09.08.11

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• The Great Linux Migration: who’s made the move, why, and what’s in store for the future growth of Linux?

• Munich Migration From The User’s Viewpoint

  So the FUD about the Munich Migration being a disaster of some kind is not real. They are doing much more than migrating to another OS at the same time by rationalizing IT in other ways (CMS and web-applications) and they are not in any hurry crunching 50-100 per week and likely doing some hand-holding at the same time. It works for them.

• Server

  • Mainframe Ubuntu Linux?

    When you think of “Ubuntu Linux,” you probably think of the community Linux distribution and the Linux desktop. That’s great, but Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, also wants you to think of Ubuntu as a server and cloud operating system platform. To that end, Canonical has been working with IBM to get Ubuntu certified on IBM’s high-end System P Power hardware line and System z mainframes.

  • An Open Source Platform for Virtual Supercomputing

    Erlang Solutions and Massive Solutions will soon launch a new cloud platform for high performance computing. Last month they announced their intent to bring a virtual supercomputer (VSC) product to market, the idea being to enable customers to share their HPC resources either externally or internally, in a cloud-like manner, all under the banner of open source software.

• Kernel Space

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 3.1 (Part 2) – Storage and filesystems

    The software RAID code now supports bad block management and dm-crypt can notify SSDs about freed storage areas. The iSCSI target framework LIO has been updated to Version 4.1 and the default Ext3 settings make the filesystem more robust, but a bit slower.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Two More Developers Join The Chicago Linux Panel

      Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren’t yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.

    • A Happy Four Years To An Open-Source ATI/AMD

      It was four years ago, on the 6th of September 2007, that I exclusively broke the news on AMD’s open-source strategy that would end up greatly changing the open-source Linux graphics driver landscape.

      While the news was delivered on the 6th of September, XDS Cambridge was going on at that point, and it wasn’t until the 17th of September that the RadeonHD Linux driver was published, so it’s hard to call a precise birth-date for this strategy. It could also be considered the point at which SUSE wrote a letter to AMD with this open-source idea.

• Applications

  • Top 50 best Linux apps 2011

    For everyone at Linux Format magazine and most of its readers, computers and Linux are a passion.

    Linux is perfect: its open source nature and excellent shell make it the ultimate hobbyist’s operating system. Fortunately, there’s a huge number of top-class applications available as well: market leading packages for professional and consumer level media creation, tools for developers, systems administrators and students – as well as great games to help you procrastinate on a Friday.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 15

    • Using Vim with the System Clipboard on Linux

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE Ships September Updates

      September 7, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.7.1 Info Page. The changelog and Bugzilla list more, but not all improvements since 4.7.0. Note that these changelogs are incomplete. For a complete list of changes that went into 4.7.1, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs. 4.7.1 also ships a more complete set of translations for many of the 55+ supported languages. To find out more about the KDE Workspace and Applications 4.7, please refer to the 4.7.0 release notes and its earlier versions.

    • KDE Ships September Updates

• Distributions

  • Unity Linux 2011 to use Arch-Linux-Like Approach

    In other news another favorite of mine, at least in the rpm universe, has released an Alpha build of what will be Unity Linux 2011. I reviewed Unity Linux last year on this blog and images were 276MB and 277 MB per architecture, and the subsequent update 2010.2 brought it to well over 300 MB. This time the size is only a 100 odd megabyte and the team is making some significant changes.

  • ArchBang 2011.09 Includes the Linux 3.0.4-1 Kernel

  • Archbang 2011.09 Released

    Keeping up the schedule of a new release roughly every six months, a new and updated Archbang live/install image with the 3.0 kernel is out, 2011.09. Read the release announcement and see a screenshot here. As always it is available for i686 and x86_64 architectures. The images are a handy download size of 526 MB and 531 MB respectively. If you already have it installed there’s no need to get this as of course Arch is rolling, but good for if you want to update a copy on your USB stick for newer hardware.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • September 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat: Java now on firm path for the cloud

      Open source raconteur and Red Hat senior director of middleware engineering Mark Little has laid down some defining comments as to the current state of Java EE7 Enterprise Edition.

      Speaking to a US-based software developer web site, Little has hinted that Java EE7 is a real “milestone release” and that its current status marks the point at which Java truly heads towards the cloud computing of IT delivery.

    • Fedora

      • Fedora Graphics Test Week, Again

        The Fedora Project is having another Graphics Test Week. This time around it’s for testing the Intel, Nouveau, and Radeon drivers for the forthcoming Fedora 16 release.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Convoluted Rebuttals – Unity: The War Without End?
          

          I would assume that Unity is developed to appeal to the mainstream masses. It’s easy for us that are tech interested to believe that Linux and its associated packages are written to cater for and pander to us. The vast majority of users on this planet have no interest in tech other than it’s a medium in which they wish to get tasks done. They don’t care about open source, they don’t care about patents they merely want to use a PC to get a job done. Conversely though, they are happy to learn a new way of working if the benefits are presented to them, it’s a natural progression that any product will undergo change which will require a small investment of time on behalf of the consumer. Compare a smart phone to that of one from the early 90′s. A company’s vision of a product with many competitors is something to be encouraged, not scorned because you think that people can’t or won’t be interested in something new.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Beta

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Samsung to acquire MeeGo, report claims

    • Samsung interested in Meego, report says

    • Android

      • Top Free Android Calculators

      • Droid Bionic unveiled with 4G, dual-core CPU, and a $300 price

        Verizon Wireless will start selling Motorola Mobility’s Droid Bionic for its 4G LTE network on Sept. 8, featuring heavyweight features and a matching $300 price. The Droid Bionic offers a dual-core 1GHz processor running Android 2.3.4, 16GB each of internal and microSD storage, a 4.3-inch, 960 x 540 pixel display, eight-megapixel and VGA cameras, and accessories including a Lapdock and an HD Station.

      • Eric Schmidt: Ice Cream Sandwich coming out in October or November

      • HP TouchPad screen can now support Android

        Hard at work porting Android over to HP’s discontinued but much-in-demand tablet, the TouchDroid techs were able to create the necessary drivers to coax Android 2.3.5 to run on the TouchPad and let people tap into the touch screen.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Velocity Micro Unveils 8-inch and 10-inch Tablets, Both Under $300

      Velocity Micro announced a pair of new Android-powered tablets today, the 8-inch Cruz T408 and 10-inch Cruz T410. Due in late September the two feature 1GHz Cortex A8 processors, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, and front-facing cameras. Android enthusiasts might not dig the Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS but average consumer types will like the $239 and $299 price tags. Additional specs for both tablets include Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), Adobe Flash Player 10.3, and preloaded apps in Amazon Kindle, Amazon Appstore, Angry Birds Rio, and QuickOffice.

    • Velocity Micro Introduces Two Sub-$300 Android Slates

      Two new little Android tablets have joined the ever-growing tablet race, this time from Velocity Micro. Both the 8-inch Cruz T408 and the 10-inch Cruz T410 are nice enough, but what’ll really catch your eye are the pricetags. The Cruz T408 and T410 are priced at $239.99 and $299.99 respectively — a comfortable price point for anyone looking to get a starter slate.

Free Software/Open Source

• Bossie Awards 2011: The best open source software of the year

  One of the best ways to see the success of the open source philosophy is to pick up a cellphone. If you happen to grab an Android phone — the most popular in the smartphone class — you’ll have a device running a package built by Google and sitting on top of Linux. Almost all of the source code in the stack is released under a generous open source license.

• Editing Community Offers Input

• Events

  • Meteorite Consulting to host UK Open Source BI User Group

    On 8 September 2011, Meteorite Consulting are hosting the inaugural UK Open Source BI User Group Event. The UK OSBI User Group aims to provide information to help organisations select and implement innovative commercial and open source business intelligence, data warehousing and data integration solutions.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird 6.0.2, 7.0 beta and 3.1.14 security updates now available

    • Firefox 6.0.2 and 3.6.22 security updates now available

• SaaS

  • Why the cloud is accelerating open-source adoption

    In general, open-source projects typically require two components to get community uptake. First, the nature of the project itself has to be technologically challenging. Successful open-source projects are largely about solving a set of complex technological tasks vs. just writing a lot of code to support complex business processes, such as the case with building enterprise software. Linux, MySQL and BitTorrent are all good examples here.

• Databases

  • NSA open sources Google database mimic

    The US National Security Agency is open sourcing a distributed “NoSQL” database based on Google’s proprietary BigTable platform.

    Known as Accumulo, the platform has been in development at the NSA for over three years, and it’s built atop Hadoop, the open source distributed file system and distributed number-crunching platform that mimics Google’s internal infrastructure.

  • NSA’s open-source project aims for secure, large-scale storage

    The National Security Agency is looking for help from the developer community in contributing to a label-based storage software that could be enable secure, granular access to data in large storage systems.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org drift apart

    Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects. In light of the several million lines of source code by which the two products now differ, he says users should not assume that code committed to Apache OpenOffice.org will “inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice”. “Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing,” added Meeks.

• CMS

  • Switch to Moodle ongoing this academic year

    The university has since decided to use Moodle Rooms, which provides an enhanced version of the free and open source Moodle.

  • Are you really investing in your real estate website?

    There is one solution which is cost effective and will provide you with freedom and choice. That is to use an open source CMS which is free to use on a General Public License. These open source CMS are usually owned by a not for profit organization of web developers and designers, who’s goal is to share code amongst a worldwide community of developers in an effort to provide a free and powerful CMS for websites. PHP is an open source language and a few CMS build upon PHP include Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, CakePHP and Codeigniter.

  • Diaspora still trying to reinvent social networks with open source

    Most people won’t have even heard of it. Diaspora is an up and coming social network which is getting a lot more attention in some circles in the wake of Google+’s ‘real names’ policy.

    Users are climbing on board after being tipped off that there’s a network just like Google+, only without having anything to do with Google, where you can be who you want to be, how you want to be, and still retain full ownership of everything you put there.

• Healthcare

  • CONNECT issues latest iteration of open source HIE software

    Health information exchanges running the CONNECT platform take note: The CONNECT team has issued a new version, 3.2.1, which fixes a number of bugs and known issues.

    The open source software taps National Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) standards and protocols to enable the creation of an HIE and the exchanging of healthcare information, both regionally and on a national level.

  • VA Launches Online Open-Source Agent for VistA EHR System

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Review: Jaspersoft’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition

      But the suite’s open source codebase also enables it to support third-party commercial and open source BI tools, which gives it its broad range of capabilities. These components include Talend’s open source extract, transform and load (ETL) tool and activity monitoring console; R, an advanced analytics development environment; and JasperAnalysis, an OLAP tool based on the open source Mondrian engine.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD: A Faster Platform For Linux Gaming Than Linux?

    FreeBSD provides a Linux binary compatibility layer that allows 32-bit Linux binaries to be natively executed on this BSD operating system. Linux binary compatibility on FreeBSD allows Linux-only applications to be executed in a near seamless manner on this alternative platform, even for games. New tests have revealed that the modern FreeBSD operating system (via PC-BSD 8.2) can actually outperform Linux when it comes to running OpenGL Linux game binaries.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Fall internship positions are still open—apply today!

• Licensing

  • MPL 2.0, copyleft, and license compatibility

    In part one of my Mozilla Public License piece, I mentioned license compatibility as a major feature of MPL 2.0. In fact, it’s such a major – and complicated – issue that it warrants its own explanation.

• Programming

  • Revisiting the Dataists Programming Language Rankings

Leftovers

• Security

  • Simple security by evaluating open ports

  • Velocity Micro Introduces Two Sub-$300 Android Slates

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Mall of America visitors unknowingly end up in counterterrorism reports

    As he shopped for a children’s watch inside the sprawling Mall of America, two security guards approached and began questioning him. Although he was not accused of wrongdoing, the guards filed a confidential report about Kleinerman that was forwarded to local police.

    The reason: Guards thought he might pose a threat because they believed he had been looking at them in a suspicious way.

• Cablegate

  • Dick Marty rendition report condemns ‘cult of secrecy’

    A report for Europe’s human rights watchdog has called for greater scrutiny of secret services and support for whistleblowers.

    The Council of Europe investigated how countries like Britain, Germany, Romania and Lithuania assisted the US with the rendition of terror suspects.

• Finance

  • Occupy Wall Street will lay siege to U.S. greed

    On Sept. 17, the Arab Spring becomes the new American Fall, with 20,000 revolutionaries in a tent city. Plus “solidarity” occupations in major financial centers worldwide, all ready for a long siege, vowing not to leave till they get their “one simple demand.”

• Civil Rights

  • ‘UID project is full of ambiguity, confusion and suspicions’

  • The Spy Who Tweeted Me: Intelligence Community Wants to Monitor Social Media

    A research arm of the intelligence community wants to sweep up public data on everything from Twitter to public webcams in the hopes of predicting the future.