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11.03.11

Links 3/11/2011: Steam on PCLinuxOS, JavaFX

Posted in News Roundup at 7:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Yet Another Misinformed Swipe At Open Source and Linux

    Dominating the consumer desktop has not been a point of focus for the Linux community for years. Red Hat, a huge public company focused on Linux, doesn’t even make it a priority. At least Gualtieri concedes that over 60 percent of servers on the Internet run Linux, but he doesn’t even discuss embedded Linux, or technologies that have flourished as offshoots of Linux.

  • Server

    • Deutsche Borse implements 10GB Juniper switches on Linux trade platforms

      Deutsche Borse, the German stock exchange based in Frankfurt, has implemented 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches from supplier Juniper Networks on its Linux-based trading platforms.

      The stock exchange said the new switches will be resilient and will help slash trading round trip messaging latency and process market data for co-locating traders on its Eurex derivatives and Xetra cash markets.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

      A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE 3.5 fork Trinity updated

        One year since the last update, the Trinity Project has released version 3.5.13 of its desktop environment. Trinity is a fork of the last stable snapshot of the 3.5.x branch of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), KDE 3.5.10 from August 2008, that has been enhanced with additional features and is intended to be compatible with more recent hardware.

  • Distributions

    • Scientific Linux, openSUSE, Ubuntu Tests

      Up for viewing today are benchmarks of Scientific Linux 6.1, openSUSE 11.4, Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 11.10. This is the latest in the series of Ubuntu 11.10 benchmarks after looking at the power consumption, boot speed, performance relative to Sabayon 7, and virtualization performance.

    • New Releases

      • IPFire 2.11
      • OLPC 11.3.0
      • Announcements concerning Scientific Linux

        Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD 5.7 can now be downloaded for 32 and 64 bit:

        ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/livecd/57/i386
        ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/livecd/57/x86_64

      • IPFire open source firewall improves OpenVPN support

        The IPFire project has released version 2.11 of its open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux server distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s internal drive.

        According to Project Leader and developer Michael Tremer, IPFire 2.11 is a major update that includes a new option to create net-to-net virtual private networks (VPNs) using OpenVPN. Previously, it was only possible to create “roadwarrior networks” using OpenVPN. Recently updated documentation about OpenVPN on IPFire can be found on the project’s wiki.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Mark is right, and Mark is wrong

            The second was a comparison of Unity, and to an extent GNOME 3, to the Edsel; comparing those desktop environment releases to how Ford had built up an enormous curiosity around this new “E-car” in 1957 — a car of the future — they were developing amid a shroud of secrecy before revealing to the world, well, the Edsel — which nearly everyone hated once they saw what Ford’s idea for the “future” was.

            I wish I could remember the third one. It didn’t get far and it was just kind of ramblin’ — that’s R-A-M-B-L-I-N-apostrophe.

          • Ubuntu One cloud storage: Staying for the long haul?
          • Ubuntu Plans To Make It Easier To Hookup With Users

            While the latest bold attempt by Ubuntu is to put it on TVs and phones in the next two years, this new social effort isn’t to build a full-blown social network to compete with (or replace) the likes of Google+ and Facebook. What this new community/social effort is about is just making it easy to find Ubuntu users and Ubuntu events within your geographic area. The idea has been brewing for over one year, but due to devoting resources towards designing the Unity desktop, this idea was largely postponed until now.

          • Leadership Summit Part Two Today

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Sick of Unity in Ubuntu 11.10? Give Xubuntu a try

              A few weeks ago, we took a look at Ubuntu 11.10 and observed that its default desktop, Unity, was much improved in this popular Linux distribution.

              Regardless, it seems that some people still dislike the Unity. Well, dislike is a bit mild — some readers wrote in stating that absolutely hate it and that sentiment has gained some traction here and there on the Internet. It seems that Canonical — the organization responsible for Ubuntu Linux — aren’t ones to shy away from controversy.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi close to shipping $25 schools computer

      The cheap Linux-based computer for schools, Raspberry Pi, looks to be getting closer to reality with the news that the foundation behind it has ordered sufficient parts to make the first 10,000 units.

      The Foundation reacted to premature reports that it had produced 10,000 completed Raspberry Pi computers by making clear that what had been ordered were “parts kits,” not complete devices.

    • ‘World’s smallest’ SDR radio runs Linux

      Epiq Solutions announced what it claims is the world’s smallest commercially available software defined radio (SDR). The 4.6 x 2.2 x 0.9-inch, four-ounce Matchstiq incorporates a broadband (28MHz) RF transceiver supporting 300MHz to 3.8GHz frequencies, an onboard GPS receiver, and an Iveia Atlas-I-LPe module integrating a Texas Instruments DM3730 processor and a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • IT People should just say no to clueless reporters….

          I originally wrote this after Paul Thurrott wrote a ridiculous article (http://www.windowsitpro.com/content1?topic=android-140400&catpath=google1) about all that is wrong with Android. After writing it, I felt better but I realized he isn’t the only one with this messed up perception of corporate life. I have been consulting and supporting companies in the area of IT operations for my entire 16 year career. I have worked for a vary diverse set of companies from GE and Chrysler to an Internet Startup to Mom and Pop companies and everything in between. While they all have their own issues and odd behaviors, they always have a few things in common. IT is always a drain on resources that no one wants to fund. The IT staff always has to do more with less than they had last year. Finally, they are all expected to figure out how to do the next big thing.

          [...]

          So the next time Mr. Thurrott or anyone in the press wants to talk about life as an IT Professional he or she should try being one for a while. For now though, go back to doing what you do best. Be a great reviewer and tell me what great things I have too look forward to from all of my favorite vendors. Leave the heavy lifting and worrying about how to protect corporate assets to the people who do that for a living.

        • Android Navi-X media streaming app arrives

          All Media Online (Amo) has recently released the Android market’s first app exclusively devoted to streaming multimedia to Android smartphones and tablets via Navi-X, an extensive, open source, community supported, media indexing web-service.

        • Ice Cream Sandwich confirmed open-source coming in weeks
        • Google: Android 4.0 to be open sourced in “coming weeks”

          Google will make its Android 4.0 dubbed “Ice Cream Sandwich” available to the open source community in the coming weeks and is designed to fuel Google’s big push in both the smartphone and tablet war against Apple. Google’s planned purchase of Motorola’s Mobility unit — the most successful Android smartphone and tablet supplier — will also likely help if it ultimately musters government approval

        • What Would Concern Me About Android if I Worked for Google

          The growth of the Android platform undoubtedly masks some of its shortcomings. As Chris DiBona summarized, “the only thing that really matters is how many of these we ship…There is a linear relationship between the number of phones you ship and the number of developers.”

        • HTC does it again, record Q3 earnings thanks to Android

          HTC is one of the leading smartphone manufacturers in the world. HTC phones feature amazing build-quality along with top-notch software and hardware. We reported HTC’s Q1 earnings a long time ago where we were shocked by their amazing performance, recording an almost 200% growth in revenue (thanks to Android).

        • Android found all over PC World’s Top 100 Best Products of 2011
        • Microsoft updates Bing app for Android and iOS, not Windows Phone 7

          If I hadn’t read it on Microsoft’s own Bing blog, I wouldn’t have believed it. The Microsoft Bing team has just released the new Bing for Mobile app for iPhone and Android… but not for Windows Phone 7 devices.

          Wow. Just wow.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Kid-friendly Android tablet features drop-resistant cover

        Karuma announced a seven-inch Android 2.3 tablet designed for kids. The PlayBase is equipped with a 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, 8GB of storage, and an 800 x 600-pixel capacitive screen protected by a shock-absorbent silicone cover that can be folded back to use as a stand, says the company.

      • It’s official: New Nook Color tablet launching Nov. 7

        As we reported last week, rumor had it Barnes & Noble would be launching its next-generation, Android-powered Nook Color tablet e-reader on November 7. Now it’s become official, with Barnes & Noble sending out invites to the media for an event that morning in New York.

      • Motorola Intros XOOM 2, XOOM 2 Media Edition for UK, Ireland
      • Motorola Xoom 2: Second time’s the charm?

        The smaller Xoom 2 Media Edition is geared more toward entertainment. The screen offers a 178-degree viewing angle to let more than one person watch movies or videos at the same time. Motorola claims a 20 percent improvement in graphics performance and has added virtual surround sound, turning the Media Edition into a gaming device. This model can also double as a remote control for TVs and other equipment courtesy of a pre-loaded remote-control app. Battery life is rated at only around six hours per charge.

      • Ubuntu on tablet PCs by 2014

        Canonical grande fromage Mark Shuttleworth has said that the Ubuntu open source operating system will be available on tablet PCs by 2014. At this time it is also thought that Ubuntu for smartphones and “smart” televisions will also be available.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source vs. proprietary software
  • Evercube: the beautiful 5TB open source home storage server

    Massive amounts of storage are becoming increasingly important to companies providing cloud-based services. For home users, networked attach storage (NAS) is available from a number of manufacturers, and gives you the option of storing all your digital content in one giant storage area accessible to all your devices over a network connection.

    Choosing which NAS to invest in can be tough, though. Some use their own software that is less than great, others have limited storage and/or upgrade potential. Most of them don’t look great either, being just a plastic box and flashing LEDs you’d rather not have on display in a room.

  • IBM Open Sources Messaging Client for Embedded Devices

  • Events

    • Guest Post: Apache in Space

      The ApacheCon NA 2011 conference is rapidly approaching. The event takes place November 7 to 11 at the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver, Canada. Registration for the event is now open, with discounts available. In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2011, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from movers and shakers in the Apache community. In this latest guest post, three officials from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) introduce OODT (Object-Oriented Data Technology), an open source middleware suite for working with and managing data-intensive scientific applications. It’s used at JPL and overseen by the Apache Software Foundation.

  • SaaS

    • Hortonworks launches Apache Hadoop based platform
    • Hortonworks Introduces Open-Source Hortonworks Platform

      Hortonworks recently introduced the open-source Hortonworks Data platform to mark their entry into software space. Hortonworks is a company formed from Yahoo! this past June.

      Considered a minor business move by the company, as compared to Cloudera, the provider of Apache Hadoop and mega-vendors like Oracle, EMC and also IBM which have their own plans for Hadoop, Hortonworks will need to put forth more effort and not rely on only name recognition alone.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle v. Google – How to Proceed on the Copyright Issue

      Monday’s filings were all about how to proceed on the copyright issue. That is, proposing what determinations the court needs to make with respect to copyright protection afforded Oracle before it can assess whether Google has infringed.

    • Office Suite Update

      Apple and Microsoft haven’t issued press releases about LibreOffice of course. Rumors on the street are that both companies are less than happy with the progress that The Document Foundation has made.

      While LibreOffice is not totally comparable to Microsoft Office, in that it doesn’t have matching applications for all functions, it does give a solid, inexpensive option. It works beautifully on Microsoft Windows, and is often used by offices which have large archives of documents saved in different versions of the Word file format, because it often is more compatible with Microsoft Office, than Microsoft Office.

    • Oracle formally proposes open source JavaFX

      At the recent JavaOne conference, Oracle had said that it intended to open source JavaFX. Now Oracle is formally proposing that the JavaFX user interface toolkit be open sourced under the OpenJDK project and is looking for it to be incorporated into Java 9. Oracle’s Richard Bair made the proposal on the OpenJDK mailing list, saying the company had talked about it for a long time, “but finally (finally!) we’re ready to act on it”. JavaFX was originally created by Sun as a standalone technology with its own scripting language, but since Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, it has been revamped and repositioned as a general Java user interface toolkit with a modern architecture, supporting features such as hardware acceleration and CSS styling.

    • Oracle reveals open source JavaFX plans

  • Project Releases

    • Logback reaches 1.0.0

      The Logback project has announced that its Java logging system that picks up where log4j left off has reached version 1.0.0. There are no big changes from previous releases of Logback, according to lead developer Ceki Gülcü.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Cabinet Office publishes open source procurement toolkit

      The Cabinet Office has published an open source procurement toolkit for the public sector on its website.

      It said the purpose is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.

    • Cabinet Office publishes open source procurement toolkit

      It said the purpose is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.

    • Open source buying toolkit published by UK Cabinet Office

      A fifth document, CESG guidance on Open Source, is only available to users with a gsi.gov.uk email address, but should address the issues which caused problems, now resolved, for Bristol City Council’s open source plans. The purpose of the toolkit it to help level the playing field for public sector open source acquisition. The procurement advice note points out that procurement rules need to compare total cost of ownership (TCO), but that where that cost is the same between open source and proprietary solutions, the open source solution should be preferred. This is because of open source’s inherent flexibility, an attribute that isn’t encapsulated by TCO calculations.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The power shift effect of open government

      The second CityCamp Colorado started off with Tom Downey and Stephanie O’Malley from the City of Denver setting the stage for the day’s theme: enhancing access to government. Held at the Jefferson County Administration and Courts Facility on October 28, 2011, more than 70 people gathered to participate, learn, and advance the open government movement.

      Tom Downey, Director of Excise and Licensing for the city and county of Denver, is excited about the spread of open government. He said the beauty of a movement like CityCamp is that the organization is flat, decisions are made democratically, and things can get done and move forward.

    • The power of open-source cancer research

      This is the question that cancer researcher, Jay Bradner and his colleagues have focused on in their research, and they think they may have found the answer: a molecule, which they call JQ1. But unlike the corporatocracy and its minions, which operate in secrecy, Dr Bradner and his colleagues chose to do something different. Engaging in an enlightened social experiment, they shared the news of this molecule by publishing their findings — and they mailed samples to 40 other labs to work with. In short, they open-sourced the information about this molecule and they crowd-sourced the testing and research.

    • Open Compute Project Gains Momentum

      From the racks to the roof, the Open Compute Project (OCP) is trying to break the mold to improve and redesign everything we take for granted as “industry standard” in the data center world. Its goal is to use open source community thinking to effect changes to the server hardware, design of the racks and even the building itself in much the same way the Linux community of developers changed the paradigm in the software realm. On Oct. 27th, the OCP held its second summit in New York City. In fact, Red Hat was there and formally announced it was joining and would be contributing to the OCP.

    • Open Access/Content

      • UNESCO recommends open educational resources

        The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the Commonwealth educational organisation, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), have published guidelines on the use of open educational resources in higher education. The 20-page Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher EducationPDF document argues that the number of students is set to rise from the current 165 million to around 260 million in 2025, but that this will not be matched by a corresponding rise in expenditure.

    • Open Hardware

      • Open Hardware Journal
      • BeagleBone: The $89 Open Source Hardware Platform From BeagleBoard

        The all new BeagleBone has been dished out by the BaegleBoard.org as an open source Hardware platform, announced the organisation.

        According to the developers, the new BeagleBone comes as a pretty low cost, hardware hacker oriented, and expandable variant of the original BeagleBoard. Fan boys can get their hands on the new device for $89 only.

  • Programming

Leftovers

Links 3/11/2011: Linus Torvalds Speaks Out, Trinity Desktop Debated

Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Ed Bott, Apologist for M$, Does it Again

      I paraphrase for the situation: Every PC that is shipped with our booting key is a small victory; every PC that is shipped without is a small defeat. Total victory is the universal adoption of our standards by OEMs, as this is an important step towards victory for M$ itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home running M$’s software.”

      Good try, Ed, but I’m not buying it. Building in anything specific to the OS of a monopolist is dangerous. M$ has shown for decades that it doesn’t do anything that doesn’t bolster the monopoly. You should know better.

      On the other hand, OEMs don’t really love M$ and I expect most of them will provide some kind of kill switch for the lock-in but it will be more work to migrate more PCs to the light.

  • Server

    • HP launches ARM-based blade servers with Linux support

      HP launched its Redstone server range using low-power processors from both Intel and ARM vendor Calxeda. HP claims Redstone servers are designed for testing and proof-of-concept, presumably the concept that it can produce ARM-based servers.

      The Calxeda Energycore processors in HP’s Redstone servers are 32-bit processors designed for massively parallel workloads with an 80Gbits/s crossbar between processors. Calxeda claims that when the chip is mated to 4GB of RAM the whole setup consumes just 5W under load and idles at 0.5W.

    • Need a Reliable Server?

      Netcraft’s latest report gives some clues. The world’s most demanding hosting companies run GNU/Linux. Of the top 42 most reliable hosting companies,

      * 2 run F5 Big IP,
      * 5 run FreeBSD,
      * 8 run that other OS, and
      * 15 run GNU/Linux.

    • October 2011 Web Server Survey

      Across the million busiest sites Apache and Microsoft each lose market share this month whilst nginx and Google see small increases.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

    • Two decades of productivity: Vim’s 20th anniversary

      The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.

      In this article, we will take a brief look back at the history of vi and its descendants, leading up to the creation of Vim. We will also explore some of the compelling technical features that continue to make Vim relevant today.

    • Cheese Goes Great With Webcam Hams

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE’s November Updates Improve Nepomuk Stability

        November 2, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.3 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. The October updates contain many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications using the Nepomuk semantic framework.

      • Trinity Does New Release To Let KDE 3.5 Live Om

        While KDE 4.0 has been around for nearly four years (and most complaints regarding the initial KDE4 fallout have been addressed) and the last KDE 3.5 stable snapshot (v3.5.10) came three years ago, the Trinity Desktop Environment has issued an official release today to keep the KDE 3.5 desktop living.

        The Trinity Desktop Environment is designed to pick up where KDE 3.5 left off in keeping up with the KDE 3.5 branch development. There’s been bug-fixes, new features, and other work to make KDE 3.5 more relevant in today’s world. The version released today is Trinity 3.5.13.

      • The Grass has Always been Greener on the other Side of the Fence

        Now to my actual blog post: I appreciate the idea of the Trinity developers to bring back the KDE 3.5 desktop experience to those users who really want it. This is a great offer. Personally I doubt that the Trinity project is doing the effort in the right approach. Instead of just porting Kicker and KDesktop to Qt4/KDE4 they forked everything and the kitchen sink. I rather doubt that a team which is smaller than the KWin team is able to maintain not only KWin but also every other part of KDE 3.5 and now also Qt 3.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Britain’s $25 computer is coming by Christmas

      Earlier this year British games pioneer David Braben surprised many people with the first appearance of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, open source computer aimed at children that he was helping to develop.

      Now, six months on from that initial blitz of publicity, he says that it’s almost ready to go on sale for the first time. A finished version is due by the end of 2011, he told GigaOM, specifically aimed at programmers.

    • Jungo Launches Automotive Connectivity Middleware for Linux-based Infotainment Systems

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Rear-seat touchscreen computer runs Android 2.3

          VizuaLogic announced a rear seat entertainment (RSE) touchscreen computer that runs Android 2.3. Integrated into a car’s front headrest, the “SmartLogic Android Rear Seat Entertainment Package” is equipped with a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a seven-inch capacitive touchscreen, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IR, USB, microSD, and HDMI connections.

Free Software/Open Source

  • An interview with Equalis, a Scilab based business

    Equalis supports all these needs by providing a complete Scilab support programs including: training, deployment, real-time support and consulting. Equalis also drives the Scilab product development roadmap to meet customer needs by accelerating bug fixes and including feedback on the strategic product roadmap. Additionally, Equalis also develops and supports exclusive premier software features and application modules to augment the baseline platform to meet its customers’ specialized needs.

  • SaaS

  • Semi-Open Source

    • Zarafa to unveil free web meeting plug-in

      Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa is set to unveil a new web meeting plug-in for its groupware product. According to the company, the free plug-in for the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) currently supports up to three users, works regardless of each user’s email client or platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), and does not require registration.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

    • Eclipse is celebrating its 10th Birthday

      It is just a decade since IBM released the Eclipse project under an open source licence and the Eclipse Consortium, consisting of IBM, Borland,Rational, Suse, TogetherSoft, was announced.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Windows 7 finally beats XP, or does it?

    According to the StatCounter analysis Windows 7 overtook XP in the United States in April 2011 and in Europe in July. However, in Asia Windows XP still retains a clear lead at 55% in October compared to 36% for Windows 7.

    [...]

    StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month (4 billion in the US) from their network of more than three million websites. NetMarketShare data collection network has over 40,000 websites, and counts unique visitors once for visit for day. In summary, NetMarketShare’s data is compiled from approximately 160 million unique visits per month.

    What that means is that StatCounter counts all page views while NetMarketShare looks at single site visits. That in turn imples that very active users of a particular operating system would weigh more heavily on StatCounter’s numbers.

  • Finance

    • “OCCUPY WALL STREET” to Occupy WBAI

      A new show on WBAI starts this Wednesday: OCCUPY WALL STREET RADIO. From the streets to airwaves, the movement that began five weeks ago as a Day Of Rage takes to the airwaves on the only station that broadcasts the voice of the 99%. The initial Occupy Wall Street Radio airs Wednesday October 26th, from 6:30 to 8 PM. Going forward, the show can be heard Monday through Friday from 6:30 to 7 PM. The show will offer a regular check in for the latest breaking news from the streets. Hear the voices, the heart, the soul of this 99% growing and now global movement.

    • People’s Trial Of Goldman Sachs By Occupy Wall Street

      Taking their inspiration from the Bertrand Russell public trials of U.S. government officials held during the Vietnam War, the proceedings will include expert analysis by Cornell West and Chris Hedges, as well as testimony from individuals directly affected by Goldman Sachs’ policies.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • What CIOs Need to Know about Intellectual Property Law

      While nearly every CIO should worry about IP issues, there are exceptions. Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, a founding partner of top technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove, explains that if you’re CIO of, say, a government agency, there is “little, if anything” to get worked up over. Such a CIO likely never has to worry about her agency being sued by anyone, nor will she be selling products to others.

      That’s also the case for CIOs of most non-profits, or at least smaller ones. “Having some degree of oversight by a lawyer should cover just about everything they would need to know, because their exposure to the outside world might be limited to a Web site,” says Updegrove. “As long as they ensure that all proprietary software has been paid for and is not being used in violation of its terms, there should be little exposure and therefore no need for much knowledge.”

11.02.11

Links 2/11/2011: Linux Everywhere, Doom 3 Source Code, OpenBSD 5.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • 4G – A Brief Discussion Of Its Usefulness

    The first question that comes to mind for a person with a completely nontechnical background is ‘what is 4G?’ There have been several levels of up-gradation you have seen in the mobile phones available in the market since it was launched. The variations have been available not only in the designs and looks of the phones but also in the engineering and technology with which they are made. This has initiated various changes in their features and functionalities.

  • Apple: It’s time to leave Neverland

    Post-Jobs, Apple must exist in a world of constantly improving commodity technology being created by its competitors and enterprises seeking next generation, integrated mobile and desktop solutions that the company is not currently offering: Products which are arguably more open and can more easily attract the partners needed to create solutions.

    And it should go without saying that Apple cannot compete by continuing to use the intimidation tactics of its departed founder, no matter how many tens of billions it has in its expansive larders.

  • People Cannot Buy Large Expensive Computers Even if They Wanted Them
  • iPhone 4S Battery Woes: Where is the Outrage?
  • Column: The iPhone 4S battery problem
  • iPhone 4S battery issue reminiscent of ‘antennagate’
  • Apple a digital vampire, says The Who star

    The Who guitarist Pete Townshend has launched a bitter attack on Apple, claiming that the iTunes Music Store is a ‘digital vampire.’

    The ageing mod-rocker likened Apple’s download platform to the failed Northern Rock building society and says the store is ‘bleeding dry’ and failing to support up-and-coming musicians.

  • Finance

    • Did Corzine’s risk taking cripple MF Global?

      In early April, Jon Corzine was in a tough spot. MF Global, the company he had run for the previous year, was about to post a fourth-quarter loss, marking its fourth successive fiscal year of red ink.

      For the former Goldman Sachs chief, it was a setback to his efforts to turn MF Global around. He had just announced a plan for the bank to boost trading risk by holding more assets on its books, both to help customers and to bet on markets.

    • Free Speech For People goes to Occupy Wall Street

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Anti-Spam Law in Limbo as Lobby Groups Seek New Exceptions

      Last December, the government celebrated passing eight bills into law, including the long-delayed anti-spam bill. Years after a national task force recommended enacting anti-spam legislation, the Canadian bill finally established strict rules for electronic marketing and safeguards against the installation of unwanted software programs on personal computers, all backed by tough multi-million dollar penalties.

  • ACTA

    • European Parliament releases “nonexistent” coordinators’ minutes on ACTA

      The European Parliament’s register released the International Trade (INTA) committee’s coordinators’ minutes on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Prior to the release, the Parliament’s services denied the existence of these minutes four times. Only after the FFII provided proof that the documents do exist, the Parliament released them. The minutes document illegal decisions.

      On 21 June 2011, the coordinators of the INTA committee decided to ask the Parliament’s legal service an opinion on ACTA. (pdf) This decision was illegal for two reasons. First, the ACTA text had already been published, the discussion should have taken place in public. Second, coordinators can prepare decisions, not take them.

11.01.11

Links 1/11/2011: OpenMAMA, Humble Voxatron Bundle

Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Launches OpenMAMA Project

      Several financial services firms are teaming up to launch the OpenMAMA project to deliver a new open-source messaging API, according to the Linux Foundation.

    • New OpenMAMA project releases open source middleware messaging spec

      NYSE Technologies and several financial services firms have launched the OpenMAMA project to deliver an open-source messaging API for financial services and telecommunivations. OpenMAMA 1.1 for x86-based Linux platforms has been released, and additional messaging middleware for high-volume, high-speed transactions on Linux and other platforms will follow, according to the Linux Foundation.

    • OpenMAMA 1.1 for Linux on x86 Systems Released

    • Graphics Stack

      • xf86-video-intel 2.17 Release Candidate

        Chris Wilson has taken a break from his Sunday hacking on the SNA acceleration architecture to put out the first release candidate for the upcoming xf86-video-intel 2.17.0 release.

        The xf86-video-intel 2.17 release isn’t going to be terribly exciting, since much of the interesting developments happen within Intel’s kernel DRM and Mesa components, but there are a couple of fixes in this upcoming driver.

      • AMD Catalyst 11.10 Linux Driver Released

        On the last day of the month, AMD has released Catalyst 11.10 as their October 2011 proprietary Linux driver update.

        AMD Catalyst 11.10 / fglrx 8.90 series has “early look” Ubuntu 11.10 support (even though it’s been in since the fglrx 8.89 series), production-rated support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, and 2D performance improvements for the AMD Brazos platform.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Coverage From The Qt Developer Days In Munich

        For those that weren’t present at the Qt Developer Days 2011 in Munich this past week, here’s some of the content that’s now available online from this conference that marked the beginning of the Qt Project.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 23rd October 2011
      • Goodbye Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook and ARM

        Kate Stewart announced on October 28th that thr Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook and ARM editions reached EOL (End of Life) on October 29th, 2011.

        The ARM and Netbook editions of Lucid Lynx were released 18 months ago, on April 29th, 2010. Since then, it received important security updates and critical fixes.

        On October 29th, 2011, Canonical stopped supporting the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook Edition and the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) ARM Edition.

  • Distributions

    • Linux light – SliTaz GNU/Linux and SliTaz-Aircrack-ng

      Once upon a time there was DSL (Damn Small Linux) which provided a full workable system in a 50 MB image. I used to have it on a small tertiary partition for repair and rescue tasks on my main systems. It was never or at least very rarely needed as I recall, but I liked the pre-set radio stations in XMMS and the backgrounds and conky config in DSL, so I ended up running it more and more over Zenwalk 2.6, which at the time was using a very half-baked early XFCE 4.4, if only to listen to internet radio on a geeky minimalistic looking box.

      DSL is no more and has been superceded by TinyCore, which is only 10 MB in size. If that is too minimal for you there is another option, SliTaz GNU/Linux. It is a small distribution based in Switzerland that at exactly 30 MB in size sits somewhere in the middle and comes in French and English by default. You choose your language after booting. It´s been around for a while, I had a look at their 1.0 release in 2008 and was impressed. It is mainly intended as a live system but can be installed to hard drive. For being this small it includes a load of functionality, the Lighttpd web server for instance which makes it perfect for loading from USB stick or CD and running a website from memory.

    • New Releases

      • Berry 1.12
      • Linux From Scratch Version 7.0 released

        The Linux From Scratch (LFS) project has released Version 7.0 of its manual for building a custom Linux installation. The new version of these step-by-step instructions uses more recent components than previous editions – for example the recently introduced version 3.1 of the Linux kernel, the fairly recent GCC version 4.6.1, and the Glibc 2.14.1. The new LFS also explains how to set up a “/run” directory in the root directory using tmpfs, an approach taken by various distributions for several months.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Linux 2011.0

        There’s a lot to like about Mandriva 2011.0. The user interface has been tweaked and simplified, documentation and supporting services have continued to improve and clever ideas such as Timeline make it well worth experimenting with – at the very least by enthusiasts with virtual machines.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat (RHT) Could Break Through $53.33 Resistance Level

        Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) closed Friday’s trading session at $51.86. In the past year, the stock has hit a 52-week low of $31.77 and 52-week high of $52.00. Red Hat (RHT) stock has been showing support around $49.19 and resistance in the $53.33 range.

      • Gloves off in NYSE: Red Hat trading tech face-off

        It was a bit perplexing when two weeks ago, apropos of nothing, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat affirmed its commitment to the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) messaging integration software that is at the heart of its Enterprise MRG-Messaging variant of the Linux stack it sells. Now we know why.

        This morning, the Linux Foundation and a bunch of important financial services giants that make use of such messaging software have backed an alternative project, launched today, called OpenMAMA.

      • Why OpenMAMA is the Future of Open Source

        OpenMAMA is an effort to standardize and simplify the MAMA APIs that have been in use since at least 2002. The basic idea behind have an open source implementation of MAMA is to have a level-set, a baseline implementation that is used to promote interoperability. The financial industry, especially stock exchanges like the NYSE are not strangers to Linux. The Big Board itself has been running on Red Hat since at least 2008. There has also been collaboration among financial services vendors as part of the AMPQ messaging standard too.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu on phones, tablets, TV’s and smart screens everywhere

            By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.

            Unity, the desktop interface in today’s Ubuntu 11.10, was designed with this specific vision in mind. While the interface for each form factor is shaped appropriately, Unity’s core elements are arranged in exactly the way we need to create coherence across all of those devices. This was the origin of the name Unity – a single core interface framework, that scales across all screens, and supports all toolkits.

          • Unity Integration to Run Deeper in Ubuntu 12.04

            As UDS continues over in Florida, USA thoughts have turned on how to make integration between applications and the Unity desktop better.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 will Focus on Power Users, Efforts to Bring Ubuntu to Phones,Tablets and TVs by 14.04 LTS

            In opening keynote address of Ubutnu Developer Summit (UDS), Mark Shuttleworth said that lots of efforts will be put this cycle to make Ubuntu more power users friendly. Emphasis will be on improving multi-tasking, multi-monitor support and other features for power users.

            With 12.04 LTS, the support will also be extended to 5 years which has been 3 years until now for LTS releases. Also a more streamlined desktop experience will be delivered to corporate users who deploy Ubuntu at mass scale.

            Mark also talked about some plans for the next 14.04 LTS release, due in 2 years. He said that there will be efforts to deliver the core Unity platform to a range of devices that include smartphones, tablets and TVs.

          • Ubuntu Software Centre 12.04 Gets Discussed

            Plans for improving the performance and start-up time for Ubuntu’s Software Centre in 12.04 have been discussed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

          • Shuttleworth Misses the Point Yet Again

            I can’t speak for everyone, but I can at least speak for myself. I am not “too cool” to use something that looks “slick” (I mean comon, have you seen Enlightenment).

            What I’m not about to use though is something that was clearly designed for a touch screen on my computer that has a 15+inch monitor driven by a keyboard and mouse. I’m not about to use something that is resource greedy. And I most certainly not about to use something that makes most all the choices for me about how my desktop should be laid out. I’m the one that is going to be using my computer – so how about I get to choose how the GUI works best for me?

          • Shuttleworth: Linux Power Users Aren’t too Cool for Unity

            Mark Shuttleworth makes no apologies for the Ubuntu Unity Linux desktop interface, in fact he sees it as the foundation for his company’s platform strategy as the company moves beyond desktops, servers and the cloud.

            Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, delivered a keynote address today at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), reminding the Ubuntu faithful of the progress made this past year. He also delivered his vision for the road ahead, which involved leveraging Unity to bring Unity to multiple types of smart screens including phones and tablets.

          • [Ubuntu Fridge Update]
          • Ubuntu 14.04 will be a smartphone and tablet OS. So what?

            n a recent blog entry, Mark Shuttleworth, owner of Canonical and the de facto leader of Ubuntu development, announced that future versions of the OS will be optimized for tablets and smartphones. By spring 2013 (assuming the company keeps to its rigid release schedule), version 14.04 LTS “will power tablets, phones, and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server, and the cloud.”

            Shuttleworth’s ambitions are certainly timely. While it has become apparent that Linux will never challenge Windows’ core constituency of desktop and laptops, the definition of what constitutes a computing platform is expanding at an enormous rate thanks to continued advances in smartphone and tablet capabilities. Android and iOS have already established themselves as clear challengers to the Windows paradigm while ARM is threatening the x86 portion of the vaunted Wintel Alliance. Even more importantly, this is scarcely an idea the Canonical owner jotted down half-baked. Ubuntu’s Unity GUI, writes Shuttleworth, was specifically designed to scale across a wide range of devices from small touch screens to desktops, and to provide a consistent operating environment across all of them.

          • Will Ubuntu Mobile Kill The Desktop?

            Mark Shuttleworth, the optimistic leader of Ubuntu, has shared his ‘next’ big plan and it has everything to do with the markets where Linux is already strong — non desktop markets.

          • Ubuntu for smartphones, tablets and TVs
          • Shuttleworth: Ubuntu is heading to phones and tablets
          • Ubuntu Linux eyes tablet territory
          • Can Ubuntu Linux win on smartphones and tablets?

            Mark Shuttleworth is as close as Linux has ever had to Steve Jobs. He has vision, he’s articulate, and he can move an audience. But, can he move a market that’s in love with Android phones and Apple iPad tablets to give Ubuntu a chance? I think he has a shot.

            I’ve known for over a year that Ubuntu was going to try for the smartphone and tablet market, so when Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth told me he was going to expand to devices, I wasn’t surprised. Technically, Ubuntu, and its parent company, Canonical, have the chops to do it.

          • Ubuntu Linux to Hit Tablets, Phones, TVs in the Nick of Time?
          • Canonical to Expand Ubuntu for Smartphones, Tablets
          • Ubuntu Linux looks beyond the desktop to phones, tablets, TVs
          • Ubuntu Plans Move to Smartphones, Tablets, TVs

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Xubuntu 11.10 and my Netbook

              October saw the release of the latest version of the Ubuntu family and that includes Xubuntu, the Xfce edition. I’ve just installed Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook and the experience was rather good.

              The netbook in question is an eMachines (Acer) model eM350. The specs are: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive. I’d been using it for a couple of months with the default installation of Windows XP.

            • Kubuntu + Realtek card – slow network performance
            • Thanks Kubuntu and Canonical!

              So several weeks back, the wonderful Kubuntu folks, on behalf of Canonical, supplied a tablet to help me test modifications I’ve been making to allow Bangarang to be more touch friendly. Bangarang was shipped with Plasma Active One with some very basic modifications to help make it at least tolerable on a touch device. I’ve spent a little more time trying to improve the touch mode and the supplied tablet has made it so much easier for testing.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • New $89 Open-source Hardware Runs Full Linux OS

      An open-source hardware group on Monday announced a US$89 credit-card sized motherboard based on an ARM processor that could be used for robotics, gaming and medical devices.

      BeagleBoard’s BeagleBone development board is targeted at the open-source hardware community, which includes hobbyists and engineers writing code for hardware with open-source specifications. Some BeagleBoard projects include bringing Linux-based Android and Ubuntu operating systems to its hardware.

    • $89 dev board includes Cortex-A8 CPU, Ethernet, JTAG

      BeagleBoard.org announced a new open-platform, hobbyist-focused development board — priced at just $89 and equipped with a Linux distro that boots in ten seconds. The BeagleBone offers an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 720MHz, 256MB of RAM, two 46-pin expansion connectors, a USB host port and multipurpose device port, on-chip Ethernet, and a microSD slot.

    • Phones

      • $100 Atrix 2 is a smartphone bargain, review says

        Motorola’s Atrix 2 is well worth its $100 on-contract price, at a time when some Android smartphones are selling for $300, says this eWEEK review. Dual-core, 1GHz performance, a 4.3-inch qHD display, and a responsive eight-megapixel camera offer good value, and an extra $300 brings you the nifty Lapdock 100 accessory.

      • Never say die: why HP should open up webOS instead of killing it

        HP announced last week that it will keep its PC division instead of spinning it off as the company had previously discussed. The future of the company’s mobile strategy and the fate of the webOS platform remain unclear, however.

      • Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • LinuxCon Europe Wrap-Up

      The first-ever LinuxCon Europe wrapped up on Friday October 28 in Prague. The LinuxCon portion of the week was just one part of a combined schedule that also incorporated Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) 2011, the Linux Kernel Summit (LKS), and the GStreamer Conference.

      By all accounts the event was a success, attracting more than 800 attendees — a number that threatened to overflow the meeting rooms of a few of the more popular sessions. In fact, the far-greater-than-expected turnout already prompted the Linux Foundation (LF) to look for a larger venue for the 2012 conference. The co-location of LKS and ELCE meant that a lot of talks dealt with the kernel itself (file systems, device drivers, kernel module development, etc.) and with embedded development, but there was plenty of other content as well — desktop environments, databases, license questions, and more.

  • Web Browsers

    • Midori: One Of The Most Lightweight Browsers Around [Linux & Windows]

      We’ve had browser wars back when Netscape was still the king. Today, it’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all battling it out to see who’s top dog. There are plenty of different categories where they are being compared, such as speed, memory efficiency, functionality/features, and more.

  • SaaS

    • Rackspace Doubles Down On Open Source Process

      Open source has been vital in creating the cloud. The open source process allowed many companies to use what began as Google’s (GOOG) MapReduce, evolving it into things like Hadoop (originally a Yahoo (YHOO) project), entire cloud stacks like Red Hat’s (RHT) OpenShift, and services like Amazon’s (AMZN) EC2 in relatively short order.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice extensions and templates site now live

      Following a six-week public beta, The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced that the project’s new extensions and templates repositories for LibreOffice are now online. In a post on the TDF blog, Florian Effenberger, a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, says that the sites are just “one of the many community efforts at the LibreOffice project”, adding that the repositories will “benefit of millions of LibreOffice and free office users worldwide”.

    • Oracle v. Google – Opposing Positions (to Motions)

      Last Friday was the day for both parties to get their negative mojo on as they each filed oppositions to the motions of the other. The three motions addressed are:

      * Google’s motion that it not be held liable for patent damages occuring prior to July 20, 2010 (see, Google Files Motion for Partial SJ on Oracle’s Failure to Mark);

      * Google’s motion to strike two “rebuttal” damages reports (of Oracle) by Dr. Kenneth Serwin (see, Google Loses Lindholm Email Battle); and

      * Oracle’s motion to exclude portions of the expert reports (of Google) of Gregory K. Leonard and Alan J. Cox (see, Google Loses Lindholm Email Battle)

  • Healthcare

    • GNU Health 1.4.1 released

      GNU Solidario is happy to announce the release of GNU Health 1.4.1, in which we have incorporated support for PyPI, the Python Package Index Digg this article

  • Licensing

    • Ruby 1.9.3 arrives with licence change

      The Ruby development team announced the release of version 1.9.3 of its open source programming language. Described as basically being “an implementation-improved version of Ruby 1.9.2″, the first release of the new stable series of Ruby improves library loading performance and brings changes to the Ruby licence.

    • Ruby project ditches GPL in favour of BSD

  • Open Hardware

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Insurers Want Obama to Defy Law So They Can Continue Keeping You In The Dark

      If you have no idea what you’re paying good money for when you enroll in a health insurance plan, there’s a good reason for that: insurers profit from your ignorance. And they’re waging an intense, behind-the-scenes campaign to keep you in the dark.

      In my first appearance before Congress after leaving the insurance industry, I told members of the Senate Commerce Committee that insurers intentionally make it all but impossible for consumers to
      find out in advance of buying a policy exactly what is covered and what isn’t, and how much they’ll be on the hook for if they get sick or injured. Insurers are quite willing to provide you with slick marketing materials about their policies, but those materials are notoriously skimpy when it comes to useful information. And the documents they provide after you enroll are so dense that few of us can understand them.

  • Finance

    • Joyce Will Be Back at GoldmanSachs666.com Monday

      I know you join me in welcoming her back with her on target posts relating to our core job of exposing Goldman Sachs as to their many actions which contributed to our current financial crisis and to the economic demise of our great middle class.

      GoldmanSachs666 is a non monetized site which has run from day one by volunteers such as Joyce. We welcome and appreciate the efforts made by her and the many others who have participated over the past few years of our existence.

    • We are the 99%
    • Goldman Sachs Sued By Hedge Fund For Knowingly Selling Toxic Mortgage-Backed Investments

      The Basis Fund filed a similar suit against Goldman in June 2010, but a U.S. district court dismissed the suit in July since the Australian hedge fund was not able to prove that its purchases from Goldman were made in the United States. Basis filed its lawsuit on Thursday to the New York County Supreme Court, rather than in the federal court system, in order to sidestep that complaint.

      Basis lost $67 million in its dealings with Goldman Sachs in 2007, according to Lewis: Eleven million dollars from a $12 million investment in Point Pleasant and another $56 million out of a subsequent $81 million investment in Timberwolf. The hedge fund is suing for an additional $1 billion in punitive damages, because they say Goldman practiced systemic fraud as it tried to unload $1 billion in Timberwolf on unsuspecting customers.

      Lewis said that Basis plans to use the discovery process in order to dig up more information about Goldman’s development and marketing of the Point Pleasant and Timberwolf securities. They said they plan to look at internal emails; investigate Goldman’s dealings with Greywolf, a firm with Goldman ties that helped select Timberwolf’s underlying assets; probe the ratings agencies that stamped Timberwolf with a AAA rating; and ask Goldman executives to testify in court.

  • Civil Rights

    • Positive Policing From Wisconsin’s “Original Occupation”

      After two tours of duty in Iraq, 24-year-old Wisconsin native Scott Olsen managed to escape unscathed and with seven medals for valor. But Olsen was critically injured in an Occupy Oakland march last week by a police projectile. According to eyewitnesses, Olsen was acting as a human barrier between unarmed civilians and Oakland police in riot gear who were charged with keeping a public park cleared for sanitation purposes.

10.31.11

Links 31/10/2011: Particle Code; hypePhone 4S Battery Problems Spread

Posted in News Roundup at 11:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • My life with a Linux Desktop in the Corporate World…

      When I recently changed jobs I was given the opportunity to build my dream machine and put what ever OS “I thought would be best”. Several of my counterparts were running Linux or dual booting between Linux and Windows. In my new position, I will mainly be supporting the IBM Tivoli family of security products. Most of these applications run on Linux and the ones that don’t, run on Windows in a VM just fine. So I was all set and ready to begin. The first question was which distro?

    • I am soo Tired of the Endless Desktop Flame Wars – Can we Please all Stop This?

      The biggest asset of FLOSS is choices for the user. One of the essential aims of the FSF through the GPL is to grant the user rights that enable them to have choices. The right to modify software enables people to fork and to create different directions. The ensuing competition fosters an environment of innovation. This distinguishes us positively from Apple and Microsoft.

      I have been sitting on the sidelines about this topic for a long time. I remember the discussions about the original license of the Qt libraries (which were and are an iintegral part of the KDE desktop) that led to the commencement of the Gnome project – Interestingly, today some Gnome applications use Mono with its patent problems, while Qt is now licensed with FSF promoted GPL licenses.

    • Multiple OS a challenge

      On the other hand, there are other ways to get access to that program, without necessarily having to shut everything down and rebooting.

      Depending on which is your main operating software, there are software solutions that allow you to access programs from other operating systems from within your current setup.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • ASUS X101-EU17-BK 10.1-Inch Netbook (Black) Review

      The Asus X101-EU17-BK is 10inch netbook that belongs to the Eee PC family. It is powered by an Intel Atom N435 processor and comes with 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Even though it is similar to the other 10inch netbooks in the Eee PC family, its bundled operating system is what sets it apart. The X101-Eu17 runs on the MeeGo OS developed by Intel. It is a Linux based OS that was developed especially for netbooks. Thanks to this, this OS is designed to run fast on the limited resources that netbooks offer. Its user interface is also designed to be easy to work with on the small netbook screens.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • What People Are Saying About GNOME [Part 2]

        A few days ago I shared the first one thousand comments about the GNOME desktop from the 2011 GNOME User Survey. Here’s now the next set of one thousand comments concerning the state of GNOME in the eyes of end-users.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 171

        · Announced Distro: openSUSE 12.1 RC1
        · Announced Distro: m23 rock 11.4
        · Announced Distro: Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26
        · Announced Distro: CAELinux 2011

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat and Telstra Partner to Bring Enterprise Solutions to the Cloud

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, has extended its partnership with Red Hat to enable expanded choice for enterprise customers in the cloud.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Review: Kubuntu 11.10

          This was supposed to be a review of the new Ubuntu release (Oneiric Ocelot), however the only thing the new Ubuntu did not do to me was jump out kick me in the head. From an incomplete upgrade because I was running Dropbox, a UI that fails miserably in being a useful User Interface (UI) and the going out of its way to trash the whole system while trying to get 2 screens working made me believe that after 2 releases, Unity is still not ready for prime time.

          Instead, I decided to look at Kubuntu, the Ubuntu varient using the KDE desktop. Previous attempts at Kubuntu left me slightly cold. I love KDE, and I liked the KDE3 version, however previous Kubuntu versions lacked the full power of Ubuntu and lacked that polish that I wanted for a operating system.

          Not anymore. If anything, Kubuntu has leaped ahead of the parent distro, with a full and vibrant desktop with all the graphic elements switched on, and having a user interface (UI) that does not actively work against the user.

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Linux heads to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

            Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will announce at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL, that they will be taking Ubuntu Linux to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

          • Ubuntu 11.10: Looks Kind of Cool But Who Is It For?

            I decided to try out Ubuntu 11.10 on my Thinkpad T43. It was actually my first time using Unity, although I had used the Ubuntu Netbook Edition on a netbook, and I knew the two had similar UIs. This isn’t going to be a huge, in-depth thing because I don’t see how anyone is going to touch the Ars Technica review of 11.10 (DarkDuck’s Unity vs. GNOME3 review is also quite good).

          • Vodafone Webbook review: cheap and cheerful Ubuntu netbook

            Cellular network operator Vodacom recently launched a netbook, the Vodafone Webbook, that, at R1 499, it hopes will give South Africans an affordable entry into personal computing. TechCentral put the Webbook through its paces.

            The computer, which runs the Ubuntu Linux operating system — specifically Ubuntu 10.04, code-named Lucid Lynx — has a 10-inch LCD screen, 512MB RAM, and 4GB of flash storage.

            It sports an 800MHz Freescale iMX515 processor that is based on the ARM Cortex-A8. It also includes a low-end webcam — centred above the screen — and a built-in microphone for Skype calling.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Particle Code Platform May Go Open-Source

    Particle Code, a software platform that allows game/application developers to easily target multiple operating systems and mobile devices, may not only be gaining Linux support but could also become an open-source development platform if there’s sufficient interest.

    Particle Code was acquired a few days back by its competitor, Appcelerator. The acquisition appears to mostly be about picking up the Particle Code engineering talent with their vast experience in making games/applications cross-platform in one pleasant sweep.

  • Juniper Embraces OpenFlow

    The emerging OpenFlow approach to building programmable, scalable networks is continuing to gain traction. The latest vendor to jump into the fray is Juniper Networks with a Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables Juniper users to try out OpenFlow.

  • SaaS

  • Education

    • EDUCAUSE takeaway #2: Open source is alive and well

      I, like about 4 million other people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, am sitting here without power. My 4G card just died, but should be able to charge enough off my laptop in the next few minutes to at least post this piece once I finish writing it. The power outage, though inconvenient, is at least forcing me to sit in one place long enough to reflect back on the mid-October EDUCAUSE conference, from which I’ve only had time to give you one takeaway (essentially that learning management systems are everywhere, but Pearson’s new Google Apps-integrated LMS isn’t nearly as big a deal as most of us initially thought).

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Open core or dual licensing? The example of MySQL

        It has been suggested that Oracle might be planning to move MySQL away from dual licensing to an open core model. Richard Hillesley takes us through the arguments, and the pros and cons of these different models.

        Projects do not thrive when there are ambivalences and ambiguities around the ownership of the code that makes up the project, as can be seen from the fallout among the various projects that Oracle inherited through its purchase of Sun Microsystems.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Government of Portugal is Cutting Funding to M$

      Until this year, the central government of Portugal has paid for M$’s software licensing for schools. This year that will end and schools will either have to pay out of their own meager budget or choose FLOSS.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Cable Green, director of learning at Creative Commons, on the obviousness of open policies

      Cable Green, director of learning at Creative Commons, gave the final morning’s opening keynote at the 2011 Open Education Conference on the seeming obviousness of open policy as a necessity for education.

      “I’m interested in the policies that prevent us from providing an education to anyone in the world who might want one,” Green said. That worldwide demand for education outpaces our ability to meet it.

    • Open-Source Software Exhibit Models Human Motion

      OpenSim, open-source software that is designed to accurately model human motion, is on display at The Leonardo, a science and technology museum in Salt Lake City. Designed by Scott Delp, PhD, a professor of bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and orthopedic surgery at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif, OpenSim was created to help medical professionals and bioengineers study, diagnose, and correct abnormalities in how people move.

Leftovers

  • As iPhone 4S battery suckage spreads, fixes appear

    Ever since the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 were released earlier this month, early adopters have flooded the web with complaints about reduced battery life and overheating handsets. But now a few solutions have emerged from multiple sources – but not from Apple, unfortunately.

    “So… is this going to be considered ‘Battery-gate’ or ‘Suck-gate’?” asked one commenter to Chris Breen’s Macworld article, “Troubleshooting a battery-sucking iPhone 4S”.

  • Canonical: Mobile OEMs are going to love our Linux

    Ubuntu, the free and user-friendly Mac-a-like flavour of Linux, will be targeted at mobile phones, tablets and smart TVs.
    The new OS could chew into Google’s Android market share, although it’s not expected to hit devices until April 2014, Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu developer Canonical) said in an interview ahead of a speech at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Florida.

    After completing the next version of Linux Ubuntu for desktop, Canonical will start to focus on making a mobile Ubuntu, ready to ship by version 14.04 due in April 2014.

  • 9 Incredible Tech-Themed Halloween Costumes

  • Finance

    • Alan Grayson Gets Standing Ovation While Bill Maher Panel Mocks Occupy Wall Street ‘Hippies’

      One would think that the anti-corporatist ideals of the Occupy Wall Street movement would receive some safe harbor on Real Time with Bill Maher, and one would be correct that their ideology gelled entirely with the audience. But before Alan Grayson passionately stood up as a spokesman for their cause, the panel spent a fair amount of time mocking the group ruthlessly, for their “bongo drums,” disorganization, and incoherence.

    • Occupy San Francisco: the teenager who was refused cancer treatment

      As Miran Istina puts it, she has been living on borrowed time since she was 14. Diagnosed with cancer, she was given just months to live after her health insurer refused to provide her with life-saving surgery.

      Now 18, Istina, from the city of Sisters in Oregon, has spent the past three weeks living in a tent at the Occupy San Francisco protest and says she will stay there indefinitely, despite her illness.

10.30.11

Links 30/10/2011: GNOME 3.3.1, GNOME User Survey

Posted in News Roundup at 7:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • How to Convince Your Friends to Use Linux Without Being a Jerk

    Linux is one of the most secure and stable operating systems around, and yet, its user base hasn’t really grown as everyone expected it to. There are many reasons for this, and we won’t go into those right now. However, if you, like any other Linux user, are disappointed by the current market share stats, we can tell you some simple tips that will help you convince your Windows or Mac-crazy friends into using Linux.

    Now, many Linux users have already tried to coax their friends and family members to try out this popular and newbie-friendly distro called Ubuntu. A select few have succeeded and many have failed. So here, we will give you some important tips to help you spread the word about Linux without sounding like that arrogant nerd who has nothing but contempt for Windows or Mac.

  • What’s Popular In The Linux World This Year

    Now being in Orlando for the UDS-P summit, but with the event not officially getting underway until Monday (beginning with Mark’s keynote where something will be announced), there’s time to catch up on a few things (especially as the beer is crap and the weather is less than ideal for VFR flight at the moment). In deciding what to write about next, I was looking at the most popular Phoronix stories from this calendar year.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 3.2 Is Still Looking To Be Power Hungry

      The PCI subsystem pull for the Linux 3.2 kernel was published on Friday evening. If you were hoping it would rework PCI-E ASPM (Active-State Power Management) to be more like the Windows implementation or for more PCI drivers to be setting the bits directly to support it (effectively white-listing drivers/hardware), it didn’t happen yet.

    • Graphics Stack

      • The DRM Pull Request For Linux 3.2 Kernel

        There’s a new driver to the DRM subsystem in Linux 3.2 and it’s the Samsung Exynos SoC driver. This DRM driver is only for the Exynos 4210 SoC at the moment. It supports kernel mode-setting, but doesn’t expose any 2D/3D hardware acceleration or any user-space interfaces. Samsung doesn’t have a full open-source driver stack for this ARM SoC, so the capabilities of this driver just come down to mode-setting in the kernel right now. Samsung has been working on this driver for a while.

      • 2011 Linux Graphics Survey Results

        In September the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey came to an end, but due to Oktoberfest, AMD Bulldozer Linux testing, OpenBenchmarking.org developments, and other matters, I didn’t have time to look at the survey results until this weekend when getting ready for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Here’s the 2011 results looking at what Linux desktop end-users are running when it comes to graphics cards and drivers as well as their key concerns.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3.3.1 Development Release

        It never stops ! Here comes the first development release of the 3.3 development cycle. We are off to a slow start, with most features still
        on the drawing board or in early development. Expect things to become more exciting in the next development release. But for now, we want you to download, compile and test this release.

        [...]

        This release is a snapshot of early development code.

      • GNOME 3.3.1 Development Release Is Here
      • Gnome User Survey

        Phoronix recently hosted a near Gnome User Survey, which surprised me, given Gnome Developers’ general “We know what’s best, bug off” attitude.

  • Distributions

    • Zentyal Linux, a usable Linux Server
    • Jolicloud “personal cloud” for PC, iOS, Android coming soon

      Jolicloud Personal Cloud

      Jolicloud is getting ready to roll out a new cloud-based service that the company says will offer a new way to interact with all of your online services from one place — and that place can be a web browser, smartphone app or tablet app.

      When Jolicloud first launched, the company made an operating system for netbooks based on Ubuntu Linux. The “cloud” part of the name signified two things: the ability to “install” web apps to your desktop so you could launch them quickly just like native Linux applications, and a social element that let you share your recent activity with your peers.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Ubuntu, Red Hat Take Stand On Microsoft’ Secure Boot Lockdown

        Microsoft stirred the bee’s hive by announcing new requirements for manufacturers who want to ship Windows 8 systems, including a feature called ‘Secure Boot’. It means only Windows 8 will be able to run on that hardware, locking GNU/Linux out, shutting all windows on Linux on these computers.

      • Secure Boot and your choice for Linux

        Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu together with Red Hat, have weighed into the controversy surrounding the so called Secure Boot setup that requires OEMs to lock down your BIOS allowing only “approved” software to boot from it. This is of course being pushed by Microsoft.

      • Feeding the trolls

        A few years ago I got up on stage and briefly talked about how the Linux community contained far too many people who were willing to engage in entirely inappropriate behaviour, how this discouraged people from getting involved and how we weren’t very good at standing up against that sort of behaviour. Despite doing this in front of several hundred people, and despite the video of me doing so then being uploaded to the internet, this got me a sum total of:

        * No death threats
        * No discussion about any of my physical attributes or lack thereof
        * No stalkers
        * No accusations that I was selling out the Linux community
        * No accusations that I was a traitor to my gender
        * No real negative feedback at all[1]

      • Red Hat, The Linux Foundation and Canonical Publish White Paper on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface
      • Will Rise Of Cloud Computing Push Red Hat Higher?

        Today we’ll look at Red Hat (RHT), a leading provider of open source operating systems based on Linux. The rise of cloud computing has been increasing demand for Red Hat’s open source solutions, which are often less expensive than comparable offerings from Microsoft and other rivals.

      • Red Hat, Cisco Partner to Bring Open Source to the Cloud

        Cisco and Red Hat offer RHEL with FlexPod: FlexPod, as you might remember, is the NetApp/Cisco virtualization project, essentially a blueprint for deploying a pre-configured interoperable virtualization environment specifically designed for scalability. Now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be part of that mix, and will be part of Cisco’s Validated Design (CVD) program. Ideally, Red Hat now has another avenue to find its way into enterprise data centers, potentially even through Cisco VARs. In addition to the CVD induction, Red Hat will also be made compatible with Secure Separation, a process that ensures secure “separate multi-tenant environments for non-virtualized workloads, alongside virtualized ones.”

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Debian joins Dropbox’s officially supported platforms along with Fedora and Ubuntu

        If you checkout Dropbox’s Linux download page, you will see that Debian packages are provided. Up to a few days ago, they only provided packages for Ubuntu and Fedora.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • End of support for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook and ARM – 2011/10/29

            Ubuntu announced the 10.04 Netbook Edition and Ubuntu for ARM products 18 months ago, on April 29, 2010. At that time, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 18 months for these specific products.

          • Ubuntu Unity Experience

            I’ve come to enjoy launching and switching between applications via the Launcher. Making the distinction between running and not running applications less important and having stable targets for the most common applications is nice. But only as long as it’s about single window applications, as having to juggle windows after using the launcher just feels like a hassle. The single top bar switching between title and menu is great with maximized windows. This is barely enough to tolerate the shortcomings.

          • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot review – Damn good

            Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has a silly name, but it is a very decent and polished product.

          • Ubuntu LTS support period getting extended starting Ubuntu 12.04
          • Dell bundles Ubuntu Linux on PCs in China
          • Canonical, Dell bring Ubuntu laptops to 220 Chinese retail stores
          • Canonical Changes OEM Strategy to Reflect New Customer Base

            What do you do when your partners also become some of your most important customers? That’s a challenge Canonical executives grappled with recently as they moved to restructure Canonical’s relationship with OEMs. Here’s what’s changed at the company, and what it means for the open source channel.

            As Canonical CEO Jane Silber pointed out in a recent blog post, OEM partnerships have been key to distributing Canonical’s main product, the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. Agreements with server manufacturers in particular have helped Ubuntu gain a significant presence on enterprise machines.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Review: Kubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”

              That’s where my time with Kubuntu ended. Barring a few Rekonq crashes which could be fixed by Mozilla Firefox, Kubuntu is absolutely amazing. It is stable, polished, and really, really fast. Plus, it brings with it the benefits of a familiar interface (compared to Ubuntu’s Unity) along with the large package selection and the PPA system of Ubuntu. I would strongly recommend that newbies try this, and if the trend of improvements is an indicator for future versions, I might just consider installing Kubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” on my laptop as my main distribution, now that I know that it will be supported for 5 years. It, along with Linux Mint, Chakra, #!, and Pardus, is now a contender. Bravo Kubuntu!

            • Xubuntu 11.10: go, little ‘Buntu, go!

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Xilinx Launches Open Source Linux Support and Developer Community at ARM TechCon for Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform

      Xilinx Adds Open Source Linux Support as Xilinx Continues to Build out Development Model for its ARM Processor-Based Programmable SoC

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Exclusive: First Pictures of the DROID4 by Motorola

          Keyboard lovers, get ready – the DROID4 by Motorola is coming and according to our sources, has the best slideout they have “ever seen on a smartphone.” In this set of glamour shots we received, you can get a taste for what’s to come which means ultra-thin slider with DROID RAZR styling and wait for it….4G LTE. You asked for it and Moto appears to have made it.

        • Motorola announces Q3 financial results: Smartphones selling like hotcakes, tablets… not so much

          Motorola Mobility recently announced third-quarter 2011 financial results, posting net revenues of $3.3 billion, up 11 percent from third quarter 2010. Mobile device revenue came in at $2.4 billion, up 20 percent from Q3 of last year. Motorola smartphones have been flying off shelves, with 4.8 million smartphones shipped in Q3 of 2011, up 1 million from Q3 of last year. On the flip side, Motorola’s XOOM tablet hasn’t been doing so well, with only 100,000 XOOM’s shipped in Q3 (apple ships that many iPads a day). There’s also a few tidbits in there about the Motorola/Google merger, with around 18 million in expenses going towards the merger, which will seek stockholder approval on November 17th. The merger will also require antitrust clearances in the U.S., by the European Commission, and in Canada, China, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey.

        • An Update on Google TV

          The Google TV platform contributes to this evolution by enabling new content creators to add to the programming you already enjoy on your TV. Given so much choice, we’re committed to delivering the best way to discover and engage with the high-quality entertainment on your television, whether that comes from your cable or satellite provider (DISH, Comcast, DIRECTV, etc.) or from the Web (YouTube, Netflix, and thousands more). The initial version of Google TV wasn’t perfect, but launching it gave us the opportunity to learn. These are still early days, and we’re working hard to move forward with each update.

        • Hacking the Google TV Box Without Rooting It

          I’ve long held the opinion that the most effective way to get Internet-based content onto a TV is to simply hook a laptop up to the flat screen with an HDMI cable. The laptop acts as an oversized remote control. You get a full Flash-based Web browser, hard drive and keyboard on your TV.

        • Top 5 Word Games For Android
        • Hands on: Motorola Atrix 2 review

          The original Motorola Atrix smartphone was a powerful device that doubled as a pseudo laptop or AV centre – you could connect it to an HDTV in your living room or the LCD on your desk and run a Linux variant with full keyboard and mouse.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Following the open source (and beer) trail through Europe

    Before I follow up with a story on Nokia Qt’s news of the Qt platform now moving to a completely pure open source status, I thought I would also make mention of LinuxCon as I had to select just one from the two events and chose to have my beer German flavoured this year with Qt.

    LinuxCon will reportedly feature a keynote/Q&A held between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman about the kernel and 20 years of Linux.

    So 20 years in as we are, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will detail the biggest challenges we still now face and what the next 20 years looks like. While Chairman Emeritus at the IBM Academy of Technology, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger will present “Linux – A Short Retrospective and an Opinion on the Future”.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Feeds The Mouth That Bites It; Starts To Bing

        The only reason we have Firefox today is because Microsoft used their signature anti-competitive business practice to butcher Netscape. Google helped Firefox to generate revenue so as to create a competitor to Microsoft’s fossilized Internet Explorer and bring the Web to the highway.

        Firefox used Google as its default search engine. The open source browser signed a deal with Microsoft recently to also use Bing as a search option.

        Just today the open source browser announced another deal to feed the hand that bites it. The Mozilla foundation has announced a version of Firefox with Bing as the default search engine.

        Microsoft is an abusive monopoly which kept all other players out of the PC business. When Linux emerged as a contender they started attacking all Linux players over unknown patent issues which Linus Torvalds called bogus.

      • Bing Filters LibreOffice And Linux, Yet Firefox Goes In Bed

        Firefox, which was created from the ashes of Netscape, which was burned down by none other than Microsoft, is now going in bed with the same Microsoft. The interesting point is Microsoft’s Bing gives out ‘confusing’ results.

        We did a test and searched for Open Source Office Suite. The results were obvious for any user. You must see OpenOffice and LibreOffice as top results. When we Googled. We got the expected Results.

      • Mozilla’s Brendan Eich on JavaScript – and Microsoft Buying Netscape

        It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape’s 0.9 version of its Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994 was clearly the beginning of a new era. For a few years, Netscape was the centre of the Internet universe – it’s home page was the first you checked each morning for news about what was happening on this strange new Web thing that the company was doing so much to define.

        Of course, Netscape went from Net hero to zero remarkably rapidly, but its influence is still felt in multiple ways. Perhaps most importantly, Netscape Navigator gave rise to Mozilla and thus Firefox. It also gave us JavaScript. Or rather, Netscape’s Brendan Eich gave us JavaScript. Eich is not so well known as some of his colleagues around that time, and that’s a pity, because he was one of the key figures in this formative time. Today he is CTO of Mozilla.

        A few weeks ago I met up with him, and we looked back at the amazing ride the Web – and he – has had since the founding of Netscape. What follows is the first part of that interview, dealing with the birth of JavaScript and the origins of Mozilla. Next week the story will look at Firefox and more recent developments.

  • SaaS

    • Internap Debuts World’s First OpenStack-based Public Cloud
    • Karmasphere Announces Quick-Start Hadoop Virtual Appliance for Developing Analytics on IBM InfoSphere BigInsights
    • Jaspersoft Announces New Hadoop-Based Big Data Analytics Solution
    • Why We Moved Off The Cloud

      Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.

      First though, I wanted to write a short bit about the advantages of cloud servers since they are ideal for some use cases.

      * Low initial costs. Specifically, you can get a cloud server for less than $20. Even the cheapest dedicated servers (and I wouldn’t recommend the cheapest) will cost more than $50. For new companies, this can make a difference.
      * Fast deployment times and hourly billing.If you have variable traffic and you’re not having problems scaling your data persistence layer, you can fairly easy spin up and spin down servers quickly in response to usage patterns. It’s worth pointing out that I specifically mean variable traffic rather than growing traffic. From purely an ease of deployment standpoint, handling even quickly growing traffic is fairly easy on both cloud and dedicated platforms.

      * Cheap CPU performance.If your application is purely CPU bound, then you can end up with great price/performance ratios. Most cloud servers allow a single small node on a physical server to use more than its fair share of CPU resources if they are otherwise underutilized — and they often are. One of the last bits of our infrastructure still on the cloud is CPU bound and even though we pay for very small Rackspace cloud servers, we get the performance of dedicated hardware.

    • Clouds, open source, and new network models: Part 3
    • Open Compute Project Aims to Bring Open Source Standards to Data Center Technology

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle v. Google – Oracle On Copyright

      Yesterday’s filings of significance all came from Oracle, beginning with a letter to the judge disagreeing with Google’s request that certain copyright issues be disposed of by the judge before the trial commences. (566 [PDF; Text]) Google had suggested that the following issues related to Oracle’s copyright infringement claims were a matter of law and should be decided by the court before the commencement of the trial to make the trial proceed more efficiently:

    • October wrap-up

      I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite. In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense).

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Hadapt Secures $9.5MM Series A Financing

      Hadapt, creator of the first big data platform to integrate Hadoop with a structured data store to allow for high performance analytics across both structured and unstructured data, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A round of financing led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Bessemer Venture Partners. Matthew Howard, general partner at NVP, and Felda Hardymon, partner at Bessemer, have joined Hadapt’s Board of Directors.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF: Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

      My problems with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been simplistically condensed to either being a knee-jerk reaction to anything the FSF has to say, or else part of a broader conspiracy to hate all free software.

  • Licensing

    • Why I (A/L)GPL

      In the Python world the GPL is frequently frowned on, with most people preferring to use a more permissive license such as BSD, MIT, or Python’s. It’s understandable then when people get angry because I’ve licensed Lamson under the GPL. Many people just hate the license, since they feel it goes contrary to the spirit of Python.

      However, I’d like to explain why I use the GPL after decades of writing open source software and after a couple of “successful” projects. These are my reasons for using it, and only apply to me and what I want to do with my software from now on. You are free to your own opinions and choices, and I hope you’ll respect mine.

      [...]

      I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Good. Because I have a solution to that too.

    • Justifying the commercial license for open source

      It was the late summer of 2008 that I found myself sat listening to Sun Microsystem’s then CEO Jonathan Schwartz explain how the open source model would work for customers in practice. Sat as I was at the last JavaOne conference before Oracle’s acquisition of the Java innovators, Schwartz said something like:

      “Hey, the software is free. When you want the services that go with it, we’ll be there to provide them for you.” For ‘provide’ you can obviously take it that he meant ‘sell’ of course.

      So how do companies now continue to justify the open source model and validate their option to sell a commercially provided service, support and maintenance package in this space?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Making It Real: Next Steps for the Open Compute Project

      When we announced the initiation of the Open Compute Project earlier this year, we posed an audacious question to the industry: What if hardware were open?The benefits, if we could make it work, were clear enough: More openness and collaboration would likely mean a faster pace of innovation in infrastructure technology, greater accessibility to the best possible technology for us all, more efficiency in scale computing and a reduced environmental impact through the sharing of best practices.

    • 50 Companies Team to Create Open Source EV

      The StreetScooter is a $7,000 EV with a 74 mph top speed and an 80-mile range. It relies on leased batteries and uses a heat pump for heating and air conditioning, and shipping company DHL has already ordered 3,500 of them — but the most interesting thing about the vehicle is how it came to be.

    • OpenSim open-source software from Stanford accurately models human motion

      There are 640 muscles in the human body, or maybe it is 639. Or maybe it is 850. Or 656. It all depends on whom you ask. In any case, it is a lot. Stanford bioengineer Scott Delp knows; he has programmed almost every one into his latest work, OpenSim, a software application that helps medical professionals and bioengineers study, diagnose and correct abnormalities in how people move.

    • How R&D is going open-source

  • Programming

    • Serendipity 1.6 integrates jQuery and updates plug-ins

      Serendipity logo Version 1.6 of the open source Serendipity blogging software has been released. The new update includes the jQuery framework so that plug-in and template authors can “provide extended functionality to the frontend” and, like plug-ins, templates can now also use config-groups.

    • 5 Reasons to Learn a Programming Language
    • Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

      Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

    • IP and License Clean for Eclipse Foundation

      Over the past couple of months the Hudson community has been working hard to ensure that its source code and libraries are IP and license clean in order to pass the stringent entry requirements of the Eclipse Foundation. I spoke briefly about this at my Hudson session at JavaOne and the response was so enthusiastic that I feel I need to bring the facts to a wider audience through this blog.

      The Hudson code that is moving to Eclipse is made up of its core components and plugins for SSH-Slaves, Git and Subversion. The initial upload was made up of around 1700 Java files, 125 XML files, 600 Jelly files and some 3700 property files. The core elements (core, UITest and UpdateCenter) have now been approved and are around 8 of the external libraries but there is still some way to go. Each license is checked by both Eclipse’s automated system and by hand.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Great American False Dilemma: Austerity vs. Stimulus

      It’s quite clear that advocates on both sides of the current debate truly believe that the US can return to a growth path. Equally, they share an assumption that the supply of energy will adhere to a shift in the supply curve, which means simply that more supply or substitutes will be brought to market if the price level is sustained at high enough levels.

  • Finance

    • Bringing Europe’s cultural treasures to a new generation

      If these assets are made digital and put online, we can bring them to a wider audience, and preserve them for the next generation. They can have applications in education, tourism, or as a source for further art. They can be used by developers and for online exhibitions to which members of the public can contribute. And they can boost our growth and jobs, including in the creative sector which represents 3.3% of our GDP.

      Europeana is the focal point for all these efforts. It already holds 19 million digital items – from Principia Mathematica to Het Meisje met de Parel. Check out the site now and explore our cultural heritage!

10.29.11

Links 29/10/2011: Google TV 2.0, Orion 0.3

Posted in News Roundup at 7:54 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • People see and want but then don’t.

    Then there is Linux. It makes no promises, it offers no excuses. It is what it is and you can take it or leave it. Linux has it’s beauty spots and it’s warts and they are both out there, side by side, for all to see. Linux has features that windows users see and they exclaim “I want this on my computer!” They claim this quite emphatically, sometimes even going so far as to actually installing Linux and using it for a while.

  • 20 years of Linux: Looking back, forging ahead

    In the larger scheme, however, Linux is arguably one of the most influential technologies of our time. It’s providing the backbone for tech applications that are changing the way the world works and plays. The most powerful computers in the world use it to crunch complicated algorythms. Linux has paved the way for companies’ move of information into “the cloud” and for the general spirit of collaboration that has fueled everything from social networking to Wikipedia.

    This year, Linux turns 20. The computing community is celebrating the anniversary of the date when Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds released Linux to the world, looking back at Torvalds’ vision for modern computing and looking ahead at some of the ways Linux might change business in the future.

  • Hanging on by their fingertips – the last bastion of the proprietary-ware industry

    Want to watch a Blu-ray on your PC? That’ll be £50 please. Simon, for one, is fed up of this game. Join him as he looks at one of the many wheezes the proprietary software and hardware industry are still trying to pull…

    I’ve just opened up my e-mail mailbox, to be greeted by press releases for another round of product announcements. The one that caught my eye, as it does every year, is the release for another piece of DVD playback software. In this case, it’s Corel WinDVD Pro 11, although it’s not the only offender. And if you’re looking for an example of the wheezes the proprietary hardware and software industries pull, then look no further.

  • Desktop

    • Desktops – the final Linux frontier

      Linux Inside Where will you find Linux … Inside your phone? In your car? In your living room? Open Source Software has long been at home in the data center, providing the engine to drive everything from web servers to high performance computing to Cloud. Its versatility, combined with low cost and massive community are pushing it out of the raised floor and into your pocket.Let’s take a look inside a typical consumer router as an example. Chances are, you’ll find Linux at the core.

    • Canonical and Dell Push Ubuntu PCs Into China

      Ubuntu has found some new horizons in China. In a post on Canonical’s blog, it was announced that Canonical and Dell will bring PCs loaded with Ubuntu to the Chinese market. According to the post: “The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.”

    • Ubuntu Gets Retail Shelf-Space In 220 Retail Stores In China

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Top 5 Android Launchers Worth Trying Out
        • Android smartwatch smackdown!

          Two startups are about to go “chrono y chrono” with competing Android smartwatch gizmos. The “I’m Watch” exclusively targets smartwatch applications, whereas the “WIMM Platform” is meant to create “a new market of connected wearable devices that deliver timely, relevant information at a glance” — of which smartwatches are but one example.

        • Google TV 2.0 gains Honeycomb, Android Market

          Google unveiled Google TV 2.0, which will roll out on Sony TVs and Logitech Revue boxes Oct. 30. Featuring Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”), the upgrade includes a revamped interface featuring a new customizable home screen and app shortcuts, provides hundreds of Android Market apps, and offers improved search for TV and YouTube, says the company.

        • Droid Razr goes on sale as Mot unveils Fire XT smartphone

          Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless began selling the Droid Razr Android smartphone on pre-order for $300, with shipments promised by Nov. 10. Meanwhile, a 3.5-inch Motorola Fire XT Android smartphone was announced in Italy; Motorola Mobility announced strong third-quarter earnings of $3.3 billion; and more evidence piled up regarding an imminent release of two Motorola Xoom 2 tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

  • To the Surface: Great Open Source Projects That Don’t Make the Headlines

    Here at OStatic, we regularly do posts designed to surface unsung but very impressive open source projects. Occasionally, an early look at any one of these unsung projects leads to ongoing coverage. For example, this site broke the news about the Eucalyptus cloud computing project at U.C. Santa Barbara long before there ever was the commercial entity Eucalyptus Systems. If you’re looking to expand your open source arsenal with some tools you’ve never heard of, here are some good resources.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 rockets, C devs still best paid

      Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 developers jumped this year, with jobs requiring those skills increasing 70 per cent compared to the same period in 2010, according to a survey of the tech jobs in London by recruiters Adzuna. Adzuna collated every tech job advertised for London last month, a total of 100,000. HTML coders are still the most in demand, but also the most poorly paid – both at entry and top levels.

    • First OpenStack cloud now open for business

      Managed-hosting provider turned cloud provider Internap now has an OpenStack-based cloud ready for public consumption, beating even OpenStack founder Rackspace to the punch. It’s a big day for OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform designed to rival VMware and create competition for Amazon Web Services, but it’s likely only the first of many.

    • First commercial OpenStack-based cloud compute service announced

  • Databases

    • Neo Launches NoSQL Graph Database

      NoSQL type databases have become increasingly popular over the last several years as a way to deliver better scalability and performance. There are a number of different types of NoSQL databases, including a graph database structure, which is what open source startup Neo Technology is all about.

      Neo Technology is the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Neo4j NoSQL database. This week the company is launching its Spring Data Neo4j 2.0 release, bringing the database to the popular Spring Java framework. The company has also just completed raising $10.6 million in Series A funding.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • New LibreOffice Extension Website Live

      Have you heard about those great LibreOffice extensions but have had a problem locating them? Well, those extensions (and templates) are going to be easier to find now thanks to The Document Foundation’s new online repository.

  • Business

    • Digium Cranks Open Source Asterisk to 10

      I make no apologies for being a huge fan of the Asterisk open source PBX project. I’ve been a user since the 1.0 release, which is coincidentally the first time I ever wrote about the project, all the way back in 2004.

    • Digium Confirms Asterisk 10 Release, Media Engine Gets Makeover

      Digium Thursday confirmed the release of Asterisk 10, the latest version of the 12-year-old Asterisk open-source telephony platform that’s slowly but surely gaining traction in the broader telephony market.

      Digium, which is Asterisk’s primary developer, announced the release in line with this week’s AstriCon conference in Denver. According to Digium, the freely available Asterisk platform has seen millions of downloads in the past few years, including 2 million in 2010 alone.

  • Project Releases

    • Announcing Orion 0.3

      The Orion project is pleased to announce the availability of its 0.3 release. If you’re using Orion Hub, then congratulations on successfully upgrading to the new release! If you don’t have an account, sign up for free here. If you’re the kind of person who still likes to download and install tools, you can find the latest server on our download page.

  • Public Services/Government

Leftovers

  • The KNOS Project demo review

    BSD-based operating systems are considered very secure. More so than Linux, in fact. Now, there are many reasons why this may or may not be so, including the market share, the speed and quality of software validation, the release cycle, the internal security mechanism, the skill and mentality of developers, administrators and users, the deployment setup, and many other factors, all of which are highly debatable.

  • Science

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • NYFD Removes Gas, Generators From Protest

      New York firefighters removed about a dozen gasoline cans and six generators from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have camped for almost six weeks, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

      About 30 to 40 firefighters were sent to the park along with the police department’s community affairs unit, Bloomberg said today on his weekly WOR radio show.

      The equipment, which helped power computers and mobile phones and keep people warm as temperatures dipped near freezing, are safety hazards and illegal, Bloomberg said. Forecasts call for rain and snow in the metropolitan area tomorrow.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • At OWS, Cenk Uygur Announces Effort to Amend Constitution, Get Money Out of Politics

      The “Occupy” movement has been inspired in part by the increasingly outsized political power of the top 1%, which has made elected officials more responsive to deep-pocket donors than those they were elected to represent. In response to the other 99% being left politically and economically disempowered, former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur has announced plans to work toward amending the U.S. Constitution to get big money out of politics and restore representative democracy.

    • Right Wing Front Groups Flood Ohio With Anti-Union Spin

      With Ohio voters looking to overturn Governor John Kasich’s union-busting Senate Bill 5 through a statewide referendum, national Republican donors, strategists and corporations are pumping money into the state to defend the Governor and his bill.

  • ACTA

10.28.11

Links 27/10/2011: GNOME 3.4 Plans, Retail Stores in China Sell GNU/Linux PCs

Posted in News Roundup at 1:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Multi Boot vs Virtual Machine
  • White Paper: Secure Boot impact on Linux

    Canonical, together with Red Hat, today publishes a white paper highlighting the implications of these requirements for users and manufacturers. The paper also provides recommendations on how to implement “Secure Boot”, to ensure that users remain in control of their PCs.

  • Desktop

    • Dell offers machines with Ubuntu Linux in 220 Chinese stores

      Dell might have scaled back its Ubuntu Linux offerings in the west but in China – the market that really matters – the firm is rolling out a range of machines running Ubuntu in 220 stores. Unlike its solitary US web-store offering, Dell presents Chinese punters with a range of Ubuntu Linux systems and better still the firm said its staff will promote the benefits of Ubuntu Linux to consumers.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Yocto 1.1 embedded Linux stack adds GUI builder
    • Comarch Becomes a Silver Member of The Linux Foundation
    • Linuxcon: 20 years of Linux at Intel

      DAY TWO of Linuxcon Europe included a keynote from Intel about the last 20 years of Linux since its creation.

      Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux technologist at Intel, gave the talk this morning and counts himself lucky to be one of the people to get involved at the very early stages of the project with Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.

    • LinuxCon Europe Debuts to Standing Room Only Crowd

      With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members…

      With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members.

    • Linuxcon: BMW might use Linux in future cars

      GERMAN CAR MAKER BMW spoke about how it might use Linux for in-car entertainment at Linuxcon Europe in Prague today.

      In a panel on providing high performance we heard that we could see Linux being adopted for use in car entertainment systems in future BMW vehicles. The firm is looking into it and thinks that it’s a valid possibility.

    • The Kernel Panel at LinuxCon Europe

      Linus Torvalds and other kernel developers sat down for a question and answer session at the first LinuxCon Europe. Lennart Poettering, creator of PulseAudio and systemd, served as moderator for the panel, which consisted of Torvalds, Alan Cox, Thomas Gleixner, and Paul McKenney. The four took prepared questions from Poettering, as well as responding to impromptu audience member questions on every topic from version numbers to the future of the kernel project itself.

    • Linux 3.1 Enhances Sandy Bridge, Preps For Ivy Bridge

      The Linux 3.1 kernel was released earlier this week and it further enhances the Intel Sandy Bridge graphics support while also prepping the open-source kernel driver for Intel’s next-generation Ivy Bridge processors.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Killing DRM Graphics Cruft With Fire

        It seems to be a good time to clean-up the Linux graphics driver stack. After old hardware support was dropped in Mesa in August, more Mesa code was dropped, and most recently the classic ATI R300/R600 drivers are to be killed (this is set to happen this Friday). Now Intel’s Daniel Vetter is chopping up some DRM code.

      • The State Of OpenGL 3.0 Support In Mesa

        Last month during XDC2011 Chicago it was publicly talked about how Intel wants OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa and ideally before year’s end. But how’s that goal coming?

        For those not tracking the Mesa mailing list, there’s been a continual stream of new patches arriving for Mesa that ultimately work towards this GL3 goal. Intel developers and others (namely the VMware developers and other independent contributors) adding support for new OpenGL extensions, work towards GLSL 1.30 compliance, or cleaning up parts of Mesa to facilitate future support. E.g. just earlier this week a patch series arrived for adding interpolation qualifier support for i965 as needed by GLSL 1.30 and lots of other work.

      • Intel SNB RC6 On Linux 3.1 Is Both Good & Bad

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Alternatives to KDE and GNOME on Linux systems

      Before anything, this article is for those using KDE and GNOME and start feeling the need for more, or something else. This is not a trolling article (we hate that), nor is a rant against the two DEs. We respect the freedom of choice, and the Open Source world is all about freedom of choice. With this article we only want to show you what other options you have, the pluses and the minuses, with no bias whatsoever. We’ll go less than technical with this article, and we hope we’ll widen your perspective and help you use something that’s really fit for your needs. All you need is a working Linux machine and the minimal knowledge of knowing how to install software on it, plus the use of an editor of choice. Since your DE/WM is something you work with every day, it’s more important to your productivity than it could appear at first look. You may have to learn some new commands, but if you feel it’s right for you and it makes you more efficient, it will be worth it. Plus your system will run faster, since KDE and GNOME are full of features for everyone, but that comes with a cost. Before we start, let’s get some terms clear.

    • Q&A with Enlightenment Lead Developer “Rasterman”

      It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of the Enlightenment desktop. I recently got into contact with the project’s lead developer “Rasterman” and we did a little bit of a question and answer session. If you aren’t sure on what all the Enlightenment desktop and the EFLs are exactly please see my post here.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • digiKam 2.x – Amazingly Good Photo Management

        If you are interested on digital photo management, I would encourage you to take a look at digiKam, and specifically at the newer 2.x version. The 2.0 release announcement was made at the end of July, and they are now already up to version 2.2. Here is a short recap of the reasons I choose to use digiKam rather than the other obvious candidates:

      • Introducing Inqlude, the Qt library archive

        Today I would like to introduce you to Inqlude, the Qt library archive. The goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive listing of all existing libraries for developers of Qt applications. So if you are creating applications using the Qt toolkit, and are looking for libraries, components or modules to use, Inqlude is meant to be the place where you find all information and pointers to get started.

      • Kubuntu Network Configuration

        Because Kubuntu is gaining popularity I thought some users might be needing some additional help with network configuration and settings. Of course there are many ways to handle your network settings, but for new users, setup is extremely simple. Upon installation network settings are generally detected and configured automatically, but on occasion we all run into problems. Finding all of your network settings when using Kubuntu also is quite simple, and help is always available when needed. You can always check the official Kubuntu help documentation provided upon installation to get additional help with advanced topics.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME3 vs Unity on Ubuntu 11.10: my score is 6 – 9

        So, Ubuntu 11.10 is here and GNOME2 is gone…
        Even if you had an option to run GNOME2 in previous release of Ubuntu 11.04, there is no more this option in 11.10. It is only shipped with Unity interface.
        Does it mean GNOME is fully gone? No, it is still here… But that’s not GNOME2. That is GNOME3, updated version which follows (or creates?) new wave of user interfaces.

      • The First Development Release For GNOME 3.4

        The first development release for GNOME 3.4, which is marked as GNOME 3.3.1 in the 3.3 unstable series, is now available for testing.

        The release announcement with source download links to all of the packages can be found in this mailing list message. When scanning through the change-logs for the core and application components to GNOME 3.3.1, some of the items that stick out are listed below.

      • The Survey That GNOME Would Rather Ignore

        As you may have seen, the Phoronix site is hosting a private survey about GNOME. The survey still has several weeks to run, but, so far, neither the circumstances surrounding the survey or the replies show the GNOME project in a favorable perspective.

        The survey was begun by Felipe Contreras, who first raised the idea back in July on the GNOME desktop-devel mailing list. “Lately I’ve [been] feeling that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with GNOME 3,” he wrote. “Why not find for good what people are thinking with an user-survey?”

  • Distributions

    • 6 Linux as a Service Distros you should know about..
    • Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26 Has KDE SC 4.7.2

      Phil Miller proudly announced a few minutes ago, October 27th, the immediate availability for download of the stable Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26 operating system.

      Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26 is now powered by Linux kernel 3.0.7 and X.Org 7.6, as well as the latest KDE Software Compilation 4.7.2 environment, updated toolchain, and WebGL and HTML5 support for Qt/KDE web-browsers.

    • SalineOS 1.5

      It’s always interesting, and usually fun, to try out a new Linux distribution. I saw the announcement on DistroWatch this morning of a new release of SalineOS, and I have a bit of free time today, so this seemed like a good opportunity. It has turned out to be both – interesting and fun!

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon Linux Definitely Has a Personality All to Its Own

        Well it’s my third day on Sabayon Linux and I must say it definitely has a personality of its own. From its snappy performance to its unusual bugs it has left a huge impression on me. It’s also had me going through wikis and forums more than any distribution I have ever encountered on the “easy” side of the Linux distribution fence.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Joins Facebook’s Open Compute Project To Drive Datacenter Efficiency

        Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has joined the Open Compute Project, a project established by Facebook with the goal of building one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost. With this, Red Hat will collaborate with the Open Compute Project and its members on technologies, design and development to redefine the next-generation datacenter.

      • Parallels Now Offering Licenses for CloudLinux OS
      • ADW Builds Cloud Solution with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
      • Libguestfs 1.14 Rolls Out

        In a blog post today, Richard Jones, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, announced the release of libguestfs 1.14, an open source set of tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine (VM) disk images. “I’m really charged about how the new tools let you analyze and fix alignment problems in your guests,” Jones tells NetworkWorld.

      • Red Hat Stock Hits New 52-Week High (RHT)

        Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) hit a new 52-week high Thursday as it is currently trading at $49.08, above its previous 52-week high of $49 with 47,056 shares traded as of 9:36 a.m. ET. Average volume has been 3.1 million shares over the past 30 days.

    • Debian Family

      • I’m pushing Debian Squeeze and GNOME 2 as hard as I can

        I never really considered myself a GNOME user. Though I am. I’ve used Xfce, Fluxbox, Fvwm2, LXDE, even JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) in Puppy and FLTK in TinyCore. But most of the time I stick with the default desktop environment offered by a given distribution.

        And more often than not, that’s GNOME 2. And I’ve been using Debian Squeeze with GNOME 2 since November 2010 — almost a year now — and using it for more of my work than ever.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Why Ubuntu 11.10 fills me with rage

            Jason Perlow, ZDNet Sr. Technology Editor, searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all Linux operating systems have. Then an accidental overdose of half-baked user interface interferes with his unique mental state. And now, when Jason Perlow grows angry or outraged, a startling metamorphosis occurs.

          • Dell, Canonical to sell Ubuntu PCs at retail locations in China

            Canonical and Dell are teaming up to sell computers with Ubuntu preinstalled at stores in China. The program, which could help improve the mainstream visibility of the Linux-based operating system, will span 220 retail locations.
            According to a statement that Canonical posted this morning on its official blog, the products will be set up with marketing materials that tout the virtues of the Ubuntu platform. Retail staff will also be trained to explain the products to consumers.

          • Retail Stores in China

            On Wednesday in Beijing, Canonical and Dell announced the start of an exciting retail program to sell machines pre-loaded with Ubuntu, initially rolling out to 220 retail stores in China.

            The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.

          • 5 Alternatives to Unity in Ubuntu Oneiric

            With the past few releases, Ubuntu has been focusing more and more on their homegrown desktop Unity. Some people love it, but a lot of us don’t. Fortunately, as with all things Linux, there are many alternative options. For those of us who just can’t find a way to unite with Unity, here are 5 great options that you might find you like better.

          • Ubuntu Development Update
          • Automated deployment of Ubuntu with Orchestra

            Orchestra is one of the most exciting new capabilities in 11.10. It provides automated installation of Ubuntu across sets of machines. Typically, it’s used by people bringing up a cluster or farm of servers, but the way it’s designed makes it very easy to bring up rich services, where there may be a variety of different kinds of nodes that all need to be installed together.

          • Orchestra Provides Automatic Deployment of Ubuntu
          • Ubuntu at ARM TechCon 2011
          • OMG! Ubuntu!: The Interview!

            When it comes to reporting what is happening in and around the Ubuntu community OMG! Ubuntu! reports the news as it happens, it seems like Joey and Benjamin along with other guest bloggers and writers never tire. The list of contributors to the OMG! Ubuntu! come from many areas of the community: Canonical, Debian, Zeitgeist, The Banshee Project, elementary OS, and more. As one who personally reads 100’s of feeds, mailing lists, IRC conversations and more this is no small endeavor and one OMG! Ubuntu! seems to have down to a science.

          • Ubuntu: the dreamy wildcat flexes its claws

            What’s new about Ubuntu GNU/Linux? That is always the question that arises when the six-monthly release takes place and this time, with 11.10, the answer is probably best encapsulated by the project itself.

            The Ubuntu project site proclaims “Hey, good looking!” and nothing could be more true – most of the work since the last release, which saw the introduction of the Unity desktop, has gone into refining and beautifying the desktop and all its appendages. Ubuntu 11.10, aka Oneiric Ocelot (dreamy wildcat) now looks very good, has nice fonts and is easy on the eye.

          • Annoying “unable to find a medium containing a live file system” in Ubuntu
          • Ubuntu Community Survey Next Steps: Enhancing Recognition and Credit

            While those who do get sponsorship are naturally happy and motivated to be going to UDS, those who don’t get sponsorship support sometimes feel quite de-motivated, and some feel insecure about how Canonical or leaders in Ubuntu view their contributions and “why wasn’t I chosen, particularly given all my contributions to Ubuntu?“.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • MontaVista Announces an Advanced Linux-Based Application Environment for High Speed Packet Processing
    • ‘Bare Metal’ Linux gains data plane chops

      MontaVista Software has updated the MontaVista Linux “Bare Metal Engine” distribution with dynamically configurable data plane features. Bare Metal Engine (BME) offers a single development environment that can scale from high embedded Linux services down to the “near zero overhead” bare metal environments used in network packet processing, the company says.

    • VeriFone intros hybrid contactless payment system

      The system utilized a 32-bit ARM11 400MHz processor and the Linux OS

    • Cortex-A9/FPGA combo SoC gains open source Linux platform

      Xilinx launched an open source Linux platform and developer community for its Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform (EPP), which combines a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor and a 28nm FPGA. The Zynq-7000 EPP Linux Solution offers GNU toolchain, runtime libraries, and debuggers, plus options including a Virtual Platform hardware emulator based on Cadence VSP.

    • Linux-based payment device features NFC, color touchscreen

      VeriFone Systems announced an Linux-based Point of Sale (POS) payment device that integrates a near field communication (NFC) contactless reader. The H5000 runs Linux on an ARM11 processor, offers a 3.5-inch color touchscreen, and supports multiple payment types– including legacy magnetic stripe, EMV smartcards, and contactless cards — with a single hybrid card slot, says the company.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android, iOS Duke It Out for Smartphone Ad Supremacy – iPad’s in the Ring Alone

          Android served up more ad impressions overall in Q3 than rival iOS, at 56 percent, Millennial Media reported. For its part, ABI Media noted that in Q2, Android overtook iOS to become the market share leader in mobile application downloads. The market shares of Android and iOS were 44 percent and 31 percent, respectively, ABI said.

        • How Sweet Is Ice Cream Sandwich?

          The most important thing about Ice Cream Sandwich is that “there seems to be a change in the wind insofar as Android being a pure operating system is concerned,” said blogger Roberto Lim. “With Android 1.6 to 2.3, the ‘vanilla’ version was a pretty basic OS, which provided the minimum necessary smartphone functionality.” With ICS, “the vanilla Android install is not very much like ‘vanilla’ anymore, but more like a Banana Split.”

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • $179 Android tablet features full-sized USB port, microSD slot

        Leader International announced two Android tablets, both with full-sized USB ports and microSD slots. The $179 Impression 7 (I7) runs Android 2.2 on a 1GHz processor, and provides a seven-inch 800 x 480 resistive touchscreen, while the $349 Impression 10 (I10) runs Android 2.3 on a 1GHz Samsung Hummingbird, adding a 9.7-inch, 1024 x 768 capacitive IPS touchscreen, an HDMI port, and a two-megapixel camera.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Interview: Eagle Genomics, open source solution provider for genome content management

    F4S: Greetings Richard. Please, give us a brief introduction about your company Eagle Genomics.

    Richard: Eagle Genomics is an outsourced bioinformatics services and software company specialising in genome content management and the provision of open-source solutions. Eagle consistently delivers quality and value-for-money for customers across the biotech sector, combining cloud and NGS expertise with a track record in building scalable, efficient genomics analysis workflows.

  • Open Source, Open Science, Open Source Science

    The digital age has added significantly to the tools available to scientific work, but has also introduced new challenges. Glyn Moody describes the present situation, and suggests that we need true openness with respect to scientific software.

  • Google open sources JavaScript coverage analysis tool

    Google has announced the release of ScriptCover as an open source project. Available as an extension for the company’s Chrome web browser, ScriptCover is JavaScript coverage analysis tool that provides real-time, line-by-line code coverage statistics for web pages.

    ScriptCover displays results as the page continues to load and is automatically updated when the user interacts with the site. The reporting tool highlights each of the lines of code that have been executed for a more detailed analysis.

  • Is Open Source Innovative?

    There are numerous counterexamples to this; my analyst colleague from the 451 Group Rachel Chalmers cites Unix, others the underlying protocols of the internet and I myself would point to the more recent work that browser teams like Chrome and Mozilla are doing or the pre-Cambrian explosion currently occurring in the non-relational database market. But superficial questions like “can open source innovate” obscure real, fundamental changes in the way that software is being developed today. Changes that are important.

  • Events

    • Second day at OWF 2011
    • LinuxCon Europe: live video streaming

      For those not able to attend this year’s LinuxCon Europe conference, which is currently taking place in Prague, Czech Republic, the Linux Foundation is offering live video streaming of all the keynote sessions. Free access to the live video streams of the first ever European LinuxCon event is available on the LinuxCon Europe 2011 site (registration required).

    • LinuxCon Europe Debuts to Standing Room Only Crowd

      With flashing cameras and a crowd that flowed into the lobby where attendees could watch the keynotes on large screens, LinuxCon Europe debuted with an appearance by Linux creator Linus Torvalds and hundreds of Linux community members.

      Day one of the first-ever LinuxCon Europe was heavy on stellar content and great beer. The day started with a welcome from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin, followed quickly by the exclusive Linux Kernel Panel featuring Linus Torvalds. The rest of the day included individual sessions from “Why the Free Desktop Matters” to “File and Storage Systems: Making Complex Systems Easy to Use” and “Using Dynamic Analysis to Hunt Down Problems in Kernel Modules.” The technical content featured at Linux Foundation events is the result of detailed review by Amanda McPherson of hundreds of submissions as well as her discussions with community members about the most important topics to address that will help advance the platform.

    • Seminar about original computer system LUV-in for Linux fans

      People are invited to a Mooroopna LUV-in this weekend ? but you can leave your kaftan and hippy beads at home.

      Linux Users Victoria are holding a free information session for people eager to learn more about the original computer operating system similar to Windows and Android, but with one major exception ? there is no cost.

    • Third Day at OWF 2011

  • Web Browsers

    • Will Microsoft Return to Unfair Practices with IE and Windows?

      In April of 2000, when the U.S. Department of Justice handed down its decision that Microsoft was an “abusive monopoly” and set about imposing restrictions on the company’s business practices, many people wondered two things: 1) why did the decision arrive after so many years?; and 2) what exactly would the DOJ place restrictions on?

      Among the various restrictions that were imposed, one of the most influential was that Microsoft could not continue to tie its Internet Explorer browser to Windows as inextricably as it had, thereby creating an unfair distribution model for the browser, since other browser makers didn’t have a ubiquitous OS such as Windows to tie their browsers to. Now, more than 10 years later, the DOJ’s consent decree has lapsed, and there is a possibility that Microsoft could once again tie Internet Explorer to Windows in a number of questionable ways.

    • Chrome

      • I’m pushing Debian Squeeze and GNOME 2 as hard as I can

        Google Chrome and Chromium open-source web browsers version 15.0.874.106 has been released. Latest stable release of Chromium web browser brings many improvements, performance enhancements and fixed several security bugs. The new tab page has been redesigned to easily access your mostly visited websites, web store applications and customizable website speed dial.

    • Mozilla

  • SaaS

  • Databases

    • Oracle Formally Embraces NoSQL, Implies It Invented NoSQL

      Whether the acronym “NoSQL” stands for “not only SQL,” as some database architects content, or literally “no SQL,” up until this month, it has been taken to imply “no Oracle.” One of the many hallmarks of Oracle’s SQL RDBMS technology, historically, has been consistency — the notion that every client perceives the same view of the data at any one time. Maintaining consistency, among other factors, incurs latency issues as database sizes scale with social media into the stratosphere.

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GCC 4.6.2 Compiler Released

      GCC 4.6.2 was officially released today as the second point release in the GCC 4.6 series to address bugs and other outstanding issues. GCC 4.6.1 was released in June and the original GCC 4.6.0 release happened this past March.

  • Licensing

  • Programming

    • Dennis Ritchie Day

      For myself, I can attest that there would be no O’Reilly Media without Ritchie’s work. It was Unix that created the fertile ground for our early publishing activities; it was Unix’s culture of collaborative development and architecture of participation that was the deepest tap root of what became the open source software movement, and not coincidentally, much of the architecture of the Internet as well

    • 10gen Partners With Zend Technologies at ZendCon 2011 for MongoDB and PHP Synergy

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • Study Refutes Congressman Paul Ryan’s Claims About Upward Mobility

      Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan has been trying to dismiss recent studies suggesting America’s tax system has disproportionately benefitted the super-wealthy. But his claims about upward mobility have themselves been refuted.

      The Congressional Budget Office just released a study showing that between 1979 and 2007, income grew by 275 percent for the top 1 percent of households, whereas it grew just 18 percent for the bottom 20 percent and just under 40 percent for the next 60 percent. The income gap grew under Republican presidents who promoted low taxes on the wealthy.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Franklin Center: Right-Wing Funds State News Source

      As newsrooms across the country shave off staff due in part to slipping ad revenue and corporate media conglomeration, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, is rushing to fill the gap. The group has 43 state news websites, with writers in over 40 states. Its reporters have been given state house press credentials and its news articles are starting to appear in mainstream print newspapers in each state. Who funds Franklin and what is its agenda?

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