04.19.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Daniel Pop: Well hello there, Dmitry! My name is Daniel Pop (not complete, I have two extra “secret” names). I am 26 years old. I write to you from the extraordinary (that’s not necessarily a good thing 
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Desktop
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The association ESOP from Portugal made available two papers of original research. They concern what they call an “artificial exclusion of Linux-based laptops”. I had the opportunity to see the study earlier. Both studies can be freely accessed from ESOP. It is not easy to calculate economic effects but ESOP applies their own innovative approach for calculating losses.
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Marseille, France is known for a lot of things, among them bouillabaisse stew, hostility toward centralized government and a flourishing drug trade. Yet on a recent trip there I discovered something unexpected: Ubuntu Linux running in a commercial environment. Here’s what I found, with some thoughts on where desktop Ubuntu might be headed among small businesses more generally.
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Lately, I’ve been talking to several people who want to give Linux a try but they lack some confidence or have heard several myths about this OS. That reminds me of myself back in the times prior to my migration. Thus, I guess other computer users out there may be in the same situation. If you are one of them, feel free to keep reading. You might find useful information here. This is for simple, plain computer users who feel like giving Linux a chance.
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Server
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Historically, Check Point has run two operating systems (OSes), the Nokia IPSO OS and the SecurePlatform (SPLAT) that was on its own appliances. But Check Point acquired Nokia’s network security appliance business in 2009, and has now, at long last, merged the two OSes into a new unified OS release.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Yesterday I reported on it appearing the 295.40 NVIDIA Linux driver effectively fell off a cliff with a range of performance regressions, stability issues, and other problems. This issue has been confirmed by NVIDIA and they’re working to address the situation.
Last week NVIDIA released the 295.40 Linux driver in order to address a high-risk security vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain access to the system memory via the GPU and the un-patched graphics driver. It turns out that the security fix is responsible for these weird issues now being experienced by a number of NVIDIA GeForce Linux users.
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While the NVIDIA 295.40 Linux graphics driver closes a high-risk security vulnerability, there’s many reports coming in that the proprietary driver’s performance has effectively fallen off a cliff and also caused stability issues.
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Patches were published today that introduce pinging support for Wayland clients, in an attempt to determine if a client is dead or alive. Should a client not respond to the ping request, the Wayland client’s surface is faded-out.
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Intel’s Ian Romanick has made progress in his long side-project of compiling OpenGL assembly shaders to GLSL IR. He’s now up to the point of being able to run the Doom 3 binaries with this conversion work for Mesa.
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Applications
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Ever wondered what other music players are there in Linux world that can replace your default one? Believe me, you are pampered with choices. While the popular ones receive many coverage, there are several lesser known music players that are equally powerful. Here I have compiled a list of lesser known (and good) audio players available for Linux operating systems along with their salient features.
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Xournal is an app that lets you input data your way — through a keyboard or through a stylus if you prefer to hand-write your notes. It’s a great tool for taking notes that involve text and drawings. However, it lacks the ability to import a graphic or text file, which could limit its use for some people.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In what is seen as a major overhaul to the cross-platform application and user interface framework, Qt 5 Alpha has been released in advance of the full-blown iteration, which is expected later this year.
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Swapnil: Can you tell us more about you? Where are you from and what do you do?
Daniel: I’m from Brazil, working as system analyst in a big company and a software geek in free time.
Swapnil: How did you come in contact with Free Software?
Daniel: I always hated having to re-install windows for every time it started to be slow or didn’t boot up. I also hated the user interface. When I was younger I wanted to build an OS but of course I had no idea of how hard would that be. So in high school I found out about Linux but without Internet (and with dial-up) it wasn’t a good alternative at time, so later at university with high speed Internet I brought a notebook and started to use Linux daily.
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The open source model at its core is all about freedom. The freedom for users to choose and the freedom of not being locked in. That freedom also can be a lifeline for projects that otherwise wouldn’t survive. Just ask the Kubuntu project, which found new life this past week after Canonical decided it wouldn’t support it anymore.
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GNOME Desktop
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A review of GNOME 2 seems redundant at this point. After all, the first release was almost a decade ago, and it’s been a year since GNOME 3.0 was announced.
However, a review of Mate 1.2 is not quite the same thing. Mate is Linux Mint’s fork of GNOME 2, designed to fill the ongoing demand for this GUI that simply refuses to die.
Announced as “the traditional desktop environment,” the point of Mate is not so much what new features it introduces as how well it preserves GNOME 2 while remaining compatible with GNOME 3 — and how these efforts compare to similar efforts, like GNOME’s current fallback mode (aka “Classic GNOME”) or Linux Mint’s Cinnamon.
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The GNOME Project has released version 3.4.1 of its open source Linux and Unix desktop environment. The first update to the GNOME 3.4 series offers the small improvements and bug fixes that are customary for such minor GNOME releases; the developers also updated and extended the support for different languages.
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The development team behind the MATE desktop environment proudly announced last evening, April 16th, that the stable 1.2.0 version of the popular project is now available for download and upgrade.
MATE 1.2.0 is a fork of GNOME 2, providing a traditional desktop environment for Linux operating systems and low-end machines.
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New Releases
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The Chakra Development Team, through Anke Boersma, proudly announced yesterday, April 16th, the immediate availability for download of the Chakra GNU/Linux 2012.04 operating system.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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If you have not been following the saga of the Mageia Linux distribution then you are unaware that Mageia 2 is slated to be released on May 15th. At this point the distribution is in Beta 3 testing and then will have a Release Candidate out right around May 2nd.
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Red Hat Family
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Facebook’s efforts to seek the most cost-effective ways to operate its fast-growing, No. 1 social network has led it to Red Hat’s door.
In March, a Facebook engineer joined the advisory board for Gluster, an open-source software-only storage system firm Red Hat (RHT) bought in October for $136 million.
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Jason Andersen, Director Middleware Product Line Management at Red Hat, explained to that the starting point for people to consider the Data Grid is when they have a performance or latency issue with their Java apps. The Data Grid is a key-value store that is embedded in-memory, providing a performance boost to disk-bound applications.
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Fedora
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The final Fedora 17 beta has just been released. Fedora is Live CD distro, so you can boot it up on a CD or in a virtual machine to check it out before doing an install. I went with the default version that uses GNOME 3 for this Sneak Peek.
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Debian Family
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This is the first time the project has had a leader for so long, apart from the time when its founder Ian Murdock was in charge from August 1993 till March 1996,
Zacchiroli’s re-election is an indication that the members of the project are happy with the initiatives which he has launched in the last two years.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Back at the last UDS Orlando summit I mentioned that Canonical was looking at finally recomending the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Linux by default for new installs rather than 32-bit. This issue is again being discussed at the last minute for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” release due out next week.
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Canonical has added a feature to the upcoming long-term support release of Ubuntu 12.04 that alleviates cloud lock-in.
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Martin Stadtler, director of global support and services at Canonical said his company would be working within the partnership to “help deliver enhanced engineering, online and professional services to Ubuntu partners and customers worldwide.”
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Linux and Open Source is going main stream. Earlier we noticed LibreOffice in ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
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Canonical has unveiled a beta version of AWSOME (Any Web Service Over ME), an open source proxy service that helps users who currently use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to migrate to OpenStack’s cloud computing platform. AWSOME will be included as an install option in the server edition of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS which is scheduled to be released later this month.
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Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution is making a big push into the enterprise and cloud, where it will go head to head with long-time enterprise Linux incumbent Red Hat and its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. However Shuttleworth is not sure that Red Hat’s pricing structure will make the firm competitive.
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Flavours and Variants
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Bodhi Linux is a very interesting Linux distro. It is generally based on Ubuntu but unlike the other Ubuntu-based distros which usually try to give users a newbie-friendly and work-out-of-the-box experience, Bodhi is very minimalistic. By default, Bodhi comes with very few necessity applications pre-installed so users will have to choose the other applications to install. Beside the simplicity, another special thing about Bodhi is Enlightment – the desktop environment. I myself have been using Linux for serveral years but I never tried Englightment before ( as I just recently heard about it) so 2 days ago, I decided to try Bodhi Linux on my Sony laptop. This article is my review about Bodhi Linux after 2 days of playing and testing it.
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The Trisquel project has announced the release of Trisquel 5.5, code-named “Brigantia”. This is the first version of the distribution that is based on the GNOME 3 desktop environment, although it is using the 2D fallback mode option by default. Trisquel GNU/Linux is approved by the FSF as a Free Software distribution and as such cannot rely on a 3D composited desktop like Gnome Shell, as many 3D drivers for Linux are proprietary in nature. Trisquel 5.5 also uses version 3.0.0 of the Linux-libre kernel, which is a parallel distribution of the regular Linux kernel that aims to remove all non-free components and firmware.
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I believe that what ever a computer users requirement are the Ubuntu Family (official derivatives) have them covered and one such beautiful member of the family is Xubuntu. Xubuntu comes with lightweight and highly customisable Xfce running at the current stable release 4.8.1. The default look of Xubuntu 12.04 is quite appealing.
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With the first shipment of Raspberry Pi computers, a new wave of computer programming may just be born. A group of schoolchildren in Leeds, U.K. will be the first to get a batch of the tiny computers, followed by fulfillment of the first orders by April 20.
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It’s been the most highly anticipated launch in the history of development boards, but one of the most problem-ridden too. Originally unveiled early last year with a suggested launch schedule of September 2011, the Raspberry Pi single-board computer has proven a beast to get out of the door – but the first retail models are finally landing in customers’ hands this week.
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Phones
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Android
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SAN JOSE – Google is expected to boost its support in Android for cores from MIPS Technologies, giving the company a badly needed boost in the hot smartphone and tablet sector.
The Android native developers’ kit is expected to start bundling a GNU compiler for MIPS within weeks. Google is expected to bundle full support for the MIPS application binary interface in all Android code and libraries, starting with a future Android release in the next several months.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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I was surprised by the beginning of the Economist’s article “Error Message” (based on the IADB study) that says the Peruvian Una Laptop por Niño project “did not accomplish anything in particular”. The IADB study clearly stated that the project “substantially increased use of computers both at school and at home”, “positive effects were found in general cognitive skills” and improved “competence in operating laptops in tasks related to core applications (like a word processor) and searching for information on the computer”.
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With the frequent focus on mobile machinations and desktop deliberations here in the Linux blogosphere, it would be easy to assume that all else in the FOSS fiefdom is relatively conflict-free.
Easy, perhaps — but dead wrong, nonetheless.
Case in point: cars. There’s a growing movement to apply the open source model to the design and manufacturing of electric cars, as described in a recent Txchnologist article on the Tumanako project.
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In 2010, Guido Appenzeller left his professor’s job at Stanford University, to start up a new company that would expand the OpenFlow networking technology he helped to create. This week, Appenzeller is taking the stage as a presenter at the Open Networking Summit in a session titled, Opening Up Your Network to Cloud Innovation with SDN.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google attempted to introduce a new approach to computing when it first launched Chrome OS in 2010. The operating system consists of little more than a fullscreen Web browser perched atop a rigorously-hardened Linux environment. The platform makes some unusual trade-offs, eschewing conventional native applications in exchange for bulletproof security and low-maintenance stateless computing.
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SaaS
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In the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and more can be found in large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.
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For programs, we make a distinction between free and nonfree (proprietary). More precisely, this distinction applies to a program that you have a copy of: either you have the four freedoms for your copy or you don’t.
An activity (such as a service) doesn’t exist in the form of copies, so it’s not possible to have a copy or to make copies. As a result, the four freedoms that define free software don’t make sense for services.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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News about the lawsuit between Oracle (which owns Java) and Google (which uses aspects of Java in Android) are resonating far and loud at the moment. At this point in the article, I should summarise the story: the trouble is that a summary at this point is impossible. The main problem is with Oracle, and their inability to understand free software.
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Education
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BSD
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In the 1980s, BSD was just another leg of the Unix table. DEC used it as the basis for Ultrix, and Sun Microsystems based its SunOS on it. But BSD today is more about open-source development than it was in the 1980s. When Unix System V version 4 shipped in the early 1980s, the BSD community began to focus more on the desktop than on the server, and the many varieties of BSD were born.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In my past several articles, I’ve looked at various packages to do all kinds of science. Sometimes, however, there just isn’t a tool to solve a particular problem. That’s the great thing about science. There is always something new to discover and study. But, this means it’s up to you to develop the software tools you need to do your analysis. This article takes a look at the GNU Scientific Library, or GSL. This library is the Swiss Army library of routines that you will find useful in your work.
First, you need to to get a copy of GSL and install it on your system. Because it is part of the GNU Project, it is hosted at http://www.gnu.org/s/gsl. You always can download and build from the source code, but all major distributions should have packages available. For example, on Debian-based systems, you need to install the package libgsl0-dev to develop your code and gsl-bin to run that code. GSL is meant for C and C++, so you also need a compiler. Most of you probably already are familiar with GCC, so I stick with that here.
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We have done a lot of refactoring in GIMP over the last ten years, but its innermost pixel manipulating core was still basically unchanged since GIMP 1.2 days. We didn’t bother to do anything about it, because the long term goal was to do all this stuff with GEGL, when GEGL was ready. Now GEGL has been ready for quite a while, and the GEGL porting got assigned a milestone. Was it 2.10, 3.0, 3.2, I don’t remember. We thought it would take us forever until it’s done, because nobody really had that kind of time.
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GEGL in GIMP is finally going to be going full-speed. For GIMP 2.10 the open-source imaging program’s core will be 100% ported to GEGL, the Generic Graphics Library.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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In the Czech municipality of Grygov open source is used almost everywhere. It covers most of the applications used by the administration, offers public Internet access across the entire village and it is the basis for an SMS gateway linking the regional fire department with the volunteers in the village. The software even keeps parents up to date on changes in school schedules.
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently announced one of the most progressive open source policies in the US government. They reiterated the current OMB and DOD guidance by making open source commercial software, but they also went one step further: code they write is open by default. I am totally impressed.
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Programming
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The Dart team has announced the first global Dart hackathon. The event will taken place between the end of April and the beginning of May in fourteen cities worldwide. Locations include Mountain View in the US (27-28 April), and London and Prague (27-29 April) in Europe. A date for the London hackathon has not yet been announced.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Ever since 2010, when the Transportation Security Administration started requiring that travelers in American airports submit to sexually intrusive gropings based on the apparent anti-terrorism principle that “If we can’t feel your nipples, they must be a bomb”, the agency’s craven apologists have shouted down all constitutional or human rights objections with the mantra “If you don’t like it, don’t fly!”
[...]
Anyone who rode the bus in Houston, Texas during the 2-10pm shift last Friday faced random bag checks and sweeps by both drug-sniffing dogs and bomb-sniffing dogs (the latter being only canines necessary if “preventing terrorism” were the actual intent of these raids), all courtesy of a joint effort between TSA VIPR nests and three different local and county-level police departments. The new Napolitano doctrine, then: “Show us your papers, show us everything you’ve got, justify yourself or you’re not allowed to go about your everyday business.”
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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North America has a number of LNG export projects underway, mostly in Kitimat, British Columbia. But yesterday the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved the first application for such a facility in the lower 48. Until these projects are operational, North American natural gas will continue to be trapped by geography. And, given that prices here are near $2.00 per million btu, I thought it would be enlightening to pull the most recent data chart from FERC, showing what customers pay for the same amount of NG, in liquified form, around the world. | see: World LNG Estimated April 2012 Landed Prices.
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Finance
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Robert Lantos, the canny, creative, and famously combative movie producer who once stood atop the Canadian film and television business as the chairman and CEO of Alliance Communications, has filed suit in a bitter custody dispute over six of his films which he says were sold to an international distributor without his permission.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein’s compensation increased 14.5 percent to $16.2 million in 2011 despite a sharp decline in profits and share price during the year, leaving the bank open to more attacks on its pay policies.
Blankfein’s pay boost includes stock awards from previous years that vested in 2011, and therefore does not reflect the amount that Goldman’s board awarded him strictly for the company’s performance last year.
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The sweetheart deals just keep coming. Lawbreakers at one bank after another are let off the hook as their shareholders write a check. And then they go out and repeat the illegal behavior they promised not to do in the last settlement.
It shouldn’t be surprising that this keeps happening over at the SEC — especially as long as Robert Khuzami continues to serve as Director of the Commission’s Division of Enforcement.
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Privacy
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Die Danish EU Presidency is on the scrouge. For the EU Future Internet Assembly they raise fees from lobbyists. Makes me wonder if they fear EU presidency conferences become the new food stamps. I find it unpleasant that even a low walled garden would exclude parts of the Dutch population e.g. students from participation.
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DRM
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While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can’t freely loan, re-sell or donate them, read them without being tracked, or move them to a new device without re-purchasing all of them. They’ve even had their ebooks deleted by companies without their permission. It continues to be a major issue in the area of movies and video too.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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David Martin, the rapporteur of ACTA at the EU Parliament, has issued his draft report recommending the Parliament to reject ACTA. This is an important step toward effectively killing this dangerous agreement. But while denouncing ACTA, the rapporteur nevertheless supports the 15 year-long war on culture sharing. He also carefully avoid to stress the need for a positive reform of copyright, so as to protect fundamental freedoms online and fostering access to culture and knowledge.
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In the next few weeks, the EU Parliament will continue to work on ACTA, the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, ahead of its final vote around the summer. This is a crucial moment for the citizen mobilization against ACTA, which will have to resist the growing pressure that the copyright lobbies put on the Parliament. Beyond the rejection of ACTA, the whole EU copyright enforcement policy needs to be revised. Only a reform of copyright can protect once and for all fundamental rights online of EU citizens and push the online creative economy in a new direction, away from blind repression. Here is a state of play on the next steps of the mobilization in the European Parliament.
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04.17.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Based on that incredibly important criteria, I hereby declare that Linux has reached the pinnacle of true success. Send the marketing folks home, ladies and gentlemen, we’re done here, because everyone and their brother is now officially trying to the “the Linux of” whatever the sector within which they are seeking to succeed.
The latest company to hang this label on their product line is VMware, which has declared via CTO Steve Herrod that their new Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will be the “Linux of the cloud.”
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The truth is you are thousands of times more secure with GNU/Linux than that other OS. The count of malwares proves that. The incidence of malware infections proves that. The prevalence of GNU/Linux servers on the web proves that. The fact that M$’s servers are becoming more like GNU/Linux machines with time is another. Heck, M$’s 2008 server can even run GUIless and uses scripting. Where have we heard of that? Oh, GNU/Linux back about 1995.
It is a standard military manoeuvre to seek out an enemy’s weakness and exploit it. If you are trying to run IT are you charging the enemy’s centre with it’s heavy artillery, enfilade fire and mines or are you going to flank him and cut his supply lines? We must do the same in IT. M$ has proven thousands of times that its software is insecure. We should run GNU/Linux. It’s the smart thing to do.
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Server
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According to survey results released earlier this year, Ubuntu still has a lot of room to grow in the cloud space. But it seems to be doing just that, the latest indicator being HP’s release of cloud products based partially on Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop, and why it matters for the Ubuntu world in particular.
Last week, HP announced the public availability beginning May 10 of its HP Cloud platform, which began life as a private beta about six months ago. Most of the HP Cloud features are not very unique — it’s the same basic deal as other popular hosted cloud infrastructures, like Amazon EC2 — but one of the characteristics HP seems to be pushing is the open-source technologies on which its solutions are built, freeing users from vendor lock-in.
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Kernel Space
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Say what you will about the mainstream viability of Google Plus, but anyone who has spent even a few days on Google’s rapidly developing social network can tell you that the userbase seems unusually knowledgeable and tech-savvy. There have been numerous posts and articles attempting to explain this phenomena, but the most common theory seems likely enough: the early invitations were given out to primarily technical users (developers, tech journalists, etc), and they predictably shared their invites with like-minded individuals.
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Ubuntu and Canonical have done quite a bit in expanding the ecosystem and market for Linux, which used to be practically unusable on the desktop. By aspiring to a better, easier and more polished UI, Ubuntu has lifted other Linux distributions and their UIs along with it. This does not absolve Canonical of the responsibility to engage in upstream kernel work and contribution, though, and the company stands more to gain than lose by putting resources toward Linux.
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Graphics Stack
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There is another new open-source Linux graphics driver entering development and it has already showed signs of success with basic 2D acceleration working. This new open-source driver is for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon / Adreno and who is leading the development of this driver is also quite interesting.
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The Nouveau Kepler Gallium3D code that was published yesterday does indeed work for allowing OpenGL acceleration on the GeForce 600 series using this reverse-engineered open-source code. In an odd story to end out the weekend, the Nouveau Kepler graphics driver consumed nearly 120GB of hard drive space while running this open-source driver on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680.
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Applications
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Transcoding is the process of the conversion of digital data (typically video and audio files) from one format to another. It involves extracting tracks from a digital media file, decoding the tracks, filtering, encoding, and then multiplexing the new tracks into a new container. Transcoding will reduce the quality of the tracks unless lossless formats are used.
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RSSOwl is a free and powerful news feed reader. RSSOwl lets you organize, update, gather,save informations and search news in a convenient. RSSOwl easy to use interface with endless flexibility.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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In the Indie game “The Great Jitters Pudding Panic“, done by the German developers kunst-stoff, you are a Green pudding and your goal is to exit from an haunted house without fainting from fear, while at the same time trying to scare the monsters in the maze.
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0 A.D. is a free and open source ancient warfare real time strategy game, that has drawn a lot of attention around it for a good reason. This game started as a very ambitious project which is always good, but also very difficult. This Monday we meet Aviv Sharon, in an effort to learn more about the details behind this fantastic game, that many people already “love” although it is still in alpha state.
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When it comes to ioquake3, the open-source id Tech 3 game engine, it’s almost always being used for powering a first-person shooter. However, released on Friday was a major update to an open-source multi-platform game running on ioquake3 but is not yet-another-FPS title. However, it’s also arguably the oddest game to be powered by this engine that was originally designed for Quake III.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Plasma Workspaces provide a graphical interface and lots of eye candy for the desktop Linux experience. Many would argue that it is equal to or even better at this than Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. KDE, however, is not only a graphical frontend for Linux. It comes with a set of applications and also with a set of system administration tools that can help power users take control of their desktops or laptops without dropping to the command line.
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For Slackware, it’s been no exception. Some of you faithful Slackers may have noticed lately that the Slackware home page has been offline. I posted about this at Jeremy’s Linux Questions forums. Alien Bob (Eric Hameleers) replied stating that it was an old hardware/lack of funds issue. This is sad. 
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New Releases
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A new sets of Slackel KDE 4.8.2 edition. A collection of four KDE iso images are immediately available to our users, including 32-bit and 64-bit installation images as well as 32-bit and 64-bit live images that can be burned to a DVD or used with a USB drive.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last week, I received, in CC:, an email from a Mandriva Linux developer. This email was entitled “A foundation for Mandriva Linux *NOW* or Mandriva Linux to *DIE*?”
That suggested to me that maybe Mandriva was not going very well. This, of course, hurted me. At the same time it leads to the interesting question of a Foundation for a project like Mandriva Linux.
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Red Hat Family
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There were a number of points in Cormier’s blog post, however, that could be interpreted as being less complimentary toward the Redmond giant. A reference to Red Hat having attained its current status “not without opposition” may well be a veiled dig at Microsoft, as could a line asserting that “some of the new entrants [to the open source world] are surprising.”
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While Red Hat might be one of the largest open source providers in the world, Jim Totton, vice president for the company’s platform business unit, is surprisingly coy about mistakes the company has made and learnt from in the decade since it launched.
Coming up to its 10-year anniversary in May, Totton is in Australia from the US to celebrate. However, discussing mistakes Red Hat has made over the years doesn’t appear to be on the agenda.
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Debian Family
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* Debian project leader elected
* Registration open for DebConf12
* Personal BSP initiatives
* The state of Debian s390x
* Interviews
* Other news
* Upcoming events
* New Debian Contributors
* Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
* Important Debian Security Advisories
* New and noteworthy packages
* Work-needing packages
* Want to continue reading DPN?
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Siduction 11.1 is a fork of the Aptosid distro. Siduction comes in KDE, Xfce or LXDe spins. You can get 32-bit or 64-bit versions of each spin. Siduction is based on Debian Sid and includes Linux Kernel 3.1-6 and X.Org server 1.11.2.902.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Windows is great, but after a while, it can get cluttered up with too many programs and become intolerably sluggish. Backing up your files and reinstalling it can help, but an alternative is to try the free Ubuntu operating system. Ubuntu isn’t too demanding and can make even a lowly netbook seem sprightly compared with running Windows on it.
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Ubuntu GNU/Linux has been global on the web but Canonical/Mark Shuttleworth has a larger project in mind. So far they have created business relationships with most of the large OEMs and provided cloud services and content-distribution portals.
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Two weeks ago a Linux Foundation report showed that since version 2.6.32, Microsoft had committed more code to the Linux kernel than Canonical. Since then, Canonical has faced claims from rivals that it does not contribute to Linux as much as it should given its popularity.
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We need to ensure we get total coverage of our different ISO images; the different images that you can download and install from. Each of these images has a small set of mandatory tests that we need to run through to ensure everything is working. We want to ensure all of these mandatory tests are run so that we can find any problems before the release and get them fixed.
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Flavours and Variants
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Y’all should know by now that I’m a Linux user. I write in Linux, I game in Linux, heck, my house has been Microsoft-free for about three years and I’ve never looked back. (The only exception being my day-job laptop. I’m stuck with Windows there.) The only thing that really bugs me about Linux is the uncertainty of upgrades.
I’ve been using Linux Mint for a while now. Since version 8, I believe, when I changed over from Ubuntu. I find Linux Mint more user friendly than just straight Ubuntu and this is important. I’m a very plug-and-play kind of person. I don’t want to sit around installing drivers and slogging away at software installs. I want to plug it in, turn it on, and have it work. When I installed Linux Mint 8 for the first time, it did just that.
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Raspberry Pi, the $35 Linux system about the size of a credit card, is fully baked and ready to eat… er, ship.
The system was designed by a British nonprofit with the idea of encouraging people everywhere, particularly young people in developing countries, to become more interested in programming.
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Free Software is resilient, Raspberry Pi has proven it again. After a month full of challenges and hurdles whether it be wrongly soldered LAN port or requirement of getting a CE mark the tiny devices are now shipping. For those who missed to order, the Raspberry Pi boards from RS and Allied are priced at £21.60 plus a shipping charge of £4.95 to any destination worldwide, plus VAT and import duty as applicable.
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Phones
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Android
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This screenshot tour was created to accompany DeviceGuru’s forthcoming post describing how we rooted and tweaked an Amazon Kindle Fire. The tour comprises more than 100 screenshots, which showcase the Kindle Fire’s standard homescreens and settings, the utilities and process we used for rooting and tweaking it, and the overall end result.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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When Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers and other executives take the stage at this week’s Cisco Partner Summit, The VAR Guy wonders: Will Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) executives be armed with Cius tablets? The answer to that question could reveal how Cisco is feeling about its purpose-built tablets, which run Google Android and leverage the Cisco AppHQ app store.
Cisco Cius tablets don’t seek to compete in the consumer tablet market. Rather, the devices are designed for corporate executives who leverage unified communications and video applications. Cisco Partner Summit 2012 (April 16-19, San Diego), could provide a prime stage to update partners on the Cius.
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One of the most exciting up and coming trends in the world of networking in the last few years has been emergence of Software Defined Networking (SDN). At the core of the SDN revolution is the open source OpenFlow protocol which has helped to define the entire SDN space.
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The hits just keep on coming for the Android mobile operating system–albeit this time from European telecom vendors that are insisting the Linux-based operating system would help prop up the flagging Lumia smartphone sales… if only the Lumias ran Android instead of Windows Phone 7.
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Web Browsers
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Databases
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MontyProgram AB, the company formed by MySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius in the wake of his break with Sun Microsystems, has released the latest version of MariaDB, a “drop-in replacement” for MySQL built on the MySQL 5.5 codebase. MariaDB 5.5.23, which according to developer Colin Charles has “1.5 million additional lines of code compared to MySQL,” pushes forward the development of an open-source database with features that aim to match those of Oracle’s commercial-only MySQL releases.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice/OpenOffice//Calligra
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For home and enterprise users alike, software like LibreOffice has made desktop Linux a whole lot easier. A reliable office suite is a key part of using a modern computer for most people. Given that important, it’s worth noting that a new Koffice fork has been developed. It’s called Calligra Suite.
Unlike LibreOffice, which doesn’t reflect the styles of one desktop environment over another, Calligra Suite is based on Qt and was definitely designed with the KDE user in mind.
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It’s here at last! oi_151a_prestable2 AKA oi_151a3 is the third update since OpenIndiana 151a was released in September and the first since then to be available as freshly pressed ISOs.
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BSD
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A few weeks ago I asked if readers would be interested in seeing reviews of network-attached storage (NAS) projects. The feedback was really positive and so I present the first of what I hope to be a series of reviews covering NAS solutions. This week we will be looking at FreeNAS, a FreeBSD-based project sponsored by iXsystems.
Before we get started I think it’s only fair that we address the question of why we might want to run a dedicated NAS operating system rather than a generic server system. For instance, this week we’re looking at FreeNAS, what motivation do we have for using it instead of FreeBSD or a popular Linux server distribution? The answer is largely one of specialization. People looking at network-attached storage are looking for a place to store files (usually a lot of files) and aren’t interested in other features a server operating system might provide. A NAS box will be focused on storing and transferring files, it’s probably not going to serve up e-mails or websites or provide DNS services. With that in mind, a NAS should come with all the tools we might need to easily add new disks, take snapshots, perform backups and, being focused on these tasks exclusively, it can cut out any extras, providing a lightweight solution.
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Standards/Consortia
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Security
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Cyber attacks on IT systems would become a criminal offence punishable by at least two years in prison throughout the EU under a draft law backed by the Civil Liberties Committee on Tuesday. Possessing or distributing hacking software and tools would also be an offence, and companies would be liable for cyber attacks committed for their benefit.
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Civil Rights
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Congress’ latest attempt at a bill that affects the way people use the Internet has many scared, with some calling the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is “worse than SOPA,” the bill that caused widespread Internet outrage and blackouts before ultimately being shelved. Experts say the danger level associated with CISPA depends on the answer to one question: Which Constitution amendment do you care about more, the First or the Fourth?
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”
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04.14.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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ViewSonic and Userful, which makes cloud managed Linux desktop virtualization, has announced a partnership to deliver a low cost zero client solution that enables schools and businesses to deploy three to four times as many computer users for the same cost. The MultiClient solution turns one Linux computer into 20+ high performance independent computer stations (with monitors, mice and keyboards) using the ViewSonic VMA line of zero clients and Userful’s MultiSeat software. It provides all the benefits of traditional thin client computing, but with higher performance, and lower costs.
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Linaro is leading ARM Linux unification efforts, according to its CEO, and the organisation is looking to lead the ARMies of chip makers in other areas of Linux development as well by acting as a safe “demilitarised zone” for the many ARM vendors that make up its membership.
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Cisco is now refreshing its Linux powered portfolio of network devices with new switches and wireless access points (APs). On the switch side is the new 500 series switching platform that will serve customers that don’t need an IOS powered Catalyst switch.
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Desktop
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In less than two weeks, the latest version of Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04, Precise Pangolin, will be released. This new Ubuntu is looking good. How good? In a recent interview with Julie Bort, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said, “We expect to ship close to 20 million PCs in the next year.”
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While the Chromebook hasn’t taken off in quite the way Google expected it to, OEMs are still working on them. Samsung demoed a Chromebook at this year’s IDF in Beijing that would have an “instant on” boot thanks to new Coreboot code, a Linux-based BIOS replacement that talks to the computers hardware. Why does Coreboot sound so familiar? Just last week there was news that Google added code to Coreboot for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processor support. Is that what was on display at IDF?
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Server
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Another misconception that extends far beyond HPC clusters is the notion that openly available software is free and therefore adds no cost to a cluster. Although the initial acquisition cost of open software might be nonexistent, software support and integration most certainly have associated costs. This time and effort has to come from either the user or a vendor and does not vanish because the software was freely available. In the case of HPC clusters, these costs can be quite substantial and are often the responsibility of the customer. If the customer takes the “learn as you go” approach to managing an open software stack, additional time and cost should definitely be expected.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Even if you’re not a NVIDIA graphics customer and not interested in the state of the Nouveau driver and its big advancements today, there still is some Mesa Gallium3D news of importance to share. AMD has merged their Radeon HD 7000 “Southern Islands” Gallium3D driver to mainline.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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The Kickstarter-backed Wasteland 2 game that’s already had plans for a Linux client may be powered by the Unigine Engine.
Last month word came out that Wasteland 2 would have a Linux client as the sequel to Brian Fargo’s original Wasteland game from two decades ago. Via the crowd-sourced funding on Kickstarter, Wasteland 2 has raised over 2.4 million US dollars to fund its development by Fargo’s inXile Entertainment company.
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The New York Times has included a mini-game in one of its articles, published yesterday. The article, enititled ‘Just One More Game… Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyper Addictive ‘Stupid Games’, includes a mini-game just under the heading.
The article concerns the ‘darker’ nature of video games. The pointless addictive nature of what the writer calls “stupid games”, which began with Nintendo, the Game Boy and Tetris, and currently, Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Microsoft Office may be the dominant productivity suite in much of the computing world, but it’s not for a lack of alternatives.
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How about something different for a Friday? Dream Linux is a distribution which I was watching some time ago, but it seemed to stall at release 4 Beta 6. I was pleased to find recently that it is not dead or abandoned, as I had feared, but the developers had decided to go back and make a fresh start for Dream Linux 5. There is a Message to All on their web page which explains what they have done, and why. The Dream linux home page (note the .info domain) gives a lot more information, of course, and explains the two installation options, either a “Full Install” to a disk drive or partition, or a “Persistent Install” to an external flash storage device.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, said today that they’d like to get “the opinion and ideas of the community, as well as to feel how strong you are.” He says that the desktop distribution has been their foundational product and that its community is a necessary element of that.
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Red Hat Family
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Coekaerts’ 17-year track record at Oracle suggests the technology giant is very serious about the Linux and virtualization markets. But how serious? With a little luck, The VAR Guy will track down Coekaerts during a trip to California next week.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Enterprises are increasingly buying into the Cloud, but they need help in transferring their cloudy workloads between different providers and internal clouds.
Canonical – which manages the Ubuntu Linux distribution – has run into this issue itself, as Ubuntu is a giant on public clouds. After solving the issues for its own internal use, it is now releasing for beta testing a cloud proxy product, dubbed AWSOME (“Any Web Service Over Me”) that will make cloud workloads more portable, by providing APIs for OpenStack, that are also common to Amazon’s EC2 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) public clouds.
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It’s a pretty nice dream. On your morning commute, you send a text message to the office espresso machine with your order for a double Americano and the warm mug is waiting when you get in.
For Seattle-based cloud texting company Zipwhip, the dream is reality. Its engineers custom-built an espresso machine that takes orders via SMS using their own cloud messaging application. (Watch the video, it’s pretty sweet.)
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As Linux users look forward to the release later in April 2012 of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Canonical’s decision to cease sponsoring Kubuntu as an official Ubuntu variant has passed largely under the radar — a sign, perhaps, that Kubuntu’s user base is small. But as the first member of the Ubuntu family to lose official endorsement, where is Kubuntu headed? And more importantly, what does its departure mean for the Ubuntu brand as a whole? Read on for some analysis.
Full disclosure: I’m writing this post from a Kubuntu system. Well, actually, it’s not pure Kubuntu, but it’s close enough — It’s an Ubuntu computer with the kubuntu-desktop package installed. I use the KDE desktop environment almost exclusively these days, because it just works in a universe where so many other Linux interfaces — namely Unity and GNOME Shell — still have a bit of maturing to do, to put it simply.
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LINUX VENDOR Canonical will release an application programmable interface (API) to bridge the gap between Openstack based clouds and those that run on Amazon Web Services.
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Flavours and Variants
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Easter Weekend brought good news for Linux users. The much anticipated (by me, at least) release of Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 4 arrived on Friday. After just a few days of testing and working with it, and installing it on just a couple of my netbooks, I would say that it is every bit as good as I had hoped it would be. The Update Pack Announcement gives a lot of good information about installation, so be sure to read it. In a nutshell the options are:
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Phones
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The images show that the device can support multiple home screens, an Android-style notifications bar and pinch-to-zoom, but this could either be evidence of the S40 re-skin (codenamed “Sonic”) or, fancifully, the first appearance of Espoo’s Linux-based Meltemi OS for low-end phones.
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Android
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Following Google’s strong earnings report this week, CEO Larry Page has provided one of the clearest glimpses yet of what his company’s Android tablet strategy will look like. Previously, TIME reported that Google may be focused on a co-branded 7-inch tablet in the $200 to $250 range, possibly based on the Asus MeMo 370T, for the July time frame. The Register has also noted that an Asus-based 7-inch tablet in that price range is likely from Google.
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Syllable, an attempt to write a desktop-focused operating system from scratch using best practices, has notched up a new milestone, with its developers releasing 0.6.7 today.
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Audacity, the venerable and much loved open source audio editor, has a 2.0 release today in versions for OS X, Windows and GNU/Linux.
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UPS supplier Eaton has released a new open-source software development kit aimed at providing better accessibility and flexibility to users of its power management products.
RELATED: Cisco, EMC, VMware unite behind big data, cloud training initiative
Hervé Tardy, the company’s vice president and general manager of distributed power quality, says the ability to substantially modify the management software based on the specific needs of each client is a powerful upside to the firm’s technology.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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After more than two years on the back burner, Firefox has finally introduced click-to-play (or “opt-in activation” in Mozilla terms) for all plug-ins, including Flash, Java, and Silverlight. Plug-ins are the single biggest cause of browser slow-downs and security vulnerabilities — and Chrome has had a similar feature for more than a year — so really, it’s about time Mozilla added this to Firefox.
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Mozilla engineers are in the process of improving the security and speed of Firefox by implementing a permission switch for browser plug-ins.
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SaaS
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In the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and more can be found in large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.
“Open source is certainly at the foundation in terms of building out cloud technologies,” says Byran Che, senior director of product management at Red Hat and responsible for its cloud operations offerings, management software and Red Hat Enterprise MRG, (Red Hat’s Messaging, Real-time and Grid platform). “If you take a look at market share in the server space, as you look at traditional data centers, about 70 percent are running on the Windows platform and about 30 percent are running Linux. As you take a look at what operating systems people are choosing to build applications on in the cloud, the ratio flips completely.”
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Over the last two weeks there has been a whole lot of news about ‘open’ clouds. From my perspective though there is now one clear winner – OpenStack.
As opposed to say Eucalyptus or CloudStack, OpenStack has one key item that those other two ‘open’ cloud efforts do not – THE SUPPORT OF EVERY MAJOR LINUX DISTRIBUTION.
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Databases
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Oracle announced Thursday that it has launched MySQL Connect, a user-focused event to be held Sept. 29 and 30 in San Francisco, the weekend before Oracle OpenWorld.
Oracle’s proclamation comes just before the Percona Live MySQL Conference kicks off next Tuesday in Santa Clara, California. It’s run by MySQL software vendor Percona.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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With the surging popularity of Joomla, it’s no surprise hackers are drawn to it as well. Don’t panic, however. There are a number of things you can do to strengthen your security and turn your Joomla website into a fortress. Read along as we show you how to guard against the most common exploits and hacks that this open source CMS faces.
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Healthcare
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More than five weeks ago, when some of my cancer markers were elevated, I began the process of bartering with the insurance company, doing the tests they said would be covered, and then coming all the way back to the start to finally getting the tests my doctors originally ordered. My full diagnosis and treatment considerations have been pending ever since, and that has given me time to think and to remember. Waiting, worrying, and wondering.
It’s not that I believe every cancer is a death sentence. I certainly know that isn’t the case. I am a uterine cancer survivor. My mom is a two time breast cancer survivor. But I am 57 years old now — old enough to be an expensive liability in our society, especially if I get sick and need care, but too young to be covered by Medicare. If I face a serious illness like cancer again that costs me an awful lot in out-of-pocket expenses not covered by insurance and lost time from making the money we need for survival, I will doom my husband to struggles he doesn’t need and that are not his fault. Bad enough that one of us should be sick, there is certainly no need for me to take him down with the ship.
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Business
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Finance
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Public Services/Government
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The global economic crisis has triggered a series of unprecedented social and political upheavals that have left many governments on the brink of bankruptcy. The high volume of debts have engulfed even the most well-managed economies, triggering a chain reaction in which cuts to public sector spending have become inevitable.
A high profile casualty of these consequences was Iceland, where a collapse in the banking system led to long-running financial and diplomatic crisis. Significantly, it has recently been announced that Iceland is set to swap its high-cost public sector proprietary software solutions in favour of open source alternatives. Strategists behind the move cited cost savings as a prime reason for the shift in solution and, to their credit, this is a perfectly logical reason for engaging with open source alternatives.
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The new Open Government Plan, “Flagship Initiative,” is the creation of an “accessible, participatory and transparent web environment,” a goal reflected in the new site. Users are welcomed to a colorful, easy-to-read and easy-to-browse database of NASA projects and information — and they’re encouraged to comment on everything.
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NASA chose its website as flagship for a revamp of its open government plan rolled out yesterday, and — as if to show the agency meant business — did so with a brand-new, brightly colored buzzword-catcher of a website.
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Openness/Sharing
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Call it crowdsourcing for cures. Fed up with outdated models for finding new treatments that have missed the mark, drugmakers and other public health stakeholders have ignited open source efforts that involve networks of companies and scientists joining forces to discover drugs. And one of the pioneering efforts of this ilk in India is moving ahead with a mid-stage trial for a drug against tuberculosis.
India’s Open Source Drug Discovery unit, which uses an online infrastructure to connect more than 5,500 scientists and others, revealed late last month with the Global Alliance on TB that the anti-tuberculosis molecule will be investigated in a Phase IIb trial in India, Forbes reported. And the open source group has two more TB molecules in advanced preclinical testing that could eventually enter trials and combat the infectious disease, which kills about 400,000 people annually in India.
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Zero is the Apple of electric motorcycles. The Santa Cruz, Calif.,-based company’s bikes coast out of the factory in gleaming perfection with control software that has been optimized for safety and performance. And, as with iPhones, the source code remains a company secret. Gearheads who like to know every detail of how their machines work or want to modify them either have to jailbreak their devices or start from scratch. They can turn to outside sources but, again, the only option is to buy a motor controller kit from a company that has made all of the configuration decisions in advance.
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“People who are into electric vehicles like to be able to tweak them to make them faster and to be able to fix them themselves,” says Philip Court, the director of Greenstage, an electric racecar developer in New Zealand.
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Crowdsourcing can boast of many success stories today, but in 2008, when the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) launched such an effort for drug discovery, there weren’t many. Four years on, its Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) network is emerging as a cyber platform to garner resources for developing drugs that pharmaceutical companies don’t find attractive enough.
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A typical evil genius will attempt to conquer the world and keep his or her plans secret. As any reader of The H knows, that’s no way to build a culture of innovation within the evil genius community. The H was pleased, therefore, to talk to Simon Monk who has been using open source technology, like the Arduino, as the basis for a series of Evil Genius books for aspirant evil geniuses and other people who want to get building open source based gadgetry.
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Open Data
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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PHP as an open source language has gained more popularity from PHP developers and PHP programmers because of its more interactive approach than HTML. Not only it is very fast, secure, economical, and efficiently manages the data but PHP codes can also be incorporated very easily. Moreover, another reason behind its popularity is that a web developer can download it free of cost and customize it according to the project requirements. Several business owners and big corporate are attracted towards PHP custom web application development due to its easy availability and flexible terms and conditions.
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Standards/Consortia
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We’ve certainly talked quite a bit about the institutional-level corruption of the way Congress and lobbying works, but a recent This American Life episode, done in partnership with the Planet Money team takes a much deeper dive into how lobbying works. You absolutely should listen to it. It’s really fascinating, even for folks who follow a lot of this stuff. There is also a full transcript, but hearing the whole thing is quite fascinating. Among the elements that are most interesting are the details of just how much time and effort goes into politicians raising money, and how the various fundraisers work.
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Open Source Initiative cofounder Bruce Perens said that, thanks to Apple, Unix is more popular than ever. “We now have more Unix systems than we’ve ever had before. They are in our phones and our access points. I think if you actually set out to count, you could make a graph and show that Unix—if you define Unix as something that serves a POSIX I/O—that Unix is at its peak today,” he said.
“What’s the difference? We don’t care about the stuff the user doesn’t see. The user doesn’t see Unix. This is something I often have a hard time explaining to companies.”
And while one of the world’s largest companies—Apple—is based entirely on Unix kernels, that doesn’t mean Unix is on the cusp of a massive comeback. In fact, it would seem that the formal Unix market has essentially stood still in recent years.
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Security
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A critical security flaw has been identified in a component of the latest version of Backtrack, a popular version of Linux that is used by security professionals for penetration testing. The flaw is in WICD, an open source utility that can be used to manage networks in Linux operating systems.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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With the most recent release of international oil production data, EIA Washington has revised figures back to 1985. This is one of the most comprehensive revisions I have seen in several years. Generally, the totals were revised slightly lower, and this was especially true for the past decade. Data for the full year of 2011 has now completed. | see: Global Average Annual Crude Oil Production mbpd 2001 – 2011.
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Finance
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Reno is suing Goldman Sachs, alleging fraud against one of Wall Street’s largest investment firms.
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Censorship
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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CHICK-FIL-A sells an average of nine sandwiches per second at its roughly 1,600 restaurants. Bo Muller-Moore paints T-shirts in the garage next to his house in Montpelier, Vermont. In 2011 Chick-fil-A’s sales were more than $4 billion; Mr Muller-Moore (pictured) estimates that his were $40,000.
[...]
They warned Mr Muller-Moore that they had successfully pressured other miscreants into dropping some 30 slogans, from “Eat More Dog” to “Eat More Music”. Their letter also alleged that Mr Muller-Moore’s “misappropriation of Chick-fil-A’s EAT MOR CHIKIN intellectual property…is likely to cause confusion.”
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04.13.12
Posted in News Roundup at 1:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Given the vast numbers of Macs that are apparently infected with the Flashback Trojan malware, it’s not at all surprising to see that sales of Mac security software are now skyrocketing.
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Desktop
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The Government of Malaysia has long used GNU/Linux internally. In their country, many consumers are unaware of GNU/Linux and replace FreeDOS on PCs with illegal copies of that other OS. A program is under way to persuade OEMs and retailers to use GNU/Linux on PCs instead.
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With an eye on an unseen, distant future the ‘pseudo-modern’ desktops are adopting the single windowed approach. Whether it be Microsoft’s Metro, Ubuntu’s Unity or Gnome’s new shell, they all think PC is nothing more than a smartphone with a touch screen.
I am one of those who are not big fans of this approach. The ‘pseudo-modern’ desktop Uis are focused on smartphone/tablet like devices where you use one window (one app) at a time. What’s the point of buying expensive CPUs and GPUs (minimum system requirements for modern operating systems) and 27″ multiple monitors when all I can do is run one app at a time?
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You are not your car. You can be a hacker and ride a sedan, you can ride a muscle car being a writer and you can go to school in a BMW. For some, the car is important or even has philosophical signifant but for most, the goal is ‘what I’m going with my car’.
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Server
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While HANA and its in-memory capabilities is a key platform for SAP’s database strategy, so too is the Sybase database. SAP acquired Sybase in 2010 for $5.8 billion. Sikka said that Sybase is now able to run the entire SAP business suite.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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The open-source ARM Mali graphics driver, known as the the Lima project, has achieved a major milestone.
Since delivering the exclusive news of the Lima project as an open-source reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics driver for Linux back in January, there hasn’t been too much else to report on about this driver that’s still early in its development life. This driver is called Lima since it doesn’t have the official blessing of ARM Holdings and right now has been only running simple demos with Limare. The code is available and is running on the KDE Plasma Active Tablet as was talked about and shown at FOSDEM 2012.
Fortunately this morning I’ve heard some news from the Lima developers about hitting a major milestone. Joining Luc Verhaegen, the lead developer of the Lima project, have been Ben Brewer (another employee of Codethink) and Connor Abbot have been the latest developers joining the Belgian on this open-source driver project.
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A set of Direct Rendering Manager patches have appeared to ease the development of targeting DRM drivers for embedded systems. There’s also two new DRM drivers using this SDRM layer.
These patches for DRM on embedded systems provide “helpers” to take care of the DRM device and introduce an “SDRM” layer. The helpers can setup the CRTCs, encoders, connectors, and other components as separate devices rather than having the current monolithic design to a DRM driver. This work is based upon some of the Exynos driver patches by Samsung but was written by Sascha Hauer of the German-based Pengutronix.
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Applications
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Synfig Studio is intended to be professional 2D animation software and is available to download for free. It has been around for quite some time now and seems to have had a fairly checkered history in terms of development, as noted in TildeHash’s blog last year, Potential for Free Animation Software dead? Not overly surprising for free, open source software.
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In light of Adobe killing Flash for Linux, there’s a new release of the open-source Lightspark Flash Player. Lightspark 0.5.6 is the new release with a number of noteworthy improvements.
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Proprietary
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When Linux enthusiasts think about software on the Linux desktop, they’re likely thinking about applications that are available under various open source software licenses. Yet what about the other side of the software world – proprietary software for the Linux platform?
Despite the fact that proprietary applications do exist for the Linux desktop, I’ve found that most people tend to avoid them.
In this article, I’ll explore some of the challenges proprietary software faces in gaining traction with Linux enthusiasts, in addition to providing some software titles that I think are worth looking into.
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When it comes to the number of quality paid applications available for download, Ubuntu has always lagged behind Windows and Mac. Despite some great choices in the Software Center, the Canonical-made distro has a long way to go in order to go head-to-head with other operating systems.
That said, not everything is so sullen and gloomy in the Canonical world. Slowly and steadily, Ubuntu is catching up with its competitors by offering some great paid applications that many users have started appreciating. And though you won’t find Adobe Photoshop or MS Office here, you’ll find an assortment of some fantastic games and software that put Ubuntu way ahead of any other Linux-based distribution.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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One of the most active Ubuntu developers Jo-Erlend Schinstad is also a pro-active defender of Ubuntu Unity and HUD. He tries his best to clarify doubts of users and educate them about the features of Ubuntu Unity. Muktware has published quite a lot of his articles on various topics related to Ubuntu. We recently interviewed him to understand his approach towards Ubuntu and its users. He has now posted a video to compare Ubuntu Unity with Gnome Panel, as people seem to keep saying that they are more efficient with Gnome Panel than with Ubuntu Unity.
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The Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition 201204 operating system has been announced by Clement Lefebvre on April 11th, 2012.
Linux Mint Debian Edition 201204 RC comes in two editions: the first one features the MATE 1.2 and Cinnamon 1.4 desktop environments, and the second one features the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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After a long developmental period, Calligra 2.4.0, the first stable version of Calligra, has been released. Calligra is a Qt-based graphic and office suite forked from KOffice in 2010. Note: In some quarters, Calligra is said to be a continuation of KOffice, rather than a fork.
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Being discussed following the Ubuntu 12.04 Desktops Impact Performance, Power Consumption was the impact that KDE’s KWin compositing window manager (and others that don’t redirect fullscreen windows by default) has on the OpenGL gaming performance.
Depending upon the driver it can potentially cause a hit as shown in Wednesday’s comparison of Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox. All of the desktop environments were tested in their “out of the box” / stock configurations on Ubuntu 12.04. The KDE aspect is being discussed in this forum thread where the usual items are brought up.
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A student has discovered a critical vulnerability in BackTrack, a flavour of Linux that’s a favourite among security pros.
The previously undiscovered (hence zero-day) privilege escalation bug in the network penetration-testing distro was discovered during an ethical hacking class organised by the InfoSec Institute.
Jack Koziol, security programme manager at the institute, explained that the bug in Backtrack 5 R2 (the latest version) allowed the student to overwrite settings to gain a root shell. The flaw was found in wicd (the Wireless Interface Connection Daemon), which has not been tested for “potential remote exploitation vectors” according to Koziol.
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New Releases
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Clement Lefebvre announced last evening, April 11th, the immediate availability for download of the Release Candidate version of Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 201204.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Last fall Mageia put out the call for artists to participate in their Mageia 2 artwork contest. It’s been eight long months, but the choices have now been made. The new Mageia 2 default and alternative backgrounds have been chosen.
Submitted by Luiz Fernando, the winning image is a lovely deep blue base with wisps of royal blue cutting across the primary focal lines.
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Red Hat Family
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After roughly two years of development, the Arquillian team has released version 1.0 of the open source platform for testing middleware applications. Arquillian gives Java developers the ability to write unit tests that work at run-time within Red Hat’s JBoss application server.
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Red Hat has announced the availability of a beta version of Red Hat Storage 2.0, the second version of the company’s integrated storage appliance, version 1.0 of which was launched in December. Red Hat Storage is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and GlusterFS, which the company acquired last year.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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A recent job listing has revealed that an Ubuntu Phone OS is currently under development. Canonical, the major developer behind the Ubuntu OS, is seeking a Business Development Manager for its Ubuntu Phone OS project that will be responsible for establishing relationships with phone vendors and telecommunications companies to promote the platform.
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Support for ubuntu 10.10 maverick meerkat end on April 10, 2012. This date was established when Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat was released in october of 2010.
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Phones
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Android
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Sony’s new SmartWatch puts various functions of the user’s Android smartphone on his or her wrist, connecting with the handset — which can be left in a pocket or bag — via BlueTooth. Its various functions include access to email, events, SMS, music player controls, and the camera’s shutter. It’s compatible with Sony and Sony Ericsson phones as well as a variety of phones from other makers.
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An image of what is purported to be Samsung’s unannounced Galaxy S III smartphone — the vendor’s flagship mobile device for 2012 — has been published by a Polish blog. Claiming to have received the photograph from an anonymous source who said he was testing the device, oPDA.pl on Thursday posted the image to its site, stating that it received no details about the handset or its specifications. While the authenticity of the image is anything but certain, a few things can be gleaned from the image if the device is in fact real.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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With the availability of Android 4.0 platform, white-box makers have rolled out tablets in 7-, 8-, 9.7- and 10.1-inch sizes with specifications catered to customer’s demand, said the sources, adding that the models target markets in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
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Google’s total investment in Android/Linux is just pocket-change (cash = $49.3billion) for them and they are making the market for its search and app business grow by shipping more smart thingies and encouraging other suppliers to do the same. Even if users of smart thingies are not replacing their PC with a smart thing, they are increasing the hours of the day they can access Google’s services by mobility. There is no downside for Google. There would be a serious downside if they stuck with the stagnant Wintel platform. Google would not have 24% growth staying with Wintel only.
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Hotfile is determined to outlast Hollywood’s ongoing crusade against file locker services. The company is defending itself against an aggressive litigation campaign that movie studios first brought against it over a year ago. Hotfile’s case may be bolstered by a recent report which shows that the two most widely-downloaded files distributed through the popular file locker service are open source software applications.
Charges against Hotfile that alleged direct copyright infringement were thrown out last year by a federal court judge. The remaining charges allege that the company is liable for inducing its users to infringe copyright. The answer to that question will hinge on whether the courts find that Hotfile has substantial non-infringing uses.
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Overall as I developer, I find the ability to instantly push out updates highly desirable. As a consumer I appreciate the fact that submissions are tested and verified to at least technically work and not crash. Is there a perfect system? Not that I know of. What is the perfect system? I don’t know. If there was a way for developers to be able to reach their users quickly with bugfixes and even new features that allow for consumers to not have to wade through extremely low quality and exact duplicate apps, then I would be one happy developer.
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The thought of ‘open source’ need not always conjure up images of socially removed geeks slamming away at their keyboards.
There have been instances of the open source ideology saving and improving lives, and this article explores a couple of examples on that aspect.
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We are happy to announce the release of PhoneGap 1.6! The PhoneGap/Apache Cordova Community has worked hard to fix many bugs (including the nasty local storage bug caused by the iOS 5.1 update) and added some new features.
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Events
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The Linux Foundation has opened up reservations for the Enterprise End User Summit. The conference, now in its fourth year, is being held at the New York Stock Exchange on the 30th April and the 1st May, and will include keynotes by Scott Crenshaw of Red Hat, and Antony Liguori of IBM.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Nineteen companies have formed the OpenStack Foundation, vowing to invest millions of dollars into an open source cloud initiative. It sounds like the OpenStack Foundation will seek to raise at least $4 million annually for OpenStack’s development as a public cloud and private cloud solution.
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Databases
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Offering a glimpse of the new features some database administrators will be working with before too long, Oracle has posted a preview version of the next MySQL relational database management system.
The Development Milestone Release (DMR) for MySQL 5.6 comes with a number of new and still experimental features for the open source database system, including improved replication and the ability to bypass the SQL framework for faster data access.
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10gen, the company behind MongoDB, has announced the general availability of a connector for its open source NoSQL database and Apache Hadoop, the MapReduce framework and distributed computing platform. According to its developers, version 1.0 of the connector is the “culmination of over a year of work to bring our users a solid integration layer between their MongoDB deployments and Hadoop clusters for data processing”.
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Version 5.5.23 of MariaDB, a drop-in replacement for MySQL, has been published by the developers at Monty Program. The first stable release in the 5.5 series of the open source database includes performance improvements and “a few added features” over MySQL 5.5.23, which it is based upon.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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When reviewers look at LibreOffice and its ancestor OpenOffice.org, they inevitably assume that it’s inferior to Microsoft Office. At the very most, they may grudgingly find it acceptable for undemanding users.
However, when you examine LibreOffice and MS Office without assumptions, the comparison changes dramatically. That’s especially true when looking at the word processors, LibreOffice’s Writer and MS Office’s Word.
For one thing, features frequently have different names in Writer and Word. Although LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have a history of conforming to MS Office’s name-choices — for example, in the spreadsheets, data pilots were recently renamed pivot tables to match Excel’s usage — holdouts remain. For example, the equivalent of Word’s AutoSummary in Writer remains AutoAbstract.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Well it’s been a disconcerting kind of week here in the Linux blogosphere, not least because of all the darn construction going on down at the Google+ Grill.
First it was the hammering giving Linux Girl a headache. Then, on Wednesday, she walked in after lunch and could barely recognize the place. What is this interface sorcery, she wants to know?
Then, of course, there was the retirement of Linux Girl’s old friend, Maverick Meerkat, in the past few days as well. Alas, dear distro — we hardly knew ye!
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Openness/Sharing
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Charles Mangin, a web developer and consultant based in Raleigh, NC, hoped to recreate the drawing-tablet experience (such as that with a Wacom device) on what we today think of as tablets (like iPads and Android tablets)–and to do it as open hardware. The result is now on Kickstarter: the PressurePen.
Tablets are the perfect form-factor for on-the-go digital art. But very, very few of them come with a stylus, and the earliest third-party styluses made for them couldn’t adjust performance to pressure.
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Open Access/Content
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World Bank stakes leadership position by announcing open access policy and launching open knowledge repository under Creative Commons.
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Programming
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Security
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Microsoft’s recent announcement that it will end support for the Windows XP operating system in two years signals the end of an era for the company, and potentially the beginning of a nightmare for everyone else.
When Microsoft cuts the chord on XP in two years it will effectively leave millions of existing Windows-based computers vulnerable to continued and undeterred cyberattacks, many of which hold the potential to find their way into consumer, enterprise and even industrial systems running the latest software.
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Finance
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In a process internally referred to as a “denial sweep,” Litton’s computers would automatically generate denial letters for every homeowner who, according to Litton’s records, hadn’t sent their documents. But untold numbers of those documents had been lost on another continent. Wyatt complained about the practice in multiple meetings with senior management, he says, but managers were chiefly worried about reducing the overwhelming backlog.
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Copyrights
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Under US law, violation of copyright is not a crime unless commercial use is made of the copy or the value is more than $1K. Even when it is a crime, illegal copying is limited to 1, 5 or 10 years for different levels of severity and this guy was likely in the 1 year category.
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Send this to a friend
04.12.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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I like to think that Linux is about a flexible an operating system as you can find. But it can be easy to forget just how flexible it is. We can get ourselves stuck in our computing habits and stick with the old and familiar. And sometimes, just trying something new can sometimes seem daunting and just not worth the effort.
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Server
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Proxmox Virtual Environment 2.0 lets you run and manage both KVM virtual machines and OpenVZ containers using a powerful web interface. Koen reveals all…
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Kernel Space
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Linux is already being adopted by an increasing number of car makers such as GM and Jaguar predominantly for in-vehicle infotainment systems. But much work remains to ensure that Linux is automotive-grade. In this article we will discuss the opportunities for Linux in vehicles and the five requirements that need to be addressed to bring it up to speed.
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Vivek Goyal, a Red Hat developer, questioned whether CFQ as the default scheduler in the Linux kernel is still the right choice. CFQ works well on a slow, rotational media like some Serial ATA disk drives, but under-performs for faster storage arrays, PCI-E solid-state drives, virtualized disks, etc. Therefore he’s sent in a patch that would change the disk scheduler default for non-SATA drives to being the deadline scheduler rather than CFQ. Making deadline the default over CFQ for these faster storage mediums should provide a speed boost.
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Graphics Stack
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The latest out of the Wayland development camp is a new, super CI repository setup by a Red Hat engineer that should make it easier to test out Wayland and its reference Weston compositor.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Here’s a collection of screenshots to help you decide the best looking open-source game for Linux. The screenshots are a collection of open-source games, albeit far from being an exhaustive of all available OpenGL-powered open-source / free Linux games. The point is to spark a vibrant discussion within the forums to pay tribute to the open-source (or even closed-source) Linux games with the most impressive visuals.
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Desktop Environments
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Humor: Google yesterday rolled out a new layout for Google+, it’s social network. The new UI has impressed a majority of users. If Facebook’s infamous TimeLine was inspired by the horror movies “I Know What You Did Last Summer” to help stalkers and governments,”, Google has gone geek. The new design of Google+ is inspired by Gnome 3 Shell.
“A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations. So today we’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google+. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google.” wrote Vic Gundotra on a Google blog.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Dr. Will Schroeder is one of the keynote speakers for Akademy 2012 in Tallinn, Estonia. Will is the CEO of Kitware Inc., a proven leader in the creation and support of open-source software.
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The KDE Community has announced that the Simon Listens speech recognition project has successfully completed its migration from the SourceForge source code repository to KDE’s Git infrastructure. Often referred to simply as Simon, the program, which is included with some Linux distributions such as Knoppix 7.0, allows users with physical difficulties to control their systems using only their voice.
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GNOME Desktop
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There’s some more progress to report on with Wayland and Weston beyond the Wayland talks at last week’s LF collab summit, including a video showing various GTK applications running within Wayland on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
One of the independent developers that has been involved with the ongoing Wayland/Weston work for some time has posted a video and information about running various GTK applications under Wayland with an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS host. Additionally, he’s written an unofficial “State of Wayland” report as of early April.
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Slitaz seems to be growing up and playing with the big boys. In the latest release, new original tools highlight the maturing nature of this tiny distro. It’s been two years in the making, but it’s been worth the wait.
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Where do Linux gurus come from? From baby newbies. How do baby newbies become gurus? One good way is with the help of the best child- and beginner-oriented distribution, DoudouLinux.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Once upon a time, PCLinuxOS used to be one of my favorite candidates for permanent desktop use, but it was back in 2009, with a truly magnificent Gnome release. Such is the trouble with great success, sequels cannot match the original. In the three years since, my experience with the distro has steadily declined. But now, there’s a fresh new release, and this means fresh new hope.
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One of the distributions I used in the years before starting this blog was PCLinuxOS. After I discovered that PCLinuxOS was a spinoff of Mandrake (the first Linux distro I ever used), I gave it a try, and used it for at least a year. It served me quite well but that was many years ago. What is it like these days? Here’s my review of their latest release.
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Red Hat Family
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Hopefully you’re not too anxious to know the codename for the future Fedora 18 Linux release, which will serve as the successor to Fedora 17′s Beefy Miracle. Red Hat’s legal department has caused a delay in coming up with the codename for this Fedora release due out in H2’2012.
Coming up with the Fedora codenames via contributor suggestions has generally been an interesting but odd event with a colorful selection of possible codenames each cycle. With Fedora 17 it’s been arguably the oddest codename with the “Beefy Miracle” title; heck, even Ubuntu developers like it. While many see the Fedora codenames as just good fun, some Fedora users have grown concerned about the names.
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Recently, there was some justified excitement that Red Hat had finally done it, and turned in annual sales of over $1 billion. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post here on Computerworld UK wondering why there were no companies based around open source that had managed to achieve such billion-dollar turnovers, and suggested that the key reason was one put forward by Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst:
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The first iteration of the Gluster clustered file system that is going through the Red Hat annealing process is coming closer to market with the launch of a the first beta of the tool since Shadowman acquired Gluster last October.
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Debian Family
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Here are some benchmarks comparing Debian GNU/kFreeBSD with the new 9.0 kernel, Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux 3.2 kernel, and FreeBSD/PC-BSD 9.0.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As a fan of Ubuntu in particular and Linux in general, I’m always interested when new devices come out with my favorite operating system already installed.
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How does the choice of desktop environments you make for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS impact your system’s performance and power consumption? Here’s the latest round of benchmarking from the various Ubuntu 12.04 desktop environment choices — Unity, Unity 2D, GNOME Shell, KDE, Xfce, LXDE, and Openbox — when running them on three different laptops.
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It also speaks about the good battery life and the “good value” delivered by Intel Pentium Dual Core B950 based products. In so far as the operating system is concerned, the laptops are being distributed come equipped with the Linux based operating system. Ubuntu 10.10 is distributed as free and open source software. The decision of the government to avail the open source option is important for several important reasons. Firstly, it reduces dependence on proprietary software vendors and secondly it drastically cuts down on the overall cost of the machines. Since they are not bundled with expensive licensed software such as Microsoft Office they are cost-effective and provide value for money, an important factor for the government to consider which has an inherent responsibility and fiduciary duty to the taxpayers.
Open source is also a catalyst for development as it allows users to adapt the software to their own needs. This can improve IT and programming skills that in turn promote innovation. The Ubuntu OS comes installed with Libre Office and the internet browser Firefox. Additional software that is not installed by default can be downloaded and installed using the Ubuntu Software Center without paying any additional charges – an added bonus, since this would be illegal with proprietary software. Also, Ubuntu does not need an antivirus as its kernel is designed in such a way that no spam or virus can affect it.
UBUNTU is getting popular globally due to its open source and freeware feature. It is not only being used by students but the LINUX enterprise OS offerings are being used by world renowned education institutes for their enterprise deployments and universities in Pakistan are also using it. The primary purpose to bundle the UBUNTU OS in the machines was to save cost and promote students to take advantage of this free OS which has some great features, is easy to use and comes with a UBUNTU Liber Office (just like MS office) and also has the world renowned Fire Fox Internet Browser (similar to MS Internet explorer).
The Punjab Government has also saved cost on bundling MS Office which is even more expensive that Windows OS. Ubuntu also has another advantage; it does not need an Antivirus as its Kernel is designed is such a way that no Spam or Virus can affect it which in turn saves cost. The selection of bundling the UBUNTU was done in order to take advantage of all the features free of cost to the government. In this regard, it is further advised to instruct all educational institutions to discourage any ads that are placed on their notice boards with regard to installation of the Windows OS as the people who are offering the students to install a Windows OS for Rupees 500/- are also using pirated versions and thus misguiding the students. Furthermore, a DVD has been provided with every laptop which contains drivers for not only UBUNTU but Windows OS as well.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu — the version of Ubuntu Linux that uses the KDE desktop interface rather than the standard Unity desktop — has a new sponsor.
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That’s right, I packed it in. My MacBook Pro is now on the shelf. In a while, it goes on Craigslist — not because it’s been obsoleted by the latest version of Mac OS — Mountain Lion as mine will work okay (some MacBook Pros will not). Instead, there’s a cushy comfort zone that’s dangerous for a product reviewer to fall into.
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The beauty of Linux lies in the fact that there is a distro for everyone. It doesn’t matter whether you are a geek, beginner, Apple fan, Windows fan, gamer or developer, there’s surely one distro for you. And yes, if you are a Chinese, there is this distro just for you, and it is elegant and well-polished.
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I like to think that Linux is about a flexible an operating system as you can find. But it can be easy to forget just how flexible it is. We can get ourselves stuck in our computing habits and stick with the old and familiar. And sometimes, just trying something new can sometimes seem daunting and just not worth the effort.
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Phones
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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The OpenNebula community has announced the release of OpenNebula 3.4 which now supports multiple data storage backends, with separate stores for VM images, disk images in file format, iSCSI/LVM for disk images on block devices and a specialised VMware store for the vmdk format. These new data storage backends work alongside new transfer drivers. The release also reintroduces the concept of load balanaced, high availability clusters.
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Databases
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You’re a part of the Core PostgreSQL Team and, at the same time, the president of PostgreSQL Europe. What are your responsibilities in these positions?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A little under a year ago I wrote a happy post about LibreOffice. The team back then showed a strong focus on cleaning up and re-architecturing LibreOffice to make it ready for the future.
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CMS
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Business
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You’ve been thinking about starting an open source company. Or maybe you’ve got an idea but don’t know how to take it to the next level. You need something to accelerate your idea. Maybe you need to pitch it to investors? Perhaps you’re looking for a co-founder with skills that compliment yours? Startup Weekend could be the event that gets you moving.
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Freedom/FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Liberated Pixel Cup is a two-part competition: make a bunch of awesome free culture licensed artwork, and then program a bunch of free software games that use it.
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Public Services/Government
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“We used this milestone to sharpen our focus and commitment to Open Government. We see Open Government as the responsibility of every person who works at NASA and we take seriously the principles of participation, collaboration and transparency in all that we do,” Open Government program manager Nick Skytland wrote.
One new feature of the plan is the inclusion of a citizen engagement directory, meant to provide members of the public with ways to contribute to NASA’s goals and encourage the development of broader interest in science, technology, engineering and math education.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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One of the world’s largest research charities, the Wellcome Trust, is to support efforts by scientists to make their work freely available for all.
The Trust is to establish a free, online publication to compete with established academic journals.
They say their new title could be a “game changer” forcing other publishing houses to increase free access.
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Open Hardware
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I was at the Palmetto Open Source Conference (POSSCON) a few weeks ago and one of the best exhibits was from SparkFun, an electronics company that sells open source hardware, offers classes, and provides online educational tutorials. A massive collection of electronic gadgets drew me to their booth.
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Security
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Whenever you write about security in general and SSH security in particular (and for good measure also get slashdotted for your efforts), the comments inevitably turn up a variety of useful and less useful suggestions.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Natural gas in North America broke below the $2.00 barrier today, for the first time in ten years. It’s important to remember that, unlike oil, natural gas does not trade at a converged, global price. Accordingly, a million BTU in LNG form currently trades for over $9.00 in the UK, and over $15.00 in Japan. Such low prices for natural gas unquestionably give the US a competitive advantage. But, it will take a resurgence in manufacturing and related industrialism to fully capture the price disparity. After all, the US is still very much an oil-based economy.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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No doubt about it, large unlimited donations are flowing into SuperPACs from rich individuals and corporations aimed at influencing who is elected at all levels of government in 2012. With the SuperPACs and other forms of political committees regulated by the federal and state election agencies, or by the IRS under section 527, at least we know who the donors are.
But when political campaign expenditures are made by various forms of nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations, such as 501(c)(4) social welfare groups (like Crossroads GPS) or 501(c)(6) business associations (like the US Chamber of Commerce), there is no general law requiring their donors to be identified. So secret money in the millions, once again, flows in.
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Send this to a friend
04.11.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Chrome OS
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This new interface, Aura, is both a new desktop window manager and shell environment. Aura is an optional replacement for last year’s Chrome OS single Web browser interface. With it you can have multiple, small browser windows, each with its own set of tabs, against a desktop screen background. These windows can be overlapped like the Windows on older desktops such as GNOME 2.x, Windows 7 or Mac OS X.
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Server
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The inter-tubes were buzzing yesterday with the news of the blockbuster $1 billion sale of Instagram to Facebook.
This is a company that is barely a year old and yet they achieved so much in so very little time.
While there are a number of components that contribute to Instagram’s success, it’s important to realize that Linux is one of them. While the front-end of Instagram is an iOS (and now Android) client there is also a back-end.
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Kernel Space
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The first Linux 2.4 kernel was released in January of 2001. Today after eleven years of service, it looks like the end of the 2.4 kernel is finally here.
The 2.4 kernel has been in maintenance only mode for most of the last six years since the 2.6 kernel was first released. There has long been a subset of vendors (many on the embedded side) that still relied 2.4, but that’s no longer the case.
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Applications
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Surpisingly, a relatively obscure app called qOrganizer goes a long way toward solving that problem. And for those with the luxury of just one computer, this handy app can be all that you need to track and manage your day. qOrganizer does a nice job of going head-to-head with some of the more well-established PIM apps as well.
Linux has a collection of apps to handle calendaring, note-taking and sounding reminder alarms. But much fewer full-fledged PIMs are available. qOrganizer matches up nicely against epic apps such as the Chandler Project’s Note to Self Organizer, KOrganizers, Osmo and Getting Things Gnome.
qOrganizer is a general organizer that includes a calendar with schedule, reminders, journal/notes for every day and a to-do list. Its otherwise comprehensive collection of components combined with a simple interface gives this app a fresh, innovative approach to tracking your important activities.
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The popular Media Center application XBMC is now available for Ubuntu and Linux Mint users, thanks to Debian. The application is now available through Ubuntu Software Center on Ubuntu 12.04 as it has been accepted into the official Debian distribution. The application was earlier available through a PPA.
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As you may recall, in the inaugural entry for this blog I described a crude mock-up I’d cobbled together, using Linux utilities, for producing screencast video lectures along the lines of those found on the khanacademy web site. I recently had occasion to explore some alternate screencast applications, since ogv files ceased playing back sanely on one of my systems. That issue was ultimately addressed by “upgrading” the video card in my aging Pentium 4 computer (with an old 128 MB nvidia card I got for $15). But not before I investigated some alternatives to recordmydesktop.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The Qt development toolkit is undergoing a major overhaul. The developers behind the project announced the availability of the Qt 5 alpha release this week. It’s a key milestone on the path to the official launch of Qt 5, expected to occur later this year.
Qt is an open source toolkit designed to support cross-platform desktop and mobile application development. It provides libraries, user interface controls, and other components. Qt was originally created by Trolltech, a Norwegian software company that Nokia acquired in 2008. Nokia subsequently relicensed Qt under more permissive terms and transitioned the toolkit to a community-driven open governance model.
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Simon, KDE’s speech recognition software, has recently migrated from Sourceforge to KDE’s Git infrastructure. Developed to allow people with physical disabilities to control their computers entirely by voice, Simon has found its way into voice-controlled media centers in homes for the elderly and most recently in assistive care-giving robots.
The move has also brought Simon into KDE Extragear, the kde-accessibility mailing list, and KDE’s accessibility sub-forum for user support.
The community around Simon has grown since the move, so this is a good time to join in for those interested in improving Simon or KDE’s other accessibility projects. The Simon Listens e.V. is also accepting tax-deductible donations (translated from German) to further support development of their software.
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Yesterday, DistroWatch.com made it public that the beta 1 of ROSA Marathon is available for testing. This distro is a new fork of Mandriva.
Interestingly, after one day of being released, ROSA is now in the 11th position, trailing Mageia (#8 in DistroWatch).
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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A Red Hat Storage 2.0 beta with Big Data and Apache Hadoop support is now available. So what is Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) trying to achieve in the storage market, and where do partners potentially fit into the story? The VAR Guy is so pleased that you continue to raise such timely questions. Here are the answers.
First, the basics. Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011 to push into the storage market. Red Hat Storage is a software-only solution that seeks to help partners and customers manage the storage of unstructured data. Open source storage, virtualization and middleware represent three critical ways Red Hat is trying to diversify beyond its Linux heritage.
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The emerging NoSQL database market isn’t just for startups anymore. 10gen the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source MongoDB database is partnering with enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat in a bid to grow marketshare.
The partnership will see MongoDB certified for enterprise use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 as well as providing tools and support for joint customers. Mike Evans, VP of Business Development at Red Hat told InternetNews.com that there is now a move towards a new era of apps with mobile and cloud as the base. Those apps increasingly are moving away from traditional database in favor of NoSQL, especially MongoDB.
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Investment analysts at MKM Partners assumed coverage on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) in a note issued to investors on Tuesday. The firm set a “neutral” rating on the stock.
Shares of Red Hat traded up 1.76% during mid-day trading on Tuesday, hitting $59.59. Red Hat has a 52 week low of $31.77 and a 52 week high of $62.24. The company has a market cap of $11.508 billion and a P/E ratio of 78.08.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, the commercial developer of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, seems at times to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Some testers and industry watchers alike have praised the company’s innovative Unity desktop shell and the Heads Up Display (HUD) bolted on top of it in this month’s release of Ubuntu 12.04, the Precise Pangolin.
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Flavours and Variants
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Kubuntu, the KDE-based derivative of Ubuntu, is entering a new era. Blue Systems will be sponsoring Kubuntu from the 12.10 cycle starting in May. Canonical recently stopped sponsoring Jonathan Riddell’s work on KDE. Jonathan gave indications of this sponsorship during a recent meeting when he asked if it was OK with the Technical Board of Ubuntu if someone else sponsored Kubuntu.
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Well of course it lives on! When Canonical cut the proverbial cord, it simply meant that Jonathon Riddell and the Kubuntu community would have to continue outside of business hours. Regardless of the time Riddell spent at Canonical, the community has still been able to carry to the torch.
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Discussions about Red Hat’s involvement in the OpenStack project have dredged up old enmities about Red Hat’s kernel development practices, charges that are perhaps misdirected, yet still reflect a strong undercurrent on the value of code contribution in open source.
It was an innocuous article from colleague Sean Michael Kerner that started the whole thing, which highlighted an interesting analysis of code contributions to the recent Essex release of OpenStack.
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TrueCrypt is a fully open-source tool for encrypting data. That data can be on a completely encrypted hard drive, or just an encrypted image file. Thankfully, the encryption works the same regardless of your platform, so Windows and OS X users can share encrypted files between computers.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has posted a very interesting demonstration of real-time video chat features that will head into the Firefox browser later this year. The company is building technology around the Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) standard, which facilitates real-time video chat without requiring browser users to install any plugins. You can view the demonstration on The Mozilla Hacks blog, and here are more details on the technology.
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SaaS
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Last year, Canonical the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, made a big deal about switching their Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) technology to an OpenStack base. The OpenStack open source cloud community also based their reference architecture on Ubuntu.
With that amount of ‘tight’ public integration you would think that Canonical/Ubuntu would be a major contributor to OpenStack. You would also think that Red Hat, which has its own cloud efforts would be no where to be found on the list of OpenStack contributors.
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With competition heating up in open source clouds, an analysis of community participation among four major projects shows that Eucalyptus – the oldest of those studied – has the largest standing community but OpenStack and CloudStack are gaining momentum in the developer community.
The dynamics of the open source cloud computing market are changing. Eucalyptus, which is a private cloud Infrastructure as a Service model, recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to ensure interoperability between the two systems. Meanwhile, Citrix announced this week it would be migrating away from the OpenStack project and would give its CloudStack platform an Apache license, in effect creating a competing open source project to OpenStack.
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Databases
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How’s this for ironic: The new HP Public Cloud will promote MySQL databases as a service, essentially leveraging Oracle’s software to compete with the Microsoft SQL Azure cloud, among other public cloud database services.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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CMS
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The next WordPress release is just around the corner, and the first beta came out on April 5th. If you’re a WordPress user, or thinking about using WordPress in the near future, here’s what you have to look forward to.
The 3.4 release is set to be pretty modest – the set of features in 3.4 is not extensive or likely to change the WordPress experience too substantially. But it does have a few features that are worth taking note of.
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Business
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BSD
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Public Services/Government
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had the distinct advantage of being able to build its systems from scratch, having been established by a 2010 law.
One of the advantages it has had over other government agencies making the transition to more modern systems was the fact it was entirely unencumbered by legacy systems. As such, it took advantage of that flexibility to build open systems built on open source software that could grow with the agency over time.
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The U.S. took legal aim at Apple Inc. and five of America’s largest publishing firms on Wednesday, hitting them with an antitrust lawsuit for allegedly setting pricing patterns for eBooks that limit competition. The suit contends that Apple and the group of publishing companies cost consumers millions of dollars through an arrangement where publishers set the pricing of eBooks, eliminating variable costs for them that could have been set by retailers and distributors.
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Security
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Microsoft released six bulletins on Tuesday to fix a total of 11 vulnerabilities, one of which has become the target of active attacks against unpatched applications.
One of the four critical patches in the batch – MS12-027 – addresses an Active X issue that impacts numerous application and creates a mechanism to drop malware onto vulnerable Windows systems.
Microsoft warned of attacks in the wild against the zero-day flaw, which affects an unusually wide range of Microsoft products and Microsoft users. Applications affected include Office 2003 through 2010 on Windows; SQL Server 2000 through 2008 R2; BizTalk Server 2002; Commerce Server 2002 through 2009 R2; Visual FoxPro 8; and Visual Basic 6 Runtime.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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For the full year of 2011, the US exported 107,259 thousand short tons of coal. This was the highest level of coal exports since 1991. More impressive: exports recorded a more than 25% leap compared to the previous year, 2010. (see data here, opens to PDF). Additionally, this was also a dramatic breakout in volume from the previous decade, which ranged from 40,000 – 80,000 thousand short tons per annum. The below chart, from EIA Washington, does not capture the full year, though it certainly portrays the trend. Nota bene: this chart tracks the quarterly volumes of coal exports:
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Finance
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Money power in private hands and democracy can’t co-exist. Wall Street crooks transformed America into an unprecedented money making racket.
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Censorship
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Last year, in their decision regarding the controversial LOPPSI bill, French constitutional judges held that Article 4 of the bill, which allows the French government to censor the Internet under the pretext of fighting child pornography, is not contrary to the Constitution. In doing so, the French constitutional court failed to protect fundamental freedoms on the Internet, and in particular freedom of expression. Hope now lies with European institutions, the only ones with the power to prohibit such administrative website blocking and its inherent risks of abuse.
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Privacy
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This week’s Boston Phoenix cover story — Hunting the Craigslist Killer: An Untold Detective Story from the Digital Frontier — would not have been possible without access to a huge trove of case files released by the Boston Police Department. Many of those documents have never been made public — until now. As a kind of online appendix to the article, we’re publishing over a dozen documents from the file, ranging from transcripts of interviews to the subpoenas that investigators obtained from the tech companies that helped them track the killer’s digital fingerprints. We’ve also published the crime scene photos and uploaded recordings made by investigators as they interviewed the killer, Philip Markoff, and others involved in the case.
One of the most fascinating documents we came across was the BPD’s subpoena of Philip Markoff’s Facebook information. It’s interesting for a number of reasons — for one thing, Facebook has been pretty tight-lipped about the subpoena process, even refusing to acknowledge how many subpoenas they’ve served. Social-networking data is a contested part of a complicated legal ecosystem — in some cases, courts have found that such data is protected by the Stored Communications Act.
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Civil Rights
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It has been a of week of chaos for Britain’s government on civil liberties. Theresa May signaling the intention to bring in legislation to allow law enforcement agencies to check email, web, social media and gaming forum traffic unleashed a wave of protest. It also unleashed contradiction in the government parties. The Conservatives were quick to exploit the “being tough on crime” angle in the Sun. LibDem president Tim Farron was fielded to promise to shoot down the proposals Nick Clegg was set up to defend just a few short days before.
We have had leaks, briefings, interviews, spin and letters. Lots of letters. The whole debacle has been capped with Home Office and the Prime Minister’s websites being DDoSed by Anonymous.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Paris, April 10th 2012 – The European Parliament has decided not to refer ACTA to the EU Court of Justice, and will normally hold its final vote this summer, as originally planned. This coming week marks a new opportunity for EU citizens to engage with their elected representatives in Brussels, calling on them to move swiftly toward a thorough political assessment of ACTA.
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04.08.12
Posted in News Roundup at 10:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Red Hat’s Matthew Garrett talked this week again about the troubles in supporting UEFI under Linux.
With Linux support for PCI Express ASPM having been corrected to address the notorious Linux kernel power regression of last year, Matthew Garrett’s latest topic and focus of work has been on UEFI for Linux.
Matthew’s commonly talking about the UEFI problems with Linux, especially when it comes to the Secure Boot functionality. Some past examples (and some reading for reference) include UEFI Secure Boot Still A Big Problem For Linux, Going Over The Good & Bad For UEFI On Linux, and Myths About Secure Boot: Security, Microsoft, Etc.
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There’s a new Linux graphics driver for allowing mini/pico/compact/handheld USB-interfacing display projectors to work under your favorite distribution.
Earlier this week an email hit the Phoronix news inbox from Antonio Ospite, who has been working on this new driver support along with a Reto Schneider. While some of these small projectors have a VGA/HDMI interface (in which case no special Linux graphics driver is needed under Linux), a growing number of them are USB-based where only a Microsoft Windows driver is available. (If you’re not familiar with these types of mini/handheld projectors, see the Texas Instruments projector demo from X@FOSDEM.)
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The 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit concluding this week in San Francisco. In case you missed out on any coverage of the interesting sessions from the event, here’s a run-down of the worthwhile information that was shared and discussed, plus a few other extra tid-bits from the invite-only event.
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Graphics Stack
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Unigine Corp has announced a set of improvements to their cross-platform and visually-stunning Unigine Engine. With the Source Engine on Linux finally looking to be imminent for entering the public spotlight, new improvements to Unigine couldn’t come at a better time.
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Applications
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TermSaver is a pretty cool screensaver that can run from the command-line interface or terminal in Ubuntu/Linux. TermSaver isn’t supposed replace other screensavers that come with your desktop such as GnomeShell, Unity,KDE, or other Desktop Environment. And it also might not be able to carry out the actual purpose of a screesaver since it lacks a lot of pixel movements (screen animations), which otherwise helps to prevent “screen burns” on display devices
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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Kickstarter is doing lots of good to Linux gaming as more and more developers are adding Linux support.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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GNOME Desktop
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Gloobus Preview is an quick file previewer which supports images, documents (pdf, odf, ods, etc.), source files, audio (mp3, wav, ogg and more), video (avi, ogg, mkv, flv, etc.), folders, archives, fonts, plain text files and more.
Gloobus Preview was recently fixed so it now works with Ubuntu 12.04 too. Besides the Ubuntu 12.04 fix, the latest Gloobus Preview from BZR comes with GTK3 support, support for password-protected documents, a rewritten documents plugin, WebM support, fixed ttf, pdf and video plugins and other fixes.
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I had tried out all these distributions again last week (during spring break) and this week, but I didn’t think that each of them warranted their own posts (and this is also why there were no posts last week), so I have decided to combine them all into a short summary of my experiences. I’m doing this because I’m seriously trying to figure out what I should start using after Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora” GNOME. I tested the 64-bit (because my computer has 64-bit hardware) live USB sessions of all of these using MultiSystem. Follow the jump to see what each is like.
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Red Hat Family
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It’s certainly been an interesting week on the open source cloud platform front. GigaOm reports that IBM and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) are planning to announce their respective support for OpenStack, perhaps as early as next week. Neither company was commenting on the deal, but it sounds like a fait accompli, albeit one that hasn’t been announced yet.
If not next week, we may wait for the announcement until the OpenStack Design Summit starting April 16 in San Francisco.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Sure Red Hat just crested the $1 billion-revenue mark with almost $150 million in profit while Canonical, maker of Ubuntu Linux, still isn’t profitable after seven years in business.
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I was bored yesterday and this Yahoo! feature got my attention. It is about how tell if your “PC has a virus”.
I might be mistaken, but the image they used to illustrate the first symptom of those annoying virus infections that plague Windows users seems to have come from… a computer running Ubuntu!
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For the past 6 months we’ve been travelling around conferences talking about juju and charms. We’ve had charm schools and training events, but it’s been difficult to explain to people the differences between service orchestration and configuration management, especially with a tool that wasn’t so complete. Thanks to the work for some volunteers though, we’ve managed to have 58 charms available in Ubuntu so far.
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Midsize businesses that are considering the transition from Windows to Linux might want to take a look at the results of a recent user survey from Canonical.
Canonical, responsible for products such as Ubuntu and Launchpad, polled over 15,000 English speakers (as well as more than 1,800 Spanish speakers and 1,700 Portuguese speakers) in an effort to better understand its user base. But the answers the company received might not be what some would expect.
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South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth has spent many years and huge sums of money producing the Ubuntu operating system. It’s the third most popular desktop operating system in the world and not only because it’s free, but also because it is extremely competitive and improving constantly.
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Good news! We just received confirmation that the Raspberry Pi has passed EMC testing without requiring any hardware modifications.
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Google Glass is Google’s effort at wearable technology, a display that projects contextual information and communication information onto glass that you wear (like a pair of regular glasses kinda/sorta). Little is known at this point about the actual hardware/software technology and to be honest at first, I thought this was an April 1st joke — but it’s not.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung Electronics has said it expects its profit for the first three months of the year to almost double as its smartphone sales continue to grow.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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This is a valuable report, because it points out a general problem not specific to OSS.
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OmniTI announced OmniOS, an open source operating system for application developers in the Solaris community looking for data-intensive application deployment.
OmniOS is a continuation of the OpenSolaris legacy and aims to address the longstanding issues that occurred when Oracle decided to discontinue open development of the operating system. OmniOS builds on Illumos to make a complete OS.
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Events
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SaaS
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In the wake of Citrix’s decision to cut its support for the open source OpenStack cloud computing platform and move full steam ahead with the next phase of its CloudStack strategy, it still seems clear to most observers that OpenStack and CloudStack are headed for fierce competition. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. All the way back in 2009, open source platforms were emerging as the best way for IT departments to guarantee flexibility in their cloud deployments. But what many people are still missing is that support is going to be the key differentiator between OpenStack and CloudStack, and other cloud platforms.
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CMS
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The community supporting the popular Joomla open-source content management system announced that it has been downloaded more than 30 million times.
The community attributes the continued growth in the number of individuals, companies and organizations using the CMS to an aggressive development road map that included the release of Joomla 1.7 in July 2011. The CMS also began adhering to a six-month release cycle meaning more product enhancements being introduced more often. New features in the latest version included multi-database support, one-click version updating, predefined search options and language-specific font settings.
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BSD
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Another one of the interesting presentations from the LF Collaboration Summit this week in San Francisco was covering the improvements made to GCC 4.7, which is the latest GNU compiler update with several new features for developers.
At this week’s invite-only event Qualcomm was highlighting LLVM and Clang as a great compiler infrastructure and shared their ambitions to build the mainline Linux kernel for ARM with LLVM/Clang, while Oracle’s Paolo Carlini was covering GNU Compiler Collection 4.7 and C++11.
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Public Services/Government
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As a non-partisan, non-profit organization, the Sunlight Foundation is taking the ethos found among the open-source software movement and applying it to government. It’s one goal is to publish the government’s public data in an easy-to-access location, at no cost to users.
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Licensing
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The latest “why we don’t need the GPL” argument comes from one Donnie Berkholz of an analyst firm called RedMonk. It begins with a falsehood: “In the early days of the GPL and copyleft software, it played an important role in forcibly training companies how free/open-source development worked.” No, it did not. The GPL, being a free software licence, had nothing to do with open source at all; it was about ensuring freedom for users, freedom of the political kind.
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Finance
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No doubt, a few economists and some business leaders will be inclined to argue that the trend is not entirely negative. Fair enough. Perhaps it indicates flexibility in US labor markets, especially as the economy tries to recover through the formation of small business. Also, it makes sense that an economy trying to recover would first add back part-time work in equal amounts to full time work, before stepping up to the array of benefits extended to the full time worker. But therein lies the problem: American workers desperately need health-care coverage, which is not typically offered to part-time workers. Meanwhile, deleveraging of household balance sheets since the high debt levels of 2007 has been mild. The result is yet another way to see how deeply consumer demand is restrained: there’s not enough work to both pay down debt, and restart consumption.
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Rebecca Kaplan was once a rabbinical student, and the Oakland City Councilmember still knows her scripture well. On Wednesday afternoon, Kaplan quoted the books of Isaiah, Leviticus and Exodus while speaking during a teach-in about the city’s bond debt with Goldman Sachs at Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland.
In 1997, Oakland and the investment bank Goldman Sachs agreed to a rate-swap deal relating to $187 million in city debt. The deal allowed the city to convert floating interest rates on the debt into a fixed rate of 5.6 percent. But what appeared to be a good deal at the time has proved costly in the long run, after the market collapsed in 2008 and interest rates dropped to below 2 percent. The city has come out on the short end of the deal, and has already paid out $26 million more than it owed and is currently paying $5 million annually.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Privacy
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04.06.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:16 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For a number of years, many Linux users (myself included) struggled with Wireless on Linux. Simply put, Linux distros didn’t always correctly recognize or work with the Wireless hardware on the user’s laptop. That has changed in recent years.
Speaking on a panel at the Linux Collaboration Summit this week, Linux Wireless maintainer John Linville said that wireless on Linux has matured.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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There’s growing interest in being able to build the mainline Linux kernel with the LLVM/Clang compiler as an alternative to the kernel’s long-standing love-affair with GCC.
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Chris Mason, the Oracle engineer who’s the lead developer of the Btrfs, just finished a session at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit about his promising and feature-rich file-system.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Avadon: The Black is an old school crpg game created by the legendary Spiderweb Software which created many other old school crpg’s.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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First week of the month is typically when the KDE team releases its maintenance updates. These releases are nothing to get excited about — but they still hold water for us users. Why? The project steers clear of the glitches introduced with point zero releases towards stability, by squashing bugs and adding minor feature improvements.
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GNOME Desktop
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Gnome 3.4 was released several days ago. This update brings a plenty of improvements to the user experience, including many bug fixes and small enhancements. Most of the applications have also gone through a redesign and have become more Gnome3-ish. Best of all, this release also brings an improvement to its performance and is now running faster and better. Let’s check it out what is in store in Gnome 3.4.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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At the Go/No-Go meeting it was decided to slip the Beta by an additional week[1]. Minutes follow below.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Tweet
This story is special, as it was created in an open source manner. The story was written in collaborative fashion by 2-3 dozen people working on it simultaneously. The story is a shining example of the collaborative power of Google Docs. We would like to thank all those who contributed to this story.
The Linux Foundation recently published its annual report about the development of the Linux kernel. As usual, Red Hat and SUSE topped the list as major contributors to the development of Linux kernel. Even Microsoft made it to the top 20 due to their code cleanup of hypervisor. But Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, was missing from the list again.
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Flavours and Variants
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The package comprises of 14 winners from Ubuntu 12.04 Wallpaper Contest plus the new ‘incrementally updated’ default wallpaper (tweaked noise version).
Many of the community contest selections differ from those previously proposed following copyright, quality, and CD space considerations.
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Tired of waiting for Raspberry Pi? With delay after delay, and no fixed release date in sight, maybe it’s time to look for an alternative
Follow @LinuxUserMag
The Raspberry Pi is no doubt a very exciting device, with an unmatched ratio of size, power, and value. However, after months of delays and false starts ranging from manufacturing problems to certification issues, the open source wonder board hasn’t actually been delivered to those who have bought it, or would love to buy it.
All is not lost though, as there are several alternatives available that might just pique your interest.
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Phones
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Android
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Or you can pick it up from your local Asda supermarket. The Walmart-owned chain didn’t say how many of the low-cost e-readers it has in stock, and we note the comments from some Reg readers who tried to take advantage of the offer the last time Asda slashed the price of the Kobo and found stores without them.
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Bubs thinks you should just go out with the bingers and act like a crazy person right along with them – they won’t know the difference! Fair enough, but I’m not interested in ‘partying hard’, I want to talk with like-minded people about subjects I don’t necessarily get to talk about at the office. For example, we don’t use Node.js at work – so I go to JSConf to chat and learn about it in a casual atmosphere. Except I don’t get to do that. It’s always the same: talks, then binge time.
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The roboticist on the panel argued that AI is an intellectually challenging field where the problems are difficult, and therefore can be solved only by highly intelligent people working on obscure mathematics and algorithms. The future, he argued, will look much like the past: a series of incremental, hard-won improvements in very narrow fields.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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LibreOffice has breathed new life into the stagnated open source productivity suite. Under The Document Foundation it is moving ahead aggressively. We talked to Charles-H. Schulz Co-founder & Director, The Document Foundation, to understand the development process of LibreOffice, the current status and future plans.
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BSD
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I’m not trying to start a flame war, but OpenBSD packs a lot more current, useful information into fewer pages than does FreeBSD into its still-excellent, more-massive Handbook. The same is true for NetBSD’s also-excellent documentation when compared to what OpenBSD has to offer.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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While we have seen that Intel’s Sandy Bridge is doing well on the new GCC 4.7 compiler (along with LLVM/Clang 3.1), has AMD’s Bulldozer CPU architecture advanced at all for this leading multi-platform compiler? Up today are benchmarks of GCC 4.7.0 — with comparative benchmarks going back to GCC 4.4 — from an AMD FX-8150 Eight-Core Bulldozer setup.
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The kernel may be the core of a Linux system, but neither users nor applications deal with the kernel directly. Instead, almost all interactions with the kernel are moderated through the C library, which is charged with providing a standards-compliant interface to the kernel’s functionality. There are a number of C library implementations available, but, outside of the embedded sphere, most Linux systems use the GNU C library, often just called “glibc.” The development project behind glibc has a long and interesting history which took a new turn with the dissolution of its steering committee on March 26.
In its early days, the GNU project was forced to focus on a small number of absolutely crucial projects; that is why the first program released under the GNU umbrella was Emacs. Once the core was in place, though, the developers realized they would need a few other components to build their new system; a C library featured prominently on that list. So, back in 1987, Roland McGrath started development on the GNU C library; by 1988, it was seen as being sufficiently far along that systems could be built on top of it.
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Open Access/Content
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Tufts University is taking its enterprise content, course, learning, knowledge, and curriculum management system for health sciences, known as Tufts University Sciences Knowledgebase (TUSK), open source. Medical schools around the world now have the opportunity to install TUSK at their own institution, customize it to suit their own needs, and optionally contribute their customizations back to the TUSK source code.
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Programming
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Copyrights
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Hollywood and Obama should’ve learned: No form of censorship will be acceptable to Internet users, and we’re fed up with corrupt, back-room deals that are driven by the rich and well-connected. Any major Internet policy changes should be negotiated in the light of day, so the millions of people who’d be affected can have their say too.
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