The fact is that there are many projects and organizations devoted to maintaining and improving Linux, there are a few organizations devoted to the promotion of Desktop Linux, but there are almost no organizations devoted to the sales and advertising of desktop Linux.
What The Linux Dairy Council prescribes is finding people that will stop and help someone in obvious distress carry some boxes inside.
Or show them that there is an easier way to use their computers.
The Linux Dairy Council Vision Statement:
The LDC is a project to help promote Linux in general, rather than specific distros. To help coordinate marketing and education activities around Linux by creating materials and organizing activities with other projects.
This week on Linux Outlaws: Dan & Fab discuss all the recent F/OSS news such as Skype open-sourcing their Linux client, Microsoft opening the PST format, Apple dropping ZFS, open source e-voting and they also interview Popey from the Ubuntu UK Podcast about Karmic Koala and why he loves the Satanic Edition so much.
And thinking of practical, once Grandpa has a Linux desktop, you’ll be able to spend your weekend with him watching football instead of updating his AVG or cleaning out malware. I don’t know about you, but I know which way I prefer to spend my weekends!
Linux isn’t perfect, Windows isn’t perfect, Apple isn’t perfect, Unix isn’t perfect. They never will be. Quit expecting them to be and take a look realistically at what each one offers that will help you make the best out of each unique situation.
The most interesting aspect of the project, from my perspective, is Mutter. Mutter is essentially Metacity with the Clutter technologies baked into it. As Joe Gregorio noted back at OSCON, Clutter’s a popular project these days, and for good reason. Built by the Intel-acquired OpenedHand team, among others, Clutter offers aesthetically pleasing, thoroughly modern graphics capabilities that, even better, are fast. Indeed, of the available compositing options for my hardware, the only one that performs adequately is the next generation option in the Clutter based GNOME Shell. That is most unusual; the bleeding edge stuff is typically very slow.
Most people tend to forget that there are still hundreds of millions of computer users worldwide still connected to the Web using 56K modems, having to dial up every time they want to enjoy the Internet experience.
Something like one year ago I switched from Linux to Mac OS X. It was not an easy switch if you think that my desktop on Linux used to be this one, that is, just fvmw2 with a minimal configuration, super fast virtual desktop, border-less windows.
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The strength of Linux, or why Mac OS X is weak as development environment
“We found an old Irwindale from 2005 sitting in a corner and we checked against that too,” adds the OpenLab CTO. “Moving up from then to now, running Linux – Linux is our OS of choice – we saw 4x performance increase from the cores, and as much as 6x with the use of symmetric multi-threading.”
Griffin’s IT team used the LAMP stack to build and deploy the services. LAMP is an open source Web development platform based on Linux. The services used Apache as the Web server, MySQL as the relational database management system and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language.
According to Steven J Vaughan-Nichols, the firm is a well-established presence in the sector and continues to meet the dedicated server needs of many customers seeking external IT support.
Located in East Orange County, the company, which provides Linux-based cluster computing power to large-scale users such as the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, secured the Sabalcore.com web domain and recently relaunched itself as Sabalcore, Inc.
Consider that a DDC-Server configured with 1TB of shared memory, 192 cores of AMD processors at 2.8 GHz and 8TB of storage, all connected via an InfiniBand switch and complete with cables, Linux OS and DDC-Pool software lists for $250,000. A DDC-Server with 256GB of shared memory, 96 cores of AMD Istanbul processors at 2.4 GHz, 4TB of storage with an InfiniBand switch, cables, Linux OS and DDC-Pool software is listed at $99,000.
Looking around the conference hall at the Cloud Computing Conference, companies such as 3tera offer a provisioning tool that is able to automatically produce images of servers, switches, and routers within a virtual environment. You need a new LINUX box, you drag and drop a pre-configured LINUX image into your environment. It “spools” and is ready for access within about 2 seconds. From the user’s perspective, it is a physical LINUX server that could very well be mounted in the next room. The object functions exactly as a physical server would behave.
Phoromatic was originally mentioned during the Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 development cycle, but the web-based service has not gone public in beta until this morning. The Phoromatic module in the Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 client provides a few updates to the Phoromatic support and interested users are encouraged to use the just-released Bardu Beta 2 or newer. This was pushed back from 2.0 Sandtorg due to strapped development resources, waiting for a few internal pts-core API changes in 2.2 Bardu, and then awaiting feedback from various PTS-using companies.
A good portion of the boot time on current Linux systems is spent on system initialisation and starting dozens of daemons sequentially. The Ubuntu 9.10 development team have started to parallelise and accelerate the boot process through the large scale use of Upstart.
This year’s Kernel Summit saw Linux developers, led by Linus Torvalds, discussing the development process and gaining an insight into how Google uses the Linux kernel in-house. Ulrich Drepper and Alan Cox think universal binaries in Linux are a step in the wrong direction. Various graphics drivers have recently been updated to add new functionality.
Skype announced that it is working on an open source UI layer for its Linux VoIP client. Although apparently not fully open source, the upcoming version of the Skype client for Linux could enable more open development of client front ends, including those for mobile devices.
So, if you really need PhotoShop, you can use it in Linux. I you don’t need Photoshop, you can run Gimp for free! It works just like Photoshop and is every bit as powerful.
What is it with installing programs these days? Just about any program you wish to install comes with some useless so called value added junk which does nothing but use up computer resources and slow it down. Being a technical person I can of course easily remove or disable those extras but I really feel sorry for those who don’t know any better.
Egoboo is a (90 megabyte!!) 3D Rogue-like game. Rogue is a very, very old game — the original adventure game, really — and Egoboo builds on its legacy, throws in a little hack-and-slash… and it’s even a bit of a RPG! There is loot, there are gribbly monsters that are out to eat your face, and there are plenty of pretty zones to explore (plus there’s a map editor!)
The KDevelop team is proud to announce the sixth beta of KDevelop4. There haven’t been any major features started since beta 5 as this is mostly a bugfix release (demonstrated by the list of fixed bugs). This also marks the end of the KDE 4.2 support. With this release KDevelop4 requires KDE 4.3 and Qt 4.5 to fully supply the GUI we want to provide our users with. It is also the last release that we’re doing on behalf of ourselves, all upcoming betas will be done together with KDE 4.4. We are aiming at releasing with KDE 4.4.0 as we think that KDevelop4 is ready feature-wise and really needs to get a first release out of the door.
Originally when I switched from GNOME to KDE 4, I kept using Compiz. But with the unknown state of Compiz++ / Compiz-Fusion, I opted to give the KDE 4 native compositing engine an honest shot.
The Amarok team is aiming to raise $10,000 for the coming year and asking users to help the project by making tax-deductible donations during our Rokvember fund raiser.
Actually, I shouldn’t say “their” mentality as I must confess that I too am a distrohopper. I started out ages ago playing with different Linux distributions and just kept right on going with it. To this day I get excited when I see that a particular distro has a new release coming out. I usually can’t wait to get my hands on it to test it and see what great new stuff is in it.
Every so often there comes a distribution that sets itself apart from all others in ways far beyond mention. Parted Magic is one of those. It is *the* defacto distribution for all hard drive maintenance. And the more it grows, the better it gets. So let’s look at this distro and see what it has to offer.
No distro is perfect. Exaggerated reports or isolated cases will not be very helpful either in assessing these things. So just keep in mind, YMMV for each time that you want to use something.
Well, it’s been a while since 5.1 packages entered into mainline and I am pleased to see that for the most part, it went pretty smooth. I think I heard more complaints about the amount of packages vs. updating issues. I can live with that. Portage is constantly changing, very active and can be a challenge to keep up to at times. This keeps entropy maintainers busy bringing you the latest and greatest stuff.
People disagree, some people think that no operating system has any need for distributions, with all their difference and their central repositories that aren’t as central. But one of the thing that impress most the users who switch is, in many cases (at least that I could look at myself) the presence of distributions and the ability to install almost any software by simply looking it up in the package manager.
Just a quick announcement from me. We have released SLAMPP 2.0.2 yesterday. This is a maintenance release of current 2.0.x tree with some fixes and new documentation. Please get your copy here at http://slampp.abangadek.com.
We are proud to announce the release of Elastix 1.6 stable. It can be downloaded in 32-bit or 64-bit ISOs. This release has several improvements from Elastix 1.5, that would fix bugs from Elastix and CentOS. Here are some of the more important changes:
* Asterisk updated to 1.4.26.1-4
* Dahdi updated to 2.2.0.2-6
There are packages that we used to have to add to Scientific Linux, that are now already in Enterprise 5, and so we do not have to add them ourselves. Fuse, and it’s kernel modules, are now provided by The Upstream Vendor (TUV). The Atheros wireless chipset is now supported by TUV.
In many of the tests Ubuntu 9.10 had carried the lead — both by small and large margins — but the Karmic Koala had stumbled when it came to the OpenGL performance, PostgreSQL, and NASA NPB. Of those areas, the OpenGL performance is the most intriguing with such a dramatic difference when using the same exact graphics driver from NVIDIA, which we will continue to explore and run other OpenGL tests available through the Phoronix Test Suite.
OK, so there’s something that always disturbs me when release time comes around. Here’s a rough chronology of every Ubuntu release (at least since I’ve been involved, so that goes back to Breezy Badger) and what the “buzz” around the internet says:
1. Alphas come out: buzz says, “not much to see here folks, move along.”
2. Beta comes out: buzz says, “wow, great release, but where’s the new artwork?” and I’m thinking “How on earth can the pull this off?”
3. RC rolls around: buzz says, “new awesomeness right around the corner!” and I’m thinking “darn it, there’s a lot more to do.”
4. Release day: buzz says, “OMG I have to download this” and I’m thinking “phew, that’s over, I’m glad I rsync’d/zsync’d yesterday”
5. The week after a release: buzz says, “Noooooo, this is the worst Ubuntu release EVER!” and I’m thinking “wow, they really did pull it off”
6. Rinse and Repeat
In this final interview in my Where Karmic’s Karma Comes From series, we meet Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu CTO and chair of the Ubuntu Technical Board. Matt brings each team together with his tireless efforts to ensure quality, professionalism, and polish to each release.
Kees Cook is the security engineer and Gerry Carr is the head of platform marketing at Canonical. In this interview they discuss the security improvements in Ubuntu 9.10, the security challenges the Ubuntu team faces as well as what the latest version of Ubuntu offers to the developer community.
Here at Canonical we are all big fans of the Creative Commons. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they have created a set of Free Culture licenses that make it simple for people to release open content. They also run a variety of resources to make finding and remixing content simple and empowering.
I’ve been playing with the latest Ubuntu desktop release, 9.10 Karmic Koala, since the first beta and I’ve now been using it full time for business work for three days. Here are my impressions and comments…
Yesterday Elizabeth Krumbach (pleia2) gave an Ubuntu Open Week presentation describing the Ubuntu Community Learning Project. This is the project that aims to create the materials that teachers can use to teach Ubuntu and other Free Software tools to everyone.
All in all Jolicloud is a very solid netbook distro. It has replaced Ubuntu Karmic as the default operating system on my Asus EEE PC. If you own a tiny computer it is definitely one worth checking out. Rock solid distro thus far and I feel the Joli team will only deliver more spectacular features before they come into a full 1.0 release.
Google has defended its decision to allow unfettered Android tweaking, saying that although this may fragment the Googlephone market, it’s what’s best for developers.
“Everybody talks about fragmentation as a bad thing, but I think you need to look at it from the perspective of the developer,” Eric Chu, Google’s group manager for Android mobile platforms, told the wireless-happy OpenMobileSummit in downtown San Francisco this afternoon. “How much work does the developer have to do to address the fragmentation? If there are a million devices and they’re in three fragments, they don’t care.”
But the first step in the Android takeover is necessarily the phones. Android 2.0 means the handsets aren’t just interesting anymore; they’re truly buyable. As Matt said this week:
In time, Android very well could be the internet phone, hands down, in terms of raw capabilities…. Android 2.0′s potential finally feels as enormous as the iPhone’s, and I get kinda tingly thinking about it.
The LiMo Foundation is heralding the launch of the Vodafone 360 Samsung M1, the second LiMo-compliant device built upon LiMo Platform release 2, writes editor Richard Wilson.
One of the most common questions we’re being asked in the aftermath of our HTC HD2 unboxing is how its on-screen QWERTY keyboard compares to one of the other eye-catching smartphones of the quarter, the Nokia N900. We’ve staged a quick size and keyboard comparison, and you can find the gallery – and read our early opinions on both devices – after the cut.
The slider mobile phone will be powered by Linux Maemo, making it the first Nokia phone to feature the company’s much-anticipated operating system. Previously, the platform has been employed solely on the company’s selection on Internet Tablets.
ABI Research is projecting that in 2009 Linux will represent 32 percent of netbook sales, far higher than the seven percent figure claimed by Microsoft, says a report. ABI also estimates that Linux will overtake Windows on netbooks by 2013, largely due to sales in less-developed countries, says the story.
Ok, so much for slogging through a lot of the details. Overall, I like the Karmic Netbook Release better than I did the previous ones. I think it is visually better, clearer, easier to understand and use. Some time ago I set up an HP Mini 2140 with UNR for a friend. I will be seeing her again soon, and I will show her the new UNR release and ask if she would like for me to upgrade it for her.
Last month we provided a Moblin 2.1 preview, but to reiterate some of the key features there is the Moblin Garage (effectively an “app store” for this mobile-oriented distribution), Clutter 1.0 integration, Bluetooth device support, improved connection management, localization support, and even a much-improved web-browser.
You have to be prepared to live with Windows XP Home, Windows 7 Starter or Linux and deal with the usual netbook constraints such as a 10.1-inch screen, no optical drive and an Intel Atom N280 processor.
“Michael Moore ignores capitalism’s blessings” is a much better article, not that I necessarily agree with the politics behind it, but simply because it wasn’t apparently written by someone who played with liquid mercury throughout their childhood.
One of the most interesting aspects of this article is that the author is holding up Open Source as a success of Capitalism and good-old-fashioned American gumption, which is quite a contrast from the usual anti-American / Communism brush that critics usually love to pull out.
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That’s a long way from having to convince people you aren’t some anti-capitalist communist zealot hippie that wants to destroy the economy with Free Software.
Are you skilled with the super powerful open source 3D graphics and animation application Blender? If you’re unfamiliar with Blender, it’s so flexible that impressive, full-length animated movies have been created with it. In this post, you’ll find a review of an online book on beginning and advanced Blender skills. The book is called Blender Basics.
One platform that began to take shape at that time was focused not on hardware or software but on licensing. Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT to start the GNU project, an effort to produce a clone of the Unix operating system to be distributed under a license that would ensure users’ freedom to run, modify and redistribute the software. The open-source model has since driven much innovation in enterprise technology.
Scientists of Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) release EtherNet/IP? open-source software stack to help product developers cost-effectively connect devices to industrial Ethernet.
The administration of the Tuscany region in Italy this month published a new version of Sagadb, an open source Geographic Information System (GIS) application.
The software allows users to view a map to access public available information. The system is also being used by museums, libraries, courts of law and by health care organisations in the region.
The 471 schools of the Paris region (officially referred to as ‘Île-de-France region’) that are to be involved in the portal project that was announced in October 2009 will be using Eliot, a web-based workflow software that was originally developed for three schools of the region.
The founders and co-lead of Business Intelligence Reporting Tools (BIRT) are looking ahead when it comes to the next generation of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), open-source BI software. In an event held Tuesday in New York City, San Mateo-based Actuate offered partners and analysts a peak at the company’s next release, Actuate 11.
Sun Microsystems has announced that Columbia University will use an open source Sun solution to run its digital preservation project, and also that the University of Zurich is deploying Project Wonderland projects to advance an ambitious global eLearning initiative.
The Sakai Foundation is seeking nominees for its third annual international Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award. Representatives from the Foundation announced next year’s competition at the EDUCAUSE Conference in Denver, CO, today. The intent of the award is to highlight examples of innovative and transformative educational applications of Sakai.
Open source is obviously often viewed as a part of agile development and more effective software development, as well as distribution. As the pressure to keep up in mobile, cloud computing and elsewhere continues to build, it will be interesting to see how far open source software’s speed advantages will take it.
Mozilla plans to overhaul the look and feel of Firefox for Windows, a redesign that will resemble Google’s Chrome in several key elements, according to screenshots and discussions on the open-source developer’s Web site.
Mozilla may have released the first beta of Firefox 3.6 nearly two months late, but the organization believes the final version still will arrive on schedule before the end of the year.
The Mozilla wiki page on version 3.6, code-named Namoroka, listed early September for the scheduled release of the first beta, but it actually arrived October 30. Despite that, Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering, said Mozilla wants to release the browser before the holidays and is sticking by the overall schedule for the open-source Web browser.
Firefox is one of the towering achievements of the open-source movement, accounting for almost a quarter of all Web site visits just five years after its launch. One of the reasons for its enormous popularity is that it can be easily customised with a range of add-ons — from download accelerators to funky themes, they make your browsing experience faster, slicker or just better looking. The official Mozilla Firefox add-ons site now lists over 10,000 extensions for download.
It’s been 10 years since the Apache Software Foundation hung out its feather, creating what has become a series of communities filled with focused project entrepreneurs working on a laundry list of innovative efforts, one of which landed in the White House just a few weeks ago.
The Apache Software Foundation is celebrating 10 years since its incorporation, and so we’re partying like it’s 1999 here at ApacheCon. By which I mean ApacheCon has remained true to its roots with a community-driven feel that seemed more common in the Open Source events of 10 years ago.
One of the many things I love about working in the world of open source is that this field is much more about passion than profit. Think of how many extra hours you or your friends and colleagues put in on nights and weekends (and occasional holidays). You don’t do that for just a “Job”.
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But when I step back and look at all the individual pieces we contribute – like when Emma takes the time to teach some elderly people how to get a handle on their gadgets, or when ZaReason works with volunteers to refurbish and donate 16 computers to Kids on Computers, or The Apache Foundation works with partners to provide live streaming for FREE to people who can’t make it to ApacheCon US this year, or Google’s amazing outreach with the Google Summer of Code – I see that our small parts are actually increasing accessibility in a big way.
Users of the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) now have one-stop access to Zend Server via ULN, helping to speed installation for their PHP-based Web applications. The Unbreakable Linux Network is a resource for Oracle Unbreakable Linux support subscribers, with access to software patches, updates, and fixes.
“Oracle and Zend have a long-standing commitment to the PHP community, with a history of collaboration that has ensured integration between Oracle and Zend’s PHP-based solutions,” said Andi Gutmans, Zend CEO. “Together, we are now delivering an enterprise-grade PHP stack from top to bottom supporting the development, deployment, and management of business-critical PHP applications on Oracle. This full stack will also ease deployment in virtual environments using Oracle VM.”
The Dutch government program “Netherlands in Open Connection” and OpenDoc Society have announced the public availability of a beta version of Officeshots.org. Officeshots is an online webservice that makes it possible to compare the output quality of various office suites as well as web-based productivity applications. The project is financially supported by a grant from the Netherlands based not-for-profit investor NLNet Foundation.
Based on OpenOffice, Symphony includes a spreadsheet, word processor and graphics presentation application. “You give them e-mail, but you have to give them a word processor as well so they can deal with documents that arrive,” said Lobo.
Computers cannot easily parse government documents rendered within the Portable Document Format, according to the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to government transparency. The group argues that because of this, the widely used document standard is actually detrimental to government transparency efforts.
The difficult parsing means that people have to work harder to reuse government data, the organization asserts.
The European Network and Information Security Agency (Enisa) today stepped into the row over version 2 of the EU Interoperability Framework, which aims to offer governments and businesses guidance on using open source software.
Remember Gopher? The protocol predated the Web, and a hardy band of enthusiasts have kept Gopherspace alive. Ars takes a look back at Gopher and shows you how to use it to browse Twitter and 4chan.
Denmark is a country which has traditionally embraced modern technology. For over a decade pupils have been able to type up their exam answers on computers.
The last article talked about the anatomy of SSDs and the origins of some of the their characteristics. In this article, we break down tuning storage and file systems for SSDs with an eye toward improving performance and helping overcome some of the platform’s limitations.
It looks like AMD and Globalfoundries are going to set up shop in Dubai after taking a hefty chunk of change from an investment firm based in the emirate. AMD CEO Dirk Meyer told Emirates Business that the firm is looking to a open chip design center in Dubai, and maybe a fabrication plant in Abu Dhabi.
Second Life is attracting a cult following among businesses, who say the virtual world gives them richer collaboration than teleconference calls or video conferences. But Second Life still has limitations that pose barriers to enterprise adoption.
Was the risk that Goldman hedged with AIG as bad as Goldman Sachs Alternative Mortgage Products’ GSAMP Trust 2006-S3? Any risk manager worth their salt would have reasonable doubt about this deal and conduct a fraud audit. A fraud audit doesn’t mean you are accusing anyone of fraud, only that the audit will be thorough, because there are indications of grave problems. If there is fraud, however, the audit should be rigorous enough to uncover it.
The recent revelations about the criminal “pump and dump” speculative behavior of the Goldman Sachs Syndicate, along with its heartless new role as Repo-Man of Americans’ homes, drives home the point, once again, that the federal government must do something to tame Wall Street or we’re just setting ourselves up to be scammed again.
Goldman has yet to explain why it risked its blue-chip reputation and financial health to buy and repackage at least $135 billion in loans mostly originated by companies that have since gone bust.
Looking at the list, it seems to comprise men who are very long on hubris, and who have no doubt that if they can run Goldman Sachs, they can do anything else, with normal rules not really applying to them. All of them, post-Goldman, have been tarnished. If Lloyd Blankfein has any sense, he’ll retire quietly.
Suits filed by the pension funds, however, allege that Goldman made materially false or misleading statements in its public offerings, failing to disclose that many loans were based on inflated appraisals and were bought from firms with poor lending practices.
Yet, thanks to U.S. taxpayers’ bailout and its dumping of bad debts, Goldman Sachs is more than back on its feet and planning to pay billions in bonuses.
In the recent report published by McClatchy some new and interesting details concerning those hedges are being brought into the spotlight. We hope that the regulatory bodies will perform their task and launch an investigation about the nature of those hedges.
Meanwhile revelations continue to surface about Goldman’s “pump-and-dump” operation with a mountain of financial derivatives which they claimed to believe were rock-solid…
THE nation’s peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government’s climate change policies.
President Obama just nominated Islam Siddiqui, a top official from CropLife — the pesticide industry’s powerful trade group — as America’s chief agricultural negotiator for international trade. If confirmed by the Senate, Siddiqui, who has spent the last several years of his career fighting various restrictions and bans on environmentally hazardous pesticides, would bring that inappropriately aggressive stance on broadening pesticide use to the White House and influence trade negotiations with Europe and the developing world.
Kellogg, the nation’s largest cereal maker, is being called to task by critics who object to the swine flu-conscious claim now bannered in bold lettering on the front of Cocoa Krispies cereal boxes: “Now helps support your child’s IMMUNITY.”
Of all claims on cereal boxes, “this one belongs in the hall of fame,” says Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “By their logic, you can spray vitamins on a pile of leaves, and it will boost immunity.”
Then there are the threats. Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!” Other bracing messages include “You have blood on your hands” and “Your day of reckoning will come.” A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor’s two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit’s face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.
WHILE MANY HAVE WELCOMED the unfettered reign of the Internet service providers (ISPs) coming to an end in the US in favour of network neutrality, a team of learned legal minds has warned that all might not be as it seems.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided that it will police the Internet to make sure that the large ISPs – telecom and cable companies, mostly – do not force a two-tiered Internet on the American public.
Given its history of provocative and occasionally aggressive blog posts, it’s actually a little surprising that popular law blog Above the Law has not been sued before. A blogger’s life is inherently filled with peril. We bet our houses with every blog post, and eventually the law of large numbers starts working against us. The risks are even greater for bloggers covering legal topics. By definition, we routinely cover people who are prepared to mix it up in court. As a result, it’s almost inevitable that blawgers who keep at it long enough will get sued eventually.
Stephanie Migot writes in to let us know how UK law firm Wragge & Co has decided to set up a special “cyber tracing” team, whose job it will be to scour the internet for anyone making negative anonymous comments about any of their clients and then take action.
The goal of any business, generally, is to be profitable. The simplest equation for a successful business is to sell something for more than it cost you to produce. The more of that you can do, the more successful you are. However, markets change all the time and a strong business responds to that change to maximize its long term profits.
But when it comes to the entertainment industry there’s an odd dynamic at work. It seems more important to punish those involved in the changing market, rather than focus on maximizing profit. Yet it does no good to punish people who will never buy if it doesn’t do anything to increase actual revenue.
Now Lucasfilm has brought an action in the Court of Appeal to try to prove that the Stormtrooper suits are sculptures and therefore works of art covered by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.
With the Lisbon Treaty being signed by all European Union member states, the Pirate Party has gained another seat in the European Parliament. The second Pirate Party seat will be occupied by the 22 year old Amelia Andersdotter, who will become the youngest Member of the European Parliament.
Mr. Powers advocated using free and open source software like the Linux operating system and OpenOffice. Instead of investing in proprietary software which costs hundreds of dollars per user, Mr. Powers recommended investing in people to support free software. As a professional system administrator and IT director of over 15 years, he is well familiar with the total cost of ownership of large enterprise deployments. At the school district where he works, we has been able to convince the board that savings to the tune of $90K+ of savings that Linux is worth doing, even though this means training adults to use unfamiliar Linux desktop software such Open Office. Children, according to Mr. Powers, do not care what software they use therefore they do not require Linux desktop training. As you are honest about the software’s shortcomings, moving to Linux will be worth it.
The following Linux distributions were announced last week: Endian Firewall 2.3, Toorox 10.2009, Ubuntu 9.10 and openSUSE 11.2 RC2. In other news: Nvidia releases the new 190.42 video driver for Linux users, now with support for OpenGL 3.2. For this week, we had the pleasure of reviewing the PS3 Media Server 1.10.5 application. We are also proud to announce gedit is the “Application of the Month” for October! The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases.
There has always been a dearth in quality training material in Linux System Administration. And if there are resources on the Net, they are hard to find. Now here is a new venture by John Yerhot who endevours to provide very well made videos which explain how to use different commands in Linux, useful to people who administer Linux servers.
From some of the comments to the post, it’s not clear that this problem is, in fact, affecting all Linux users. (And on a side note, one of the workarounds suggested is installing the Firefox User Agent Switcher extension that makes Firefox “look like” IE to sites that don’t allow Firefox).
This year’s LugRadio Live conference, which took place in Wolverhampton on Saturday the 24th of October, may again like last years, be the last. LugRadio Live 2009 was organised by the Wolves LUG, Wolverhampton’s own Linux User Group (LUG) and included attendees from locations as far away as Russia and New York – Jono Bacon, one of the LugRadio founders even flew in from San Francisco where he now lives.
Let us suppose that you have carried out a full port of a piece of mainframe software, and it runs on the target platform.
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However, it is likely that there will be more challenges in the near future. What if the application needs to be moved to an internal or external cloud in the near future? Get-the-job-done mainframe migration does not guarantee readiness for a cloud. Is there a possibility that the app may need to be moved from Windows to Linux or back? Can you get more out of the migrated app, such as composition with other apps to enhance or integrate business processes? What if you have to combine the app with another from a company you just acquired?
I had the very good pleasure today of meeting with Joe Golden of the old Green Mountain Linux company up in Vermont. He expressed to me a strong desire to help people get in touch with Free and Open Source ideals and importantly get people to recognise the community efforts that go into making all this great software.
Downloading GNU Linux software was cited as one of the legal uses of BitTorrent during the landmark court case between internet service provider, iiNet, and the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT).
Most MIDs tend to have pretty anemic hardware. Not so with the Soyea MID Z5 (Engadget). This bad boy dual-boots Windows XP and Linux, which should satisfy the hardcore open source geeks among us. In addition to the unique OS combo, the Z5 has some pretty intense hardware.
Hey linux guys! Who said I forgot about you? As a linux fan I know you like those awesome Linux wallpapers as they simply show the difference. I had some of those cool Linux wallpapers on my pc and thought about compiling a list. So I went to look for some more cool Linux wallpapers and here is a list of 20 of the best and free Linux wallpapers ever.
Bomgar (News – Alert) Corporation, specializing in appliance-based remote support software, has announced the expansion of its Linux capability to support the needs of IT systems administrators during a Linux remote support session. The new Bomgar 10.4 offers platform support to technicians for running Bomgar from anUbuntu ( News – Alert), RedHat and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
VMware is upping the fight with rival Parallels after it upgraded its Fusion 3 software, which allows the use of Windows, Linux, and Mac virtual machines on a physical Mac system.
At the moment, 3Leaf has two configurations of server clusters it is selling. A base DDC-Server has eight server nodes, with a total of 256 GB of memory, 96 Opteron cores (using the Istanbul chips) running at 2.4 GHz, 4 TB of disk capacity, an InfiniBand switch, the DDC-Pool software, and a Linux license for all the nodes; it sells for $99,000, which is a fraction of the cost of a big RISC/Unix server. (Yeah, that’s the point.)
By 2004, when a group of friends and I founded the Open Source Business Conference, there was significant, growing awareness of open source, but its adoption was still stymied by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, much of it fomented by Microsoft (Steve Ballmer in 2001: “Linux is a cancer”) and the SCO Group (lawsuit over the provenance of Linux code in 2003).
Today, SCO Group, once a high-flier, is struggling for existence. Meanwhile, Microsoft has committed another $100,000 to Apache Software Foundation, has started its own open-source foundation, and has embedded significant bits of open-source code within its proprietary programs, among other things.
Linux, for its part, struggled to get noticed in data centers back in 2003. It has since become essential, mission-critical infrastructure across the Global 2000 ranking of public companies
Arkeia, which shipped the industry’s first network backup solution for Linux in 1999, says it plans to integrate Kadena’s technology in its system. Arkeia says Kedena’s chief technology officer, Tamir Ram, also will join Arkeia as chief architect.
Linux Security had the chance to talk with Eddy Nigg, founder of StartSSL, an “alternative” CA, by any meaning. Their business model is quite different then that of other well known CAs, with a pricing policy absolutely counter to current trends: once a customer verified its identity, any number of certificates can be obtained for free, payment is only required for those steps requiring human intervention (usually identification and release of EV certificates).
It’s been over two weeks since -rc5, partly because of a very quiet week there due to lots of kernel people (including me) being in Tokyo for the annual kernel summit, but also partly because we had an annoying problem with ext4 filesystem corruption after unclean shutdowns.
The 2009 Linux Kernel Summit was held in Tokyo, Japan on October 19 and 20. Jet-lagged developers from all over the world discussed a wide range of topics. LWN’s Jonathan Corbet was there, and has written the following summaries.
Finally, ATI Radeon customers under Linux can use XvBA, but it is not through using XvBA directly. AMD and Splitted Desktop Systems have been collaborating to develop xvba-video, which is an XvBA back-end for VA-API. Splitted Desktop Systems is the company that brought H.264 VA-API GPU video acceleration for Gnash, VA-API support in MPlayer and FFmpeg, and a NVIDIA VDPAU back-end for VA-API.
Last December the Linux folks at VIA Technologies had released their Chrome 9 series DRM code, which is needed for Linux 3D support with these newer-generation VIA IGPs, but this initial version ended up getting rejected from inclusion into the mainline kernel on the basis of the rest of VIA’s 3D stack for the Chrome 9 being closed-source and some problems with the code itself. The situation was similar to that of Intel’s Poulsbo DRM being rejected from reaching the mainline Linux kernel earlier this year.
The Mesa 3D graphics library on Linux has been moving along at a brisk pace lately with a frequent stream of new releases as many features arrive like new Gallium3D state trackers, maturing of new hardware support (particularly with the ATI Radeon graphics), and new OpenGL extension support. Mesa 7.6 was released in September, but now Intel’s lead OpenGL contributor, Ian Romanick, has proposed a release schedule for Mesa 7.7.
While not very extensive, a bit more information is also available on the X.Org Wiki with regard to the status of Gallium3D. We will have more information soon.
Symantec Corp. released a new version of its bare-metal restore software that adds support for Linux servers and tightens integration for centralized management of server backups.
BakBone Software, a provider of Universal Data Management solutions, has announced that its Linux-based data protection solution, “NetVault,” has helped hospice care services provider VistaCare to manage backup files in an easy way.
If you’re like most computer users, your hard drive is probably stuffed to the gills with movies, pictures, music, and media files you want to hang on to. If you’re trying to figure out a good way to manage them all, have a look at Moovida, an open source media player that’s so snappy you might kick your current player to the curb.
In the last couple of days, both Google’s Chrome browser and Mozilla’s Firefox have come out with new betas claiming improved performance. Why not compare these new betas head-to-head?
To be fair, speed isn’t everything; each of the new browser versions add new capabilities in addition to performance. The new Chrome beta offers bookmark syncing, similar to what Opera has had for over a year with its Opera Link service. Meanwhile, the Firefox 3.6 beta, which was released last Friday night, incorporates Mozilla’s Personas feature, which lets users customize the look of the browser with the click of a button. It also warns users about out-of-date plugins, and adds a number developer-focused capabilities, like more support for open web video, CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies, and the Web Open Font Format.
Allmyapps makes software installation a breeze. No matter how many applications you need, 1 click is all you need to have all your favorite applications installed on your PC.Allmyapps also keeps your applications safe! Would you need to reinstall your system, Allmyapps takes care of reinstalling all your favorite applications in the blink of an eye.
Two of the major components that will be part of the GNOME 3.0 desktop are GNOME Shell and Zeitgeist. The GNOME Shell redefines the GNOME desktop by taking over the responsibilities of the GNOME Panel in GNOME 2.xx along with the role of the window manager (and it also supports Clutter for making a nice, attractive user-experience). Zeitgeist in the simplest form is an event logging framework to help users find files and other user activity events in a structured way. Unfortunately, both Zeitgeist and the GNOME Shell are running behind schedule and will likely not be ready for GNOME 2.30.
Well, I use Ubuntu at home, and something linux-y at work, I don’t know what. I’m very much a command line person, having used Unix since version 6, somewhere in the 70s. And in research I’m very much an infrastructure guy. So I’m not well versed in the KDE and Gnome world.
KDE 4.3.3 has a number of improvements that will make your life just a little bit better. Some of KWin’s effects have been smoothed and freed of visual glitches, JuK should now be more stable, KDE PIM has seen its share of improvements while in the back-rooms of KDE, the developers are working hard on porting all applications to the new Akonadi storage and cache. The changelog has more, if not exhaustive, lists of the improvements since KDE 4.3.2.
Mandriva, which is headquartered in France and also has offices in Brazil and the US, hasn’t updated its main website to reflect this new release yet, but there’s a 2010.0 Tour available, as well as Release Notes to pour over.
Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat today got its freestanding, bare-metal Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor, a hardened version of the KVM hypervisor it took control of last summer, to market. That makes Red Hat a player as x64 servers the world over are set for a massive wave of virtualization.
The open source industry needs profitable champions to demonstrate success, and attract funding and participation in open source, according to Red Hat CEO.
In an interview with ZDNet Asia Wednesday, Jim Whitehurst said revenue models of open source proponents such as Red Hat itself and Google, have brought success to the respective companies and allowed them to contribute back to the open source community. Google relies on ad-based revenue, while Red Hat’s revenue runs on a subscription model.
Red Hat has been talking about its new virtualization strategy for much of 2009. Today, the Linux vendor is making good on that talk with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes a standalone hypervisor (RHEF-H) as well as a management platform (RHEV-M).
With Tuesday’s release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager (RHEV-M) for servers, the company has completed the first phase of a server virtualization rollout that effectively now puts KVM front and center. Red Hat released KVM commercially for the first time in September as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.
will allow organisations to better implement and manage server virtualisation setups, and let administrators manage virtualised server deployments based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.
I haven’t seen it mentioned on Slashdot or LWN yet… and I even emailed LWN informing them… but Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers and the accompanying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor products today. There are a slew of press releases and demo videos. They even had a webcast press conference. Oh, and hey, they also released all of the manuals too.
Centrify announced last week that it has added Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition to the long list of non-Windows operating systems whose authentication it has integrated with Active Directory. It has supported Ubuntu for quite some time, but what really exited the Centrify folk was the fact that this version of Ubuntu includes an open source cloud computing environment that can be easily integrated with Active Directory through the Centrify Suite for identity, access and privilege management.
The ability to run Ubuntu on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure is not new, but Karmic consolidates the direction with supported images for the private Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and EC2.
The latest version of Ubuntu Server (9.10) includes the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), which is actually powered by Eucalyptus. The ability to deploy a “cloud” on any server running Ubuntu is really quite amazing, especially given the compatibility of Eucalyptus with Amazon and the plethora of application images available for nearly immediate deployment. It supports both a public and private option, and a hybrid model, and comes replete with management tools designed to make building, deploying, and managing your own personal, private cloud a breeze.
Mumbai: UK-based software firm Canonical Ltd is banking on Karmic Koala, the latest version of its free Linux-based operating system (OS) Ubuntu that it launched last week, to penetrate markets such as India where an impending launch of third generation (3G) services is expected to make cloud computing accessible to individual users.
In one of the following “open-space” session John Willis gave some great insights about the new Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) which is now available in the Ubuntu Karmic release.
All in all, Ubuntu isn’t too hard to use or learn for anyone who doesn’t have much technical knowledge. While some of it will be a challenge, most of it isn’t more difficult than Mac or Windows. The look and feel might take some time to get used to, but that’s the initial buy-in of picking up a new OS. Knowing the names and locations of what you are looking for can be tricky at first, but you learn pretty quickly.
Want a program that doesn’t come with the operating system? Easy. Use the Ubuntu Software Center, Ubuntu’s new one stop application ‘store.’ I put store in quotes because it’s all free. With Windows, you know the drill. Go to your local store, poke around what’s available on Download.Com and Tucows, etc. etc. Just be sure to have your credit-card ready since a good deal of Windows software isn’t open source or free.
During the install we were also offered an encrypted home folder, protected by username and password. There is no nonsense about needing a premium edition to get such features; Ubuntu users can have it all.
I’m please to (mostly) give this release of Kubuntu a thumbs up. Yes, there were some things I didn’t like but overall I think this is a step up from the last release and it’s quite usable. I’d like to see a better software management tool but it is functional as it is (though it leaves much to be desired in some ways) and I don’t think it’s a show-stopper.
Kubuntu can be used by beginners and more experienced users alike. However, beginners might want to opt for the KDE version of Linux Mint after it is updated to incorporate the latest version of Ubuntu (9.10). It’s not that Kubuntu isn’t worth using, it’s just that Linux Mint is a bit more elegant and includes additional software that makes using it easier and more comfortable right from the start.
Still, I think that Kubuntu is worth a download and well worth considering if you’re a KDE fan.
Nonetheless, there’s virtually nothing an Ubuntu desktop machine can’t do that a Windows one can, and it’s all for free. For that reason alone it makes a lot of sense to at least consider a roll-out or a feasibility study to assess the costs of staff retraining, should you decide to abandon the Microsoft ship.
As Linux matures, it’s becoming more and more of an OS accessible to the average user. KK is another step in that direction. There are still a few foreign concepts for a Windows convert to absorb, but on the whole Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, is a package that won’t be a horrible stretch for the novice, yet contains enhancements for the Linux guru as well.
The M14Kc core builds on the base M14K core with additional features for embedded applications such as home entertainment, home networking and personal mobile entertainment. These applications require a compact footprint but also the ability to execute increasingly complex software algorithms on an RTOS or Linux. Based on the popular MIPS32 4KEc™ micro-architecture, which provides a powerful Linux and Java engine and superior performance for the Android platform, the M14Kc core has a full cache controller and translation lookaside buffer (TLB) memory management unit (MMU).
Techsol announced it is now shipping its Linux-ready Medallion Touch Panel Computers (TPCs) with Python-GTK support. The new support enables developers to develop embedded GUIs using Python-GTK on a desktop PC and easily load it onto Techsol’s TPC touch-panel systems, thereby accelerating proof-of-concept design, says the company.
Chinese manufacturer Soyea has begun taking orders for a mobile Internet device (MID) that runs Linux or Windows XP on Intel’s dual-speed, MID-oriented Z515 Atom CPU. Soyea’s Z5 is equipped with 1GB RAM, an 8GB SSD, a five-inch touchscreen, plus 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, and a three-megapixel webcam.
Marvell Semiconductor announced a partnership with electronic paper display vendor E Ink, targeting joint development of processors for e-readers. Based on Marvell’s new Armada SoCs (system on chips), the technology forms the basis of Android e-readers from Entourage Systems and Spring Designs and is also said to be available in turnkey platforms.
CHIP MAKER MARVELL is planning on cashing in on the expected popularity of e-readers with some new partners.
Looking at the popularity and hype over readers like Amazon’s Kindle and the Sony Reader, Marvell has seen an opportunity to get in on a growing market.
None of this stops you from downloading DRM-free e-books, and here the news is more promising with the whole Project Gutenberg library and other gratis online sources at your fingertips. The Opus has 1GB of on-board storage which, Bookeen says, is enough for 1000 books. Not enough? There’s a Micro SD card slot in the Opus’ top edge.
MIPS Technologies announced two new MIPS32 cores, including one that’s optimized for Linux. Both the M14K core and the M14Kc — a superset that incorporates Android-ready, Linux/Java microcode — support MIPS’ microMIPS instruction set architecture, enabling 1.5 DMIPS/MHz performance and advanced code compression that can reduce code size by 35 percent, says the company.
Verizon Wireless, in the Basking Ridge section of Bernards, last week unveiled the Droid, its first smartphone to run on Google Inc.’s open-source Android operating system.
Can iPhone remain the king of smartphones? Will WebOS win back the Palm faithful? And what will 20+ Android phones on the market mean for the platform? It is going to be an interesting year. I’m looking forward to next year’s conference to see which players are left standing and in what positions.
While Symbian continues to dominate the smartphone market it could soon be facing increasing competition from a new quarter – Maemo.
There’s no debating that the Symbian platform remains the daddy of the smartphone world: one in every two sold today carries the Symbian OS.
But there could be clouds on the horizon. According to the analysts, while the number of Symbian phones sold will continue to increase over the coming years, its years of growth will eventually come to an end with a fall in device shipments in 2014.
Sony Ericsson announced its first Android phone, along with a “UX” user interface targeting social networking. The Xperia X10 offers from 8 to 16GB of flash storage, a four-inch touchscreen, and an 8.1-megapixel camera with face recognition and geo-tagging, plus the usual 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS features.
Available in “Luster White” or “Sensuous Black”, the 119mm x 63mm x 13mm device weighs 135g and features a 4in, 480 x 854 capacitive touchscreen display.
“Microsoft is being squeezed from one end by this open source approach from the likes of Android, Symbian open source, Maemo and LiMo, and squeezed from the other by RIM and Apple, which offer closed environments that users are very happy with,” she said.
A few things, however, are quite clear. The N900 runs on Nokia’s “other” operating system, Maemo, which is 80% based on Linux and is designed for better applications processing, storage, and browsing than typical smartphone operating systems. Nokia has put a lot of thought and effort into producing a device that integrates modern computing applications, such as the ability to run multiple chats simultaneously, and video capability from video streaming technology vendor Qik.
Litl hasn’t said what OS the Webbook uses, but it certainly has a Moblin look about it, with its presentation of website bookmarks, contacts, media files, social networking accounts and so on as on-screen widgets. It has true widgets too.
So, with these changes I have ended up with what I consider to be a very usable netbook desktop for the standard Ubuntu distribution. I think it is good for experienced users, who know their way around and don’t need to have everything spread open in front of them all the time. Next up, I’ll take a look at the Karmic Netbook Remix, and see what has been done to make Ubuntu even more user friendly on netbooks.
An ARM based XO-1.75 on the other hand is much more of an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary step into the future. So many people, especially a certain Charbax, had long expected OLPC to move from an x86 to an ARM design.
You see, non-Free software is a detour on the way to Software Freedom. Sometimes you might have to take a detour to get to where you need to go, sure. But you’d rather not, and no one save perhaps a roadside vendor or two pretends that the detour route is just as good as the desired route.
One does not choose not Free Software out of desire but one may settle on a not Free solution out of immediate necessity, but that actually a limited-term compromise. It’s not a matter of arguing that not Free software can’t be useful or should never be used; it is recognizing that not Free software is a detour, a distraction, something that increases the time it takes to reach the desired destination.
The team says the open source OpenNap 2.0, still under development, will ignore “copyrighted” music files in an attempt to avoid the sort of RIAA scrutiny that shut down the original Napster and its open source clone, the first OpenNap. They don’t seem totally clear on how to do this — only that it’s worth doing because when the first Napster came into being, no licensed online source offered a comprehensive catalog of music. Given today’s legitimate online music marketplace, these guys think it’s time for a non-infringing descendant of Napster.
When you start Plone, you spool up the Zope application server and then Plone on top of it. Zope tends to use quite a bit of RAM so expect very large memory footprints for Plone compared to a system run on LAMP architecture. Plone also spools a large number of content items into RAM as well. This feature is configurable and results in somewhat better performance if you have the RAM to handle it. My own view is that Zope and Plone are built with this large content cache to improve upon marginal performance, perhaps due to the custom object database that comes native to Plone.
SMEs may not be spending so much on security, and some are turning to open source to reduce capex. Security may be seen as just another tick and open-source products appear a low-cost alternative.
The blogosphere was all a-twitter yesterday when rumors surfaced that Skype, the popular internet telephony application, would be released as open source “in the nearest future“. It turns out that Skype’s plans are not so grandiose, and even if they were, questions about who owns the code would prevent it from happening.
Dear diary…ermm readers *hust*… this is my first post on this blog so please be gentle with me! I am sort of helping out now and then since qudobup is busy with other stuff. Beeing a forum regular I had to help out of course, even if I might not have the time to post that often.
RedHat might not have been able to compete with software giants in terms of funding, talent, or even passion – but they did have one thing in their favor.
In today’s new business TV show, RedHat founder Bob Young tells the story of the company he created, and how open source development revolutionised the software industry.
A health informatics professor from Sydney University today said Australia’s e-health systems should be strictly open source rather than using proprietary software.
The disaster management system has been used earlier by various institutions, NGOs and even individuals to help disaster mitigation including during the recent West Sumatra earthquake.
Sahana is an integrated information system that was created to take on various disasters. The system enables the government to collaborate with NGOs, social organizations and volunteers to perform integrated steps.
Funambol has its developers in Italy, Zapatec in the Ukraine, but both have operations in Silicon Valley that will be consolidated in Redwood City. Zapatec CEO Dror Matalon will become vice president of emerging technologies for the combined company, said Funambol vice president of worldwide marketing Hal Steger.
The combined company is focused on a tough problem for mobile developers, namely how do you create apps that integrate with native apps, yet don’t have to be completely rewritten for each platform.
Dreamticket contacted Suretec to discuss possibly installing an open source call recording system, that is, using software that does not entail hefty license fees. Such ‘open source’ software is fast being adopted by companies and local authorities alike, as there is greater choice and flexibility, increased security, greater reliability and stability, lower technology costs – and the use of open standards means vendor independence.
Collecting money from customers should be the easy part of your business, but an billing system that underperforms can make life unnecessarily difficult for CIOs.
In this edition of 5 Open Source Products to Watch, we take a look at billing systems. That’s right, there are open source applications available for invoicing and billing customers. They’re open source, Web-based and can be extended and integrated to suit specific needs.
Until we cross the border into Utopia, we’re going to continue to see the biggest investments in open-source innovation come from Google and its peers: companies with wallets fat with proprietary profits.
Google just opened the Google Wave developer sandbox for federation. Developers can now begin prototyping tools against WaveSandbox.com. Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers. Google also released a how-to document that explains how to set up a Java-based Wave server over the weekend. More details about how to implement the Wave Federation Protocol can be found here.
Showcasing its Open Computing portfolio and partner solutions at the Educause Conference 2009, Sun Microsystems is reinforcing its position as a leader in open source technologies for the education community. It today announced that Columbia University will use an open source Sun solution to run its digital preservation project, and also that the University of Zurich is deploying Project Wonderland projects to advance an ambitious global eLearning initiative.
EU antitrust regulators are concerned that Oracle, which has a large business in proprietary software, won’t be a good home for Sun’s open-source MySQL database business. According to the report, Oracle is unyielding, offering no concessions to deal with the EU’s concerns.
One of the greatest things about the open source philosophy is that its principles can be applied to projects that help mankind. Content management systems, media apps, and gaming software all have their place in the FOSS ecosystem, but when projects like the Pink Army Cooperative come along, it reminds people of just how powerful the open source doctrine really is.
Founded in March of this year, Canadian-based Pink Army Cooperative is using open source synthetic biology to create better drugs to fight breast cancer. The organization is comprised of members who pay $21 CDN to join the cooperative and, in turn, receive a small economic stake in the co-op.
The OpenTaps development team has announced the availability of the first preview of version 1.4 of OpenTaps, an open source ERP and CRM suite (Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management). OpenTaps is intended as a complete open source platform covering the areas of ERP, CRM and business intelligence. The software package utilises Apache OFBiz, BI tools Pentaho and JasperReports and Funambol Data Synchronisation Server. Funambol facilitates data synchronisation between mobile devices and for example the Outlook email client.
rSmart, the provider of enterprise support for open source application software in education, today announced impressive growth for its rSmart Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software and support services. Fourteen new academic institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz and University of the Pacific, as well as the open source Kuali Foundation, have implemented the rSmart solution this year.
The basic principles around revenue, profit, loss, taxes, payroll, overhead, accounting, sales, incorporation, health care, and human resources all apply. You can be a starving open source software entrepreneur as easily as a starving proprietary software entrepreneur. No one will excuse basic business failures and screw-ups just because you use open source. Make sure that you will produce a product that people want and in some way will pay for, no matter how indirectly.
Open source is government-free and self-sustaining
In fact, many public-domain innovations have developed into their own financially sustainable system. Much of the Internet is run by patent-free “open source” software. Open source permits anyone to modify a program, as long as their modifications are made publicly available.
As some open-source projects reach millions of individual contributors, financial assistance is needed to pay for websites and data storage. Technology megacorporations, such as Cisco, happily sponsor open-source software; it not only gives them great publicity, but ensures access to software they find more efficient than commercial products.
Chris heads federal affairs at Sun, Paul is GM of Red Hat’s public sector team, and John’s a Mercury Federal exec. Paul tells us the memo reiterates what early adopters already know: open source saves money, is scalable, secure, and easy to deploy. Paul’s also a member of the board of advisors at OSFA, an open-source coalition. John adds: the memo, along with the White House switching to Drupal, is a boom for business. “We’re already seeing the benefits.”
If you’re a gadget junkie like me your house is probably similarly littered with devices that did a job once, and could still do so much more, if only the vendors kept them up with the times. Join with me in lobbying for open source firmware.
Flickr was ahead of the curve when it opened its API to third party developers in 2004, a trend which has since caught on with next-generation social sites.
The White House and some Federal Reserve officials have argued that poorly-designed compensation packages were one of the causes of the financial crisis, because the pay packages encouraged bankers and employees to take on far too many risks.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says that the banks that took bad risks that led to the market meltdown now need “to take a chance again on the American economy.”
In all, Goldman sold more than $57 billion in risky mortgage-backed securities during a 14-month period in 2006 and 2007, including nearly $39 billion issued from mortgages it purchased. Meanwhile, the firm peddled billions of dollars in complex deals, many of them tied to subprime mortgages, in the Caymans and other offshore locations.
Many of those securities later soured, but the sales allowed Goldman to become the only major U.S. investment bank to escape the brunt of the subprime meltdown.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) is contemplating buying tax credits from Fannie Mae (FNM). However, it may be reasonable to assume that the U.S. Treasury may not approve of the deal.
Goldman hopes to receive approval this week for $1 billion worth of tax credits. Tax credits are incentives designed to bring more investment to low-income housing developments. This would help the company reduce its tax bill as well as bring some much-needed financial relief to Fannie Mae.
Goldman Sach’s Gerry Cardinale in documents filed Monday with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice accused Canwest Global, now controlled by U.S. bondholders, of “fraudulent” and “unfairly prejudicial” behavior after it allegedly broke their 2007 shareholders agreement.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has trouble understanding that the core responsibility of any federal official is to be thrifty with taxpayer dollars. This has been confirmed with new revelations from Bloomberg about Geithner’s role in the secret AIG-Goldman bailout.
Over the summer, as the House prepared to consider sweeping climate change legislation, several lawmakers received letters on seemingly official stationery from the NAACP and the American Association of University Women. The letters warned lawmakers that the organizations had serious doubts about the bill Democrats were bringing to the floor.
Insley said ACCCE head Steve Miller, “You remind me of the guy who hired a hitman and said, ‘Just take care of the problem. Don’t tell me whether you’re using a knife or a gun.’” Inslee and Committee Chair Ed Markey (D-MA) said that when highly-funded lobbying campaigns are willing to spread lies and falsify documents in order to stop a bill, it corrupts…
It’s got pictures of kids and families. People of all colors. Gentle hands cradling our fragile planet. A hard hat resting on a pair of worn work gloves and a hammer. It says the coalition is “people like you.” It bears an uncanny resemblance to the website of the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families campaign, of which EDF is a founding member. But dig deeper and you’ll discover that the website of the “Coalition for Chemical Safety” is actually created and run by industry.
A freshly-minted front group, which proclaimed that it promoted “balanced chemical safety reform that protects public health, innovation, and economic growth,” has been outed.
The global financial crisis has bypassed the U.S. lobbying industry. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that “the year-to-date total spent on lobbying now stands at $2.5 billion through the end of September, with that sum supporting 13,428 individual active lobbyists.
During the third quarter, corporations, unions, trade associations and other special interests spent $849 million on federal lobbying, the Center for Responsive Politics has found. This is the largest single-quarter lobbying expenditure since firms began filing quarterly at the start of 2008 — about $8 million more than was spent during the third quarter of 2008.
History is unkind to tobacco companies, and never more so than since a federal court in 2006 found the industry guilty of perpetrating 50 years of fraud and deceit upon the American people.
The PR firm Edelman is handling a crisis management campaign for Imperial Sugar to “pick apart claims” by a whistleblower about poor safety standards at the Port Wentworth refinery near Savannah, Georgia. Graham H.
Edelman’s Atlanta crisis and issues management unit is helping Imperial Sugar pick apart claims by a former executive who has questioned safety measures at an Imperial plant in Georgia where 14 people died in a 2008 explosion.
According to columnist Rick Green of the Hartford Courant, Wendell told the crowd, insurance companies “spend enormous amounts of money in focus groups. They pay a lot of premium dollars to gauge public attitudes. It is a careful study of linguistics and knowing what motivates people and how to reach people on an emotional level.”
Conservative Transparency is a new website from the Media Matters Action Network of Media Matters for America. Although it is partisan, it serves as an excellent complement to the Front Groups portal and astroturf information on CMD’s SourceWatch website
A liberal advocacy group is launching a new Web site Tuesday that aims to document the financial and political ties of conservative groups, many of which have emerged as major political forces this year in fomenting opposition to President Obama’s policies.
What a world we live in: if you tinker too much with the electronic equipment you buy, you might get charged with a crime. That seems to be what happened to a guy in Oregon who helps mod cable modems. Now, clearly, some people can and do use modded cable modems to access cable service that they haven’t paid for, but there are plenty of legitimate reasons to hack your own hardware or to buy modded hardware.
An Oregon hardware hacker and author has been hit with federal criminal charges arising from his longstanding business of selling unlocked cable modems that can be used to steal extra speed from a broadband provider, or obtain free service.
Says the IPKat, this case does something to clarify the questions which many have asked concerning the fate of domain names the use of which is lawful in some jurisdictions but not in others. It seems that the fate of a domain name — which may be registered as or incorporate a trade mark — will depend on, among other things, the status of the foreign government and the juridical nature of its penal system. Says Merpel, I wonder how many people misread, as I did, fulltiltpoker.com as futilitypoker.com.
No matter how much of our personal lives exist in e-mail services such as Gmail, a U.S. District Court judge says if the government takes a look at your e-mail.
The heirs of George and Ira Gershwin (the famous songwriting brothers) were leaders (right alongside Disney) in the fight for copyright extension a decade ago. They insisted that it wasn’t about the money, but about making sure that their work wasn’t presented in a way of which they disapproved (“Someone could turn ‘Porgy and Bess’ into rap music” was the complaint from Mark Gershwin, conveniently ignoring that much of the Gershwin’s work pulled concepts from African American music). Yet, if it’s not about money, why are the Gershwin heirs suddenly involved in legal battles all about who gets the money?
One of the top copyright lawyers in the US takes Big Content to the woodshed in his new book, saying that “the Copyright Wars are a fight against our own children and it is a fight that says everything about the adults and very little about the children.”
The problem the industry is facing isn’t due to some guy in Europe catching The Colbert Report from across the sea. It comes from turning off legitimate customers and users who are sick of being treated like crap.
Millions of file-sharers have responded to the entertainment industry lobby by taking measures to hide their identities. A recent survey found that in Sweden alone, half a million Internet subscribers use anonymizing services. The findings further suggest that tougher anti-piracy legislation will boost these numbers significantly.
Lily Allen, blah blah, piracy, downloading, It’s Not Alright, etc etc. Cutting through all the nonsense, comes a beautiful ray of light. Joss Stone says Lily hates piracy because she can’t sing.
“Yeah, I love it. I think it’s brilliant and I’ll tell you why,” Joss Stone said last year, referring to music piracy.
“Music should be shared. The only part about music that I dislike is the business that is attached to it. Now, if music is free, then there is no business, there is just music. So, I like it, I think that we should share.”
“I don’t care how you hear it as long as you hear it,” she added. “As long as you come to my show, and have a great time listening to the live show it’s totally cool. I don’t mind. I’m happy that they hear it.”
Leslie Stahl had a piece Sunday night on 60 minutes on the supposed impact of piracy on the movie industry. (You can watch it here.) Her piece was so slanted toward the Motion Picture Association of America, it was almost laughable (if it weren’t so maddening).
The report goes in-depth in other areas as well, including a discussion on fair use/fair dealing, the history of copyright (and how it’s often been abused in the name of artists, when it really had nothing to do with them) and the importance of mashup/remix culture. It’s the sort of report that a program like 60 Minutes could have — and should have — done, but did not. Kudos to ABC radio down in Australia.
Never let it be said that the folks in Hollywood aren’t good at coming up with a totally fictional horror story. I just have a problem when they use it not to entertain, but to create a moral panic to push the government to pass laws in their favor.
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And, of course, it pushes for kicking file sharers off the internet (it hides this by calling it “graduated response,” of course, rather than the more common term “three strikes”). The filing also goes on about how the MPAA is just so sure that ISPs can stamp out piracy, and because of that, it thinks the government should force them to get on it.
The latest round of “negotiations” over the ACTA treaty continue in secret due to as yet unexplained national security reasons (despite the fact that the entertainment industry lobbyists have had full access to the document) are kicking off in Korea. Once again is becoming clear that the claims by US trade reps that ACTA did not represent any kind of major change in copyright law, and thus didn’t require public scrutiny, are nothing more than a myth. Despite ridiculous efforts to keep the document secret (some countries were given only physical, watermarked, copies of the latest drafts), some of the details are leaking out and it’s not pretty at all.
The plan is modeled on the ridiculously misnamed “free trade agreement” between the US and South Korea from a few years back. It’s misnamed because it wasn’t about free trade at all, but massive protectionism for the American entertainment industry.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotations continue in a few hours as Seoul, Korea plays host to the latest round of talks. The governments have posted the meeting agenda, which unsurprisingly focuses on the issue of Internet enforcement [UPDATE 11/4: Post on discussions for day two of ACTA talks, including the criminal enforcement provisions]. The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.
Negotiations on the highly controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement start in a few hours in Seoul, South Korea. This week’s closed negotiations will focus on “enforcement in the digital environment.” Negotiators will be discussing the Internet provisions drafted by the US government. No text has been officially released but as Professor Michael Geist and IDG are reporting, leaks have surfaced. The leaks confirm everything that we feared about the secret ACTA negotiations. The Internet provisions have nothing to do with addressing counterfeit products, but are all about imposing a set of copyright industry demands on the global Internet, including obligations on ISPs to adopt Three Strikes Internet disconnection policies, and a global expansion of DMCA-style TPM laws.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:
* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
I’m amazed at all the technical people living here in Lawrence, Kansas, so I’ve decided to do a series of interviews to highlight what our small college town has to offer the international tech community. Recently I sat down with local author Stephen Figgins at a coffee shop to talk about what’s new in the latest release of the popular Linux in a Nutshell book.
WINE is the reimplementation of the windows API for Linux/Unix operating systems. WINE allows you to run some applications on Linux that does not have Linux support or installers ie: Office 2007, World of Warcraft and many others. This is not a how-to but more a idea of what is going around and what its all about. WINE is the underlying technology for all the above applications. But lets face it, this was made so we could run the nice Microsoft games on our Linux distros. I for one love to game and I really would like to have more games written for Microsoft and Linux. I can’t figure out what the big deal is as most games are written in C++ and could be compiled for any OS type.
Bioinformatics, as defined by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (BCBI), is the field of science in which biology, computer science, and information technology merge into a single discipline.
Bioinformatics is being used largely in the field of human genome research by the Human Genome Project, which has been determining the sequence of the entire human genome (about 3 billion base pairs) and is essential in using genomic information to understand diseases. It is also used largely for the identification of new molecular targets for drug discovery.
Even Linux’s advocates are unthrilled at one of its sticking points: binaries built for one breed of Linux don’t always run on another. And since unifying Linux into a common distribution is about as likely as herding a circus ring full of cats into a clown car, people who want to distribute prebuilt binaries for Linux have few choices. Here’s a new choice: FatELF, or universal binaries for Linux.
The KDE developers have announced the availability of the third update to KDE 4.3. The maintenance release for the free open source K Desktop Environment (KDE) includes several bug fixes and translation updates. In addition to several fixes, the release features a number of improvements, such as smoother KWin window effects, improved stability in the JuK audio player and changes to KDE PIM .
KDE 4.4 is scheduled to be released in early February of 2010 as the six-month feature update to KDE4 and now its feature plan has surfaced. KDE 4.4 is poised to pickup a number of exciting new features along with various bug-fixes and other updates. Below is a list of some of the KDE 4.4 features that caught our attention.
Plasma Netbook’s chief virtue is its simplicity. Although a so-called intuitive interface does not exist, Plasma Netbook should be straightforward enough that anyone who uses computers regularly should be able to navigate its desktop with only a few minor stumbles.
On October 29th the NLUUG held their second conference this year (the first, held in the spring, focused on file systems). With over 200 visitors and talks by 19 speakers, all prominent in their respective fields, this conference was of particularly high quality. This is surely emphasized by the location and surroundings and the excellent organization. Read on for a short impression on the conference, which was attended by several KDE community members.
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After the last talk there was time to put some of the above recommendations into practice and have a few beers together. There was also handing out of prizes and some fun. At the end, attendees agreed the topics were interesting and, as cloud computing is an area where the FOSS world lags behind a bit, the discussions about ownership of data, privacy and security will hopefully result in more awareness on the issues with the current ‘Walled Gardens’.
Yesterday I was hit by the idea of putting KRunner at the top of the screen and making it ‘slide in’ when called up. The “floating dialog” just wasn’t doing it for me anymore and so I went ahead and implemented this to see what it would feel like. After working out various kinks, I have to say that I really like it. So I decided to do a quick screencast showing KRunner in action at the top of the screen for you to watch and then, hopefully, offer some feedback on it. It’s even better if you can try it out yourself by building from SVN trunk, of course, but I know not everyone can or will do that. If the reactions are generally positive, this will be the default for 4.4.
One pretty long task of plasma themes is to manually rename all the SVG sub elements with the proper names. Let’s say we want to theme a button, we will need a SVG file with the following elements: normal-top, normal-topleft, normal-left, normal-bottomleft, normal-bottom, normal-bottomright, normal-right, normal-topright and normal-center.
For ages, I’ve been using Google Picasa to manage and tweak photos I took with my point-and-shoot cameras. Its editing tools are pretty limited, and the Linux version is just a not-so-pretty port that runs in Wine. When I moved to a DSLR camera these and other limitations became even more apparent. So when Google released Picasa 3.5 for Windows, leaving Linux users behind with the older 3.0 release, I decided that it was time to move on. After testing different photo editing and management applications for Linux, I settled for digiKam.
The Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy. This move allows donors to give tax-deductible donations, and it increases the transparency in the spending of Amarok’s funds. This greatly helps us to be more efficient, and focus on what we really do best: Creating kick-ass software. At the same time, we stay fully committed to the KDE project! Amarok is, and will always stay, a fully committed project under the KDE umbrella. We have coordinated this move with the KDE e.V. board, who approves of our endeavors.
Developer Nanni Bassetti has announced the release of version 1.0 of the Computer Aided INvestigative Environment (CAINE) Linux live distribution. CAINE and NetBookCAINE (NBCAINE) provide a complete digital forensic environment that’s organised to integrate existing software tools as software modules and to provide a simple graphical user interface (GUI).
It’s been over two years since Vector Linux 5.8 was released, and a lot can happen in that time. But what specifically is that? And has all that extra time allowed Vector to improve and grow and become a distribution to be reckoned with? Let’s find out.
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Overall I like Vector Linux 6. It’s fast, reasonably easy to setup and administer, and system speed is good overall. Would I recommend Vector? Yes, I would, absolutely. It’s a good system, especially for those who like to go lean and mean with their setup, and for those who prefer speed over features.
Other than those previously mentioned, very few if any other problems emerged while using GoblinX so far. In addition, KDE 4 on GoblinX performs rather well, even on a system with only 512 megabytes of RAM. Whereas GoblinX may not be “install and go” to some standards, it gives the user the choice to use proprietary code other distros may take away. GoblinX is simply a nice distribution derived from a solid code base that offers the user even something better than choice – something different. And these days, anything different is good.
But there’s some good things that are going to come out of it – I am going to fork the Gentoo GRUB package, which needs quite a bit of love. It’s time to get GPT partitioning documented properly and grub-1.97 supported offiicially as it is in Ubuntu. So expect to see some things related to that soon.
I’m very pleased to say that Mandriva 2010 is now out! Checkout What’s New! Also see the Release Notes and Errata.
Myself and the rest of the Mandriva Developers and Contributors have put in a lot of work this time round. I’m pretty happy with the PulseAudio->Phonon integration work I did for KDE which builds on our previous approaches which were not quite as functional (although did at least hide potential configuration problems from users unlike on some distros! (for which the usual “solution” was a urpme/yum remove/apt-remove pulseaudio rather than actually finding the real cause!)
eWEEK Labs’ tests show that Fedora 12 will provide the latest and greatest versions of popular open-source applications, as well as features that strengthen not only Fedora but also Linux distributions in general
CentOS has not received much attention here on Ghacks, so I thought I would remedy that by introducing this outstanding flavor of Linux not by way of a Live CD (CentOS does have a Live CD, but you can not install from that CD), but by way of traditional means. Because of this you will have tutorial. But first, a little history (which might divulge reason for you to use CentOS).
Ubuntu has improved since I last tried it. It is steadily becoming more polished and user friendly for non-technical users, though this comes at a price for those who are already familiar with Linux.
Its installation process is emblematic of this. Although it’s quick and very easy, the install sequence doesn’t include some steps and options that enable a knowledgeable user to configure a Linux distribution right from the start. These include some disk partitioning options, setting up networking interfaces, marking services active or inactive, specifying boot loader configuration options and setting up security controls and monitoring. Adding some optional installation steps to let experienced users make such configuration adjustments would be an improvement, I believe.
Overall, although Ubuntu appears well polished on the surface, it doesn’t have the solid feel, depth of integration and finesse that one can discern in some other Linux distributions such as Mandriva, with which I’m more familiar. Perhaps my opinion might change after I get more used to working with Ubuntu, but for now I still like Mandriva better.
If all goes according to plan, Ubuntu 10.10 will sport Gnome 3, which represents a radical overhaul of Ubuntu’s default graphical user interface in the form of Gnome Shell, when it debuts a year from now. In order to get a taste of what this desktop of the future will look like, I’ve spent the last few days using the development version. Here’s what I’ve found.
Gnome has been around now for a decade, and its approach to the desktop hasn’t changed remarkably in that time. Gnome 1.x doesn’t differ in any fundamental way from the 2.2x versions available in the latest Ubuntu releases. Traditional Gnome also behaves similarly to the interfaces of most proprietary operating systems.
We expect this more conservative policy for package syncing will enable us to prepare a more stable long-term support release. The cost of this approach is that not only regressions will be delayed from reaching Lucid – bugfixes uploaded to Debian unstable will be delayed too (packages uploaded to Debian unstable normally don’t reach Debian testing for at least 10 days).
To sum up, Ubuntu 9.10 is a head turning, impressive Linux distribution that is built on the great progress that has been made by all of the contributors to Ubuntu, Debian (on which Ubuntu is based) and all of the upstream projects that make up Ubuntu over the last few years. The new design is superb, Ubuntu One shows a lot of promise and the new remix options offer exciting new computing experiences. There has never been a better time to try out Ubuntu, or to give it another go if you had a less than wonderful experience in the past.
I’ve listed the three OSes in the order of their evolutionary development: First came Ubuntu Netbook Remix (released June 2008), followed by the current version of Moblin (released October 2009) and lastly, the currently-in-alpha Jolicloud.
The program has been tested on an Eee PC 901, but there’s a good chance it should work with other Intel Atom powered netbooks running Ubuntu 9.10. Have you tried it on other Asus Eee PC models or other netbooks yet? Share your experiences in the comments.
IBM’s Bob Sutor has a good post up discussing advice for those who want to start an open source business. There are more and more open source startups arriving, but Sutor says “I’ve been very surprised as I’ve looked around the web that there don’t seem to be very many good guides about the nuts and bolts of starting an open source business.” He lists seven pieces of advice for those who have an open source business in the works, and here are some of our posts that can help you follow the advice.
“Brazilian elections went electronic many years ago, with very fast results but a few complaints from losers, of course. Next month, 10 teams that accepted the challenge will have access to hardware and software (Google translation; original in Portuguese) for the amount of time they requested (from one hour to four days). Some will try to break the vote’s secrecy and some will try to throw in malicious code to change the entered votes without leaving traces.”
OB: Was Qi Hardware conceptualised from the beginning as an Open Source project, and could you describe what openness means specifically in the case of hardware?
SM: Yes Qi Hardware was conceptualized from the start as an Open Source project. The founders of Qi have spent the last 2 years working together at Openmoko on the open phone project so the benefits and challenges of open source are well know to us. On the hardware side we are going to create a new kind of hardware, CopyLeft hardware. Today you can join as a Qi developer and get access to the hardware design files as well as participate in creating the roadmap.
Although I do most of my professional writing in Bluefish, I usually use OpenOffice.org at least once a day. Consequently, I keep a close eye on the OpenOffice.org Extensions page.
When it comes to Linux, or more generally FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), there are two major factions. There is the Free Software faction and the Open Source faction. The Free faction has a different ultimate goal from the Open Source faction even though they, to the outside viewer, may seem the same. Not everybody subscribes to the mandates of one faction or the other. In fact some of us can emphatically disagree with the methods and mandates of the leaders.
Yet even though we disagree, even though we may find their actions and methods detrimental to the FOSS movement, we still choose to participate in FOSS. Why is that? Personally, for me, it is because it gives me control over my computer. I have the freedom to decide how my computer should run and I have the freedom to express my individuality with it (yes even Borgs are people too :). I also do not agree to having to use my computer under conditions dictated by those who’s only goal is to make money and control my computer through forced upgrades and invasive audits.
Yahoo! has open sourced the back-end software platform that underpins the company’s webmail client and countless other applications offered up across its sweeping web portal.
Known as Traffic Server, the platform handles general edge caching, edge processing, and load balancing at Yahoo!, but it’s also used to manage traffic on the company’s internal storage and server-virtualization services.
It’s not only “homogeneous”, it’s based almost entirely on open source software (as far as we can tell), with all that this implies for robustness. So, to that extent, it’s probably true that for many companies, the server side of cloud computing is indeed relatively safe. But if they’re still using Windows with all its vulnerabilities to access those servers, much of that security is squandered. Perhaps that’s why Google is coming out with its Linux-based Chrome operating system…
Representatives of the open source Mozilla project where pleasantly surprised this week, discovering that the city of Munich is making far more use of their software.
The first official Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta release is now available, bringing with it a whole bunch of improvements to the open source web browser. It’s also (to my naked eye) missing a few features that I had initially expected to see in Firefox 3.6.
“One of the defining characteristics of the Chrome experience is speed,” O’Grady explained, and “the Mozilla folks have done a good job of responding to that, both in Firefox 3.5 and 3.6,” he said. “Both versions are noticeably quicker.”
Indeed, even Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, Mozilla says, and 10 times as fast as Firefox 2.
Mozilla has also been continuing to build out user enhancements, O’Grady added, “ranging from the aesthetic — such as personas, where you can reskin the user interface — to the more subtle, but potentially more significant.”
As an example of the latter, O’Grady cites the Ubiquity plug-in, which is integrated in the new release and makes the browser “more programmatically accessible,” he explained.
Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Firefox 3.6 beta release. Ars tests the new version, which introduces support for fullscreen video and lightweight theming.
My three laptops have relatively comparable hardware and run Chrome on Windows, Mac, and Linux respectively. The Linux version of Chrome feels ridiculously faster than Windows and Mac. Do we understand why this is? Can we make Windows and Mac feel that fast too?
General observations:
1) Scroll performance is extremely good. Even on Gmail, I can only get the mouse to lead the scroll bar by a dozen pixels. On Slashdot, it doesn’t even look like I can do that.
2) Tab creation is very fast. Maybe the zygote is helping here? Can we pre-render the NTP on other platforms?
I know that the JavaScript engine of Opera is being overhauled; something there was not time to do before the release of version 10. When that is added, it will be interesting to see how Opera fares, as when looking now between Opera and Chrome, the major delta of performance seems firmly rooted in Java Script.
The Inverse Team [External] is pleased to announce the immediate availability of SOGo 1.1.0. This is a major release of SOGo which focuses on new features, improved stability and which includes many bug fixes ad several small enhancements over previous versions.
Much has been written for librarians about copyright law. Despite the importance of the public domain, it has attracted much less scholarly attention than has copyright law generally, and yet a healthy and robust public domain is crucial to our society. It provides the building blocks for authors, composers, artists and movie makers who can borrow from public domain works without seeking permission of copyright owners. Unfortunately, the public domain is under attack from expanding the term of copyright, to making it more difficult for works to enter the public domain in the United States. Some librarians have asked if vigorous application of fair use cannot substitute for the shrinking public domain. It cannot. Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement and is very fact determinate. A court’s finding of fair use applies only to the two parties to the litigation while the public domain is available to everyone from individual users of works, to artists and authors and to publishers and producers. It is crucial that the public domain be energetically defended. Today, it is not clear whether an author can even place his or her work in the public domain since copyright attaches automatically. A statutory method must be developed for authors to place their works in the public domain.
The Association of American Universities yesterday posted a series of documents relating to a previously-unpublicized effort by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology.
The international Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) was launched in Ghent on 21 October, during Open Access Week 2009. The aim of the organisation is the networking of over 1000 global scientific repositories comprising peer reviewed publications under the principle of Open Access. This will be achieved by means of common data standards and the co-ordination of scientific research policy development. Coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the Berlin Declaration to provide free and unrestricted access to sciences and human knowledge representation worldwide, COAR takes responsibility for the execution of this vision in bringing together scientific repositories in a wider organisational infrastructure to link confederations across continents and around the globe in support of new models of scholarly communication.
While colleges can be a great place to build up your knowledge of technologies of all kinds, real world experience and free learning resources on the web can do a pretty good job of showing you the ropes as well. Here are 100 free resources to help you hone your techie skills and learn more about the ever-changing world of technology.
Some of the most beautiful artistic treasures created during the millennium we refer to in the Western world as the Dark Ages are books — usually of a religious nature, they were transcribed by hand in sumptuously precise calligraphy, illuminated with wonderfully colorful and imaginative borders, and graced with elegant inset illustrations that were themselves jewels of inspiration, meticulously set down with pen, brush and burnisher in inks, tempera and gold leaf on laboriously stretched and scraped sheets of parchment. When complete, these beautiful pages were bound in volumes large and small, from enormous folios that were easily read in the pulpits of candlelit cathedrals, to breviaries that nestled comfortably in the pocket of a monk’s cassock. Lovingly preserved through many centuries, they are as wonderful to observe today as they were when they were fresh from the standing desks of the monks who gave them birth.
RepRap (replicating Rapid-prototyper) is a 3D printer and it is impeccably free and open source under both the GPL and the Creative Commons Licence. It’s early days but the implications and the promise are potentially enormous in their own right — but the fact that it is resolutely not proprietary is what caught my attention.
I’m still not going to talk about my attack on the forge infrastructure problems quite yet; the software is coming along nicely, but I intend to announce only after it handles its fourth forge type (yes, that was a tease). But I will say this: I now think I know what the future of forges looks like. It’s called Roundup, and it is astonishingly elegant and potentially more powerful than anything out there. Anything, not excluding the clever decentralized systems like Fossil or Bugs Everywhere.
I wrote a greasemonkey script called Theoratube that connects to the Firefogg extension. It’s based very heavily on the really great Youtube without Flash Auto user script that lets you embed videos as a plug-in. But in my case I decided to use native Theora and HTML5 video because it’s more reliable, has controls and doesn’t require any additional software to start working.
How does it work? It pulls down the video, uses Firefogg to transcode it, and then stuffs it back into the browser via a private URL. It’s slow because it has to pull + encode the entire video, but it works surprisingly well for something that is as hacky as it is.
In the land of IT, the one thing you can count on is a slick vendor presentation and a whole lot of hype. Eras shift, technologies change, but the sales pitch always sounds eerily familiar.
In virtually every decade there’s at least one transformational technology that promises to revolutionize the enterprise, slash operational costs, reduce capital expenditures, align your IT initiatives with your core business practices, boost employee productivity, and leave your breath clean and minty fresh.
Soda-pop makers courting medical groups. Potato-chip producers curling up with dietitians. Beer companies linking arms with traffic-safety advocates.
These marriages of convenience have become an increasingly common part of corporate America. That leaves consumers and government regulators wondering if we can trust all the advice coming from organizations that buddy up with industry.
The Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege Friday to try to stop a lawsuit over Bush-era wiretapping – the first time the Obama administration has done so under its new policy on such cases.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced the decision in a California lawsuit challenging the warrantless wiretapping program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Under the state secrets privilege, the government can have a lawsuit dismissed if hearing the case would jeopardize national security.
President Barack Obama received a great deal of media attention on Wednesday for signing a historic hate-crimes bill into law. But, on the same day, the US president also signed a Homeland Security spending bill that received far less attention, even though it effectively blocks efforts by activists to reveal photos of detainee abuse in US custody.
More than 90,000 innocent people have been added to the national DNA database since a landmark human rights ruling that keeping indefinitely the profiles of unconvicted suspects was illegal, according to new figures.
USDA and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture have suspended operations at the Bushway Packing plant in Grand Isle, VT, a facility that processes veal calves, pending a continuing investigation based on abuses uncovered by the Humane Society.
At the ASPO conference in Denver, October 2009, I had the good fortune to meet Stoneleigh, former editor of The Oil Drum Canada, who left the The Oil Drum crew with colleague Ilargi to set up The Automatic Earth where they publish stories, news and analysis of the unfolding financial crisis. I spent a couple of days chatting with Stoneleigh where she recounted her rather gloomy prospects for the immediate future of the global economy.
Time magazine’s cover story this week titled “What’s Still Wrong with Wall Street,” by Allan Sloan, is a remarkable indicator of where the public stands on the recent obliteration of the economy by a gang crooked financiers and speculators. It shows that even the corporate media is now making the connection that millions of Americans have already made, namely, that a criminal gang of rich white guys in New York did some extremely reckless things with the nation’s collective wealth and the middle class got clobbered.
McClatchy is out with an incredibly important series on Goldman Sachs, the first two parts of which have gone up already, that raises questions about whether Goldman committed securities fraud at a massive level. I am guessing the next three parts of this series are going to be really explosive as well.
If there’s one guy in the Obama administration that I really can’t stomach, it has to be Timothy Geithner. What qualifies him to be Secretary of Treasury anyway? Is it because he has spent his life coddling up to the most powerful men on Wall Street?
Well then…perhaps Geithner and the Fed were so irresponsible with taxpayer money that they should not be trusted to negotiate for their constituents. If the best defense of Geithner anyone can offer is *he got stared down by Goldman and gave them billions of dollars for nothing* do we really want this guy as Secretary of the Treasury?
When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.
The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.
The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn’t the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.
Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.
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Theirs is an infrequent happy ending among the hundreds of cases in which subsidiaries of Goldman, better known for sending top officers such as Paulson to serve in top Washington posts, have sought to contain bondholder losses by foreclosing on properties and evicting delinquent borrowers.
Was the risk that Goldman hedged with AIG as bad as Goldman Sachs Alternative Mortgage Products’ GSAMP Trust 2006-S3? Any risk manager worth their salt would have reasonable doubt about this deal and conduct a fraud audit. A fraud audit doesn’t mean you are accusing anyone of fraud, only that the audit will be thorough, because there are indications of grave problems. If there is fraud, however, the audit should be rigorous enough to uncover it.
The firm tells McClatchy reporters it had no duty to tell those investors about what it thought was going to happen to the housing market. Check out the report and see if you agree.
In 2006 and 2007, the upper echelons at Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) realized that a fall in housing prices is imminent. Did they tell their investors not to buy securities backed by home mortgages? No; CEO Lloyd Blankfein does not think they have a duty to be honest, and tell people “how they manage risk.” So they peddled over $40 billion worth of securities backed by over 200,000 risky home mortgages.
Citigroup and the three other firms that either merged into or became commercial banks — Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch — showed signs that “a bank run was indeed taking place” on Oct. 10, 2008, days before the Paulson plan was announced, Veronesi and Zingales wrote.
A California couple close to losing their home found that Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs was the company behind their subprime mortgage and was trying to take away their home.
As CIT goes bankrupt and Treasury Secretary Geithner warns today that the “damage caused by this crisis” will “take some time” to repair, a key Wall Street player has managed to weather the storm at the expense of an unwary, drenched public.
[...]
Meanwhile, after raking in more than $23 billion of taxpayer money (most of it funneled from the AIG bailout), Goldman is repaying the $10 billion it received directly to escape federal limits on $20 billion in bonuses it wants to pay executives from more than $50 billion in expected revenue this year.
In these rainy days for the American economy, there is one place on Wall Street where everybody is staying very dry.
Three new high-street banking chains are expected to be created by the government by splitting up Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, it emerged last night.
If you think I’m going to talk about the moral, legal, financial, and political implications of using software not according to various license agreements set by money-loving companies, you’re wrong. This article is not about the subtle use of the word piracy, which is all about plunder, robbery and violence, with the somewhat foggy misuse of software in the free world of Internet. This article is not about big corporations and their draconian use of capital to squash competition and choke technological advancements. This article has nothing to do with digital piracy.
There aren’t many journalists walking away from paying jobs these days. With news organizations struggling and newsroom jobs disappearing, each week brings new calls from writers and editors who believe their flagging employers should save themselves by charging for Internet access.
So count Saul Friedman a contrarian twice over.
Mr. Friedman, who had written a column for Newsday since 1996, quit last week over the paper’s decision to require some readers to pay for access to its Web site.
CEO David Gilbertson told us in an interview that all websites in the Inform division (19 business magazines including Construction News, Retail Week and Drapers) will stop giving away free news and instead start bundling web access in with subscription packages. There’s no exact timeframe, though the process has been one year in the making. Retail Week will start on November 13.
On the whole, this sounds like someone decided they wanted to “help out” the major media companies, but without anyone putting much thought into the actual details or inevitable consequences of such a law. A more cynical person might suggest that this proposal is really designed to gain the current ruling party a bit of support from the mainstream press in Germany…
CBS’s 60 Minutes has made itself out to be more of a laughingstock than usual when it comes to “investigative reporting,” putting on an episode about “video piracy” that is basically 100% MPAA propaganda, without any fact checking or any attempt to challenge the (all MPAA connected) speakers, or to include anyone (anyone!) who would present a counterpoint. The episode is funny in that it contradicts itself at times (with no one noticing it) and gets important (and easily checked) facts wrong. And, of course, it basically mimics that old episode that history has shown to have been totally (laughably) false.
People who illegally download music from the internet also spend more money on music than anyone else, according to a new study. The survey, published today, found that those who admit illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music – £33 more than those who claim that they never download music dishonestly.
Not long ago, if you wanted music, you had to save up your pocket money, take a trip to the local record shop and lovingly leaf through its racks.
Now, it’s almost all free, instant and infinite. And our relationship with music has changed forever.
[...]
I use the free version of the music streaming application Spotify almost every day – and I now understand that it represents a genuine revolution in music consumption (and makes iTunes look pathetically old-fashioned).
It has become lamentably common for courts to issue preliminary injunctions in copyright cases once rights holders have shown a reasonable likelihood of success on the merits without going on to require them to prove that they will suffer irreparable harm unless the injunction issues. Harm is too often presumed to be irreparable if plaintiffs have made out a prima facie case of infringement. This presumption cannot be squared with traditional principles of equity, as interpreted in numerous Supreme Court decisions, particularly eBay, Inc. v. MercExchange LLC, 547 U.S. 388 (2006).
The temporary closure of the Pirate Bay had the unforeseen side effect of forcing torrent sharers underground and causing a 300% increase in sites providing access to copyright files, according to McAfee.
Mandelson in the UK. “3 Strikes” in France. Fascist Censorship in Australia. Phorm. Net Neutrality. The Pirate Bay attacks. The RIAA. The DMCA. There’s a recurring and accelerating theme of attacks, which have accelerated over the past ten years, to attempt to control what can and cannot be done with the Internet, that is beginning to blur with Science Fiction predictions from well-renowed authors. The question is: why? What’s the driving force, and what motivates these attacks, when, mathematically and statistically, they are simply impossible, leaving an alienated populace feeling threatened by and distrusting their Governments, just like in China, Iran and other “Regimes” which we believe that we are “better than”?
I’m sorry to have to remind you that the answer is very simple and straightfoward: the answer is “Global Capitalism”. The Global effects of Capitalism – the enshrinement of “maximisation of profits” as a right, on a Global scale, concentrates ungodly amounts of money – and power – into the hands of Directors who are required, by law, to enact the “maximisation of profits” mantra, to the exclusion of all other considerations. An uncontrollable positive feedback cycle results, that has eerie similarities to Cancer, “consuming” all natural resources.
# Mailbag
# Talkback
# 2-Cent Tips
# News Bytes
# A Short CGI Script for Passing 404s to Another Server
# Away Mission – Upcoming in November ’09
# Setting up a MySQL Cluster for your Linux desktop
# A ‘revisited’ guide to GNU Screen
# HelpDex
# Ecol
# XKCD
I was going to swear that, with each successive edition of this book, the page count got larger and larger, but I checked, and it’s stayed almost the same over the last three editions. O’Reilly says that the 4th edition was 944 pages long, but the 5th and 6th editions (the 6th being the latest) are both 942 pages. When I got my review copy in the mail and opened the box, the book seemed larger than I expected for some reason.
The central processing software for Vaisala’s lightning detection sensors is now available on a Linux® operating system. For the user, this means added flexibility, ease of use and lower ownership costs.
VAR Thesaurus has donned its teachers cap to launch a range of Linux-based training courses.
The courses are available in both public and unscheduled sessions to teach IT staff a range of Linux skills, ranging from the fundamentals to advanced administration and troubleshooting.
Microlite BackupEDGE (available from OnlineLinuxBackup.com) has long been the industry leader in professional Linux Backup Software. Their extremely versatile, robust, and secure software has been protecting professional Linux installations for over 15 years. With functionality that rivals software costing 10 to 20 times as much, it’s no wonder more Linux servers are protected with BackupEDGE.
There’s a new blog post on Skype.com entitled Skype open source. It’s officially confirmed that “an open source version of [the] Linux client [is] being developed.” This open-source client is part of some larger offering that supposedly will be coming down the pipe at Skype. These efforts will also help them get Skype adopted within Linux distributions and seeing Skype on other new platforms.
OK, who dressed as Mark Zuckerberg for Halloween? Click it for full size. That’s the real Zuckerberg at left in this photo being sent around the Internets, taking an important meeting at Facebook with an employee whose passion for Linux led him to dress as Tux the penguin on the day before Halloween.
Remember the Smart Cube appliances for small business? Whatever happened to those? IBM launched these Power and X64 server appliances with some (but not a lot of fanfare) in the United States this past May running the i 6.1 and SUSE Linux 10 SP2, and then we never really heard much about these appliances again. As part of the Dynamic Infrastructure announcement blitz on October 20, IBM updated the software stacks at the heart of these appliances.
Yesterday afternoon we ran a story on a new Linux driver for the Intel Poulsbo chipset, which right now is known for being notorious with its troubling Linux support. However, Intel apparently had been working on a new “special driver” that the Linux Foundation was showing off recently in Munich at a mobile development camp. Many details were not shared on this forthcoming driver, which reportedly will be released with Intel’s soon-to-be-out Moorestown platform, but this morning we have a surprising number of details on this “special driver” from Intel. Martin Mohring of the Linux Foundation, who was the one showing off the Poulsbo driver on the two Moblin netbooks from the videos shown yesterday, sent over some intriguing details to Phoronix this morning.
Two years ago, Robert Love, a senior software engineer at Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), unveiled a new open source project called Open-FCoE to the Linux community (see Intel Opens Up FCoE).
No, what has me in a funk is really just the fact that most of the interview seemed to be spent asking what chance there is running Windows programs on Ubuntu, or Apple software on Ubuntu. The last question that I remember offhand was whether or not iTunes is available in Ubuntu.
The feature list as written by Santanu several months ago. I am thinking this would be applicable for Solang on Karmic.
* Paginated views for memory and speed efficiency (in git already)
* Icon zooming in browser view (in git already)
* Undoable delete feature for tags and photos (partially in git)
* Undoable basic editing (flip/rotate/scale) (underway)
* Batch editing of pictures (hopefully) (TBD)
* An importer from flickr (Underway)
* A basic exporter that exports selected photos to a directory (hopefully through a basic editing pipeline) (TBD)
As you may already know, I presented a poster at a conference recently, and did the set up with Scribus, the texts with LaTeX with the Beamer and Beamerposter packages.
Most netbooks released over the past year have shipped with Intel Atom N270/N280 processors and GMA 950 graphics. But a handful use a different chipset designed to provide longer battery life and enhanced graphics performance. While the Intel Atom Z520/Z530 processors are noticeably more sluggish than their N2xx counterparts, the GMA 500 graphics chipset shows some promise, and some netbooks with this chipset even include HDMI ports to output HD video to an external display.
The teams have to translate at present 163711 strings. Lox Saxon (5) is at 92%, German (11) at 87%. There is a reason why Lower Saxony won’t make KDE4 in Low Saxon its National Desktop Environment for the public sector. Hardly anyone speaks it in the capital Hanover where according to certain legends the reference dialect of German (Standard German) is spoken, a city which ironically had been under English rule for quite some time.
K3B is the official CD/DVD authoring tool for Linux KDE desktop. It allows you to create, burn, copy, CD’s and DVD’s. Create audio CD/DVD, Data discs perform disc-to-disc copies, it also includes a DVD ripping function.
In my last blog I explained Kate’s scripting features in KDE 4.4. To better understand how scripting can be used let’s look at some use cases.
* join lines: This feature request wants the action “join lines” to not join different paragraphs, i.e. not remove empty lines. We have not implemented this wish, as there are probably users who prefer the current behaviour. This request can be fixed by writing a small script that joins the lines according to the user’s wishes.
Keeping any computer system running can be some work. It would be nice if we never had to do any type of maintenance or troubleshooting, but no operating system has reached that point. Many desktop Linux users have server administration experience and are quite comfortable dropping to the command line and tinkering with their system. Not only do they know how to do this, it is the method that makes them comfortable.
With the release of CentOS 5.4 last month to bring this community enterprise operating system on par with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, we decided it was a good time to see how the server / workstation performance between this new CentOS release compares to that of Ubuntu 9.10, which was released last week, and also how it performs up against the release candidate of OpenSuSE 11.2. In this article are these benchmarks.
Sabayon is a Gentoo-based, multi-purpose, GNU/Linux distribution. The latest version is Sabayon 5, released October 2, 2009. Two iso images, Sabayon 5 GNOME and Sabayon 5 KDE, are available for download. This post is a review of the GNOME edition.
LiveCDs these days provide the simplest way to test a Linux distribution. Pop in the CD, reboot and then watch the distro’s default desktop unfold before you. With flash drives being relatively cheap these days, booting your favorite Linux distribution for a clean install from a USB seems to be an interesting option. And that is possible with one tool even if you’re distribution doesn’t already offer LiveUSB images for download – UNetbootin.
If Triage Team is better and, then, faster triaging bugs, assigning them, handling them better… you will see that upcoming Mandriva releases will become even better, because assigning and handling reported bugs properly, will allow maintainers to get them faster and to be able to fix them sooner.
Red Hat is a provider of open source solutions for Internet computing. The company provides custom engineering services to develop end-to-end software solutions primarily for use in the UNIX and Linux markets and also provides support and maintenance services for these software solutions.
During the time before and following Beta release I actually took some of my limited spare time and found and filed some bugs. A couple ended up as duplicates, of course. Any time you have a Linux distribution with millions of users you’re bound to have a few people running into the same problem. Hopefully one of them takes the time to file a bug, knowing that will help developers track down the problem, and make life better for their fellow users. It’s easy to say, “Well, I don’t need to file this, because someone other than me will get around to it.” But of course, if everyone says that, then no one files the bug and nothing gets better.
One of new features of the latest version, Ubuntu 9.10, which might appeal to an average user, is the ease with which the software can be added and removed. Some users might have found this process difficult about Linux distributions generally. Ubuntu has been making improvements on this front over the years.
The latest Ubuntu release is out, being used, and being praised and shot down at all points. So far, the vast majority of my experiences have been outstanding. The hardware recognition is tops, all of the interfaces are slick and stable, the boot time is getting faster and faster, many sound issues have been resolved, and software is just as easy to install as it has been in the past. Or is it?
Ubuntu 9.10 users can now use allmyapps.com, the easiest PC setup solution which makes people lives easier when it comes to finding, installing and reinstalling their favorite desktop applications.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #166 for the week October 25th – October 31st, 2009. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu 9.10 released, Ubuntu Open Week, Ubuntu One Blog: File sync status update, Canonical Blog: Landscape 1.4 Adds UEC Support, Asia Oceania Membership Board – 27 Oct 09, New MOTU, Ubuntu LoCo News, Meet Francis Lacoste, Accessing Git, Subversion and Mercurial from Bazaar, Commenting on questions, The Planet, Full Circle Magazine #30, Ubuntu Rescue Remix, and much, much more!
Frankly, I wish more software development firms raised their hands and pledged to support Ubuntu Server Edition 9.10 — but I suspect most Canonical software partners are waiting for Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), a Long Term Support (LTS) release scheduled for April 2010.
Within an hour, the packages had been downloaded and I clicked the button to start the upgrade. Then, I went out with my daughter. When I got home, I found a dialog box asking me whether to keep or overwrite a configuration file related to the printing system (I kept it). After that, the upgrade finished in about 10 minutes and my laptop restarted.
The much-awaited Ubuntu 9.10 was released as scheduled last week. For the benefit of those readers who are new to the Linux world and who might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of available options, here is a brief recap of the official release line-up.
I for this review I was running on an AMD 1.8ghz system with 512mb ram, NVIDIA Driver Version 173.14.20 (on a GeForce Fx 5200) so its a pretty old system. None the less it flew like an off the shelf modern PC.
The Karmic Koala is getting a warm reception among FOSS enthusiasts, but opinions are still strongly divided over whether this version of Ubuntu — or indeed, any Linux desktop OS — can win over mainstream computer users to any great extent. “You REALLY need to know what you are doing to make [Linux] ‘just work,’” says blogger hairyfeet. “Those people have already joined the team.”
TurnKey co-founder Liraz Siri has announced the availability of the 2009.10 release batch, which includes 40 new and updated appliances and support for Amazon EC2. TurnKey Linux is an open source project with the goal of developing a free virtual appliance library that, according to the developers, “features the very best server-oriented open source software”.
Korenix releases JetCard 5400-w Embedded Linux PCI-104 Single Board Computer with -40-80℃ Operating Temperature for Efficient & Secure VPN Network Construction in Enhanced Industrial Control Applications.
Axiomtek has introduced a 12.1-inch touchscreen computer designed to be mounted outdoors, in kitchens, or onboard ships. The fanless GOT-812 includes a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, up to 2GB of RAM, two serial ports, gigabit Ethernet, and a PCI Express Mini Card slot, the company says.
RadiSys Corp. announced a fourth generation Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) platform for 4G wireless infrastructure that supports 40Gbps (40G) throughput. The RadiSys ATCA 4.0 initiative will offer an AdvancedTCA (ATCA) 40G chassis and 40G switch that are backward-compatible to its current 10G Promentum line of processing blades.
Roku, Inc. announced two new models to join its $100 Linux-based Roku HD digital media player. The $80, DVD-quality Roku SD and the 802.11n-enabled $130 Roku HD-XR support streaming video playback from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and MLB.TV, says the company.
Speaking at a showcase of ARM-powered devices in central London – encompassing everything from the new Nokia N900 Linux smartphone to a remarkably thin prototype netbook – the company’s mobile segment manager, Laurence Bryant, told PC Pro that smartphone performance is set to take a considerable leap forward.
Another day, another high-profile outside hire for Palm Inc. Phoronix reports today that Australian native Matthew Tippett, engineering manager for Linux Core Engineering at AMD/ATI, will be joining Palm as their new head of Linux kernel development.
Finally, the N900 runs Maemo, a Linux-based operating system that is backed by major players like Intel. Where does the Nokia N900 fit in the current smartphone landscape?
“That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or Windows Mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!!
The Androids are coming, and you’ll need to watch out for them. I saw one on Wednesday, and it was lime green, with antennas and a kind of stocky build.
Actually, it was the logo for the Android open-source operating systems for mobile phones.
Android is going to become a household word in a very short period of time. It’ll join other newcomer phrases like Twitter and Facebook in our daily conversations.
How could Google draft more customers into the Android army and diminish the iPhone’s market share? Focus on the iPhone’s weaknesses, of course. The iPhone’s lack of background-processing capability (i.e., the ability to run multiple third-party apps at once) could push multitasking professionals toward Android. And the notoriety of iPhone’s exclusive carrier in the United States, AT&T, could compel consumers to embrace Android phones carried by Verizon, which has a bigger network and a better reputation for service.
Freescale Semiconductor has begun taking orders for a Power Architecture development platform for Android-based products, opening a new category of embedded devices to Google’s open-source mobile operating system.
Asus is planning on launching a super cheap ‘smartbook’ in the first quarter of 2010 and word on the street is that the machine will run Google’s Android OS.
At Blender conference I showed an animation of an eye. Because the textures are procedural we might be able to use this eye model to quickly bake high resolution textures for not so important characters. For our main characters I hope to actually model the iris for close ups, so that we get nice shadow casting. The eye movements are some 2.5 f-curve noise modifiers, only to get some life into the animation.
LJO: We had been working with sgml and later xml-technologies for a long time, annotating the corpus materials used in the research. We were using eXist-db in our work and wanted to contribute back. This resulted in an active involvement in the project. SQL databases are good for strictly regular or structured (the S in SQL) relational data. Xml on the contrary is all about hierarchy and sequence. This is the power of the information model. Making irregular relations and annotations of
I was asked in an interview recently about “open source science” and it got me thinking about the ways that, in the “open” communities of practice, we frequently over-simplify the realities of how software like GNU/Linux actually came to be. Open Source refers to a software worldview. It’s about software development, not a universal truth that can be easily exported. And it’s well worth unpacking the worldview to understand it, and then to look at the realities of open source software as they map – or more frequently do not map – to science.
The Google Summer of Code (GSOC) is a popular programme that’s catching on among software techies and enthusiasts of Free Software.
Sarath Lakshman, a fifth semester Computer Science student of the Model Engineering College, Kochi, has cleared the GSOC for a second time in 2009. “My project is named Pardusman. It is a custom GNU/Linux distro creator from the web. We have numerous variants of GNU/Linux for different purposes, these variants are called GNU/Linux distributions.
The Apache Software Foundation turns 10 this year and will be celebrating this landmark milestone with the largest ApacheCon event in November. Although a completely volunteer organization, the ASF has helped create some of the most important technologies underpinning the modern Internet.
One major trend with the Internet is the open source environment. Open source software is where the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed with or without modification. There are many examples such as Linux, SourceForge or WordPress. The speed and adaptability of the open source environment cannot be ignored.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has released The Open PV Mapping Project showing the progress of solar installations on private roofs from 2000 to (currently) now, beginning with a flurry of activity in California, then moving to Wyoming, of all places, and WIsconsin. Gradually the states turn yellow and then orange over time as they add more solar power.
Late last night, news of a document from SirsiDynix VP of Innovation Stephen Abram slamming open source library systems began circulating via Twitter. Within a day, it has drawn much commentary, both pointed and cautious, from those in the heated debate between open source and proprietary integrated library system (ILS) software.
GATHERdata™ can be applied anywhere in any sector—it is now being deployed in pilot implementations aimed at improving health and education programs in Liberia, Mexico, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Uganda.
There is a reason why the geek image has been stereotyped as a bespectacled IIT lad with a nervous smile on his face. Only the young have the time and the inclination to fiddle around with Operating System kernels and programme source codes just for the fun of it.
To promote such curiosity-driven self-learning among the young and to encourage the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) at the school level, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Chennai, will be releasing an open source platform ‘EduBOSS’ soon.
Two Indian institutions -the Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU) and Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani- are among the top-10 institutions worldwide in Google Summer of Code (GSoC)-2009.
The GSoC is a global programme that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. This annual programme awards stipends to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free software / open-source coding project during the summer.
Pressure from open source luminary Eric S. Raymond led to geek feminists hosting code created by one of their detractors, which otherwise would have disappeared for good, a post on Raymond’s blog reveals.
Daniel Bachhuber used to look at his college newspaper’s Web site and think about how much better it could be. Frustrated by the limitations of DailyEmerald.com’s content management system, which was run by an outside company, Bachhuber started researching Drupal, Django and WordPress — platforms that would allow the site to have control over its content and source code.
We have a proven track record in contributing to the Open Source R&D, including significant contributions to projects such as Apache Web Services, OpenBRR, the Sahana Disaster Management project and OLPC. Our support to Sahana and OLPC projects has been part of our sustainability initiatives, which focus on making an impact in humanitarian and educational areas thereby helping to create a more digitally-inclusive society.
One potentially interesting announcement last week was the news that Qualcomm was setting up a subsidiary called Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) to focus on open source mobile technology.
Aberdeen-based Suretec Telecom is in the business of supporting a company that makes holiday dreams come true. Specialising in tailor-made holidays, luxury hotels, unique tours and cruises, Dreamticket luxury holidays is a niche holiday provider to the UK travel market, and it prides itself on operating cost-effectively without ‘middle-men’ so it can keep its prices keen. And it’s based in Surrey.
A few weeks ago I received a Google Wave invitation from my friend David Knopf (after publicly begging for one in my post Hoping to Surf the Google Wave). Since then, I’ve had a chance to use it and I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ever-present potential of the tool. While it does have tremendous potential, I think some of my initial concerns as outlined in my post A Curmudgeonly Look at Google Wave, have proven true.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is holding ApacheCon US 2009 from November 2-6 in Oakland, California. The foundation for a free webserver is also celebrating its 10th birthday. In honor of this 10th birthday, the celebration includes three days of the conference program available as a FREE Live stream.
The Build Environment Effort has done a lot of analysis of how our current build process works to find out if and how we can improve the experience of building OpenOffice.org.
Mozilla pushed out a first beta version of Firefox 3.6 on Friday, ahead of a planned release by the end of the year.
The delayed release promises improved JavaScript performance and faster load-up, addressing a sluggish start problem that has become an issue with recent builds of the open source browser. Firefox 3.6 will also be easier to customise as well as introducing the ability to natively display video in a full screen display.
Following several delays, Mozilla has officially announced the availability of the first beta for version 3.6 of its open source Firefox web browser, code-named Namoroka. The development release is based on version 1.9.2 of the Gecko web rendering engine and includes a number of updates.
Version 3.6 of the Firefox web browser introduces several new design options for theme creators that are not available in previous versions of the Internet browser including the latest official release version Firefox 3.5.4. One of the first themes to make use of this new features is the Operetta theme which is available as an experimental theme from the official Mozilla Firefox website.
Long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I posted the infamous article titled “What does your browser say about you?”. It got like 400 comments, got me on Digg, Reddit and crashed my server at least twice. Every once in a while I still get comments on it but these days they are mostly among the lines of:
“Dude, Firefox 2.0 is ancient! What about Chrome and IE8?”
Type designers and Web designers have reached a consensus on a format specification for embedding fonts on the Web. Mozilla is already including support for the font format in Firefox 3.6, and wide adoption could come sooner than many expected.
When Nikon decided to merge and consolidate customer data from more than 25 disparate sources into one system, officials didn’t want the burden of maintaining it in-house, yet whatever they went with had to meet all their requirements and work picture-perfect.
Amazon’s announcement that it is launching cloud-based MySQL services comes at a convenient time. It shows how money to Free Software development can come from unexpected sources, without a proprietary license appearing anywhere in the picture.
This is not really good news for Free Software. However, Amazon gives us the best evidence that MySQL can be “monetized” by offering it in a Software As a Service setting. This can happen with GNU GPL licensed software and without receiving any special permission from the copyright holder, contradicting all claims that there is no viable way to fund development of a Free Software project without a dual license. The impatient reader can jump directly to the section where I deal with the cloud, but I invite you to follow all the argument.
For the GPL and the FSF, the increasing vehemence of the attacks on it should signal that it’s doing something right. In fact, many “somethings” right.
Regional newspaper WAZ Media has learned to punch above its weight online by looking at what bigger publishers are doing digitally and seeking out free and open source software and platforms to use, explains the outgoing CEO of its new media Katharina Borchert.
C|NET’s own Antuan Goodwin revealed yesterday Ford is looking to build an open source platform for its Sync services, its in-vehicle informatics interface. (Picture from C|NET.)
Crowd sourcing means the “delegation of a task to a large diffuse group usually without monetary compensation”. It has been used, for example, to create Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and Linux, the operating system that is used on over 40% of the world’s servers.
Some days ago we could all read that “ldd”, a tool which prints shared library dependencies, should not be run on untrusted binaries. I read it first on Hacker News and later it hit Slashdot’s frontpage. In some operating systems, this is stated clearly in the man page for the program, while in others it’s not mentioned at all. I belonged to the camp that didn’t know about it and I was a bit surprised. I supposed ldd was doing its job by examining the binary file and not by running it setting some special environment variables.
Amy Wallace’s Wired feature, “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All” looks at the life and times of Paul Offit, vaccine inventor and advocate, and the anti-vaccine pseudo-science he battles as he attempts to convince parents not to give in to fear and disinformation, and to follow the science that will keep their kids safe.
The issue in the case is whether the government must notify a person when the government obtains a search warrant to access the contents of the person’s e-mail account. Judge Mosman concludes that Rule 41 and 18 U.S.C. 2703(a) require the notice to be served on the ISP, not the account holder, as a statutory matter. He then rules that there is no constitutional requirement of notice to the account holder because the Fourth Amendment does not apply to the e-mails under the third-party doctrine.
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has approved the use of internationalised domain names (IDNs), web addresses made up of non-Latin characters, such as Chinese, Korean and Arabic and other languages.
Stern also says the Sir Tim Berners-Lee will meet stakeholders involved in the use of the Web in Uganda, grassroots developers, traditional participants in Linux User Group as an important category of people. The Linux User Group (LUG) of Uganda has set their next meeting in November in order to host Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Another conclusive hallmark is rising income inequality as the insiders manipulate economic policy for their enrichment at the expense of everyone else.
Don’t hold your breath for the regulators to stop any of it, in fact, it appears as though bankruptcy is totally okay and somehow translates into being solvent, at least if that’s the criteria banks are using for lending these days.
Rohit D’Souza was on vacation with his family in India in May 2008 when he got a call from Ken Griffin, founder and chief executive officer of Citadel Investment Group LLC. Griffin wanted the banker, who had just quit his job as head of equity trading and sales at Merrill Lynch & Co., to help him do something no other hedge fund had ever tried.
The immediate question that comes to mind is: Were Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs providing “color” to Galleon on trades their other clients were making? Definitely sleazeball and unethical. OR are their computers somehow rigged with the exchanges so they see trades before other traders do? Definitely sleazeball and unethical.
The billionaire philanthropist Peter G. Peterson contends that Goldman Sachs would have to donate “at least $1 billion” to charity to calm the public’s anger over the huge bonuses being paid to its employees.
So how is Goldman Sachs’ (GS) media work progressing? Well, CEO Lloyd Blankfein is certainly doing its part. “Normally pretty reserved, Mr. Blankfein is on a charm blitz to set the record straight, including interviews, speeches and town halls,” reports the Globe and Mail.
In my opinion, David Viniar’s (CFO of Goldman Sachs) comments in the fall of 2008 were a lie (see endnote), and for that matter, Lloyd Blankfein’s (CEO of Goldman Sachs) later comments to the Wall Street Journal were disingenuous. In the context of what was happening near the time of AIG’s implosion, the key question was “What is going on between Goldman and AIG?” Their rhetoric surrounding this issue is a deft dodge. They may claim they didn’t “technically” lie, but Goldman’s business exposure to AIG posed both credit risk and reputation risk. They seem to overlook elements of the former and put insufficient value on the latter.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Goldman Sachs Group ran a staid residential mortgage operation that simply bought and sold loans. But in 2001, the elite investment bank leaped aggressively into the burgeoning subprime securities market that was becoming a fountain of money for its rivals.
That year, Goldman Sachs sold $8.7 billion in subprime bonds, a third of its business. In 2006 and 2007, it peddled more than $40 billion in securities backed by at least 200,000 risky home mortgages.
Today, pension funds, insurance companies, labor unions and foreign financial institutions that bought those dicey mortgage securities are dealing with huge losses.
A five-month investigation by McClatchy Washington Bureau correspondent Greg Gordon shows how Goldman Sachs sold these securities to unsuspecting buyers, used offshore tax havens to market them to financial institutions worldwide and benefited from key federal bailout decisions, at least two of which involved then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former Goldman chief executive officer whose staff at Treasury included several other Goldman alumni.
McClatchy, the only major US news organization to question the Iraq war until is was obvious to all that it was a misguided exercise in neocon hubris, has started a series on Goldman’s famed “short subprime” exercise. While the timing and overall outline are not new (as to when and allegedly why the investment bank went short), it delves into some details that have heretofore not been examined, as to how much subprime paper it dumped onto investors during this period, whether this duplicity was permissible, and what sort of damage was visited on foolhardy borrowers.
This is the chart referred to in the post Goldman Sachs In Government – Government in Goldman Sachs. The link in the post allows the interactive drop downs and does expand on this one as shown.
It’s kind of amazing that with all the uproar over the Galleon business, nobody is making much hay over the recent revelations about the AIG bailouts, which make former Goldman chief and former New York Fed chairman Stephen Friedman look every bit as guilty of insider machinations as Raj Rajaratnam of the Galleon fund.
The application is called Phonesnoop and allows remote users to listen in on a Blackberry user’s surroundings. The spyware app uses standard Blackberry APIs to intercept incoming calls. Once the software is installed, a call from a trigger phone number will activate the listening feature through the phone’s built-in speakerphone feature to listen to everything that’s going on around the phone.
Obama’s administration has refused to disclose the drafts of ACTA on the grounds of “national security” (yes, really!), but we know from leaks and memos that it includes universal surveillance of the net; mandatory loss of Internet connections without trial for households where one member is accused of violating copyright; and a duty to search your laptop and personal devices at the border for infringing material.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has released a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking feedback and responses to the subject of the affect of electronic media on children and whether or not the Commission should have more power to wield authority.
A major ISP has promised a court challenge to Government plans to allow the cutting off of internet connections used by people accused of illegal file sharing. TalkTalk said it will challenge the plans in the courts.
I have an op-ed in today’s Times about the British plan to disconnect people from the internet if someone in their home is accused — without proof — of infringing copyright, and how utterly unjust this is.
The founders of The Pirate Bay could face fines in Sweden if the popular torrent tracker remains online. A court has banned them from continuing to operate the site at the risk of hefty daily fines. The admins, however, are no longer in Sweden and claim that they are not involved with the website anymore.
A think tank survey into UK music fans suggests that timid major record companies, obsessed with “cannibalisation” and “substitution”, have spent a decade barking up the wrong tree.
The Demos report, sponsored by Virgin Media, suggests file sharers aren’t the wreckers of civilization they’re painted to be – but failing to convert them into paying punters has cost the industry dear.
What I find most striking about this interview is the fact that Matthew makes 26.3% of his net income from just 40 hard- core fans.
Imagine what it will be like for him when he gets to 1,000? The other thing that really stood out for me is the fact that an artist like Matthew (who is totally comfortable with Social Media and extremely Internet savvy) has very little idea what to do with analytics that he is gathering via Google Analytics, CrazyEgg.com, and Compete.com, as well as email stats via Blue Sky Factory.
Late October 2009 is proving to be an interesting time in the world of computer operating systems. Within the space of eight days we have seen Apple dramatically dropping their prices, Microsoft releasing Windows 7 and on Thursday 29 October Canonical will release Ubuntu “Karmic Koala” 9.10.
So, with this version does Ubuntu live up to it’s name of one of the most popular distributions? It certainly does and this version is certainly worth the upgrade for current Ubuntu users, especially those plagued by poor graphics drivers for Intel cards in the Jaunty release. There are 2 things which really excite me with Ubuntu. First is that, after six months when the next Ubuntu version comes out, which will be an LTS, things look really good for Ubuntu. Many computer manufacturers like Dell will use it for their netbooks, laptops and desktops. And when the cheap ARM chips based net books finally come out, Linux will certainly be a very good competitor to the proprietary Operating systems. The second thing is that with this release Canonical has come up with some innovative plans to profit from Ubuntu. If they actually are able to make money off the Linux desktop, it will be nothing short of spectacular!
Well, here you are … a computer with twin display, running Kubuntu and then, under a Virtual Box system, running Windows XP. The mouse flows between them as if they were one system, as does the clipboard. If you want to know more, watch out for the series that will be coming up on Linux Crusade as I go through installing Kubuntu and also install the Virtual Box from Sun in order to do this. I’ll also be showing you around Kubuntu itself as well.
With just a few tweaks, your Linux box can be lighter, sprightlier and quicker than ever before. Read on for the best ways to speed up your boot sequence, optimise KDE and Gnome, and get better performance from your favourite apps. We’ve also got some top tips from our favourite free software gurus…
As an added bonus, this project will be held at the Zareason shop in Berkeley, the site where many of us have purchased pre-installed Linux machines. Come on over and see the west coast’s best Linux-only retailed in action!
Jesse has added support to Mesa and the X Server that will allow for the appropriate OpenGL/GLX extensions that expose syncing and frame counting capabilities (SGI_swap_control, SGI_video_sync, SGIX_swap_barrier, etc). This code though is currently housed in his personal Git repositories as the patches await review and feedback (mailing list message). This DRI2 synchronization and buffer swaps code is also dependent upon revisions to dri2proto and libdrm along with the latest DRM code that will eventually be pushed into the Linux 2.6.33 kernel due to its vblank event support.
This year we are hosting the survey once again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information that will help them and the Linux community.
*-DoD memo and official use and consideration of open source
*EnterpriseDB updates its Postgres Plus Server, gets Red Hat investment
*Latest in Linux from Canonical’s Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Deltacloud
*Roundup of Oracle-Sun-MySQL developments and perspectives
I just got back from a three-conference trip, Futurecom in Sao Paulo, “I FÓRUM DE SOFTWARE LIVRE DE DUQUE DE CAXIAS” in the city of Duque de Caxias, a community of Rio de Janeiro, and Latinoware in Foz do Iguassu, Brazil. Each conference was interesting in its own way.
Every Linux user that has used the GNOME desktop environment must have had at least an encounter with its default text editor, Gedit. You start it up, and it looks like a simple notepad type application with a toolbar added on top. However, don’t let yourself fooled by that simple appearance. If you know how to customize this application, it can be modified to serve almost any text exiting purpose, and you can even create an IDE-like environment.
A home computer makes an ideal appliance to store and stream music. The purpose of a music server is to deliver tracks when requested by a client. The server can deliver music to machines over a local area network as well as computers connected over the internet.
After reading the first part of this series, you should have a MythTV server up and running. To watch TV or schedule recordings you’ll need to setup one or more MythTV front ends. Since the front end has to decode, deinterlace, and display the video content, it normally has to perform more work than the MythTV back end. Luckily, I have a recent NVidia graphics card which is capable of performing much of the video processing grunt work for me.
Syntensity isn’t a single game, but rather a platform that can run all kinds of 3D games. There are already a few games, and anybody can create their own. The main game is a multiplayer first/third person shooter (sort of like Quake 3 Arena), and there is also a simple drawing game (in which multiple people can draw and see what each other are drawing in realtime). You can see both games in action in this video.
Most of you, Linux users have always been limited to the two big desktop names in Linux. GNOME and KDE today represent the Linux desktop. But there exist other desktop environment along with these two; XFCE, LDE etc. All these desktop enviroment was made with a normal desktop or laptop in mind but one desktop was made with small screen and children in mind.
Recently we have finished creating the materials for the Application development for GNOME and KDE course we have been working on for CENATIC. It is a modular course, so for example you can take only the modules for GNOME programming or KDE programming. It has been designed for on-line training (using e-larning systems that support SCORM format, as moodle), presential learning or mixed combination of boths.
The much anticipated GNOME 3.0 release is coming in March, but the first development release (v2.29.1) for GNOME 3.0 (a.k.a. 2.30) is now available this week. For months now we have seen early development snapshots of the new Zeitgeist, GNOME Shell, and Mutter modules, but now that GNOME 2.28 was released, all of these free software developers have turned their attention towards the major 3.0 release.
Not long after the release of GNOME 2.8 comes a new version of NScripts. Included are a handful of new ease-of-use functions for GNOME’s Nautilus data manager.
The Dark Turrican and Light Turrican themes are my variations of the Turrican theme for GNOME with window borders created by me. The Kioo and Pepper themes are original themes created by me.
We take the occasion to open new Mandriva groups on Flickr for artwork contribution in Mandriva Linux. You can now upload whenever you want some more backgrounds, screensavers, themes… in Mandriva Linux artwork group. You can also spread your favourite distribution and upload screenshots of your environment.
Sabayon 5 (or Five oh!, as the project team likes to call it) came out on October 2, 2009. As has been the norm since the last couple of releases, it’s been divided into a KDE and GNOME live DVD. The last version LFY had bundled was version Four oh! (we skipped 4.1 and 4.2). It was a single Live DVD that contained both GNOME and KDE. So what our CD team has done this time is combine the two separate ISOs into a single live multi-boot DVD. The downside is, you’ll only get either of the two desktops, at a time.
I’m very pleased that Fedora is able to contribute to this effort through our stance on freedom. While we try not to get in the way of users making their own personal choices in software, we are also working hard at making proprietary bits more unnecessary. With every new release of Fedora, you can see the advances that are gained through those efforts.
The laptop arrived yesterday, I immediately removed the ‘Windows Vista’ off the body of the machine, and booted and installed Fedora 12 beta on it. It’s working great! I have had absolutely no problem with any piece of hardware interacting with Fedora 12. I couldn’t be happier with it.
Lentz, a senior member of the Australian free and open source software community who for a long time was the face of MySQL Down Under, says he decided to talk about depression as a form of self-therapy.
“The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian GNU/Linux operating system, confirmed the dates and venue for its next annual conference, DebConf10,” the organization said in a statement Oct. 30.
With the switch to Ext4, the Ubuntu developers also updated the default boot manager, which is now Grub2. The new boot manager in Ubuntu 9.10 is visually the same, but offers several extended features: For instance, it can start the Linux kernel not only from Ext4, but also from LVM and RAID partitions. However, the installation of the latter two is still not supported in the graphic installation wizard of the standard desktop CD, and has to be done via the text-based installer on the Alternate CD.
You may remember my mention of the Ubuntu Software Center in my article “Ubuntu Karmic Koala preview“. Well, Karmic Koala is now officially Ubuntu 9.10 and is on the streets. I have installed the release and am as pleased as I expected I would be. One aspect of 9.10 that I was most interested in was the new Ubuntu Software Center. I have always been a big fan of apt-get and Synaptic, so I was curious as to how Ubuntu could possibly improve on either of these tools. I have used the Software Center a few times already and I can see why Ubuntu migrated to this new system: It’s very user friendly (more so than the original Add/Remove Software tool), it’s reliable, it’s easier to add new repositories, and it has a much cleaner interface.
At the end of the day, I had to make the call among vanilla Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint and wattOS. I really, really liked what the wattOS team was doing, but there were some elements that weren’t quite ready for prime time. It really looks like a solid project, but it was also obviously still in beta (a status which hasn’t changed recently), so I (reluctantly) crossed them off the list. I can deal with lack of polish, but there were still some bugs on the installation and administrative sides (I can’t remember what they are offhand, but I remember they were somewhat annoying.) Nevertheless, if anyone is in a similar situation, do give them a look. I think they’re on to something. My ultimate decision was for Mint, on the strength of its organization and the fact that it includes some really nifty extra tools (MintUpdate and MintBackup, for instance.) I also took the plunge and replaced Slackware 12.2 with Mint on my desktop computer. I don’t regard Mint as a “compromise” in any way, and fears that it might be a bit too robust for the laptop have not come true, so far.
On Thursday 29 October 2009 Canonical released Ubuntu “Karmic Koala” 9.10. For existing users there are two main methods of upgrading to this latest release.
Can you believe it? We’ve made it to thirty. That’s right; thirty issues of FCM, and they wouldn’t have happened without you! Here’s a giant thank you to all the editors, translators, writers, hosting donators, and everyone else that’s made FCM and Ubuntu possible.
1. The Kindle isn’t a monopoly
The Kindle, on which I was unduly harsh when it first appeared, has been the most popular e-reader. But it does not yet have the massive market presence that the iPod did by the time the first Zunes came out. (Amazon has not released sales numbers, but TechCrunch estimates it somewhere north of a million.) This matters because lending and borrowing are only attractive if you believe there will be other people near by you whose taste you trust to borrow from.
The tide was clearly against the Zune by the time it came out, which did not give consumers confidence that there would be other Zune users to get music from. In that case, it was just safer to stick with the leader, the iPod.
Linux Mobile is one of the underdogs of mobile operating systems. Playing practically the same role they have with desktop computers, Linux systems tend to play more towards function and practicality over style and form. This is usually compensated by skinning and other customization options.
In fact, Financial Times reporter Chris Nuttall claims, Android could soon emerge as the major smartphone that isn’t the iPhone. Android systems now operate on 12 different phones with 32 phone carriers supporting them around the world. And Motorola, HTC, and Samsung are all busy developing their own Android-based handsets.
Google unveiled plans for its mobile operating system about two years ago, and rolled out the first phone based on Android about a year later. In both cases, I predicted doom.
But I was wrong.
I finally came to terms with this the other day while watching one of those suddenly ubiquitous “iDon’t” ads on TV. If you haven’t seen one, the ads slam the shortcomings of the iPhone (“iDon’t have interchangeable batteries”) while trumpeting the pending arrival of the Droid sometime in November.
In this case, Droid is a smart-phone built by Motorola for Verizon that uses Android. Add those three corporate behemoths together, and you have some serious marketing dollars available to push this thing, whatever it actually turns out to be.
In its three years, the iPhone has redefined the mobile device. But despite the iPhone’s popularity, it is by no means certain to become the mobile equivalent of Windows, the dominant platform that defines our experience of a particular technology, as well as the business choices that surround it.
Google’s Android 2.0 OS is the latest in a series of mobile offerings seeking to derail the iPhone’s momentum. Backed by heavyweights Google, Motorola, Verizon Wireless, Acer, and other big-name manufacturers, Android could potentially knock the iPhone down a peg. After all, while users love the iPhone, Apple’s controlling tendencies have frustrated developers, and its disrespect for business concerns have frustrated IT.
The Motorola DROID is the first Android 2.0 device, and like other excellent competing smartphones it is being advertised as an iPhone-killer. With its sleek look and powerful features, I think it could become as successful as the RAZR and possibly surpass iPhone’s popularity. But it will depend on whether or not its OS can really deliver the goods.
Here you are, friends and Romans, the Motorola Droid from Verizon, the phone you’ve been salivating over for the past few months. It’s now sitting quietly on the desk next to me, wondering where you are. The Droid wants you.
Android 2.0, nicknamed “Eclair,” will make its big entrance on the Droid next month, and other handsets are sure to follow. Version 2.0 brings a set of new features to the table, including native support for Microsoft Exchange. However, the wide-open Android ecosystem may be prone to fragmentation as the underlying platform grows in strength and ability.
Recently MTN Rwanda selected Wavion and Balton Uganda for the deployment of a large scale Wi-Fi network. The new network is based on Wavion WBS-2400 base stations, which will provide high speed wireless connectivity to SMEs and residential users in the capital.
It’s rare to find, then, a brochure produced with the intent of talking down free software as a whole. However, Wikileaks has turned up just such a document: the SirsiDynix brochure against “open source” library software, distributed on a restricted basis to certain customers. In particular, they’re raging against the likes of Evergreen and Koha. I should own up that I’ve known one particular Koha developer, MJ Ray, for a long while, but this isn’t an area I particularly have a lot of direct experience. If I were a Koha developer, though, reading this would be a bit smarting: they accuse it of many things, in particular of having priorities belonging in the 80s.
For example, he encouraged audience members seeking a full-feature, Web-based enterprise document management system to consider the open-source version of KnowledgeTree or the community edition of Alfresco.
Free software embodies the values of learning, sharing and open collaboration that have been the basis of knowledge creation throughout history. In Kerala, hundreds of thousands of children are not only learning with high-quality software but also are indirectly imbibing the values of sharing and openness that the software is built with. In this manner, free software promotes the highest values of human culture: that the hard work put into creating hundreds of millions of lines of software code is not meant entirely for private profit but for the benefit of people around the world.
I return to the question I started with: Should we have access to the source code of software that we use? The answer is an unequivocal: yes, we should. Free and open source software represents openness, sharing, and a culture of learning and enquiry. It invites us to understand, build upon, and advance the software tools needed for our community. It presents an infinite potential for innovation and discovery, and a challenge to our youth to stand on the shoulders of giants to build software and tools for the future.
It is still relatively concise, but the fact that the numbers keep showing double- and triple-digit improvements in important metrics (compared with proprietary software), I felt that it would only be fitting to expand the content and the data by a commensurate amount. The premise holds that proprietary software is responsible for a direct dead-loss costs of $1T USD per year, although it is enhanced by the analysis of Roger Sessions showing that the sum of direct and indirect costs are closer to $6T USD per year. Either way you slice it, in these economic times, we simply cannot afford the status quo of proprietary software dominance, either in the IT choices we make or in the economic and legal agendas that they promulgate.
Open Source philosophy fosters environments where people readily exchange knowledge and willingly share innovations as a way to develop skills for the betterment of humankind.
But as with all things open source, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. forks have already appeared on GitHub, and there are attempts to support ZFS with MacFUSE. So if you’re a die-hard ZFS fan on Mac OS X, there may be some hope for you yet.
Web-based office productivity applications such as Zoho Office and Google Apps offer deployment and collaboration advantages over their desktop-bound cousins. However, these applications tend to require that organizations house their data outside the company firewall and give up the option of switching host without losing access to the application. Enter OpenGoo, an open source licensed online productivity suite that can be run from any LAMP server.
At this years SAP TechEd 2009 event in Vienna, SAP announced that it has joined a number of Apache Software Foundation projects. The goal of the move is to integrate some of the software into future releases of its NetWeaver Application Server component.
There haven’t been any protestations from Wall Street that I’ve seen that they’re unhappy with Oracle acquiring MySQL. Rather, this has been a European affair as Monty tries to get the EU to interfere in industrial policy for his own personal benefit. So why in the world would you send your sockpuppet to Wall Street to explain any positions? What interest would Wall Street have in the matter other than to provide funding?
Corporate America hasn’t done much with Mozilla’s Thunderbird, a competitor to Microsoft Outlook. Europe, however, has given it a warm reception. For example, the French tax authority recently selected Thunderbird to power 130,000 of its personal computers, replacing IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.
Native videos now have a full screen option: right click on a video and select Full screen. On related news, a new full screen button is now available to add to the toolbars.
Like the soccer economy, the open-source software economy is best measured by the total value it creates, which will have very little to do with the direct sales the Red Hats of the world report. Open source saves enterprises billions of dollars in license fees, and arguably has the potential to collectively add trillions of dollars in productivity gains.
Today I saw a note that once high flier KANA was being sold for $49 million in cash to a private equity firm. Not because they have any real assets but because they have a $400 million operating loss. The company is essentially a publicly traded shell that might be used to roll a profitable or growing company who wants to go public into. This has many advantages I suppose for the shareholders of the new company but what about the customers?
Samba 3.4.3 is released. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS. It provides interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.
The Linux-Kongress is traditionally where kernel developers exchange honors and advice about new features and enhancements. This year a number of speakers presented performance improvement data and discussed what aspects of Linux can be drawn out even more.
“The fact that our own Department of Defense is recommending open source and Linux is huge,” wrote another commenter. “Even they realize the tremendous benefits of open source. Personally, I have migrated away from Microsoft years ago, and I couldn’t be happier. Not only is Linux much more secure than Windows, but it doesn’t have all of the maintenance headaches of Windows (removing spyware, viruses, having your personal information stolen, etc).”
Personally, I see PHP 5.3 as a major release and perhaps a different language might have elected to give it a major version number. That said, Gutmans’ question about the relevance of PHP 6 remains.
INTERNET SERVICES JUGGERNAUT Google has offered its excuses to the FCC in an ongoing row with AT&T over allegations that it blocks phone numbers on its VoIP service Google Voice.
It’s not the first group to complain about Amazon’s vice-like grip on the Kindle, not to mention its supporting services and customer information, but the Norwegian Consumer Council is able to impose fines against any company trading illegally in Norway, and believes that Amazon might just fit the bill.
According to the bill text, “any Internet service provider that, on or through a system or network controlled or operated by the Internet service provider, transmits, routes, provides connections for, or stores any material containing any misrepresentation… shall be liable for any damages caused thereby, including damages suffered” by the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, an entity that protects investors from financial harm if a broker-dealer company fails.
On top of that, the idea is already incredibly unpopular with the majority of people in the UK… and (most importantly) there’s an election coming up soon in the UK. Backing a massively disliked proposal to kick people off the internet based on accusations using weak evidence… probably isn’t a savvy political move at this moment. Given all of that, I’m wondering if the plan ever really moves forward in the UK, or if it just makes a lot of noise so that Mandelson and his colleagues can tell the entertainment industry how they tried, to make sure the political donations keep coming in.
I wonder how Watergate would have turned out if the Washington Post was relying on Nixon for cash… The editorial piece claims that no one is “filling the gap” left by fewer newspaper reporters, but presents no evidence whatsoever to support that. The market is changing, absolutely, but we’re seeing all sorts of new, unique and innovative ways of covering the news — often allowing much greater coverage than in the past.
When most people think of the intellectual property fights with user-generated content websites, they think of cases like Viacom v. YouTube. Assuming that slow-moving case ever gets to trial, a court will determine what kinds of legal obligations the video sharing website has in policing its network for copyright infringement.
It’s a natural impulse to want to support the little guy, the David who faces down a powerful Goliath. That’s why it’s easy to get behind this guy’s claims that a copycat business is suing him to force him to abandon his own copyrights. Wtf!, you might say when you read something like that. Is that even possible? It is, and the story is more nuanced when you look at both sides, which makes it a good example of why it’s sometimes hard to be a “good consumer” when deciding where to spend your money.
Well, those copyright assertions are back, this time by the Attorney General, who asserted ownership over the (for real!) Attorney General’s Public Record and Public Meeting Manual. I spent last week in Oregon meeting with law school faculty and giving lectures at 3 universities on the topic of who owns the law.
So, of course, as the news broke that there was a leak of a Congressional ethics investigation, because a staffer put the document on his or her home machine that had file sharing software on it, the usual crowd of folks wasted no time at all in highlighting the use of P2P software and presenting file sharing as if it (rather than dumb employees and bad government security) was a huge national security threat and (of course) to urge Congresss to pass laws against file sharing programs. The one thing in common? All of those calls come from people who get paychecks from the entertainment industry.
Peter Mandelson’s proposal to disconnect the families of internet users who have been accused of file sharing will do great violence to British justice without delivering any reduction in copyright infringement.
In a motion filed in federal district court on Thursday, lawyers representing artist Shepard Fairey in the copyright fight with The Associated Press over his Obama “Hope” poster asked that they be allowed to withdraw from the case and that a Jones Day attorney and a pair of law professors be allowed to replace them.
Ariel Hyatt has been blogging about the concept of 1,000 True Fans and has an interview with musician Matthew Ebel, an up-and-coming musician who makes a living from his music, and breaks down the details — including pointing out that he makes 26.3% of his net income from just 40 hard-core fans.
In this episode: Ubuntu 9.10 has been released! To celebrate, we talk about what’s new and what’s old, review a version of Ubuntu each, discuss what we love and loathe and set our minds on the future with Lucid Lynx. Koala Ho!
Buntfu.com announced today that now when users list, bid, buy, invite or refers others to its Linux and BSD computer store . They will earn credits that will allow them to advertise their own ads on Buntfu for free.
One of the biggest hurdles in reverse-engineering the new protocol is the non-standard way in which the devices communicate over USB. The usbmuxd developers have been working to implement communications and now have a Release Candidate for the 1.0.0 version. Along with testing of this package, libgpod is now being updated to play nicely with the new database format and hash of the iPhone.
Government breakthroughs aside, another interesting conversation came up on the blogs recently in response to a Phoronix interview with Nvidia developer Andy Ritger about the state of Linux graphics, gaming and drivers.
One of Ritger’s revelations: The Linux graphics driver download rate at Nvidia.com is just 0.5 percent that of its Windows driver downloads.
Also notable: “I don’t think we would ever open source any of our cross-platform driver source code,” Ritger said.
He reminded me that I had taken him to visit my two goddaughters, and as we sat on the floor playing with them, their father, Linus Torvalds, came into the room and talked with us a bit. Afterwards we left the house and he said that I was “never to do that to him again”. “Do what?”, I asked, “I told you I was going to see my god-daughters….”
I had “forgotten” about these times, but of course I remembered them when he told me. I am glad when I can influence someone’s life in a positive way.
When I met Mark Spencer, the creator of the Asterisk project, he told me that a talk I gave at a conference in 1999 convinced him to make the project Free and Open Source. It is revelations like this that keep me going.
Open source software vendor Canonical has released the new version of its Linux-based Ubuntu operating system, Ubuntu 9.10 — codenamed “Karmic Koala” — and with it comes a number of updates to improve the KDE experience.
Ubuntu has been a GNOME-centric Linux distribution since its initial release, and has been criticised for treating KDE like a “second-class citizen” on the desktop with the Kubuntu distribution playing “catch up” to the standard Ubuntu.
We’re only a few days after 2.28.1, and 2.29.1 is already there! We have some brave people who did some amazing work for this release, with new features in various modules. And of course, the numerous bug fixes that we’re all used to. It’s really exciting to already be able to play with some nifty new features: it announces some great fun during the next few months. Of course, some tarballs are still in the 2.28 era, but that’s mostly because the tarballs due mail was late (you can blame your favorite release team member for this — hopefully, I’m not your favorite one ;-)).
Richard Hughes is next in line to become another hero of Open Source Software for photography. After giving it some thoughts, he implemented a first draft of a Gnome Color Manager.
Does GTK theme make any noticeable change in performance? Yes. as I have mentioned in previous post – Top 10 Gnome Performance Tweaks, Here is a way to figure out how much does it matter. If you are interested in creating GTK themes you should know how to check performance of theme..
As I mentioned, new alliterating animals appear on a regular cycle – Lucid Lynx will be padding along in April next year. In a way, that’s just another manifestation of open source’s “release early, release often” mantra – the idea being that faster iterations keep the code fresher, engage the community more and generally allows features to be added sooner.
Contrast this with the approach the Microsoft follows. There, a new operating system appears once every few years – followed by an apparently interminable sequence of service packs and patches.
The reason this is done is largely because of the need to create a “new” product, since Microsoft’s model essentially consists of re-selling the same software to users again and again, but with each version looking sufficiently different that it can claim, with varying degrees of plausibility, that it’s worth the extra money.
Canonical aims to deliver 10-second startups for the Ubuntu 10.04 release, which is due in 2010. In this version, they have already taken some important steps toward achieving this goal in which allows users to get to their desktop faster after booting. Tests also show that it can now boot in mere seconds on a good computer with a solid hard drive!
Canonical’s Ubuntu project released the final Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, featuring faster boot times, improved audio and 3G connectivity, an enhanced Netbook Remix, and more robust cloud support, among other features. The release follows IBM’s announcement that it is launching an Ubuntu-based cloud computing distribution for businesses.
ZaReason is taking a small but significant step to help strengthen the Ubuntu brand. To help celebrate the Ubuntu 9.10 launch, the PC maker is offering “a stick of Ubuntu aluminum case badges with each computer ordered” October 29 through November 5.
The consumer world is more interesting. Ubuntu gives retailers the chance to sell hardware with higher margins and more control. Logical economics suggests this would lead over time to a considerable presence. Instead, it is entirely absent. Whatever is keeping Ubuntu out of the retail channel is not technical, economic or practical, and not the result of an untrammelled free market.
The next time you see me on campus with my laptop, I’d be more than happy to show you the eye-catching Desktop Cube I use to navigate my four separate desktops. My computer, like other Linux machines, does not crash nor does it suffer from malware such as trojans, viruses or worms due to how the kernel handles security. This is exactly the reason why most servers which power the Internet use Linux instead of Windows and, to a lesser extent, Mac.
On the server side of Ubuntu, enabling the cloud is also a key goal, courtesy of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), another enhanced feature of the Karmic release. UEC made its initial Ubuntu debut in the Jaunty Jackalope release in April with full enterprise support services following several months later. In the Karmic release, UEC is being more tightly integrated into the server as well as being enabled with a UEC store for applications. The application store packages cloud-ready application for easy consumption and deployment by enterprise users — similarly to models like Apple’s App Store for the iPhone.
Overall I really appreciate any steps that Linux takes towards being a more viable Windows / Mac alternative. And who am I to complain? I don’t have to pay for Linux and have never really contributed to making it better. So overall I am happy with Ubuntu 9.10 and there are only a few things that I wish were better. The good news is that improvement of Linux on the Desktop is accelerating while desktop OS innovation seems to have stagnated due to the OS market being commoditized. As long as the applications that run on Linux continue to improve then the future of Desktop Linux seems bright.
Other important upstream software shipped with Ubuntu 9.10 includes version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel and Firefox 3.5, which adds new features like private browsing mode and support for the HTML 5 video element.
I’m impressed with Karmic, it’s a very solid release with some nice improvements over Jaunty. The Software Centre is a great addition and I hope it will be pushed up stream to the likes of Debian. Canonical have been criticised in the past for not contributing enough back to the upstream projects they depend on, but I think that’s a little harsh. Let’s see what they do with this and then judge.
I’m proud to announce the 2009.10 release batch featuring:
* 25 new additions to the TurnKey Linux virtual appliance library
* added native virtual appliance packaging (OVF support included)
* Amazon EC2 support, with EBS persistence
* Core improvements: Ajax web shell, upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04.3
The project recently celebrated its one year birthday. Since our last major release in March the project picked up steam with weekly downloads increasing over 500% (we just flew past 60,000 downloads). Not bad for a new server oriented project. With all the goodies in this new release, and all the stuff we’re working on for the next release, TurnKey Linux’s second year should be even more interesting.
ALT Linux announces public availability of two products based on Platform Five: ALT Linux 5.0 Ark, a suite designed for making integrated solutions, and ALT Linux 5.0 School, a suite that is targetted at secondary and high schools.
1. Fresh ISO images of Owl-current for x86 and x86-64 (generated on October 25) are available on our FTP mirrors. There are also direct download links on the Owl homepage:
http://www.openwall.com/Owl/
These ISOs use Linux 2.4.37.6-ow1 as the kernel, and, compared to last month’s ISO snapshots, they contain updated versions of many packages (vsftpd, iptables, passwdqc, cpio, e2fsprogs, strace, VIM, and xinetd), as well as minor changes to some other packages.
Openwall GNU/*/Linux (or Owl for short) is a free security-enhanced operating system with Linux and GNU software as its core, compatible with other major distributions of GNU/*/Linux. It is intended as a server platform.
Consider: Intel sold its 1 billionth x86 chip in 2003. Its closest rival, AMD, broke the 500 million mark just this year. ARM, on the other hand, expects to ship 2.8 billion processors in 2009 alone — or around 90 chips per second. That’s in addition to the more than 10 billion ARM processors already powering devices today.
MontaVista Software announced more Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) for its MontaVista Linux 6 commercial embedded development distribution. The MSDs are separated into industrial automation, multi-core networking, Android, automotive and portable multimedia, and multifunction-printer versions, and support processors from Cavium, Freescale, Intel, and Texas Instruments, says the company.
Gumstix is shipping a new expansion board for its Linux-supported, ARM Cortex-A8-based Overo computer-on-module (COM) series, aimed at small form-factor wireless devices. The Palo35 is designed to incorporate one of Gumstix’s four Texas Instruments’ OMAP35xx-based Overo modules, and supports a 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen from LG, says the company.
Texas Instruments (TI) announced a DaVinci-family, HD-ready Internet Protocol (IP) camera reference design. The Linux-ready DM368IPNC-MT5 is built by Appro Photoelectron, incorporates a TI DM36x-400 SoC, and can process H.264 main-profile 1080p video at 30fps while consuming only three Watts, says TI.
Nokia’s second annual Maemo Summit brought together 400 developers and power users of the Linux-based tablet community in Amsterdam over the October 9-11 weekend. Maemo Community Manager Quim Gil said the primary goal was to bring the community together for the social and interactive benefits, but the three-day program also provided a solid introduction to the new Maemo 5 release, a preview of Maemo 6, and a chance to work with the Nokia N900 — which ships with as close to a standard Linux distribution as the marketplace has seen delivered on a usable mobile phone.
Although not officially announced, as all HTC Android smartphones rely on the same CPU, it shouldn’t be long before we see other handsets getting this update too.
Eclair is also now available to developers, as Google has just announced that the Android SDK supports the latest version of the OS.
Mentor Graphics has completed an initial port of Google’s open source Android mobile operating system to Freescale’s PowerPC processor architecture. According to LinuxDevices, Freescale Semiconductor is “now accepting orders for a hardware / software platform for developing Android applications on Power Architecture PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors”.
KDE-based distribution Kubuntu has released version 9.10 which adds a new variant showcasing the up and coming Plasma Netbook setup. The release also adds OpenOffice KDE 4 integration and extra installer beauty thanks to artwork from KDE’s Oxygen team.
Canonical on Thursday updated its Linux distribution for netbooks, simplifying the interface and adding new programs that the company says will make it easier for users to access and use Web content.
The Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix is designed to run basic Web and office applications typically used on netbooks. Netbooks are cheap and lightweight laptops characterized by limited computing resources and small s\creen sizes.
The French Government’s public finance department will switch 130,000 desktop PC’s to Mozilla’s email and calendar applications. Mozilla’s Thunderbird email service, Lightning Calendar and an open-source groupware will replace IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office.
Free programs such as Linux first challenged Microsoft Corp. in software that runs personal computers. Linux has gradually gained enough acceptance that government agencies and even some corporations are willing to try such programs for some of their most important tasks: applications that run billing, payroll and purchasing.
I know everyone’s been saying it: The economic downturn will drive more people to open source. Because OpenLogic sells support on 500 projects as well as open source governance services and solutions, we get a very broad view of enterprise use of open source. After analyzing our Q3 and 2009 results, I’ve seen the data, and I’m here to tell you that open source is looking good.
To where do we take the battle in support of OpenSource and Free Software? We are told to choose our battles carefully and not to fight where it is least effective.
Most of the time, we think of the Web as static: We accept sites the way they are and grumble about the problems with sites that aren’t entirely optimal. With Firefox, this isn’t necessarily the way it has to be. With a few well-placed add-ons, you can tweak some of your favorite sites to be just what you want them to be.
Almost everybody does a certain amount of word processing on their systems. One of the most popular word processing apps around is OpenOffice, the 3rd version of which as at yesterday (October 28) has been downloaded a hundred million times.
What makes this great office suite wonderful to use is the extent to which you can customize it with the thousands of freely available addons. These addons add extra features to make working with Openoffice very interesting. Below are 6 of such addons you definitely need to install to take your Openoffice.org to the max.
To be completely honest, none of Oracle’s plans come as a surprise. And at the end of the day, the FAQ is not legally binding, nor is it a commitment to deliver products, code, or functionality. Oracle clearly states this at the end of the FAQ. This too is completely understandable. Oracle, like any other company with shareholders, will have to evaluate and adjust its plans and intentions on a product-by-product basis over time. Oracle has a fiduciary duty to do so.
BSDBetty kicks off the show with an interview with Richard Stallman before his talk at the Edinburgh University Informatics Colloquium, with particular focus on ethics in the field of software. Transcription of this interview can be found at Indymedia Scotland.
BSDBetty kicks off the show with an interview with Richard Stallman before his talk at the Edinburgh University Informatics Colloquium, with particular focus on ethics in the field of software. Transcription of this interview can be found at Indymedia Scotland.
Join us at the third annual FSCONS, a meeting place for social change, focused on the future of free software and free society. Open discussion and brainstorming are two of the primary factors that pave the way for change. In FSCONS, we seek to engage, inform, sometimes provoke, and always motivate social change through these discussions.
More details about the release can be found in the release notes. Zenos 2.5 is available to download for Mac OS X and various Unix and Linux systems. VMware virtual appliances for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are also provided. Zenoss is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
The government has asked web inventor Tim Berners-Lee to create a single point of access to public data as its data site begins to take shape.
It is hoping this access will lead to new technologies and services being developed.
Prime minister Gordon Brown asked Berners-Lee to look at access to government data in June, after Barack Obama’s administration launched an open source data site.
We don’t know a lot about how it was done. We do know, thanks to NetCraft, that the White House is running a typical LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack to support Drupal. The actual credit for designing the new Linux-based infrastructure goes to GDIT (General Dynamics Information Technology), a well-known government IT contractor.
It wants to “move toward a pan-European approach for copyright exceptions in the digital age”, allowing more use of copyrighted works – just one of a range of measures that must be continental because “the UK cannot act independently”.
Lammy, speaking at the C&binet creative industries gathering on Tuesday, put his ambitions full-square in European policymakers’ court.
So next week, Adobe’s having aconference here to tell Federal employees why they ought to be using “Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology” to make government more open. They’ve spent what seems to be millions of dollars wrapping buses in DC with Adobe marketing materials all designed to tell us how necessary Adobe products are to Obama’s Open Government Initiative. They’ve even got a beautiful website set up to tout the government’s use of Flash and PDF, and are holding a conference here next week to talk about how Government should use ubiquitous and secure technologies to make government more open and interactive.
From the WHATWG group’s point of view, work on HTML5 is almost complete. A blog entry from project manager Ian Hickson states that development has reached the ‘last call’ stage. This applies to the “Web Workers” and “Microdata vocabularies” standards. The FAQ describes just two further stages in the standardisation process before the standard becomes widely deployed.
The Open University Campaign recognizes that scholastic advancement occurs most readily in an environment of sharing, openness and collaboration. By providing a cross-index of leading universities, the project will add important comparative measurements to encourage increased academic openness. Our hope is that these resources will provide a platform from which openness activists can endeavor to improve the scholastic environment.
In September 2008, the Bush administration changed domestic intelligence-gathering rules. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when the bureau released a redacted copy of its “Domestic Investigations and Operation Guide” in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
A year after the onset of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, details continue to emerge of the sordid secret deals cut by the Federal Reserve in bailing out certain financial giants. The very latest, courtesy of Bloomberg News, alleges that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, under the leadership of Timothy Geithner (now U.S. Treasury Secretary), engineered a sweetheart deal to pay off holders of AIG debt at par, rather than the 40 cents on the dollar that AIG negotiators had been pushing for.
Note to Goldman Sachs: The charm offensive isn’t working.
Goldman executives have been pulling out the stops trying to persuade the public that Goldman bankers aren’t the greedy, heartless profiteers that the firm’s record profits and bonuses might suggest. They have been arguing that Goldman has profited, while contributing to the greater good. The firm’s unflappable finance officer David Viniar told analysts during an Oct. 15 conference that Goldman took advantage of trading opportunities in the post-crisis environment because “we knew that we had an important role to play in supporting global capital markets and economies.”
This was the scene in front of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s apartment building Sunday, as photographed by TIME’s Deirdre van Dyk (who came across it after running a race in Central Park). The protesters were mad about, among other things, a Goldman-backed company shutting down the Stella D’Oro biscuit factory in the Bronx and moving production to Ohio.
Stirred up by union activists in Chicago, protesters picketed the offices of Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) and Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC), and then went to the Sheraton hotel, where the annual American Bankers’ Association convention was held to protest there as well.
The Chicago offices of both Wells Fargo (NYSE: WFC) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) saw picketers and protesters on Monday morning, as reported by the Wall Street Journal. The protest was part of a larger multi-day protest that focused on the American Bankers Association (ABA) annual meeting. Individuals carried signs and chanted slogans voicing their concern at bank executives for profiting from the mortgage crisis and directing their anger at what they perceive as predatory lending practices.
Late last night the Financial Times broke the news that the hedge fund firm Galleon Group paid $250 million to its Wall Street banks last year in return for received market information that other investors did not get.
Those banks need to come forward immediately and explain what information they were selling to Galleon
The FT’s report didn’t specify which banks provided the information but noted that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were Galleon’s top providers of hedge fund services and prime brokerage. Both declined to comment on the story. But the allegations are so explosive that both firms are going to have to start talking.
A book review in western Canada’s Georgia Straight newspaper asks, “Do you ever wonder why so many of the Fraser Institute’s right-wing commentaries get into Canadian daily newspapers? Perhaps you’ve been disturbed by the spate of articles about the inevitability of Canada forming closer ties with the United States. Maybe you’re troubled by the constant media attacks on Medicare or on the scientific consensus about global warming.
Do you ever wonder why so many of the Fraser Institute’s right-wing commentaries get into Canadian daily newspapers? Perhaps you’ve been disturbed by the spate of articles about the inevitability of Canada forming closer ties with the United States.
Ho ho ho. But then I read about what the swine flu is doing to healthcare insurer profits in Brett Chase’s Portfolio blog, Heavy Doses.
[...]
Now I’m rethinking whether The Onion’s report really is satire. Maybe Republicans do oppose efforts to combat the swine flu. Because, perversely, no swine flu would mean higher profits for the healthcare insurers which would mean a better chance of tougher reforms getting passed.
A GOP stall on all Health and Human Services nominees has left the department without a surgeon general during a period of a global flu pandemic, prompting the HHS secretary to call for Senate action.
Because Senate Republicans are blocking approval of Dr. Benjamin’s nomination in homage to the health insurance industry. Republicans are trying to pressure the Obama administration to end its efforts to hold health insurer Humana accountable for sending a misleading mailer out to its Medicare Advantage members to try and scare them out of supporting health insurance reform.
That won’t stop a wealthy plaintiff, though — and who’s wealthier these days than public employee unions? — from suing, however. After all, there’s pretty much never fee-shifting in defendants’ direction under the Lanham Act, although the statute does provide for it (or for that matter for frivolous copyright claims) But good luck on that.
So trademark infringement remains the legal claim of choice for those seeking to shut down smaller, poorer message opponents. File yours today!
The Chamber of Commerce is suing the Yes Men over the parody press conference the group pulled off last week.
The Chamber has filed a civil complaint in the US District Court of Washington, DC, accusing Yes Men Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos (also known as Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, respectively) of trademark infringement, unfair competition and false advertising. The Chamber’s suit also lists several members of the DC-based activist group the Avaaz Action Factory as co-defendants. The conduct of those who organized the event was “destructive of public discourse,” the Chamber argues.
TalkTalk, the second largest internet service provider in the UK, has threatened to launch legal action if business secretary Peter Mandelson follows through with his plan to cut off persistent illegal filesharers’ internet connections.
THE UK’S TOP Internet service providers have opposed Business Secretary Lord Peter Mandelson’s daft plan to cut off persistent illegal filesharers’ Internet connections.
Talktalk has even said that it feels the scheme infringes upon people’s rights and it will be happy to go to court to have it struck down.
Unjust, because it allows the media industries to function as prosecutor, judge and jury, with only minimal oversight by proper legal authorities; unjust because it cuts people off from what is fast becoming a necessity of modern life, as the UK government itself is promoting; unjust because it penalises an entire family for the alleged actions of one member: something that in war would amount to a disproportionate and vindictive act of reprisal – a war-crime, in fact.
It is unworkable because it will be almost impossible to tell whether copyrighted material is being transmitted legally or not; and ultimately it is unworkable because people will simply start encrypting material before downloading.
Labour’s plan is that the music industry will monitor what people are downloading, and on their say-so (not in any court of law), internet subscribers will receive two warning letters and then have their internet access cut off. The music industry will not have to prove that the subscribers have being doing anything wrong; instead Mandelson’s plan is that they will act as judge, jury and executioner. And it’s not just the subscriber who will be cut off, their whole household will be too; this collective punishment, if done in wartime, would be a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
It is tempting to blame the CRTC or the incumbent telecom providers (who filed the complaint over the Globalive structure) for this mess, but the real culprit lies with outdated legislation that prioritizes Canadian ownership over a competitive Canadian marketplace.
Here’s how the new feature will work: Onebox will let users stream songs directly from Google’s search result page, and will also include additional content like tour information and music videos (the actual content shown will vary depending on the partner — more on that later). Enter a query for “Use Somebody”, and you’re going to see a small ‘play’ button in your search result that lets you stream the Kings of Leon song in its entirety, or buy the song. Clicking on the play button will bring up a small browser window that will immediately start streaming your song. If you enter the name of an artist rather than a song title as your search query, Google will present a handful of popular songs by that artist with multiple ‘play’ buttons.
The article this comes from goes into great detail into F. Scott Fitzgelald’s earnings over his lifetime, and what’s striking is that with a different sort of copyright system in place, he barely seems to rely on copyright royalties at all to make money. Instead — like most jobs — he recognizes he needs to keep producing new works to earn money, selling stories to various publications, along with working for Hollywood studios in addition to his novels. How much things have changed.
Now, I’ve gone into great detail on why a music tax is a terrible idea in the past — but that was addressing ideas like Jim Griffin’s Choruss plan (which, by the way, we’re still waiting to find out who the tens of thousands of students who are supposedly already using it are, but we’ll leave that aside for now). This idea, from Chris Ovenden, is slightly different. It is not a “download license” or a “download tax” as it’s really a fund to pay for the creation of new music…
[...]
Which, of course, brings up the third problem: you still have a bureaucracy, and how does it determine who to distribute the funds to? How is it possibly fair for someone — rather than the fans themselves — to determine who gets the money.
Ron Kujawa writes to us about The Public Record and Tommy Lee’s project to collaborate with fans to produce his next album, Public Mayhem. Aiming to interact with fans and get more attention, Tommy Lee has posted some rough “stem” tracks online for anyone to download, and he’s encouraging fans to upload their own music that might go with those tracks.
Has Keyboard Cat captivated you in 2009? You’re not the only one. Online video has continued to grow in popularity while P2P is on the decline, according to the latest data from Sandvine. The trend is good for both content producers and users alike.
And, of course, once you’ve stored the video, it’s just not that hard to extract it. And it always will be. The challenge for Hollywood is to change the incentives of the game. Maybe sell me a flat-rate subscription. Maybe bundle it with my DSL provider. But make the experience compelling enough and cheap enough, and I’ll do it. I regularly extract video from my TiVo and copy it to my iPhone via third-party software. It’s practically painless and it happens to yield files that I could share with the world, but I don’t. Why? Because there’s real downside (I’d rather not get sued, thanks), and no particular upside.
Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition just been launched to a clamoring world by O’Reilly and at 917 pages including index it beats the heck out of resorting to the “man” command. My one complaint (you may well relate to this) is that my eyes aren’t what they used to be and the font size the book is set in is at my limit of resolution without glasses. As I can’t see well enough to find my glasses, this is a problem. All you whippersnappers will be fine. This book is a great resource. A 5 out of 5.
A: I’m Juliet Kemp; I’m a sysadmin and freelance writer on Linux. I’ve been using FOSS for getting on for a decade now, and working as a sysadmin for nearly as long. I recently wrote a book of Linux systems administration tips – Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach – and write regularly for http://serverwatch.com, http://www.linuxplanet.com, and Linux Format.
For those of you who were with us back in 2002, you may remember a wall calendar we produced in celebration of issue 100 of Linux Journal. It was such a fun calendar that for years to come readers would ask me when we were going to print another. I always joked “ask me in another 100 issues”. When Executive Editor Jill Franklin reminded me that issue 200 was coming up in 2010, I realized I was going to have to hold true to my promise (and lots of other “ask me in 100 issues” promises).
KSplice is an incredibly useful application that allows important updates to be installed (such as new kernels, etc) without requiring the need for a reboot.
In late September there was a call by Peter Hutterer for a new X.Org release process that consisted of a six-month release cycle for the X Server, all development work to be done in feature branches and not Git master, and a three-stage development cycle. The agreed upon version was pretty much the same as Peter’s version, but it also called for the X.Org drivers to be pulled back into the X Server (around version 1.10).
A recent trend I’ve noticed is this myth that compiz is bloated.
My argument here is that compiz is not bloated but rather it is modular.
[...]
Metacity with no compositing comes in at about 2.6 MB. It’s lightweight but it does not need to deal with having a plugin system loaded in. Stepping things up a bit, let’s turn on compositing.
The Inverse Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 1.8.5. This is a maintenance release of PacketFence which focuses on stability and includes many bug fixes and several small enhancements.
Klipper – Similar to Glipper, this clipboard manager adds features to the native desktop app, but for the KDE environment. It’s part of the official KDE base module, but you can also grab it as a standalone tool. Klipper buffers your copy history so even though the last snippet you grab is the first one pasted, you can refer back to other snippets if you need to. Actions based on regular expressions can be set in the Preferences section, or you can customize existing shortcuts any way you want.
EVO, the first open source game console, is expected out of beta Nov. 5, 2009. EVO is the first fully supported open source game console designed for both mainstream and open source users. The company sold several beta units to resellers and customers with excellent feedback.
The arrival of HoN and the announcement by id developer Timothee Besset that he will be overseeing a Linux build of the idTech 5 3D engine are both a huge boost for the Linux gaming community.
As the game opens you find yourself broken and discarded in the dump outside the city wall. Your first task is to reassemble yourself. Once that is accomplished, you can begin your quest to return to the city and your girlfriend. Your adventure unfolds as you solve puzzle-like problems in order to progress. For example, how do you trick the guard to lower the drawbridge? Or how might you enter a tunnel that remains sealed except for the few seconds when a train cart passes?
The upcoming Amarok 2.2.1 release is turning out to be quite an impressive one, especially considering how short of a release cycle we have put ourselves on. The changelog is full of good stuff already!
The application that has received the most bugfixes is once again Krita. Also KWord has seen numerous improvements in many places, and the Microsoft Word filter has once again been improved. The same goes for KPresenter and its Powerpoint import filter and KSpread.
Gentoo is a source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways. Linux Magazine benchmarks three of the most common GCC optimizations; -Os, -O2 and -O3, and throws in Ubuntu for good measure.
Welcome to the first part of my mini-guide for creating a killer KDE4 desktop with Arch Linux. In this multi-part article, I’ll first give you a general overview of installing this awesome distribution, and then in subsequent parts I’ll kick it up a notch and walk you through installing the best KDE features out there and even clone some features of other KDE distro’s while we’re at it.
PCLinuxOS also known as PCLinux Operating System or Pclos is a Free Linux distribution which is targeted at home users. This Linux distribution was founded in October 2003 by Texstar. Since its initial release, PCLinuxOS has come a long way. PCLinuxOS is distributed as a LiveCD and can also be installed to a local hard drive.
Overall, then: Ubuntu 9.10 is a very stable and despite a few quirks – like needing to enable AppArmor settings by hand – a worthy successor to Ubuntu 9.04.
If you don’t already know all of the details about Ubuntu 9.10, you aren’t reading Phoronix enough with our plethora of coverage. Though some of the highlights for Ubuntu 9.10 include new artwork, GNOME 2.28 integration, many updates to its graphics stack, the Ubuntu Software Center, GRUB2 integration, and much more.
In February, Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 9.10 would be codenamed the “Karmic Koala”. Today, after months of development and buzz, the Karmic Koala is being officially released into the wild.
The open source OS’s developers are simultaneously releasing the server, desktop and netbook editions of Ubuntu 9.10 today, offering what Shuttleworth earlier this week referred to as a complete platform that he hopes will become the default alternative to Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.
When you think “Ubuntu”, you almost certainly think of it as a desktop distribution. Make no mistake, Ubuntu 9.10 is a great desktop distribution — but that’s not what Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is focusing on with this release and the next, long-term support version, which will follow this one. No, Canonical has its eyes on the prize, and that’s the server market.
The sad truth is that, except for Novell with SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), the big-name Linux distributors tend to focus on servers. After all, as Red Hat has shown, that’s where the real money is.
Last, if you are going to install Ubuntu on a netbook or some other system with a very small screen, when you boot the LiveCD choose the “try Ubuntu without changes” option, instead of going directly to the “Install Ubuntu” option. Once it is booted, set auto-hide on both the upper and lower panels, by right-clicking on each of them, choose Properties, and then click auto-hide and OK. Then start the installation from the desktop icon. You’ll be happy to have the little bit of extra screen space this gains you for the installation window.
Since these are upgrades, there is very little to no change in appearance, with the exception of the login screen. Instead of the previous hideous brown, it’s now a hideous blue (and I like blue).
If you’ve been following the Ubuntu release cycle you know that the .10 release is forth coming. Slated to hit the World Wide Web on October 29th, 2009, 9.10 promises to have quite a number of new features that should please even the most discerning of Linux users.
When I booted into my Ubuntu Linux 9.10 desktop, I heard the Ubuntu theme play. So sound worked fine right from the start. No need to fiddle with any settings to get it working. Ditto with networking.
There’s a lot to like about Ubuntu 9.10, and its emphasis on design and ease of use. Pundits say confidence is running high within Canonical. And Internetnews openly wonders if Ubuntu 9.10 can become the “default alternative to Windows.”
As with every release of Ubuntu (…, Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic), there’s a wiki page for incoming artwork submissions and concepts (themes, icons, etc.). On the wiki you can post your artwork submissions and concepts for the Ubuntu release planned for April, 2010, nicknamed Lucid Lynx. The first submission has already been made to the Lucid Lynx artwork wiki.
Although there’s not an awful lot unique to netbook remix to touch on, it’s a superior experience over all to the 9.04 version. It also easily beats the rest of the Ubuntu-based netbook “distros” such as EeePeasy & Jolicloud by being easier to install, easier to use and ships with just about everything one needs. (Perhaps it ships with too much, but that’s moot.)
Ubuntu is no doubt the most popular Linux distribution out there. Although, sometimes you would like to go for something different from the mainstream, you are so much into Ubuntu and are so reluctant to try out another distro. In such a situation, you can try out some other Ubuntu based distributions. That way, you are in for some added support, some modified features and you are still using a lot of Ubuntu.
Indeed, the Dext has a gorgeous touchscreen, a fine Qwerty keyboard, good browser plus a reasonable camera and media players. User friendly, it offers plenty of potential for personalisation, along with growing range of apps plus Motoblur’s ability to keep you up to the second with your social networks. After the last few years of underwhelming variations on a Razr theme, Motorola has made a serious attempt to knock back the doubters with the Dext and, in all honesty, we’re a little surprised that it has come up with such a strong offering.
The red-hot smartphone sector is posed to get even hotter as competition grows with two signature releases due out in coming days — Verizon’s Droid and BlackBerry Storm2 — along with new indications that Android is making huge gains on the mobile software front.
The open-source Google Android operating system, which was introduced by the Open Handset Alliance in November of 2007, will have its successor Android 2.0 appear for the first time on the Verizon’s Motorola Droid smartphone, reportedly to be released on November 6, 2009.
It looks like Android 2.0 – also known as Eclair for some reason – will allow users to sync their devices to a number of different contact sources, as well as allowing something called ‘Quick Contact’ to be embedded within an application. The new Bluetooth API is expected to facilitate peer-to-peer activities like gaming.
Actually, Verizon did sort of put that on the iDon’t list, just not in those words. The original iDon’t list includes both ‘iDon’t allow open development’ and ‘iDon’t customize’, both of which imply that the Droid does those things which means the Droid provides a customizable, open development platform that business customers can work with.
Today we are listing here 11 Most Popular Open Source Softwares Of All Time in which most of them are cross-platform. You might not be able to enjoy all the features as commercial software but it will really help you to perform your task in a better way when your pocket does not allow you to purchase paid software.
OPEN source software offers one cure for clinical system implementation woes, as authorities struggle to find solutions that meet all medical requirements, a leading health informatics researcher says.
“Some of the greatest efficiency gains in the health sector will come from open source software, rather than packages supplied by large corporations,” said Professor Jon Patrick of the University of Sydney’s School of Information Technologies. “It’s not in industry’s long-term interests to come up with efficient and interoperable systems.
PT Indosat Mega Media (IM2) has announced that they are supporting the open source technology. They claimed that 50 percent of the total number of the company’s servers has been installed with open-source-based applications and systems.
Right now, the project site contains the Python/Google AppEngine source code for the Salmon demo. Writes Panzer, “I also intend to host the actual spec text there for the moment, along with the reference implementation code, and develop both in parallel based on discussions on the mailing list.”
IT budget cuts, an improved ecosystem and more maturity have boosted the demand for open source applications in Indian enterprises, writes Brian Pereira.
The economic downturn may be regarded as a blessing in disguise for the open source community and proponents of open source software. The skeptics (read commercial software vendors) have suddenly become silent and are in fact willing to support open source, ironically finding that this move somehow works to their advantage.
Messaging software vendor Zimbra has signed up distributor Interactive Ideas to help build its UK channel and the two firms claim interest in open source technologies is on the up.
Interactive Ideas will focus on the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) which uses an AJAX web client. The product integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, messaging, tasks and online document sharing.
Nicholas Bellenberg, IT director at Hachette Filipacchi, said all of the publishing house’s web development is based on open source technology: “I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything different! There’s no point in spending a fortune on proprietary systems or programming frameworks that don’t move with the times. And yes, you can scale it big – Facebook does.”
According to the research firm, it is likely that number of Smartphone users will shoot up and it is expected to touch around 412 million Smartphone users globally by 2014. Around 250 million of them are surely expected to equip with accelerometers.
In other words–development costs for reusing the same old molds is a dead argument. It is about giving up control, lowering costs and recognizing that the danger signal has sounded with increasing adoption rates of open source solutions.
They are soliciting your input, if you have installed solar. It is a community driven project and only as accurate as the data entered in a collaborative effort between government, industry, and the public. As they point out, currently, it is only estimates.
“Our project, Empowered by Open Source, will enable libraries to collaborate and more effectively influence the evolution of their information systems so that the systems can be molded to fit the services that libraries and patrons want, rather than services having to be designed to fit what the systems allow.”
Zenoss Inc., corporate sponsor of the award winning open source network monitoring project Zenoss Core, today announced it will host its third Zenoss Community Day on November 6. The daylong event is being held during the USENIX 23rd Large Installation Systems Administrator Conference (LISA), where Zenoss is a sponsor and premium exhibitor.
First, OpenLogic reported a 41 percent year-to-year increase in 3Q 09 revenue with a 100 percent renewal rate. These are strong results and the renewal rate suggests that clients value OpenLogic’s offerings.
So, increasingly I find myself, like many others, asking why it is that in general the public sector appears to be so far behind the curve when it comes to F/OSS adoption. We do hear that there is a faster uptake in places such as Brazil and where budgets are likely to be more limited than in, say, the UK or the USA. France’s national police force has reportedly saved 50 million euros since 2004 through adoption of F/OSS and migrating a portion of its workstations to Ubuntu. Back in February the UK Government issued a document titled Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use: Government Action Plan, in which it was reported that over the previous five years “government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer”, and suggested that “we need to increase the pace”. However, the overall picture with regards public sector F/OSS adoption, both here in the UK and elsewhere, remains seriously disappointing. Furthermore, we are still hearing reports that some government agencies are violating their own procurement policies by mandating vendor-specific technologies in their invitations to tender. Where instead they ought to be simply defining requirements – not solutions – and thus creating a more fair, diverse and competitive market, and one that has the potential to lead to better value for the taxpayer coupled with increased innovation.
First came the formation of Dynamo Business Intelligence Corp, (aka Dynamo BI), a new commercially supported distribution, and sponsor, of LucidDB. Then came the launch of InfiniDB Community Edition, a new open source analytic database based on MySQL from Calpont.
We actually included Calpont in our report but its product plans at that time looked precarious to say the least as the company found that its plans to launch a data warehousing platform based on MySQL were overshadowed by Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.
OpenOffice’s future as open source appears to be assured; “After the transaction closes, Oracle plans to continue developing and supporting OpenOffice as open source”. Oracle plans to offer a commercial license for OpenOffice for larger customers who require support and enterprise tools.
When looking at the download counter more than 100.000.000 people downloaded OpenOffice.org since version 3.0 was released about a year ago. I think this is something we need to celebrate next week at the OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto, Italy.
The developers are currently working on new features for version 3.2 of the office suite, which is currently in beta and expected to be available at the end of November. The latest stable release of OpenOffice is version 3.1.1. OpenOffice is released under version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3).
The Department of Defense Tuesday clarified its stance on open source software saying it is equal to commercial software in almost all cases and by law should be considered by the agency when making technology purchase decisions.
“The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code supports software reliability and security efforts through the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise go unrecognized by a more limited core development team,” the attachment noted.
The U.S Department of Defense is not only encouraging use of open source applications, it recently open-sourced an enterprise human resources application that has over a million lines of code.
This isn’t the first time the DOD has released code to the public. In June, a PC-based mapping application developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute for the military, FalconView, was also made available as open source.
While this measure may not be an immediate cost-saver (5 different companies are involved in re-building and maintaining the White House web site), long-term costs should fall as government agencies are able to borrow from the greater Drupal community while incrementally improving on the websites code. But the question remains, will the Obama White House share some of the contributions it’s making to open source?
Like many of you, I awoke Monday to read that whitehouse.gov was now running on open source products, including Drupal, Red Hat Linux, Apache web server, MySQL, and Apache Solr.
White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure — and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future.
In a way, Daedelus’s live performances could be considered “open source,” with the set list and performance adapting to his audience. “I really like the fact that on different nights, the show can go in a wildly different direction,” he explains. “I hope as an artist there’s a bit more of a mandate to be challenging. As much as I want people to have a good time, I also want them to be exposed to sounds that they would want to hear in a more open environment or constructive setting. I think they should both be happening, but my heart is really in melody.”
In the world of computer languages, nothing speaks louder than who adopts its usage. The Python language hit a home run with Google adopting it for a high percentage of their internal and public (Google App Engine) projects. One of the things that makes the Python language appealing to so many is how it treats everything as an object. This makes the language inherently object-oriented but not so complex and wordy that it can’t be understood by beginning programmers.
Sony has asked more than 69,000 owners of some of its all-in-one desktop Vaio PCs to return the machines’ AC adaptors in order to avoid the risk of electric shock.
But if you are in the music industry, movie industry, journalism, software services, cloud computing, if you are a software engineer, if you are a web designer, if you design logos, if you do any kind of digital work you are exposed to a huge amount of competition, you are exposed to the lowest cost provider in your sector — thanks to the Internet.
Well, it seems it was you, taxpayer – it was your money being used to play the stock market, artificially inflate it, give favored banks some big (and entirely illusory) profits. Why? Because the big banks and the big government need you to feel that things are getting better – so that you’ll go out and spend, so that revenues to big corporations and big government will rise, thus allowing them to carry the toxic assets for one more year, or so. To call this smoke and mirrors is to be nice about it – outright fraud is a better description.
Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that received a $10 billion bailout from taxpayers via the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), recently released its income statement for the third quarter of 2009, and at least on the face of it the firm’s recovery from a November 2008 loss in net income of over $2 billion seems a success.
But it turns out that Paulson just happened to be in Moscow at the same time that Goldman’s board of directors was having dinner there with Mikhail Gorbachev. (You know, as one does.)
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This is sleazy in the extreme, and will only serve to heighten suspicions that Paulson’s Treasury was rigging the game in favor of Goldman all along. (It’s also a bit peculiar, to say the least, that the only two times Paulson met with private-sector boards he was out of the country, and arguably outside US jurisdiction.)
Are we supposed to be impressed that Goldman Sachs is spending $200 million on a foundation to support “education”?
Goldman Sachs certainly thinks so.
That foundation has been much hyped recently, as America’s premier financial magnate has tried to offset the news that, shortly after being rescued by the taxpayers, it is expecting to dole out some $23 billion in bonuses this year.
So, just to be clear: Goldman Sachs would like us to think of it as a good public citizen because over the last 10 years it has donated 0.08 percent of what it’s giving out in bonuses just this year to charity.
Just a few days ago we learned Government Sa-er, I mean Goldman Sachs-announced it had set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from the year before. That works out to more than $527,000 for each employee. Not bad for nine months of work.
While many ordinary Americans are still waiting for an economic recovery, Goldman and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank’s 140-year history.
Perhaps we need a new vocabulary, one that helps us describe a society that promotes the accumulation of vast riches, bails out the rich when they take too many chances, and avoids responsibility for the common good. Even Milton Friedman would have trouble calling that capitalism.
How about the Billionaire Bailout Society?
Here are its salient features:
1. We promote accumulation of vast fortunes without limits.
2. We shun progressive income taxes that could narrow the gap.
3. We keep most of finance deregulated even after it has collapsed so spectacularly.
A posting over on the Big Government blog details recent attempts by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to shut down the website at AFTExposed.com (which, as you might guess from the name, doesn’t have very nice things to say about the AFT). The AFT’s General Counsel has sent the operators of the offending website a cease-and-desist letter, demanding “immediate cessation of use of the domain AFTexposed.com or any other variant that includes the acronym AFT.” The asserted grounds: (a) trademark infringement (that use of the AFT acronym is “likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive”), and (b) violation of ICANN’s Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (on the grounds that the AFTexposed.com name is “confusingly similar” to AFT’s trademark and was “registered in bad faith.”).
AC/DC’s new $200 box set packs musical rarities and memorabilia inside a functional 1-watt guitar amplifier.
The AC/DC Backtracks packaging, pictured, is unique and fully operational. And what’s inside is impressive as well: The limited-edition box set includes a stunning variety of media and collectibles.
Remember GateHouse Media? The regional news company sued the NY Times for linking to it, claiming it was copyright infringement to include the headline and a brief snippet along with the link (you know, like Google…). Amusingly, it turned out that GateHouse Media was doing the same thing. Eventually the two companies settled, and apparently that’s convinced GateHouse Media that complaining about such links is a good idea.
The Public Domain is supposed to be a safe place for artists to get content without fear of copyright infringement.
This permits Rumblefish advertising rights and control over public domain and the content of independent artists.
(We are the only ones we know of – but we are sure that we are not the only ones)
1-2-1VIEW (121view.com) is a provider of digital signage systems with integrated viewership counting technology that is based on Linux and are built on proven consumer electronics platforms.
For example, while anyone can download Linux, Green Hills enables any flavor of Linux to be deployed alongside real time and/or security critical applications using state of the art virtualisation technology. Innovation and integration enables customers to reduce cost and time to market over what they can cobble together themselves.
There was a time, not long ago, when GNU/Linux was only for hardcore geeks. Whatever distro one used (or made from scratch), a fair amount of programming knowledge was required. Linux was almost exclusively a “back end” server system. Of course it’s still very popular for servers, but there are more and more desktop distros available that are ready “off the shelf.”
A statement on the Gizmodo website admits that it was tricked into running Suzuki adverts which were in fact from hackers.
[...]
Blaming the fact that staff used Linux operating systems on their production machines for “not noticing sooner”, it advised concerned users to load some up-to-date antivirus software and “make sure your system is clean”.
Not normally being a huge fan of Windows software, I do have a different view of Acronis Disk Director Suite. For those individuals that simply must dual-boot Windows and Linux, this is my recommended approach.
Even though it is not deemed as necessary since it is possible to dual-boot without it, inexperienced users will find this is vastly safer to use than rolling the dice and hoping you remember which partition is which when installing that second OS.
Whether you use a single desktop or manage a lab full of servers, with the various threats we all face from hackers these days you simply have to make sure you’re running a secure ship.
Running Linux gives you some inherent protection from attack, but you still need to take adequate steps to thwart any attempts that people might make to compromise your system.
Also, the per-platform download breakdown was pretty surprising, with Windows accounting for 65%, and Mac and Linux pretty much splitting the remainder evenly…
Asustek Computer, known by gearheads for its Asus brand motherboards, is probably best known these days to consumers as the originator of the Linux-based netbook, the Eee PC. The ESC1000 personal super was unveiled at an event in Taipei today, but it is not yet ready for sale. The ESC1000 was mischaracterized in the trade press and blogosphere as a supercomputer.
After a three month development period following the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0, the first beta release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 “Bardu” is now available for all of your testing needs on Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD platforms. Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Beta 1 carries more than 200 changes since the release of 2.0 Sandtorg with many new prominent features being introduced, new test profiles added, and greater usability enhancements. In this article, we will go over some of the key improvements to be found in Phoronix Test Suite 2.2.
After quite a long development period, Nvidia finally decided to make Linux users happy again, by releasing a few minutes ago a brand-new and improved version of its graphics driver, Nvidia 190.42. As you see in the title, the big news is that Nvidia 190.42 now supports OpenGL 3.2. But, it also introduces support for the following video cards: GeForce G102M, GeForce GT 220, GeForce G210, GeForce G210M, GeForce GT 230M, GeForce GT 240M, GeForce GTS 250M and GeForce GTS 260M.
The Gimp has a great online index of all the current filter effects. You can see examples of all the different effects, without having to try each one out on your own photos.
While a lot of people swear by that other program, Photosomething or other, The Gimp has huge array of unusual and interesting features. Filters are an easy way to get great results with just a few mouse clicks.
The Xbox Media Center arrived in 2004 and became popular so quickly that it became clear more ports would be needed. So the XBMC team allowed this tool to evolve into a cross platform media center that would run on just about anything you can think of. But, of course, the purpose of this article is to install XBMC on Linux.
Three weeks from today members of the GNOME Marketing team will converge on Chicago for two days of work, brainstorming and fun.
With thanks to Google for hosting us and Novell for sponsoring us, we’ll set aside two days to work on:
* GNOME Presentation materials. We want to make it easy for for volunteers to represent GNOME at conferences, including presentations, booth materials such as banners and brochures for the GNOME Event Box and more.
* Writing and reviewing content for the new www.gnome.org
* GNOME 3.0 planning
* …and more!
On October 9 through 11, a dozen developers gathered in the Nokia Offices in Munich to bring the vision outlined in Dan Leinir’s blog about the “Future of Game Development in KDE” to life. After three days of hard work, the developers joined hundreds of other Qt developers for the Qt Developer Days 2009 (thanks to free tickets provided by Nokia).
Recently, I have started using KDE 4.3.1 after it came in Gentoo stable tree. I have been using E17 svn versions for quite some time now. I found that with E17 the cpu is relatively cooler. Of course, my benchmarking is not precise yet it shall provide you an overall view. My system is Thinkpad R60.
[...]
However, E17 proved better once more by starting at about 45 degrees and cooling down to even lower temperatures after that.
Some time back we had reported a way to have KDE 4.3 on Slackware Current using vbatt’s packages, since KDE 4.3 was still not official on Slackware. Now, you no longer have to depend on third-party packages for KDE 4.3.2 on Slcakware. It has become official.
On October 27th, Christian Graffer from the Endian team proudly announced the immediate availability of the Endian Firewall Community 2.3 Linux-based operating system. The new version includes a lot of bug fixes, improvements and many new and breathtaking features. We, at the Softpedia Labs, took the 2.3 release for a test drive and, among the new features, we noticed the support for backups, a dashbord, the VPN support, the SNMP support, e-mail notifications, policy routing, QoS, intrusion prevention, and many more.
I like the new Sabayon. It’s more user friendly, it’s faster, and yet it keeps all the cool stuff that make it such a great distribution for new users, without alienating those who are more experienced and want a distribution with a little bit of everything and “just works” right out of the box. I’d certainly recommend this distribution to all your friends and family. It’s not for really old machines, but it should now work just fine on machines up to five to seven years old.
Red Hat Inc. has invested an unspecified amount in open-source database vendor EnterpriseDB Inc., a sign that the Linux vendor may be worried about the implications of Oracle Corp.’s takeover of MySQL through its pending acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc.
In our Thursday meeting[1], the Board talked at length about the lengthy discussions that have been happening on this list, which have been both spirited and, as always, very helpful. Continuing to make the best possible Fedora distribution is a top priority to everyone who works on it. We all want to see the Fedora Project succeed as the leader in advancing free and open source software, and the Fedora distribution is how we put our best work in front of a wide audience twice a year (and at all times in between!). And of course we want the Fedora Project to continue to be a vibrant community where contributors pursue a variety of goals, sharing our core values of Friends, Freedom, Features, and First.
After all I’m satisfied with the system. Without any fan the CPU constantly runs at 55°C, which is okay, given that it must operate within 0 and 90 °C according to the tech specs. The system and the disk are somewhat lower (47 and 39°C). The power of this system is more then enough. Its booting quick and working with it works without latencies, even when the system is doing something. What I haven’t yet tested is weither the power consumption actually fulfills the expactations. I will do so, once I got a wattmeter.
Canonical plans to release Ubuntu 9.10, aka Karmic Koala, on Thursday. The open source operating system for both desktops and servers touches down around the same time as Windows 7. Code writers gave special attention to the core server product and kernel in this latest edition. They also asked the user community to list minor annoyances they had with the previous version so they could be tweaked and fixed.
An interest in Linux, and Ubuntu in particular, came many years later. This was initially out of curiosity but later as an alternative to Windows for everyday use (email, surfing, basic wordprocessing etc). I started using Ubuntu regularly in 2007 with the 7.04 release (”Feisty Fawn”) and have had at least one machine with it installed ever since. The purists might wince, but I keep Windows around because I’ve paid good money for some Windows software with a feature set I like to help with video editing.
Francis Lacoste recently started on a six-month stint of running the Canonical Launchpad team. It seemed like a good time to find out a little more about him.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Francis: It was 1996, with a few friends at university, we started an online cinema magazine and) I developed the first generation of the content management system for the site. I was looking to develop this as a “free for non-commercial use” software. Since my Mac at the time kept crashing (Internet and Apple didn’t worked well), I looked into mklinux which was a Linux variant for Powermac. And then I stumbled upon the GNU Manifesto. This made so much sense to me, that I ditched the “free for non-commercial use” and became a GNU head.
Rather than show the dmesg information during boot-up, Ubuntu 9.10 displays this minimal boot screen based on the Ubuntu logo. The same logo is used during installation, and later on when booting into Ubuntu 9.10 from the hard drive.
If the details of Ubuntu 9.10 have you salivating to give it a whirl but you don’t fancy chewing up your download limit, don’t forget that Ubuntu does offer an option to get a CD shipped for free.
Q. I recently bought a netbook with Ubuntu as its operating system and would like to know if there is any simple way to defragment the drive. The help manual for the system only talks about a complete start-over with reinstalling the OS, rather than defragmenting it.
A. Ubuntu Linux uses a different file system — or method of storing and organizing data — than other operating systems do. Most Ubuntu systems use the ext3 file system, which does not need regular defragmentation like a Windows system does.
The Ubuntu founder says that the new Ubuntu 9.1 Netbook Remix will support 25 different netbooks out of the box and offers a simpler, more user friendly interface, quicker boot and log-in times, a better audio framework, improved 3G connectivity and the new Empathy instant messaging (IM) program integrated into the OS.
October 29, 2009. Mark your calendars, people, because that is the day the Linux landscape will shift, and the bar will be raised. Why do I say this? Ubuntu Karmic Koala is released that day and, even without reading between any lines, you can easily see where Canonical is taking its flagship operating system: Business and enterprise.
If Ubuntu can work well on every device users encounter (including non-Intel smartbooks and other new classes of portable devices that will be emerging in the next couple of years, displacing notebooks for many consumers), then name recognition will follow.
Obviously, the PC space is dominated by Windows. Yet no matter how spiffy Windows 7 is (and even Shuttleworth acknowledged that it was a good OS, worthy of competing with Ubuntu), Vista taught us all a lesson (consumers and techies alike). There are alternatives to the latest and greatest from Microsoft, even if that’s Windows XP. We don’t have to upgrade.
This “PC space” is changing, though. Windows Mobile stinks. Microsoft has no plans to develop Windows on ARM platforms.
Canonical Ltd. has shown users some love with Ubuntu desktop release 9.10; the new version will be officially available on Thursday with more than 50 fixes that users have requested.
Good news for the funs of Bisigi themes , the themes actually are available also for Ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala , and you can install them by adding repositories to your karmic koala repositories, to see the complete collection and the installation steps, please see our previous tutorial :
Great themes for Ubuntu 9.04 and ubuntu9.10 Karmic Koala
Ubuntu 9.10 offers a number of new features to Linux desktop and server users along with other core improvements to this incredibly popular Linux distribution. In a number of our tests today with an older ThinkPad notebook, Ubuntu 9.10 also provided the best performance when compared to earlier Ubuntu releases from the past 18 months. However, in six of the eighteen tests that were run, there were notable performance regressions involving Ubuntu 9.10. Many performance improvements can be attributed to the switch from the EXT3 to EXT4 file-system by default, but in the tests that did not benefit from this newer file-system, it ended up degrading the performance. The ioquake3 performance with the open-source ATI R300 driver is another troubling area with Ubuntu 9.10. Fortunately though when using newer hardware we have not encountered as many performance drops, and even still, most users will find Ubuntu 9.10 worth the upgrade.
Recent moves by Shuttleworth to market Ubuntu through IBM are again an indication of his cleverness at trying to embed Ubuntu in the desktop space. His competitors under-estimate him at their peril.
He must be more than encouraged by Microsoft’s growing, often clumsy, attempts to gain traction in the open source space. The latest indication of Microsoft’s realisation that lock-in may just do more harm than good to itself is the announcement that it will be releasing documentation on Outlook Personal Folders.
This must be music to Shuttleworth’s ears. Five years ago, one could not imagine an 800-pound gorilla practising anything but total lock-in.
I have to say that this has been a very solid release so far. With so many improvements both under the hood and on the user interface, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone that doesn’t find something new and exciting about Ubuntu 9.10. The best part though? All of these improvements are merely leading up to the powerhouse that will be Ubuntu 10.04, the next Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release. With goals of 10 second boot times, improvements in the new Ubuntu Software Center, improved Artwork, as well as a long list of other improvements, Ubuntu 10.04 is sure to blow you away!
Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., creators of the leading open source private cloud platform, today announced that Eucalyptus software is the engine behind the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a new cloud computing solution packaged in the latest version of the popular Ubuntu distribution. UEC including Eucalyptus will ship with every copy of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition (announced today), which is fully supported by Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu project. Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition with the UEC (powered by Eucalyptus) will be available for free download at www.ubuntu.com starting October 29.
Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth (the guy behind Ubuntu Linux) said Amazon Web Services has emerged as a de facto cloud standard until open, vendor-neutral cloud standards can be developed.
Canonical launched Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition featuring Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) this week, on the heels of Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 R2 release.
UEC is an open source cloud computing environment based on software from Eucalyptus Systems, providing an infrastructure for creating on-premise (private) cloud computing environments. It uses the same application programming interfaces (APIs) as Amazon EC2.
As Canonical prepares for Ubuntu 9.10’s October 29 launch, the company’s channel and partner management team is developing an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud training course for VARs, partners and IT managers. Here’s the scoop.
MontaVista® Software, Inc., the leader in embedded Linux® commercialization, today announced more new Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) for MontaVista Linux 6. The new MSDs continue to expand the market specific focus of MVL6, delivering support for industrial automation, automotive, Android, portable multimedia devices, and multicore networking applications. All the new MSDs will be available this quarter and support processors from Cavium, Freescale, Intel, and Texas Instruments.
Perhaps a Linux distribution (Ubuntu?) will at least get some code for the new CPUs. If the chips are as powerful as Tilera is promising, they should be able to handle anything Linux could throw at them. They would serve well for a server of some sort, or an ultra-powerful Linux desktop as of right now. If nothing else, hopefully this will push Intel into getting their 80-core prototype CPU out as soon as possible.
But all those cores won’t do much good without applications to exercise them, right? So Tilera also offers Multicore Development Environment, a simplified multi-core Eclipse-based IDE that can target SMP Linux 2.6, Zero Overhead Linux, Bare Metal Environment and hybrid systems. The package includes an ANSI C/C++ compiler, system simulator, GNU command line tools and graphical multi-core application debugging and profiling.
Timesys announced that its LinuxLink development framework now supports Altera’s Nios II 32-bit soft RISC processor cores, which are available for Altera’s FPGAs. LinuxLink for Nios II includes a board support package (BSP) for Altera’s Nios II Embedded Evaluation Kit and Embedded Systems Development Kit, Cyclone III Edition, says Timesys.
The Swedish company Hectronic announced a Qseven COM (computer on module) and a carrier board to go with it. The H6049 module and H4103 carrier provide an Intel Atom Z5xx processor, up to 1GB of RAM, a SSD (solid state disk), four PCI Express x1 slots, and a Linux BSP (board support package), says Hectronic.
Nokia plans to release a mass-market, Linux-based Maemo smartphone to compete with Apple’s iPhone in the second half of 2010, according to UBS analyst Maynard Um. Although the move appears to signal an increasing reliance by Nokia on Maemo at the expense of Symbian, a Nokia spokesman said the company still considers the Symbian platform its main smartphone operating system.
This is only expected to continue, with smartphones expected to account for about 37 per cent of global handset sales by 2012, up from the 14 per cent stake they currently hold.
Motorola is crossing its fingers and holding its breath — the handset manufacturer desperately needs a winner. Droid, the Android smartphone that Verizon is positioning as the strongest challenger yet to the iPhone, will be available for purchase on Nov. 6. Droid is the first smartphone to run on Android 2.0, which includes access to mobile navigation functionality provided by Google Maps.
Since 1996, Microsoft has been writing operating systems for little computers to carry in your pocket. It was a lonely business until the company’s perennial rival, Apple, introduced the Web-browsing, music-playing iPhone. But now that smartphones are popular, Microsoft’s operating system, Windows Mobile, is foundering.
It never occurred to me that the Kindroid might actually become reality in the near future, and that the theoretical device would be introduced by Barnes & Noble, Amazon’s prime competition in the brick and mortar space. Still, I am impressed and somewhat vindicated that the Kindroid or a similar device that resembled my proposed configuration came into existence as the Nook.
“We believe Android is an insurance policy against any potential collusion from carriers, manufacturers and competitors to either block or downgrade Google services,” he wrote. “Google is hoping to further fragment the OS market to avoid any concentration of power in the hands of one or two competitors.”
In other words, Android doesn’t have to beat the iPhone. It just has to be better than Windows Mobile.
What’s creamy, loaded with carbs and sinfully delicious? Google would have us believe it’s the new Android 2.0 software development kit (SDK) released this week.
The Google-sponsored Android project has released version 2.0 of Android, featuring new APIs for sync, the account manager, and contacts. Among other enhancements, Android 2.0 (Eclair) features a “Quick Contact” feature that lets users tap a contact photo to call, SMS, or e-mail the person, says a story in eWEEK.
Now, OK Labs reckons it is the world leader in “mobile virtualisation” and that in a short time, we’ll be able to have it all. If, for example, the best way of running communications is through a BREW application (normally, exclusive to Qualcomm-based phones) but the best phone directory is Android, then you’ll have them both. You may never even know, or need to know.
Freescale Semiconductor says it is now accepting orders for a hardware/software platform for developing Android applications on Power Architecture PowerQUICC and QorIQ processors. The initial MPC8536E-ADK Android platform, which combines an Android runtime developed by Mentor Graphics and a board based on the PowerQUICC III MPC8536E, appears to be the first Android port to the PowerPC.
Verizon Wireless announced its first Android phone, built by Motorola. Due to ship Nov. 6 for $200, the slider-based “Droid” offers a 550MHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, a 3.7-inch touchscreen, a five-megapixel camera, voice recognition, and Google Maps Navigation with turn-by-turn voice guidance.
In a move that is likely to be seen as an attack on yet another industry, Google on Wednesday said it would release a free navigation system for mobile phones that offers turn-by-turn directions.
I’ve never done a follow up post on a topic before, but I think this is a topic worth further discussion. Yesterday I posted a rather pointed article focused on Intel and what I consider to be a very poor business decision regarding the GMA500 GPU. There were great comments, and even a responsive post over at Moblinzone.
Montreal-based StatusNet, the company behind the open-source microblogging service identi.ca, is closing an $875,000 seed round today. Investors include Montreal Startup, iNovia Capital, Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Xavier Niel. The startup, which changed its name a few weeks ago from Control Yourself, raised a previous seed round of $150,000 from Montreal Startup in January, 2009.
After The Deadline aims to help writers write better articles while spending less time editing them. It uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to find your spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, poor style and misused words and then offers smart suggestions to correct your mistakes.
Sequoia Voting Systems plans to publicly release the source code for its new optical scan voting system, the company announced Tuesday — a remarkable reversal for a voting machine maker long criticized for resisting public examination of its proprietary systems.
And the reason it can, of course, is because it is proprietary software, which means that nobody can route around the problem.
This episode shows once again why it is vital for such software to be open source so that there is no gatekeeper, and so that the community’s needs come first, not the desire of a company to make as much money as possible regardless of the plight of the people it affects.
This is a no-brainer for two reasons. First, most startups – and probably 99% of the big, successful ones – turn to MySQL for the database element of their software stack; its appearance here simply confirms that popularity. But the other reason is rather different.
[P]erhaps even more significantly, it represents an attempt to re-think email. I’m a big fan of Thunderbird, but there’s no denying that it is tied to an older email-based model that is increasingly deprecated, at least by younger Net users. Mozilla is right to explore ways of re-inventing this important area. There may well be a new kind of program that is needed to pull together the increasingly frayed thread of messaging. Whether Raindrop is that program is not the point: it’s a start. It’s shows that Mozilla has got the message about messaging.
The Mozilla developers have announced the availability of version 2.0 of their SeaMonkey “all-in-one internet application suite”. The “completely refurbished next generation” successor to the old Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Application suites includes a web browser with advanced email and newsgroup support, an IRC chat client and HTML editing support.
GNU GRUB is upgraded to version 1.97. GRUB, also known as the GRand Unified Bootloader, is a modular, portable bootloader that supports a number of platforms & is included in many Linux distributions.
Global Conference on Open Source has been finalized successfully. It’s time to talk about Free Software and the commitee is proudly present a fully free seminar (as in beer and in speech) by The President of Free Software Foundation: Mr. Richard M. Stallman.
It is official! As of the 16th of October 2009, the United States Department of Defense recognizes Open Source software at Commodity, Off the Shelf (COTS) software, eligible for purchase, read implementation, under the purchasing rules of the Department.
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has just released Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS), a new official memo about open source software (OSS). This 2009 memo should soon be posted on the list of ASD(NII)/DoD CIO memorandums. This 2009 memo is important for anyone who works with the DoD (including contractors) on software and systems that include software… and I suspect it will influence many other organizations as well. Let me explain why this new memo exists, and what it says.
Minister of Communication and Information Technology Tifatul Sembiring said open source software offered unlimited opportunities for local businesses and human resources in the information and communications industry.
Delivering the opening address of the Global Conference on Open Source on Monday, Tifatul said the government must focus on developing open source software domestically. He added that the use of open source could significant reduce government spending on software, without providing an exact figure.
HP and the University of Michigan have inked a deal that will see HP reprinting rare and out-of-print books from Michigan’s library via the printer maker’s print-on-demand service. Here’s why this is potentially as important as anything Google Books is doing.
One of the things that I have felt for a while is that mainstream economics isn’t really the best way to look at free software, or any of the other intellectual commons or – even more importantly – the environmental commons, since economics is really about consumption.
Over the last few months there have been lots of exciting announcements about open data from cities around the world. We decided to take a look at what is currently out there – in particular taking note of:
1. Whether datasets are open as in the Open Knowledge Definition – i.e. whether they explicitly say that they can be used by anyone, for any purpose, without restriction (except perhaps attribution, integrity or sharealike requirements).
Earlier this week, Automattic, the company behind wordpress.com and WordPress (the software this weblog runs on) announced that they would be supporting Theora along with MPEG-4 as part of their VideoPress platform.
The long-unrealized standards secret that I am about to share is this: even the most mundane dynamic and procedural feature of the modern, global process of developing, maintaining, branding and certifying standards has been in existence for almost 1700 years. Moreover, it can trace its lineage to the master plan of a powerful Emperor who invoked the standards process to protect the very existence of his empire from the threat posed by a rogue bishop and his clamoring followers bent upon igniting a standards war.
The ex-boss of AMD Hector Ruiz could face charges relating to the Galleon insider trading case.
Ruiz – former chief executive of AMD and now chairman of Globalfoundries – is accused of passing information on to hedge fund manager Danielle Chiesi, not of profiting personally.
A schoolboy, Nickie Chamberlain, was surprised when Government officials arrived at his bedroom and confiscated his television aerial because it was interfering with planes landing at a nearby airport.
But as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, the question of how DNA evidence is being used and how samples are being extracted, have come under fire from civil rights activists and many criminal justice experts.
Draconian police powers designed to deprive crime barons of luxury lifestyles are being extended to councils, quangos and agencies to use against the public, The Times has learnt.
The right to search homes, seize cash, freeze bank accounts and confiscate property will be given to town hall officials and civilian investigators employed by organisations as diverse as Royal Mail, the Rural Payments Agency and Transport for London.
Classified Bulgarian State Security Agency (DANS/SANS) intelligence report into high-level corruption. The report was allegedly went missing from the office of the Prime Minister, Sergey Stanishev last year.
The theft of the report, allegedly a copy marked “N2″, and its re-discovery is at the center of a scandal currently rocking the Bulgarian political and business classes.
Instead, the bank argues that an over-the-counter market in which big traders like Goldman get to do deals in the shadows in “dark pools” without the retail investor having any knowledge of what the hell is going on is somehow better for everybody, that this somehow produces better prices. Of course the reality is that the two-tiered system creates one pool of fools whose every movement is visible to every animal on the Serengeti, and another pool of giant bloodthirsty carnivores who get to walk around invisible, picking off the dik-diks one by one.
Thanks to Bloomberg News, we now have a good idea how much of that $13 billion pass-through bailout Goldman Sachs got from AIG last year was pure taxpayer-financed gravy: $5.2 billion, courtesy Tim Geithner.
AIG collapsed last year in part because it had written insurance policies on billions of dollars in stupid bets made by Goldman, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and others. Since it was functionally bankrupt, last September AIG thought it would be able to convince those banks to accept significantly less than face value on the credit default swaps it had sold them. How much less?
A White Plains, NY federal court eliminated a woman’s $460,000 mortgage debt because the paper trail was so messy that the mortgage lender couldn’t prove that it actually owned the debt.
We are talking about a denunciation (Cuffaro’s) that has no respect whatsoever for the Procura, that will have to verify 4,609 comments on the above-mentioned video, most of which have no juridical relevance, and that seems to be a pure exhibition of arrogance.
Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ, expressed outrage over revelations in The Times earlier this month that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had obtained his telephone records as part of an investigation involving the leak of information about Mel Gibson’s arrest.
Reporters Without Borders is very concerned about the consequences that the European Union’s adoption of the so-called Telecoms Package will have for bloggers and other Internet users.
“This Telecoms Package undermines the right to equal Internet access,” said Reporters Without Borders, which last month joined more than 80 organisations from 15 EU member countries in signing an open letter voicing concern. “The European Union should have sent a strong signal by refusing to create a two-speed Internet.”
With so many organizations trying to use copyright and trademark law to take content offline, the EFF is announcing the launch of its new Takedown Hall Of Shame, highlighting “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse.”
THE CHINESE Communist Party’s main newspaper has accused Google of keeping searchers away from its website after it reported on a copyright dispute.
The People’s Daily had reported on a Chinese group’s complaint that Google’s planned online library of digitised books might violate Chinese authors’ copyrights.
Open Europe, which opposes greater European integration, said that the ratification of the controversial treaty will see powers over home affairs and justice policy “almost totally shifted to the EU level.”
The ‘domestic extremist’ label brings with it police harassment – from violent arrest to being photographed breastfeeding
I am suspect A on the spotter card printed by the Guardian, and I am, in the eyes of the police force, a “domestic extremist”. This comes as no surprise to me nor did it come as any surprise to my friends, family or colleagues. I made a difficult decision to go public with the Kingsnorth story – when video footage showing me being violently arrested made the front pages – and so it didn’t make much difference to my life to be splashed across the national media labelled as a “domestic extremist.”
The Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association today sent the following letter to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting that it investigate practices by Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target that it believes constitute illegal predatory pricing that is damaging to the book industry and harmful to consumers.
That is what Vancouver has found out in recent weeks as it navigates the minefield between providing protection from ambush marketing by businesses that are not Olympics sponsors and guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression.
A source involved in drafting the Bill said that the intelligence agencies, MI5 and MI6, had also voiced concerns about disconnection. “The spooks hate it,” the source said. “They think it is only going to make monitoring more difficult.”
When you hear about file sharing and unauthorized access to information online, the view pushed by many copyright maximalists is that it’s just a bunch of morally corrupt kids who don’t want to pay for stuff gleefully “stealing” music and movies from those hard working entertainment industry employees. Of course, the real picture is a lot more complex. For example, apparently there’s a growing community of medical researchers using file sharing to exchange information and research reports that they have trouble accessing otherwise.
It used to be when someone bought an album, they expected to perhaps get two or three decent songs out of it. The rest would be garbage.
The arrival of the net fixed that. Today, people can, and do, access single tracks, completely by-passing corporate filler dross.
Now, the Guardian has Martin Talbot, managing director of the Official Charts Company, saying, “The explosion in the singles market has been nothing short of astonishing this year”.
Some 117 million singles have already been sold so far in 2009, surpassing the previous record of 115.1 million set in 2008, says the story, noting:
“The total has been reached with 10 weeks of trading, including the vital Christmas period, still to run this year, which also marks the 60th anniversary of the single.”
And the trend looks likely to continue, says Talbot.
Kaneko is the creator of the anonymous P2P software, Winny, and prosecutors tried to hold him responsible for the infringements of others who used it, saying that he was aware that his program would be put to illicit uses.
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