
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
Popular web browser Firefox unveiled its newest iteration, dubbed ‘Firefox 4: Tecumseh’, free for download just last month. It introduced several new features, as well as several major improvements on already extant features like Tab Groups and App Tabs. Here’s a quick review.
-
Mozilla’s new Firefox channels may have launched with a bang, but they do not seem to be doing so well now.
-
Databases
-
SkySQL Ab, the first choice in affordable MySQL® database solutions for the enterprise and cloud, today announced the creation of regional Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) to facilitate deeper relationships with its growing global customer base. In addition to the opportunity to influence future offerings and network with their peers, members of the boards will be the first to try new SkySQL products and services. The board will also provide insight into their business priorities and strategic directions, allowing SkySQL to meet growing customer demands.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
-
It’s hard to believe that it was only about six months ago that LibreOffice was born.
The free and open source productivity software suite was created, of course, in response to Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) unclear intentions regarding OpenOffice.org, which had long been the community’s suite of choice. At the time, Oracle chose to keep OpenOffice to itself, but now — fast forward to just a little more than a week ago — it appears to be giving it up after all.
-
Project Releases
-
Licensing
-
KDE’s licensing policies do not allow GPLv3+, LGPLv3+ and AGPLv3+ software in KDE’s repositiories (I guess it is for git, too, not only for SVN). But do we really want to keep that policy? There are more and more web-applications, ugly cloud-stuff, “software as a service”, is growing, and developers want to protect their Free Software by using the GNU Affero General Public Licens e. KDE is going to be adapted on embedded devices, and we should not care about tivoization? We should only use a 1991 license not targeting a lot of important issues of our times? Why should a KDE-application not be relicensed under the conditions of the GLPv3+ or AGPLv3+? In many cases that may be good.
-
Programming
-
Standards/Consortia
-
Google has announced a patent-sharing program around WebM in an effort to guard the open source web video format from legal attack.
On Monday, with a blog post, the company introduced the WebM Community Cross-License (CCL) initiative, which brings together companies willing to license each other’s patents related to the format. Founding members include AMD, Cisco Systems, Logitech, MIPS Technologies, Matroska, Mozilla, Opera, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and the Xiph.org Foundation, as well as Google.
-
Amazon has been the poster child for everything that is good, right and holy about the cloud.
After today, Amazon will also be demonized for everything that is wrong with their own cloud. Amazon today suffered a major outage crippling hundreds (maybe thousands?) or sites (including a few of my favs like reddit).
For years, Amazon has been suggesting that their elastic cloud (leveraging Linux throughout as the underlying OS) had the ability to scale to meet demand. The general idea was supposed to be massive scalability without any single point of failure.
-
From Amazon’s and other providers’ perspectives – the cloud stubbed toe of this week also highlights how communication and reaction are perhaps as critical as the technical aspects of addressing what’s wrong and fixing it. Open source software also provides lessons here, indicating vendors and providers are best served by transparency and openness. What the message boards and Twitterverse are telling us now is that users will accept some degree of downtime and difficulty, but they want straight information on how long and how severely they will be down. Just as vendors face a challenge in fairly yet effectively pricing and charging for cloud computing, it may be difficult to provide guidance on recovery from an outage, but the same rules of PR crisis management apply: don’t over-promise and don’t under-deliver.
-
-
-
Each year, on or about the 25th of April, the Adelie penguins of Ross Island leave their brooding grounds and swim to their winter sanctuary northwest of the Balleny Islands. Some decided to mark the occasion by including all penguins and dubbing the day World Penguin Day.
Most penguins do participate in migratory habits. Why they favor some places more than others as their destination is the current work of biologists. Current belief is that the Adelies favor a place that has more pack ice, thereby providing more protection. This appears to be true, as the Davis Station Adelies migrate north, then west, staying close to the Antarctic continent. Also, Antarctica’s days become much shorter and the Adelies do not feed well in the dark. Traveling north, these birds have longer days in order to fish and feed.
-
Hardware
-
adation over time. Memory devices make use of internal garbage collection to regain areas no longer being used by programs. But due to certain drawbacks with garbage collection (such as time required to move data around), TRIM is recommended as well. The TRIM function detects and “informs” an SSD which blocks are no longer being used and can be wiped and reused. In Linux, one can use TRIM with ext3 and ext4 by adding the word discard to the options when mounting (or in /etc/fstab). An example of use could be: /dev/sda3 / ext4 acl,user_xattr,noatime,discard 1 1.
-
Finance
-
The almost $200 million in tax cuts that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has given to corporations have been both lauded and hated by the public and media. When it was discovered that businesses like M&I Bank and others who were large contributors to Walker’s gubernatorial campaign were receiving extra provisions through changes in the consolidated reporting law, questions started cropping up about why Walker was giving handouts to corporations even though he declared the state broke.
-
Union supporters celebrated and right-wingers raged when the Associated Press reported on April 15 that Governor Scott Walker admitted Wisconsin saves no money by “weakening government workers’ collective bargaining rights.” When responding to a question from Rep. Dennis Kucinich during congressional testimony, did Walker really admit the union-busting bill costs no money? And will implementing the annual recertification requirement actually cost Wisconsin taxpayers?
-
UnitedHealth Group, the biggest health insurer in terms of revenue and market value, earned so much more during the first three months of this year than Wall Street expected that investors rushed to buy shares of every one of the seven health insurers that comprise the managed care sector. In my view, it would be more accurate to call it the managed care cartel.
-
Any business needs to know where its money goes. This is especially so if it is spending £220bn a year – the equivalent of £3500 per adult and child in the UK – purchasing goods and services on our behalf. That is nearly 20% of our gross domestic product.
The need for decent data on how it is spent and with whom has been highlighted in several reports including a National Audit Office report last May, Sir Philip Green’s report last September and my own, Towards Tesco, published by the Institute of Directors.
-
Privacy
-
You don’t want to be pulled over by the police in Michigan. When law enforcement wants half a million dollars to produce documents for a FOIA request, something is not right. And since the high-tech mobile forensic device in question can grab data in one-and-a-half minutes off more than 3,000 different cell phone models, it could be used during minor traffic violations to conduct suspicionless and warrantless searches without the phone owner having any idea that all their phone data was now in the hands of authorities.
-
-
The iOS operating system tracks your location without your knowledge and stores the data it collects in an unencrypted form on your phone. For Android users who maybe wondering the same thing, no, your location is will not be tracked without your express permission and approval.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI
-
Yesterday morning Justice Kenneth Parker handed down his ruling on the Judicial Review of the Digital Economy Act. The Judge dismissed all grounds save for one aspect of the claim about the costs imposed on ISPs. The ruling means that Justice Parker deemed the other provisions of the Digital Economy Act are consistent with EU law.
So what does this mean for those of us who place privacy, freedom of expression and due process ahead of chasing fictional losses from the creative industries’ revenues? On the face of it the decision feels like bad news for those who see important flaws in the Act. But it just means that this particular route to halting what we think is a damaging law may not work, depending on whether BT and TalkTalk appeal.
Working Title: “We use GNU linux”
Credit: TinyOgg
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA