• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Arista 10G switch: Fast and flexible

On top of its impressive performance stats, the 7508 also showed off multiple redundancy and load-balancing mechanisms and recovered quickly from failures. And it did all this running on Linux, with all the extensibility that comes with Unix-like operating systems.

Chuckle. No One Wants Small Expensive Computers.

The fallout from all this will be that Android/Linux tablets will become the norm in 2012 and ARMed devices will be abundant to take Android/Linux. Intel tablets will need huge batteries to last more than a few hours, also raising the costs. GNU/Linux will be available to offset their higher hardware costs… Love it. Wintel is feeding the fire of */Linux. Using the opponent’s weight to the opponent’s disadvantage is a winning strategy. The cloud will slurp up a huge market from Wintel this year and next.

Desktop

• The Linux Setup – Philip Newborough, CrunchBang Linux

  I am Philip Newborough. I am a web developer and GNU/Linux enthusiast. I produce an unofficial Debian derivative known as CrunchBang. At the moment, I am working full time on CrunchBang, trying to improve its quality and purpose. I love working on the project and I love learning more about the Debian system.

• CrunchBang Linux: a good system for the devoted to Linux

  This Linux OS distribution is one of the most famous in the world. There are almost no people who are acquainted with Linux, but never heard of this OS. At this moment of time, it is on the 29th place in the Distrowatch rating, somewhere between Xubuntu and GhostBSD.

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel 3.2.13 Is Available for Download

Applications

• The Best File Archive Utility for Linux

• APTonCD – another reason to use Linux

  How many reasons do you need to use Linux? Free, stable, inordinately fashionable. And now, a way of automatically backing up every single application you’ve installed.

  For those that know, APT is Debian’s incredibly easy and useful package manager. You want some software? Use the command line sudo apt-get, or the Synaptic Package Manager or the Software Manager of the Debian distro of your choice, find the software, click install, and there we go.

  When I upgrade to a new version of a Linux distribution, whether it’s Ubuntu or Linux Mint, I always do a clean install, as I find it far less troublesome.

• Top 5 Linux Monitoring Tools. Web Based.

• Proprietary

  • Life without Netflix, streaming on Linux can be awesome!

    For all the hype around Netflix it is easy for us Linux users to forget there are alternatives. Its not that Netflix is (debateably) the best, but rather its the most widely used that causes us to neglect the numerous options that are actually available to us. In this article I want to present some of those alternatives, and how they hold up against Netflix. One caveat however is that I cannot fairly compare the variety and quality of the programming selections of each service seeing as the former is too large to parse, and the latter is inherently subjective.

  • Disorganized? Get Tracks on Linux

    Feeling a bit disorganized? Looking to take control of your projects? Take a look at Tracks, an open source Web-based application built with Ruby on Rails. Tracks can help you get organized and Get Things Done (GTD) in no time.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Configure PureFTPd To Accept TLS Sessions On CentOS 6.2

  • What Every Linux User Needs to Know to Secure Their Network Using Iptables

  • Linux IP Commands

  • Running LinOTP On CentOS 6.2

  • Learning to Program the Arduino

• Wine

  • First look at CrossOver XI from CodeWeavers

    For many people out there one of the biggest challenges of moving from one operating system to another is finding applications to do all the things a person did with their first operating system. After all, the majority of the population isn’t as interested in what operating system they have, rather they focus on which applications they can run. With this in mind CodeWeavers has a product called CrossOver. The CrossOver suite allows a user to install and run Windows applications on Linux distributions or Mac OS X. If the mission of CrossOver sounds similar to WINE that is because CrossOver is based on the WINE project, but with additional effort put into polishing the user experience and testing compatibility. With the recent release of CrossOver XI the folks over at CodeWeavers offered a free trial and, as many of our readers are new to Linux and will likely benefit from the ability to run Windows applications on their new OS, I gladly accepted.

• Games

  • “Wasteland 2″ Kickstarter Hits $1.5 Million, Which Means It’s Heading To Mac And Linux

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Enhances Mirroring Network

    KDE deployed a new mirror network this weekend. The mirror network is used to spread released software to users. In the old system, users had to select a mirror server manually. The new system selects a mirror automatically, based on the country where the user is located. If there is no mirror for that country, a mirror is selected based on continent. In either case, mirrors that are geographically closer are preferred. If there is an even better mirror—such as one in the same network as the user, it is preferred over all others. Here is the current list of the official KDE mirrors.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.3.92 Release Candidate released!

  • Interesting Features Of GNOME 3.4

    GNOME 3.4, the latest major update to the GNOME3 desktop, is set to be officially released on Wednesday. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting features of this biannual GNOME update.

    The release notes coming out on Wednesday when GNOME 3.4 is to be officially announced will exhaustively cover the changes to GNOME 3.4 since the 3.2 release last September. However, in looking over the change-logs for the GNOME 3.4 packages being checked-in and with testing of GNOME 3.3 development releases, here’s some of the most interesting GNOME 3.4 features that go on my list.

  • I have found my MATE and I am happy.

    As the three followers of my blog may have noticed, I am unhappy with the direction both Gnome and KDE have taken. The tablet is a great portable media consumption tool, and minimal productivity tool, also a game machine, but really limiting for all around computing.

    Moving desktop interfaces in the direction of the pinch/swipe/poke/prod tablet interface LIMITS their usability. Point Of Fact. Limit is the key word here. The major desktops have fewer customization options, far fewer gadgets, so to speak.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Linux Mint Debian Edition gets fresh updates

  • Open Xange 2012.04

  • Parted Magic 2012_3_24 Has Linux Kernel 3.2.13

  • Parted Magic update fixes bugs, upgrades packages

    A new version, simply labelled “2012_3_24″, of the Parted Magic open source, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. According to lead developer Patrick Verner, the update fixes a number of issues related to interaction between the BusyBox tool collection and Clonezilla, and upgrades a number of the included applications.

• Red Hat Family

  • Oracle Database Certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Oracle 6

  • Forbes Earnings Preview: Red Hat

    Shares of Red Hat (RHT) have climbed 23.8% over the last three months to close at $51.54 on March 22, 2012. The company is looking to keep that trend going when it releases its fourth quarter results on Wednesday, March 28, 2012.

  • 5 Things to Watch This Week: Red Hat, Houses, Drugs, TVs and Window Dressing

  • Can Red Hat Stay Red Hot?

• Debian Family

  • A Year Into Linux Mint Debian Edition

    I have always been a Debian fan and had planned on just installing a vanilla Debian desktop on this machine with my own customizations. I recalled then that Mint was getting their direct Debian based version going. I have really liked the “Mint treatment” in terms of user interface and end experience functionality, I just can’t stand ubuntu because of the horrible things they do to security in the name of “user friendliness”.

  • Linux Mint Debian Edition Gets Gnome Shell, Cinnamon

    Clement Lefebvre, the creator of Linux Mint, has announced the updates to the Linux Mint Debian Edition. With this update, for the fist time, Linux Mint Debian users will get access to Gnome Shell, MATE and Cinnamon. This update brings Linux 3.2 kernel, MATE 1.2 (with mintMenu and mintDesktop now fully ported to MATE), Cinnamon 1.4, KDE 4.7.4, Gnome Shell 3.2.2 and Xfce 4.8.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Recoll-Lens: Full Text Search Unity Lens For Ubuntu 11.10 And 12.04 [Updated]

        Recoll is a full text search desktop tool which indexes the contents of many file formats including OpenOffice, MS Office, PostScript, MP3 and other audio files, JPEG and more. Besides regular searches, Recoll also lets you perform some advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like “AND” or “OR”.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Beta: Canonical’s New Linux Desktop

      • MyUnity 4.0: Taking Ubuntu Customization To New Level

      • Canonical’s Ubuntu System Management Service Landscape become default in Ubuntu 12.04

      • Dell, Ubuntu Team for Updated Linux Cloud Platform

      • Dell, Canonical Deliver OpenStack Cloud Abroad

        With an eye toward easing the deployment of private clouds, Dell said this week at the WorldHostingDays conference in Germany that it had partnered with Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical to deliver its Cloud Solution product in Britain, Germany and China.

      • Interview with Ding Zhou of Ubuntu Tweak

      • Integrating Your App Into Unity

      • seccomp filter now in Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi 1.4.0 Screenshots

        • Pear Comice OS 4 re-released after further Beta testing

        • Pear Linux Comice OS 4 screen shot preview

        • Pear Linux Comice OS 4 Netbook screen shot preview

        • Zorin OS 6 Lite Screen Shots

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola XT760 and MT680 smartphones appear in leaked images, to come with mid-range specs

    • Ice Cream Sandwich for the AT&T Galaxy S II Skyrocket leaks out

    • Yet Another Motorola Android device leaked, looks familiar

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Wishtel Ira Tablets – Cheap, Android/Linux Powered & Support Indian Languages

    Wishtel, a company based out of Mumbai, India has come up with its own series of Android-powered tablets under the brand name ‘IRA’. The 3 tablets are called IRA Thing E, IRA E and IRA Icon E. All of these tablets have a 7.0 inch screen and are running on either Android 2.2 Froyo/ 2.3 Gingerbread OS or Linux OS.

  • Vivaldi tablet with KDE Plasma Active dissected

    The Vivaldi tablet is a 7 inch tablet and open source KDE Plasma Active software. The €200 tablet is expected to start shipping in May, but the folks behind the official Vivaldi user forum at OpenTablets.org got their hands on an early unit — and they’ve ripped it apart to see what makes it tick.

Zipline Games launches open source dev platform Moai

ZeroMQ forked to create Crossroads I/O

Sustrick and Lucina, along with some members of the ZeroMQ community, have created the Crossroads I/O fork, which, like ZeroMQ, is licensed under the LGPLv3. The project’s goals are to serve as a user-space implementation of messaging, educate developers about distributed messaging, design for global, 20-year use cases, and encourage a commercial ecosystem to grow around the project. Specifically, they wish to be vendor neutral and implement a “liberal (e.g. Linux-style) trademark policy” that allows use of the trademark by third parties.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google’s Chrome Browser Still Needs to Crack the Business Market

    According to data from StatCounter, Google’s Chrome browser has about 30 percent market share at this point, and it may be on track to challenge Internet Explorer’s share, which has been dwindling for years. A close look at market share data for the leading browsers, though, shows that Chrome’s usage is highest on weekends, and its share numbers tend to drop during the week, suggesting that users favor it at home, but may favor Internet Explorer when at work. That’s a challenge Google needs to overcome.

SaaS

• The (bumpy) road to Free Software SaaS

  Free Software advocates quickly demonize SaaS as the ultimate way to take your freedom away. A lot of them dismiss the advantages of having data online highlighting (and rightly so) the fact that you may be locked out of your own data anytime. My question is: what if SaaS is in fact the way to go, the future, and just need to hurry the hell up and make sure that it’s easy to install, and use, the great SaaS available under a free software license?

• Amazon Web Services and Eucalyptus Form Cloud Partnership

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Chakra Gets LibreOffice 3.5.1 In Stable Repos

  Chakra, the KDE-centric distribution, has moved the latest LibreOffice to the stable repo’s. Thie means “it is no longer needed to install the complete office suite, it is split up in different components, and you can choose which parts to install,” says the project page.

CMS

• Eighteen Open Source Content Management Systems (Part 3)

Business

• 71 Top Commercial Open Source Projects

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• March 2012 GNU Toolchain Update

• Our goals and LibrePlanet 2012

  Today is a good day. I am back from presenting at LibrePlanet 2012 this weekend.

• coreutils-8.16 released [stable]

Project Releases

• XBMC 11.0 Eden Multimedia Center Released | What’s New | Screenshots

• XBMC Eden Finally Ready for Prime Time

• XBMC 11.0 released with new Ubuntu-based live CD and iOS support

Public Services/Government

• Iceland Has the Hots for FOSS

  Iceland has kicked off a migration project to put its public institutions on a strict diet of free and open source software. The move will affect a wide variety of institutions, and it could result in savings for the country’s cash-strapped government. However, just because software is free as in beer and free as in freedom doesn’t mean maintenance will come at no cost.

• Iceland’s government pushes for open source

Openness/Sharing

• Inspiring the future of work by unlocking innovation through chaos, creativity, and collaboration

  Gangplank was created by two entrpreneurs in Chandler, AZ who loved their city, but felt that it lacked the culture to make creative ventures successful. It was started just before the recession 4 years ago. It started by trying to help technical entrepeneurs through seed funding and incubation, but quickly found the community needed so much more. In the last four years the space has increased from 2,500sqft to 14,000sqft and has opened three new locations. It has partnered with two cities (Avondale, AZ and Chandler, AZ) and is activating creatives to get involved in government and their community. Bringing fresh ideas and the concept of iterating through ideas to find success. Gangplank has started a collaborative workspace movement that was highlight this year as one of Entrepreneur Magazines 100 Most Innovative Companies.

• Open Hardware

  • Notebook makers gross margins dip below 5% for 4Q11

    Quanta’s gross margin in the fourth quarter of 2011 is expected to have dropped to 3.3% from 3.7% in the third, while Compal is expected to see its percentage dropped from 5% in the third quarter to 4.8% in the fourth.

Programming

• Git PHP. RIP Subversion

Standards/Consortia

• Celebrate Document Freedom Day

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Does VMware have a real future?

Though VMware provides its low-end offerings for free, it can’t stay in the game by relying on those alone; it makes its money exclusively from selling high-end virtualization and virtualization management software. Unlike its competitors, VMware doesn’t have much of a revenue stream from operating systems and other products. And when it attempted to overcome that weakness, it was blindsided. More on that in a bit.

Dr. Jill Stein: Green Party Candidate for President

Jill Stein, a doctor and activist from Massachusetts, is running for the Green Party nomination for President of the United States. Stein is the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, running against comedian Roseanne Barr and veteran Green Party activists Kent Mesplay and Harley Mikkelson. Stein’s campaign, headed up by Wisconsin native Ben Manski, is focusing on getting enough delegates in each state to win the party’s nomination at the July 2012 Green Party convention in Baltimore and on securing November ballot lines in all 50 states.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Death by Delay: Obama Team Stalls on Chemical Regulation

  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has drafted a “chemicals of concern” list to restrict the use of certain chemicals and alert the public to their possible dangers. But the list remains secret and dormant because it’s stuck at the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review.

DRM

• Lib-Ray Video Standard: Moving to SDHC Flash Media

  In Spring 2011, I started a project to attempt to create a free-culture compatible / non-DRM alternative to Blu-Ray for high-definition video releases on fixed-media, and after about a year hiatus, I’m getting back to it with some new ideas. The first is that I’ve concluded that optical discs are a bust for this kind of application, and that the time has come to move on to Flash media, specifically SDHC/SDXC as the hardware medium. This is a more expensive choice of medium, and still not perfect, but it has enough advantages to make it a clear choice now.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • ACTA: The EU Parliament Must Face Its Political Responsibility

      Brussels, March 26th 2012 – Today is the beginning of a decisive week for the future of the ACTA procedure in the EU Parliament. Tomorrow, Members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) may decide whether to vote on ACTA in the next few months as originally planned, or to follow the rapporteur David Martin in buying time and defusing the ongoing debate through technocratic manoeuvres. Citizens must call their MEPs now and urge them to face their political responsibility by rejecting ACTA.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux and Open-source news overview for week 12-2012

Unity 5.8 Released with New Features and Performance Improvements

Evolution of IT at a Global Business

Sabre did look at that other OS but decided they did not want the lock-in. Having decided to move to Intel processors, they did not want to have to change software again if they moved to another CPU and GNU/Linux runs on everything…

Desktop

• Observations on the growth of Linux use

  Ah, statistics! How we love to deceive ourselves with them! Sometimes we tend to forget they are numbers applied to measure a reality, but they are affected by many variables. Therefore, statistics become a useful prediction, but a prediction is, ultimately, a guess nonetheless.

  I am saying this because, since I migrated to Linux in 2009, I have been listening to Windows fanboys chanting that “according to Netmarketshare and StatCounter, Linux accounts for a skimpy 1% of the total market”. And the funny thing is that they believe it!

Kernel Space

• Intel Core i7 AVX GCC Compiler Tuning Results

  For those owners of Intel’s latest-generation Core i3/i5/i7 “Sandy Bridge” processors, here’s a quick look at the impact of some GCC tuning options specific to these latest AVX-enabled Intel processors.

• Btrfs & Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

• Intel Remains Confident In Fixed-Up RC6

• A New BFS “Smoking” Scheduler For Linux 3.3

  Con Kolivas announced this weekend the release of an updated BFS scheduler for the recently-released Linux 3.3 kernel. The new BFS scheduler is at version 0.420 and is codenamed “Smoking”, with “a fairly large architectural change” since earlier versions of this out-of-tree kernel scheduler.

• Testing Out The Btrfs Mount Options On Linux 3.2

• Android “Comes Home” to Linux Kernel

  If Android is Linux’s prodigal son, the two parties came a little closer to reconciliation recently with the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel, which merges Android back into the Linux mainline. Despite all this geeky jargon, this is a change that could actually matter even to people who aren’t programmers. Here are the details in plainer English, and why they’re worth noting.

• Graphics Stack

  • New Nvidia Video Driver Supports Linux Kernel 3.3

  • Early AMD Catalyst 12.3 Linux Drivers Seep Out

    As Phoronix Forums readers have been quick to discover, early “beta” builds of AMD’s Catalyst 12.3 proprietary Linux driver have begun to appear publicly.

    First pointed out earlier this morning was an “OpenCL1.2betadriversLinux.tgz” package from AMD’s web-site. This OpenCL 1.2 beta driver Linux package was joined by an updated Windows driver too with improved OpenCL support. The beta Linux driver is from the fglrx 8.96 release stream, which is what will be Catalyst 12.3.

  • Trying Out Wayland With Rebecca Black

  • Suldal, GeForce GTX 680, NVIDIA Tegra 3 On Linux

    There’s a few updates concerning Linux benchmarks of NVIDIA’s brand new GeForce GTX 680 “Kepler” graphics card, the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 3 platform, and other Linux performance topics.

Applications

• 6 Essential Free Linux Guitar Tools

• Lightweight Music Player ‘DeaDBeeF’ Updated

• Proprietary

  • Opera TV Browser For Linux and Android Based TV Sets

    Opera web browser is almost available for every device we have these days such as desktop, tablet, mobile devices and it’s available for the major platforms. Now, Opera software ASA will provide a new web browsing experience called “Opera TV Browser”, which will allow you to have a full browsing experience through Linux and Android based TVs.

  • Install Steam on Linux easily

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Virtual Hosting With PureFTPd And MySQL (Incl. Quota And Bandwidth Management) On CentOS 6.2

  • Addendum to fifth installment: prescience?; more on xmodmap

  • Tips on Setting UP a Slave Server for DNS

  • How to dual-boot BackTrack 5 R2 and Ubuntu 12.04

  • Secure your Privacy with Ad Network Detector

  • How to enable command autocomplete by searching history in Linux

  • Smart Access Control with Apache

  • Tips on Setting UP a Slave Server for DNS

  • The Perfect Server – Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) With BIND, Dovecot & Nginx [ISPConfig 3]

• Games

  • Confirmed, Wasteland 2 Coming to Linux – Hits $1.5 Million Target

  • NEW RIJN UPDATES AND RELEASES

  • Open Source Tools for Game Development

    Ryan “Icculus” Gordon will be talking about using open-source tools for game development next weekend at the 2012 Flourish conference.

    As written about last week, Ryan Gordon will be talking once again at the Flourish conference in Chicago at month’s end. Last week his topic wasn’t disclosed for this open-source conference, but it’s since come to light: Open Source Tools for Game Development.

  • Wasteland 2 for Linux confirmed

Desktop Environments

• New Enlightenment EFL Package Releases

  There’s new releases of some key EFL — Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — packages. This round of Enlightenment package updates has also introduced some new components.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE e.V. Report for Q42011

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.4 Release Candidate Is Available for Download

    The GNOME Project announced a few minutes ago, March 23rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate version of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings more fixes to the existing bugs.

Distributions

• Watching Distrowatch

• New Releases

  • Comice OS 4 Final Officially Released

  • Parted Magic 2012_3_24

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The OpenBox Special Edition of the PCLinuxOS Magazine

• Red Hat Family

  • Technology Sector Review: $1.2M Apple Fine, HP Works with Red Hat

    Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT): HP (NYSE:HPQ) plans to work with Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to develop Linux code for mission critical operations, according to The Inquirer. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows and Linux will begin gaining market share in mission critical computer, HP believes, the publication stated.

  • Red Hat Powers More Than 50% Of Global Trading Volume

    Red Hat is an undisputed leader of the Linux world. The company has broken all records by registering a whooping $909 million in revenues for 2011. The company is a great example of profitability from open source. Red Hat now powers more than 50% of the global trading volume. The company claims that 100% of the Top 5 Asia Pacific stock exchanges, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Audio Spin: Creating Music With Fedora [Exclusive Interview]

      Swapnil: Can you tell us more about the Fedora Audio Spin, what is the goal of the project?

      Brendan: Traditionally Fedora has been known to walk the leading edge in free and open source software development but for some reason this has never been realised in the realms of pro-audio/music creation.

      We see the Fedora Audio spin as a great way to encourage people to use Linux audio and strengthen and invigorate the community surrounding Fedora Audio. We are aiming at producing a spin which allows Linux audio enthusiasts to quickly setup up and configure their audio workstations for audio and music production.

• Debian Family

  • People behind Debian: Jörg Jaspert, FTPmaster, Debian Account Manager, and more

    Jörg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones)… Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he’s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers.

  • Three in race for post of Debian leader

    After a year when there was just a single candidate, the incumbent, standing for the post, 2012 will see three developers slug it out for the post of leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Project.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Wallpapers Finalized

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Development Update 19

      • Unity 5.8 Released with New Features and Performance Improvements

        Unity 5.8 has landed into Ubuntu 12.04 with new features and fixes. It seems lots of work has gone under the hood as I have never seen Unity interface so fast.

        Its just flying and for a moment I really thought that its Unity 2D as after Unity 5.8 update, the dash menu got lots of UI tweaks and it now looks very much like Unity 2D’s dash.

      • Dell, Ubuntu Team for Updated Linux Cloud Platform

        Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS (long-term support) is being built with the latest Linux kernel and OpenStack IT and is currently undergoing integration and quality assurance testing with Dell’s version of OpenStack.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Multimonitor Fixes Land

      • Unity 5.8 Brings More Polish & Precision To Ubuntu 12.04

        Ubuntu Unity get bumped to version 5.8 bringing with it many bug fixes improving its polish and perfection. Most of the bug fixes are barely major but improves the overall Unity interface. Lets go through them one by one.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 has been released! | Screeshots tour

          Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 has been released, in this quarter update, Enlightenment has been built from a fresh SVN pull from March 20th and the default Midori browser has been updated to the latest version, a more current build of Linux Kernel ( 3.2.0-19 ), software in repositories were updated to the latest version (Firefox11, chromium 17, LibreOffice3.5…) , also this release comes with some minor improvement, this include include resolving an issue that had prevented PCManFM’s application menu from working, E17′s everything module calculator feature now works out of the box and more.

        • Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 Review

          Bodhi Linux is a lightweight Ubuntu based distribution that uses Englightenment as its desktop manager. It is geared for those who have older hardware or who prefer lighter desktops compared to the heavier GNOME or KDE.

          Bodhi comes as an installable LiveCD which when first started, is quite similar to that of Ubuntu’s startup so if you’ve used Ubuntu before, you’ll feel well at home.

          The amount of diskspace needed is very low at a whopping 1.2 GB for those who want to install it instead of using it in a Live environment. Installation was quite simple with going through a few configuration steps and then from there and not too long after it’s installed. Installation times will vary depending on your hardware specifications.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Kindle for Android Gets Comics, Graphic Novels

      Amazon has updated its Kindle for Android app, brining support for Kindle Format 8 and a larger assortment of illustrated children’s books, comic books, and graphic novels to Android devices. It’s great news for comics fans as you can now read your favorite comics or graphic novels in stunning visuals on your Android devices.

    • AT&T promises Android 4.0 updates for ten more devices

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • KDE Tablet Vivaldi To Get 10-inch Version, First Tablet Received 3000 Orders

  • Meet Vivaldi: It’s Got A Real “Spark” For Open-Source!

    Meet Vivaldi, the new opensource tablet from the gang over at MakePlayLive. You might already know a thing or two about the Vivaldi, because it used to be called the KDE ‘Spark’ Tablet. What you should really know is that at heart, it is just a giant Google Nexus S. But what makes it so special?

  • Acer Announces Quad Core Iconia Tab A510 Tablet

  • New Kindle Fire months from production?

Exploring the Free world of numerical computation tools

Numerical computation tools that run on GNU/Linux platform such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora are a huge blessing for all mathematical computation ‘freaks’, be it students or researchers. The expensive proprietary utility, Matlab, may be a leader in terms of introducing newer applications, but the Free (as in ‘freedom’) Software alternatives available are not lagging in any way.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Chromebook May Get Cheaper, To Run On ARM Chips

    Tweet

    One of the major gripes about Google’s ambitious Chromebooks is its price. It is quite expensive given the limitations it has. If reports are to be believed Chromebook may become extremely cheap.

  • Sony Also Gets On Chromebook Bandwagon, VAIO Chromebook Coming

    One may wonder what future holds for Google’s Gentoo Linux based ChromeOS. The initial sales of Samsung and Acer Chromebook was not impressive. There were many reasons for the slow sales of the Chromebooks, but the future is bright as we move towards cloud-based computing.

    The ChromesOS is gaining popularity among hardware players, after Samsung and Acer now Sony is also joining the elite Chromebook club. Sony has reportedly submitted a filing for its first Chromebook to FCC. FCC E-filing is showing a Sony device which fits the bill of a Chromebook. Any doubt over it being a Chromebook is removed on the ‘manual’ page which specifically points at ChromOS:

  • Chrome OS Makes it Mainstream

  • Sony to launch the first ARM Powered Chromebook?

    According to some FCC leak and rumoring, it looks like Sony is about to release a new Chromebook and the FCC info may point towards it running on an ARM Processor! T25 is the leaked processor info, that sound like the Tegra 250 T25. I think the thinking was T25 is intermediary between T20 and T30, in between Tegra2 and Tegra3. Basically, I think, the hope should be that if it’s a Tegra2, that it has a new faster memory bandwidth and a higher clock speed compared to the “first generation” Tegra2 devices that were released back since the end of 2010!

SaaS

• OpenStack vs. Amazon and Eucalyptus Clouds

  When Amazon and Eucalyptus finally announced plans to partner on cloud computing, the big winners were cloud integrators seeking to move workloads between on-premise IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Amazon Web Services. But ultimately, Talkin’ Cloud believes Amazon and Eucalyptus were reacting to OpenStack — which is available as both an on-premise or public cloud platform.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Forget About Google Docs, LibreOffice Cloud Coming Soon

• LibreOffice Cloud version releasing in April, Android version soon

CMS

• A Simple Image Gallery Plugin for Drupal 7

  Drupal is a hugely popular content management system, but for all of its flexibility and power it’s missing a key component: an easy way to manage image galleries. If you need to create and manage image galleries in Drupal, here’s an easy approach that won’t cost too much of your sanity.

• Dries Buytaert’s Software Powers A Million Important Websites — And He Built It From His Couch

  Dries Buytaert is programming wunderkind. He learned to program when he was six years old — even before he could read.

  Today he is internationally famous as the creator of Drupal, one of the world’s most successful open source projects.

BSD

• DragonFly 3.0.2

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCC 4.7 Released, Supports More Architectures

Project Releases

• XBMC 11.0 Eden Brings Many Multimedia Changes

  XBMC, the very well known open-source multimedia / HTPC project, has finally reached its XBMC 11.0 (codenamed “Eden”) milestone.

Openness/Sharing

• Culture Freedom Day, the friendly companion to Software Freedom Day

Finance

• The Shadow Bailout: How Big Banks Bilk US Towns and Taxpayers

  The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.

• TBTF Sheriff Bill Black on MF Global cover-up

• Food Stamp Use in L.A. Pauses At the Million Mark, Awaiting Oil’s Next Move

  For the first time in several years, the rate of growth in Los Angeles County food stamp use has slowed. That’s little consolation however given that total participation zoomed from just above 600,000 to over 1,000,000 people since the onset of the financial crisis. As longtime readers know, I’ve tracked the series as a backdoor view on rising energy costs–and in the case of LA County–gasoline costs in particular. | see: Los Angeles County SNAP Users vs. Price of Oil 2007-2012.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• CMD Asks Wisconsin Ethics Board to Examine Corporate-Funded Gifts to ALEC Legislators

  The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a complaint today with the Government Accountability Board (GAB) based on newly discovered documents revealing that numerous Wisconsin legislators have received corporate-funded gifts through their connections to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Although ALEC describes itself as the largest membership group for legislators, over 98% of its $7 million budget is from corporations and sources other than legislative dues. Documents obtained via Wisconsin open records law and other sources show that ALEC corporations are funding lawmakers’ out-of-state travel expenses to posh resorts for ALEC meetings with corporate lobbyists, in addition to gifts of entertainment and exclusive parties.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Master Linux Now! 2012 – On Sale Now

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 447

Kernel Space

• PCI-E ASPM Change For The Linux 3.4 Kernel

  First of all, this was the last pull request where Jesse Barnes of Intel is handling the role as maintainer of the Linux PCI sub-system. Jesse has announced he’s handing off the PCI maintainer role to Bjorn Helgaas, a software engineer at Google. “He’s been a core PCI and Linux contributor for some time now, and has kindly volunteered to take over. I just don’t feel I have the time for PCI review and work that it deserves lately (I’ve taken on some other projects), and haven’t been as responsive lately as I’d like, so I approached Bjorn asking if he’d like to manage things. He’s going to give it a try, and I’m confident he’ll do at least as well as I have in keeping the tree managed, patches flowing, and keeping things stable.”

• HP says it will commit to Linux as mission critical market share rises

  HP, which has a long history of developing and maintaining its own UNIX operating systems such as HP-UX and VMS, now sees Linux and Microsoft Windows gaining market share in the mission critical market. HP said it will commit code to the Linux kernel, working with Red Hat as its mission critical Linux distribution, and added that it wants to work with the open source community rather than just do its own thing.

• Graphics Stack

  • Radeon Gallium3D Still Long Shot From Catalyst

  • Setting Up A Xen Graphics Card Pass-Through

  • Linux 3.4 will support GeForce GTX 680 and Southern Islands GPUs

    About eight hours after the introduction of the GeForce GTX 680, rudimentary support for this NVIDIA graphics card has been added to the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver in the Linux main development branch. At the beginning of the week, the developers began to prepare this branch for Linux kernel version 3.4, the release of which is expected at the end of May. With version 3.4, Nouveau will also cease to be rated as a staging driver.

  • AMD releases open source Linux driver to support Southern Islands GPUs

    AMD said it will complement its closed source Catalyst drivers with open source versions for Linux users. Although the firm’s open source efforts lag considerably behind its Catalyst drivers, AMD’s Alex Deucher announced that the firm’s latest open source driver release supports its Southern Islands GPUs found in Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards.

Applications

• Five easy-to-use Linux encryption tools

• Plain and simple, Linux needs applications

  We dance around the topic of what the Linux desktop needs to succeed all the time, and usually it comes down to this argument: the Linux desktop needs to have a better design. That is the core thread of almost every argument I hear lately.

  For example, it was the first topic listed by Canonical’s Jonathan Riddell, who (up until recently) was Canonical’s lead developer of Kubuntu, the company’s KDE-flavored release when he stepped through a list of answers to the question “So how can KDE remain relevant?”

• Darktable- An open source photography workflow application and RAW developer

• FreeFileSync: Free Folder Comparison and Synchronization Tool | PPA Ubuntu

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Getting the integrated fingerprint reader on my laptop to work in Linux

  • The F4 trick in Gnumeric

  • How to dual-boot BackTrack 5 R2 and Windows 7 alongside each other

  • 10 Funny And Useless Linux Command

  • Programmer’s friend – the editor: Part 2 – emacs

  • How to Quickly Resize, Convert & Modify Images from the Linux Terminal

  • Almost There! Adding Methods to Our Classes

  • How To Configure PureFTPd To Accept TLS Sessions On CentOS 6.2

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • forums, bodega client code, partners

    We were contacted by Matthias Lee, owner of opentablets.org, a couple weeks back. Since then, they have put together forums for Vivaldi and have started posting news and information about our efforts.

    I know some of you will ask “What about forums.kde.org?” Plasma Active forums and related KDE discussions will continue there, while opentablets.org will focus on our specific tablet (and other) future products. This is the beauty of open participation: everyone gets to add their own flavour.

    We’re really excited about opentablets.org as it is one more piece of the community support and interaction puzzle being filled in by the community itself.

• GNOME Desktop

  • I don’t need sex, gnome 3 fu*ked me in the brain

    I am not just another gnome 3 hater in the most fashionable and popular way. That’s, though I don’t like the way it defies the traditional workflow, the biggest problem for me, is something else. It’s the shoddy quality of the software, even after one year of its initial release.

    Forget the usability, still the gripes are many, ranging from its integration into the system to how it talks with various other core components such as graphics, desktop effects, and the overall stability.

  • Review: Cinnamon 1.4

    This was actually going to be a preview of SolusOS, both because I wanted to do it and because a commenter had requested it. Unfortunately, MultiSystem refused to write SolusOS to the USB, while SolusOS was unbootable after being written to the USB by UnetBootin. Hence, I could not try it out. Instead, I am trying out Cinnamon 1.4.

Distributions

• Gimme A Light Linux from Vector (7.0)

• VectorLinux 7.0 Light Edition Officially Released

• New Releases

  • Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 Released

  • Announcement: RapidDisk (rxdsk) 2.0.1b Stable release

• Red Hat Family

  • Lighthorse Networks Announces Network Forensics Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

  • Oracle 11g certified for Oracle Linux and Red Hat

    Oracle has announced that it is making supported versions of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 (R1) available on Oracle Linux 6; currently, this is only for Oracle Linux 6 with the company’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Oracle Linux 6 is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle’s own kernel added.

  • Red Hat Inc. Fourth Quarter Earnings Sneak Peek

  • Execs cite talent, incentives for growth

    Fidelity’s Scot Blessington, Quintiles’ Steve Brechbiel, ABB’s (NYSE: ABB) Gary Rackliffe and Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) Craig Youst all praised the area’s talent pool of educated workers as a major factor in their company’s decision to expand in the market.

  • Scientific Linux, the Great Distro With the Wrong Name

    Scientific Linux is an unknown gem, one of the best Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones. The name works against it because it’s not for scientists; rather it’s maintained by science organizations. Let’s kick the tires on the latest release and see what makes it special.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Development Update

      • The New Wallpapers of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

        Iain Farrell, project manager at Canonical’s Design Team uploaded today the new wallpapers for the up-coming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

        The wallpapers are not yet officially uploaded in the current development release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but we have the originals and there are 16 new beautiful photos.

        Without any further introduction, we’ll present below the photos that were already approved for the final version of Precise Pangolin.

      • A first look at Ubuntu 12.04 (Gallery)

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Xubuntu 12.04 Beta Screenshots

        • Comice OS 4 – available now

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Sony colorfully reveals Android 4.0 schedule for tablets

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Wishtel Ira tablet takes on Aakash with Rs 4,000 price

    It is planning to release two variants of its tablets in the country. While one variant will be running on Android 2.2, the other variant will have Linux Sugar OS on-board. The Linux variant of the tablet will also have the native Hindi language support.

Akamai open sources Mobitest benchmarking tool

Akamai Chief Product Architect Guy Podjarny has announced that the company’s Mobitest tool is now available as open source. Mobitest is a testing agent for benchmarking the performance of mobile web pages, originally created by Blaze. Blaze was acquired by the Massachusetts-based content delivery network and cloud services provider in February of this year.

CocosBuilder development tool open sourced

GlobalSign Launches Open Source PHP Library for Fully Automated SSL Secure Site Activation

Major decisions under new HP CEO Meg Whitman

HP says that instead of selling its webOS mobile system or killing it off, it’s making it available as open-source software that anyone can use and modify freely. The company is hoping more mobile apps will be developed under webOS by offering it to the open-source community.

Open source – customer choice

Open source software is available for free, along with its source code, and it has developed its own substantial following since the early days of computing. The best known implementations are in infrastructure areas, with the well-known Linux, Java, and PHP packages. Recently, it has gained added attention due to its central role in cloud IT, and through the growing Linux-based Android ecosystem. There are many open source programs available, and there is major support from companies such as IBM and Red Hat. Well known applications include the Mozilla web browser, LibreOffice, Pentaho, WordPress, Moodle, Drupal, and SugarCRM ; but these are just the tip of the iceberg.

Open Source: OS Quality Often Trumps Proprietary Alternatives

A decade ago most enterprises avoided Open Source software, but things have changed. Right now Open Source use at enterprises stands at higher than 75 percent, and Gartner predicts that in just five years that 99 percent of enterprises will have adopted some amount of Open Source software. So rather than Open Source being considered as a marginalized alternative to commercial software, Open Source is increasingly becoming the mainstream option.

Google Wave Still Shutting Down April 30

Is BYOD the precursor to the open source desktop?

Users are taking control, and there’s no stopping them from bringing their own network-connected devices to the office. Today, every phone, every e-book reader, every tablet is a gateway to a world of networked computing. Even if you tried to prevent your employees from bringing them into the building, only military-grade security could stop them.

The BYOD (bring your own device) trend is variously viewed as “a world of pain for IT,” a security challenge that’s solvable, and something to be tolerated with grim resignation. And there’s a growing industry of companies who want to help you stop it, cripple it, or control it.

Events

• Open source has a cyber security posse heading to POSSCON

  One of my favorite projects I have the good fortune to be contributing to was created by the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (that’s DHS S&T in Beltway lingo, the equivalent of the R&D arm of the agency for the rest of us mere mortals) It’s called the HOST program (Homeland Open Security Technology).

• The Cloud, KVM and NYSE Star at Our Upcoming Enterprise End User Summit

Web Browsers

• Why is Firefox – and Open Source – a Disaster in China?

  Like many people, I’ve been tracking the steady ascent of Google Chrome – and corresponding decline of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – for some time now. Just recently, yet another milestone has been reached, apparently:

  Google’s Chrome narrowly became the world’s top internet browser for the first time on Sunday 18 March 2012, according to StatCounter, the independent website analytics company.

  As the accompanying graph indicates, there are some very interesting patterns to be observed.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox to get new home page and tabs in three months

    Mozilla has announced the arrival of the latest development version of Firefox 13 in the Aurora channel. This in-development version will arrive as the production version of Firefox in approximately twelve weeks. The development version includes a redesigned home page, changed “new tab” behaviour, and auto-completion in the browser address bar.

SaaS/Big Data

• OpenNebula: Open Source Cloud Setup

• AWS partners with open-source private cloud provider Eucalyptus

• Eventbrite: Hadoop isn’t for everybody

• MapR and Talend Partner on Open Source Big Data Solution

  Software features are good, but certification that they actually work is even better — particularly in the open source channel, where users don’t always enjoy the same kind of warranties that are common in the proprietary ecosystem. In this respect, the world of open source Big Data management became a little more stable with the recent announcement that MapR’s distribution of Apache Hadoop has been certified for Talend Open Studio for Big Data. Here’s the scoop.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 3.4.6 Released

• LibreOffice 3.4.6 fixes “potential security problem”

• OpenJDK bug database plans changed

• Social Media JSR 357 rejected by Java Community Process

CMS

• Drupal Open Source is Built on Passion (and soon Symfony)

• Drupal Bringing Open Source CMS To The Masses

  Open source is a fantastic element of the software ecosystem and recent studies have shown that it’s on par with traditional proprietary software. Drupal is one of the ring leaders in the open source movement by providing expansive, yet simple tools for Web site content management systems. It’s even so popular that it’s used for the White House’s Web site.

Business

• Does your business benefit from open source?

  Free and open source software has touched all our lives whether we know it or not. Often misunderstood and treated with suspicion, many businesses take advantage of the benefits of it without acknowledging the community that powers it.

  Before going any further, free software is not about price, rather an ideology that advocates that software has most utility when there are no barriers to its ability to be used, improved and studied at the source code level.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Ovum Recognizes BonitaSoft in Business Process Management Report

  • Open Source Server NGINX Makes LeaseWeb its Preferred Infrastructure Partner

Funding

• Nonprofit open source organizations booming

  The Linux Foundation has received the most revenue amongst all of the free software and open source non-profits and directly pays its leader the most, but the highest compensation of any sort is still being received by Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker, along with her CTO Colleague Brendan Etch.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU in Google Summer of Code

  Volunteer for The GNU Project by participating in the Google Summer of Code! More information is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/

• Glibc 2.15 released with optimisations and new locales

  The glibc developers have announced the release of version 2.15 of the GNU C Library. The new version fixes a significant number of bugs and adds two new Linux interfaces (process_vm_readv and process_vm_writev). The biggest improvements come in the area of optimisation, however, with many operations being improved throughout the code. This release also adds four new locales, including support for the Native American Unami language, which, according to Wikipedia, is extinct.

Public Services/Government

• Iceland’s public administration and schools moving towards open source

• All of Iceland’s public administrations moving towards open source

• Iceland goes open source in a big way

• Iceland latest to make big noises about open source

• Icelandic Government Moves Towards Open Source

Openness/Sharing

• DRONE: an open source Bluetooth controller for smartphones and tablets

  While using a touchscreen to game isn’t a problem for most people, there are still gamers out there who can’t stand the thought of playing games without an actual gamepad. Well, unfortunately there aren’t a lot of options out there for such purposes. This is where The Evolution Team’s DRONE comes in. Called an open source Bluetooth controller, it is a gamepad designed to work with your smartphones and tablets.

• Kickstarter: Magical Open Source Bluetooth game controller

• iRobot and Willow Garage Debate Closed vs. Open Source Robotics at Cocktail Party

  In this guest post, Frank Tobe, a robotics analyst and publisher of The Robot Report, describes a recent debate between two prominent robotics executives and their opposing views on how to nurture profitable robotics businesses.

• High Tech Cows & Open Source Farm Equipment: Yes, The Economics Of Farming Is Relevant

  I frequently get asked why I spend so much time talking about the entertainment industry here on Techdirt, and one of the points I make is that I think what’s happened to the entertainment industry over the last decade and a half is really a leading indicator of the type of disruptive change that has already started to impact, or will soon be impacting, nearly every industry imaginable. As such, by understanding what’s happening and how not to respond, perhaps we can help lots of other industries move more smoothly into the future. So I’m always interested and intrigued by parallels in totally unexpected industries. Just recently, the good folks over at NPR’s Planet Money put together a fascinating episode about modern farm economics (and host Adam Davidson also wrote a NY Times piece on the same subject). While it mainly focuses on Claudia, the high-tech cow, it also has some key economic points that will likely sound familiar to regular readers (unfortunately, these key economic points are only in the audio version of the podcast, and were left out of the transcript).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Cantor Quietly Acknowledges Failing to Report ALEC Gift

  In February, Common Cause wrote to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, asking for an explanation about an apparently unreported $1,350 gift from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 2009. Cantor’s office immediately responded, claiming our inquiry was without foundation, but last week his office quietly amended his financial disclosures to include the gift from ALEC.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • THQ seeking ’1666′ trademark

    California-based publisher files application with United States Patent & Trademark Office for “video game software.”

• Copyrights

  • Copyright isn’t dead just because we’re not willing to let it regulate us

    The first time I ever heard someone declare the death of copyright, it wasn’t a dreadlocked GNU/Linux hacker or a cyberpunk in mirror shades: it was a music executive, circa 1999, responding to the launch of Napster.

    I thought he was wrong then and I think he’s wrong now — as is everyone else who’s declared copyright to be dead.

    The problem is in the name: copyright. The Statute of Anne and other early copyright rules concerned themselves with verbatim copying because copying was the only industrial activity associated with creative expression at the time. There were lots of crafts associated with culture, of course, – performing music, plays and dance, painting pictures, and so on – but these weren’t industrial activities.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

New Commodore AMIGA mini is a modern PC that comes with Linux

Commodore USA has released the new AMIGA mini and the VIC mini, two small form factor PCs with a bit of retro styling, but very new and powerful guts

Forget the Ultrabook — Go With the New Commodore!

Pirate Bay plans to build aerial server drones with $35 Linux computer

Commodore outs Linux-running Amiga Mini desktop

Kernel Space

• The Main DRM Pull Hits The Linux 3.4 Kernel

• Linux Plus Android Equals Easier Multitasking

• Linux creator turned down Apple job offer from Steve Jobs

• TerraBlock supports Linux

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA Releases 295.33; Kepler Gallium3D Soon

  • Gallium3D Compute Infrastructure Is On Approach

    The Gallium3D compute infrastructure, which is the underlying work for supporting OpenCL over this open-source graphics driver architecture, is on approach for landing in the very near future. This has been one damn good day for open-source Linux graphics drivers following the earlier Nouveau surprise announcements.

  • AMD finally release open source Radeon 7000 GPU drivers for Linux

  • Kernel Log: Drivers for new Radeon GPUs

    Soon, the kernel will support several AMD graphics cores that are used in recent Radeon graphics cards and in various upcoming processors. In systems with Intel graphics, using hibernation can cause memory corruption. The development of Linux 3.4 has started.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Debian Squeeze (Initiator And Target)

  • Control VLC, Amarok With Mouse Gestures

  • Windows and Linux System Monitoring With PC Monitor

• Wine

  • PlayOnLinux 4.0.16 Supports Origin and Desura

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Can KDE Survive Without Ubuntu?

    Jonathan Riddell, the KDE developer, recently announced that Canonical stopping funding the Kubuntu project and reassigning him in a new role. Looking at Canonical’s focus on Unity, that’s not a surprising move. I don’t know how Canonical works, but looking at the new challenges they set for themselves with every release, I do think they need all the hands they can get. The result of that hard work is evident – Unity is shaping up really well.

  • Kdenlive Surpasses Fundraising Goals, Might Actually Work With Kubuntu?

Distributions

• Calculate 11.15 Screenshots

• Legacy OS 4 Mini: Light-weight Linux for older PCs

  Have an old computer lying around that you’d like to use for some light web surfing, document editing, and other tasks? I mean like a PC with a 1999-era Intel Pentium III processor? It turns out there’s an OS for that… and it’s not Windows 98.

• Fun With REMnux — And New Malware Analysis Book

  In my last blog about Linux Live Environments, I mentioned REMnux, an environment specifically built for malware analysis. I’d spent a little time with REMnux when it first came out, but decided to take the latest version (3.0) for a test drive.

• New Releases

  • [Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 Released]

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Say hello to Canonical’s new Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04 beta review

        Canonical’s next long-term support release of its flagship Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04 is in late beta. This next release, due out on April 26th, is in beta now. I’ve been using it for several weeks now and so far, so good.

        Indeed, the new Ubuntu is good enough already that I’ve it on my default Ubuntu system: a 2009-era Gateway DX4710. This PC is powered by a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor and has 6GBs of RAM and an Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3100 for graphics. No, it’s not fast, but unlike Windows 8’s beta, you don’t need a fast computer for Ubuntu.

      • 15 New Photo Wallpapers Chosen for Ubuntu 12.04

        From a pool of thousands, 15 photographic wallpapers have been chosen for inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04.

      • Ubuntu Survey Results Published Part I

      • Canonical Surveys Users

      • Ubuntu 12.04 to be without Wubi installer

      • Ubuntu Continues With Upstart, Releases v1.5

        With Ubuntu remaining uninterested in systemd, the Upstart init system continues to be developed. Released today was Upstart 1.5 with a few new features.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi designer hints at future version

  However, while that beefed up version may be available at some point, costs and demand will likely hold it off for a while, the popular mini-computer’s designer said.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Goes Orbital With NASA’s ISSLive

      NASA has made great efforts to get the public interested in their various projects and avenues of research using tools such as social media networks and their suite of mobile applications. Unfortunately, those applications have almost exclusively been iPhone exclusive. Of the over 20 mobile applications NASA has released, only a scant have made it over to everyone’s favorite open source mobile operating system.

    • Sony Caters to Open Source Community with Android Code

      Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Android is open source and built on Linux. Fortunately for Android enthusiasts and independent developers, however, Sony has made life a little easier by releasing the open source archive for the Xperia S device. Of course, there are some catches. Read on for what this announcement means for the juncture of Android and free software.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Acer Iconia Tab A510 with Tegra 3, Android 4.0 arriving in the US and Canada for $450

Organizational Adoption of Open Source Software

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice on track for cloud service next month

  The Document Foundation (TDF), which produces the leading open source office software suite LibreOffice, is on schedule for the release of a cloud version of its software next month.

  The team released the last update to its 3.4 build on Thursday and is now focused on developing version 3.5 further, but the group is now also ready to go live for cloud services in April. That said, the team reserves the right to hold off on launch until the last few software fixes come in, TDF spokesman Italo Vignoli told The Register.

Project Releases

• GNU Parallel 20120322 (‘#518696′) released

Public Services/Government

• Iceland’s public sector IT moves towards open source

  OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE is finding favour on the Icelandic government scene with the announcement that all of its public administration organisations will adopt it.

• Iceland swaps Windows for Linux in open-source push

  Iceland’s push to move its public sector to open-source software has made some headway, with most of the shift seeing Windows swapped for Linux.

Security

• The big leak: Microsoft’s epic security fail

  Some words just seem to go together: “bread” and “butter”; “trial” and “error”; “Microsoft” and “security breach.” The MS12-020 Remote Desktop Protocol vulnerability revealed last week shows once again that when it comes to data security, Microsoft is its own worst enemy and any “secure” system can be compromised.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Universal USB Installer supports four more Linux distros

The busy folks at Pen Drive Linux have updated their handy Universal USB Installer tool to support four more distros. Which means it can now convert live CDs of Deepin Linux, LinHES Linux, Trisquel Linux and Satux Linux to run on USB keys.

Dell Surveys Customers on GNU/Linux

Carla Schroder: Whoever controls technology controls society

CS: My first PC was an Apple LC II back around 1993. Then I got hold of a Windows 3.1/ DOS 5 PC. I spent most of my time in DOS because Windows was barely functional. I learned about Linux from a local computer magazine, Computerbits, and installed my first Red Hat around 1995. From 3.5” diskettes!

Apple was very different then, they actually encouraged users to get under the hood and learn about the system, and you could get detailed manuals. They didn’t evolve into shiny, unfriendly closed boxes until later.

Desktop

• 2012 Will be The Year of The GNU/Linux Desktop

  The GNU/Linux desktop has been around and growing for a while now but 2012 will be special:

  * Android/Linux and GNU/Linux are getting together on ARM,
  * Many OEMs are now producing desktop/notebook machines with GNU/Linux, including some old and new styles,
  * thin clients, which love GNU/Linux, are now respectable (growth 20% p.a.)…, and
  * Android/Linux is invading the desktop space on ARM and x86.

• How Linux Can Bring Life To Your Old PC

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 256 – The Beards are Coming!!!

Kernel Space

• What’s New in Linux 3.3?

• Greg KH Readies for Collaboration Summit, Talks Raspberry Pi

  Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman will be moderating the highly-anticipated Linux kernel panel at the Collaboration Summit in a couple short weeks. He was generous enough to take a few moments recently to answer some questions about what we might hear from the Linux kernel panel, as well as some details on his recent work and projects. Oh, and we couldn’t resist asking him about the new Raspberry Pi.

• Linux Kernel May Gain VMUFAT File-System Support

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Publishes Open-Source HD 7000, Trinity Code

  • An Updated Look At Radeon Gallium3D 2D Color Tiling

  • Intel Publishes More Haswell Graphics Driver Code

  • An Extremely Large Patch Hits The X.Org Server

  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 “Kepler” On Linux?

    NVIDIA has finally introduced their first Kepler-based graphics card: the GeForce GTX 680. The new Kepler graphics architecture is an exciting successor to Fermi, but how well does this new graphics processor work under Linux? Here’s a glimpse in what to expect for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 series on Linux.

    First of all, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 is designed to compete with AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 Southern Islands graphics card. The GTX 680 has a 28nm GK104 Kepler GPU with 1536 CUDA cores, 128 texture units, 1006MHz core clock, PCI Express 3.0 support and initially there’s just 2GB of GDDR5 video memory on a 256-bit bus. The GeForce GTX 680 has a 195 Watt TDP and carries a $500 USD price-tag.

  • Nouveau Project Has Huge Surprises Today

    This morning I wrote about the launch of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 as the first-to-ship NVIDIA GPU based upon their brand new Kepler architecture. At the start of the morning it looked to be the usual NVIDIA launch: binary driver support should be in place with an official driver update due out at any time and it would mark the start of the usual Nouveau driver game of reverse-engineering the support in the coming months. With Fermi and past NVIDIA generations there’s never been same-day open-source Nouveau support in any form, but it’s generally taken months to get the display to light-up with KMS.

Applications

• Why Vim?

  People ask me why on Earth would I subject myself to such dreadful text editor as vim. With it’s weird mode system, nonstandard keyboard shortcuts and all kinds of strange quirks it is not what you would call a user-friendly piece of software. Most users new to this particular editor hit a brick wall at step one: entering text. When you open vim and try to type into it will do strange things. It will mostly beep at you, or display some messages in the status bar but not type. Unless of course you happen to hit a vovel lie a or i or o, in which case it will suddenly come alive and let you type.

• GloboNote: A Sticky Notes Tool on Steroids

  At first sight, GloboNote looks like yet another sticky notes tool. But this unassuming application has a few clever tricks up its sleeve. For starters, GloboNotes offers a handful of text formatting options, including bold, italics, and underlined. The utility allows you to organize notes into groups, and you can display and hide all notes belonging to a specific group in one go. GloboNotes also sports the ability to perform simple calculations directly in notes: type a calculation (e.g., 3+2=) and press F2 to view the result.

• Pacman Package Manager

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Set Up Apache2 With mod_fcgid And PHP5 On Debian Squeeze

  • Using ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) On Debian Squeeze (Initiator And Target)

  • Work the Shell – What Day Is That Date in the Past?

  • How to disable Nepomuk, Strigi and Akonadi in KDE4

• Wine

  • PlayOnLinux 4.0.16 now can start exe from terminal, support for Desura and more

• Games

  • CraftStudio, New Real Time Collaborative Game Making Tool for Linux

    CraftStudio is an upcoming collaborative gaming making tool for Linux, featuring Minecraft style blocky graphics.

  • Free and Open Source Puzzle Game ‘Me and My Shadow’ is Quite Challenging

  • Report article Enemy In Sight!

    Our team is working on polishing the game for an alpha release now. I’ve been working on adding info to the HUD as well as giving players a few more options while out in space. Rusty has made an incredible “asteroid belt” themed mission for us.

  • A Linux Game That’s Still Not Selling Well

    While the new Humble Bundle is already pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, there’s a new Source Engine game coming to Linux, and Wasteland 2 is likely coming to Linux, as just some of the recent Linux gaming achievements, there’s still not a surplus of Linux-native games. Even without there being excessive amounts of Linux-native games, not all of the titles that do come are destined to sell well.

    Last month I wrote about the Tomes of Mephistopheles reaching an alpha state, which is a game being developed by Kot In Action — the same studio behind the popular Steel Storm series. Tomes of Mephistopheles is powered by the DarkPlaces engine, which is a great game engine for being free and open-source, and that alpha access to this Kot In Action title is available for a $10 USD pre-order.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDevelop 4.3 Brings Support for Basic C++11

    After nine long months of hard work, the KDevelop team proudly announced last evening, March 20th, the immediate availability for download of the KDevelop 4.3 software, which comes with improved performance, lots of new features and assorted bug fixes.

  • KDevelop 4.3 arrives with KDE Projects integration

  • KDE vs Unity: Is KDE Better Than Unity?

    I have been using KDE under openSUSE for a while now, and for the first time in my life started to love KDE. Last night I went on a test driver and installed couple of KDE centric distributions including Mageia and Mandriva just for the sake of comparison.

    These two distributions showed what wonders can be done with KDE, if integrated well. The moment I booted into Kubuntu, I realised why Kubuntu is so low in Distrowatch (at 27). This is ironic because the 26 spots are dominated by KDE centric distros such as Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Chakra, Mandriva, etc.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Classic in Ubuntu 12.04: It’s Like Nothing Ever Changed

    Come April 26th and the release of Ubuntu 12.04 a vast number of Ubuntu users will be getting their first taste of the Unity desktop since its basic beginnings as the Ubuntu Netbook Remix in the last LTS.

Distributions

• CorePlus 4.4 Screen Shots

• New Releases

  • Vector Linux 7.0 Light released.

  • Zorin OS 6 Lite Released

    The Zorin OS team has announced the release of Zorin OS 6 Lite. This release is based on Lubuntu 11.10 and uses the LXDE desktop environment to provide one of the fastest and most feature-packed interfaces for low-spec machines.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Open Source: Using Mageia 1 for Six Months Now

    Back in the Fall of 2011, September 4th to be exact, I decided it was time to migrate from the sinking ship of Mandriva to the new Mageia distribution which is based on the best of Mandriva while leaving the chaff of Mandriva behind. It is now six months later and I am ready to report on my experience so far. To sum up this article in a sentence, “Mageia works and works well.” If you just want the summary, that is it, you can stop reading here. If you want more, read on. I will start with what I haven’t liked since that is my shorter list.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo spotted on space station.

  • Gentoo Linux 12 review

    Gentoo isn’t the highest profile Linux distribution. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • What Follows a Fedora Linux Miracle ?

      Though we’re still a few month away from the May release date for Fedora 17 – aka ‘The Beefy Miracle’ – the Fedora community is now turning its attention to naming Fedora 18.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu User Survey: The Results Are In (Partially)

        We may never know every detail about Ubuntu’s user base. But some of its characteristics became a little clearer this week as Canonical’s Gerry Carr began releasing the results of the company’s recent survey of people running Ubuntu, the Linux distribution. Don’t get too excited just yet, as we’ll have to wait a few more days for the full survey findings. But if you’re interested in what’s been learned so far, keep reading…

      • The Smart Login Manager Of Ubuntu

      • Proposal to disable Wubi Installs from 12.04 (but maintain the separate .exe)

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux, the Beautiful Configurable Lightweight Linux

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Year 2012 Will See More Android 4.0 Phones

      The plight of developers will soon come to an end as the industry will see more Android 4.0 phones launched in 2012.

      According to Digitimes, “The supply of smartphones running on Android 4.0 will increase substantially starting the second quarter of 2012, with mid-range to high-end models coming from brand vendors including HTC, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Mobile Communications, while China-based handset makers may launch models based on Qualcomm’s 7227a solution and MediaTek’s MT6565 platform for the entry-level segment, according to industry sources.”

    • Sony Releases Source Code Of Xperia S

      Sony has released the source code for the Sony Xperia S phones. This is Sony’s flagship device (no more Erricson) which runs on 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Dual Core processor. This is the first time the company has released source code for a product built on the Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 platform. The code is targeted at inividual enthusiasts and projects like CyanogenMod to be able to take full advantage of the hardware by creating custom ROMs.

    • Sony Starts Shipping Xperia S, Globally

      Sony has announced that they have started shipping their flagship Android phone Xperia S. The phone will be available globally. The phone is powered by a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Dual Core processor and runs Android 2.3.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Zync Releases Rs 8,999 ICS Tablet For India

    India is the next big Android market. Another Indian-based company Zync has launched a Rs 8,999 (US$ 178) tablet ‘Zync Z-990′ for the Indian market.

Direct from the Source: Some Good Interviews with FOSS Leaders

It’s always good to hear from the movers and shakers in the open source community, and in addition to a number of recent interviews on timely open source topics here on OStatic, a number of compelling interviews with FOSS leaders have appeared on other sites. If you’re looking for some great input from the bleeding edge, check out this collection of interviews worth reading.

Announcing the Sixth Annual Future of Open Source Survey

Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners, in partnership with 451 Research, yesterday announced a collaboration to conduct the sixth annual Future of Open Source Survey.

The survey, an annual bellwether of the state of the open source industry, is supported by more than 20 open source software (OSS) industry leaders and is open to participation from the entire open source community.

Events

• Snake charmers unite at PyCon 2012

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome: The people’s Web browser choice

    Yes. It’s true. For one day, March 18th, 2012, Chrome, and not Internet Explorer (IE), was the most popular Web browser in the world. It won’t be the last day. While the start of the work week put IE comfortably back on top. When users aren’t chained to their desks, they’re choosing to use Google’s speedy Chrome.

    StatCounter, the Web-site analytics company research arm StatCounter Global Stats found that Chrome was the number one browser in the world that day. StatCounter data comes fron over 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) to the StatCounter network of more than three million websites

• Mozilla

  • For a Speedy Boot, Try Firefox-Based xPUD Linux

    Enter Linux in general–which is typically much faster, particularly on older hardware–and xPUD in particular, an Ubuntu-based distro built around Firefox that’s lightweight and made for speed.

  • Thunderbird 11 Officially Lands in Ubuntu 11.10

    One week after Firefox 11 officially landed in Ubuntu 11.10 last week, a few hours ago (March 21st) Canonical announced that the Mozilla Thunderbird 11.0 email client is now available on the official software repositories of the Oneiric Ocelot operating system.

SaaS

• VMware Worried About Rackspace, OpenStack Cloud Gains?

  VMware vs. OpenStack: Plenty of pundits are debating the merits of each platform for cloud computing. Now for a twist: Within the cloud storage market, the recent hot rumor involves VMware (VMW) potentially buying Rackspace (RAX) in order to disrupt potential competition from OpenStack, the open source cloud platform. Here’s a reality check from The VAR Guy.

• Dell teams up with Canonical to put OpenStack in the cloud

  OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solutions with Ubuntu are to be offered by Dell to UK, German, and Chinese companies

• Dell delivers one-stop cloud computing service based on OpenStack

• Dell gets more open saucy

• Eucalyptus Doubles Down on its Amazon Bet

  Born as a research project in the computer science department at UCSB, Eucalyptus the company was founded in January of 2009. Originally intended to replicate a subset of the Amazon cloud’s featureset in software that could be run locally, one of the project’s primary differentiators was its compatibility with the Amazon API. Importantly, however, this support was unofficial: Amazon neither supported nor legally blessed this feature. Which meant that its appeal was throttled by the uncertainty of Eucalyptus’ legal footing. More than one large vendor has privately characterized the Amazon API as a “non-starter” because their legal departments could not be assured of Amazon’s intent with respect to the intellectual property issues involved.

CMS

• Drupal Usability Test Conclusions: A Missing Conceptual Foundation

  Earlier this year we announced that we would be conducting a Drupal usability study that we would live stream so viewers could watch as participants worked with Drupal 7. Becky Gessler and I are excited to announce our analysis of the results that we will also present at DrupalCon Denver to the Drupal community in a “core conversation” session with Jen Lampton called “User eXperience for Open Source: How to Galvanize a Community.”

• Drupal’s Plan for Open Source CMS Success

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GNU Hurd/ news/ 2011-q4

  This quarter, Ludovic Courtès contributed a continuously-built Nix-based QEMU image, raising the count of GNU/Hurd distributions to three: Debian GNU/Hurd, Arch Hurd, and now Nix. His build is still pretty basic, but a step into the right direction: continuous integration is a great facility for automated testing.

• GNU Hurd/ news/ 2012-03-21

  The Google Summer of Code 2012 is on! If you’re a student, consider applying for a GNU Hurd project — details to be found on our GSoC page.

• The GNU C library 2.15 release!

• GCC 4.7.0 released to mark the 25 years of GNU Compiler Collection

  The GCC development team is celebrating the 25th year of the GNU Compiler Collection, a collection initiated by the first public release of GCC (GNU C Compiler) in 1987 by Richard Stallman. Over the years the GNU Compiler Collection, renamed as other languages joined the toolchain, shaped how developers acquired the tools of their trade and provided a platform for new compiler developments. As part of the celebration, the developers have released GCC 4.7.0, a major release of the compiler collection that brings with it new functionality.

• Happy Birthday GCC!

• GCC Turns 25 Years Old, GCC 4.7 Released

Licensing

• Enforcing the GPL with Judo moves

  “In judo, the goal is to use the momentum of the person attacking you to defend yourself, and that is exactly what copyleft does”

Standards/Consortia

• Open APIs: The Fifth Pillar of Modern IT Openness

  Last year, I wrote about the key pillars of openness in today’s enterprise IT industry, highlighting open source software, real open standards, open clouds, and open data as the ‘Four Pillars of Modern IT Openness.’

  More recently, I wrote about what I now consider to be the fifth pillar, which is open application programming interfaces (APIs). Of course, when we talk about ‘open’ anything — open source, open standards, open clouds, open APIs — there tends to be debate about what is really open, how we should define open and who should or should not be able to carry the phrase. My focus on open APIs and on APIs in general generated some good discussion, as well as some pushback (Jim comment on LI, regarding the value of APIs compared to open source software, which APIs are open, and how open is open enough?

Finance

• Goldman loses bid to end lawsuit over risky CDO

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc lost its bid to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of defrauding investors by selling risky debt linked to subprime mortgages that it planned to bet against.

  The decision by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York keeps alive a hedge fund’s claims over a $2 billion offering of collateralized debt obligations, amid intense scrutiny over Goldman’s activities before and after the 2008 financial crisis.

ACTA

• ACTA in the Civil Liberties Committee 26.3.12

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Open-Source (free) MultiMachine Project Aims to Spark Manufacturing Revolution in Developing World

Kernel Space

• Steve Jobs tried to hire Linux founder a decade ago

• Linux Kernel Performance: Flame Graphs

  To get the most out of your systems, you want detailed insight into what the operating system kernel is doing. A typical approach is to sample stack traces; however, the data collected can be time consuming to read or navigate. Flame Graphs are a new way to visualize sampled stack traces, and can be applied to the Linux kernel for some useful (and stunning!) visualizations.

• Long term kernels 2.6.27.62 and 2.6.32.59

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD Open Sources Radeon HD 7000 Driver

Applications

• TEA: A Smooth Text Editor That Hits the Sweet Spot

  The TEA Text Editor is a very handy writing tool that delivers a much different user interface. For most computer users cranking out words or program code for digital consumption, text editors are often preferable to feature-bloated word processors. TEA pours on features yet keeps from getting too steamy.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Squeeze

  • Smart Access Control with Apache

  • How to install applications on and update Linpus Lite Desktop 1.7

• Games

  • Dear Esther: A Source Engine Game On Linux

    You may have heard a few days ago that Dear Esther, a game built upon Valve’s Source Engine, would be ported to Linux and released in the coming months. Well, here’s more details about that Source-based game is getting to Linux.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2 vs. GNOME 3

    Users who choose between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 are rarely making that decision on a purely rational basis. In my experience, users of GNOME 2 are often choosing what they know, while users of GNOME 3 are technophiles who enjoy anything that is new.

    Neither is likely to go over the two generations of GNOME feature by feature. In many cases, the choice seems made before login.

    But what happens when the two desktop environments are compared in general features? I’m a fan of neither GNOME 2 nor GNOME 3, but I decided to find out.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Ankur has launched Shishir 2012

  • Legacy OS 4 Mini is Here!

    Today sees the release of Legacy OS 4 Mini an Update / Replacement for TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta. Those updating from TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta will need to save any important documents, music etc to an external Hard Drive, USB stick etc as a full reinstall is required to update to this new version, sorry!

• Debian Family

  • Debian Stable — set it and forget it — spoils me for fresh Linux Mint 12 on some very nice ZaReason hardware

    Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I’ve been running on my laptop since late 2010.

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Toshiba debuts 7-inch LT170 tablet

A Peek Behind the Curtain at Puppet Labs

In this interview, Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs, explains why the Puppet configuration management tool is a huge hit with sys admins, and tells us what to expect next from the popular open source project.

Open source moving in mobile

We got another reminder of how disruptive open source software is to mobile computing this week, when Linux and Android merged back together. This appears to be good news for a number of parties, but Android and Linux developers and users seem particularly likely to benefit. The inclusion of Android code in the Linux kernel and the ability for Linux developers to more easily work on the Android environment and applications also ties into some of the key topics we’ll be covering in a Webcast March 21 titled ‘Open Source, A Tale of Two Cities in the Mobile Enterprise,’ presented by 451 Research and Black Duck Software.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chromium OS Desktop Shell Eschews Google’s Cloud-Only Mantra

    Ever since Google started working on its Chrome OS operating system, it has had a pronounced focus on allowing users to only work with cloud-based data and applications. This has drawn criticism from many users, and some from us here at OStatic, as seen in this post. With Chrome OS, Google placed a heavy bet on the idea that consumers and business users would have no problem storing data and using applications in the cloud, without working on the locally stored data/applications model that they’re used to.

CMS

• Winning the hearts and minds: Dries Buytaert’s DrupalCon keynote

Licensing

• Understanding Open Source Licenses and Obligations

• How important is software compliance?

  Are developers actually chasing down license violations?

Openness/Sharing

• How to do open research: 5 basic principles

  There are some pretty basic things that a researcher can do to make their work into an open content project. Here are a few.

Programming

• My search findings on Learning C/C++ Programming and Using an IDE

Finance

• Banks Weren’t Meant to Be Like This. What Will their Future Be – and What is the Government’s Proper Financial Role?

Censorship

• America: Iran Can’t Control The Internet, Only We Can

  The Obama administration has condemned Iran for trying to take control of the Internet. In addition, The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued guidance and licensing information to further support the free flow of information to citizens of Iran – a freedom the Iranian regime has consistently denied to its people.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Take Action: ISPs Selling Out Customers, Pushing Backdoor SOPA

  They’re selling us out. Just weeks after Internet users from across the globe came together to to beat SOPA, the major ISPs are cutting a deal with Big Content to restrict web access for users who are accused of piracy.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • De Gucht goes rogue again

      Concerned of the ACTA dossier many citizens contacted the press staffers of his colleague Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Commissioner Michel Barnier is right when he emphasized the need for better communications. Karel De Gucht had the opportunity to embrace the public attention to ACTA, and strengthen the institutional cohesion with the European public, help the transformation of the EU towards an “Europe of the citizens”. He didn’t exercise this opportunity, and it appears to me the reason is a fundamental disrespect to democratic principles, he doesn’t take the public seriously.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Exploring DIY Linux Router Distros

Router lockups have been a problem for me ever since I got my first 802.11G Router in 2004. Since then, we’ve seen companies roll out supposed “power user” routers or routers meant for “gamers,” but for some reason not a single one has alleviated the problem of having to reset the router after running for a few days. After my new “gaming” router locked up while refreshing a server list for a multiplayer game, it was the last straw and I began searching for something a little more robust.

New Universal USB Installer for Linux

The Universal USB Installer converts live CDs of various Linux distributions to run on USB keys.

Desktop

• Past Year of GNU/Linux in Germany

  According to Statcounter, it’s more like 40%, but still quite good. Perhaps more of those units are going into homes rather than businesses. Doubling time at 40% per annum is about two years.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds: The King of Geeks (And Dad of 3)

  The license plate on Linus Torvalds’ Mercedes SLK convertible says it all. The frame running around the outside of the plate reads “Mr. Linux. King of Geeks.” But the plate itself says “Dad of 3.”

  If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow — his favorite color — and so’s the Mercedes.

• Linux guru: re-merging of Android into kernel eases sysdev a bit

  Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman said the reintroduction of 7,000 lines of Android code into the Linux 3.3 kernel will make it somewhat easier for OEMs creating Android systems. App developers? Not so much

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 8.1-devel Performance With Intel’s DRI Driver

Applications

• Darktable : Open Source Photography Apps and RAW Photo Editor

  Darktable is an free open source software development by Johannes Hanika and Henrik Andersso.this software designed for users interested in maneuvering photographies including RAW, meaning unprocessed camera captures with zero modifications in a database with numerous options to edit and enhance.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Become a VLC Media Player Power User

  • Linux Pocket Guide, 2nd Edition

  • Server Monitoring With munin And monit On Debian Squeeze

• Games

  • Let’s Play: Test Drive Unlimited

  • Fuduntu Gaming: The Humble Bundle for Android #2 is Live!

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Direct Rendering For Qt Compositor & More

  • Kdenlive: Superior Video Editor … not just for pros

    Video editing has evolved from a niche market in the computer world to something that computers are simply expected to do. It’s a tall order to be everything to everyone. But if any video editing software comes close to that mark, it’s Kdenlive—a KDE Applications star. With a strong commitment and a plan for making major improvements, the Kdenlive team is raising money. Please help out if you can.

  • KDevelop 4.3 released with basic C++11

    After about nine months of extensive development, the KDevelop team is happy to announce the immediate availability of KDevelop 4.3. As usual, this feature release comes packed with new features, bug fixes and improved performance.

Distributions

• Linpus Lite Desktop 1.7 review

• JoldzicOS 3.31 Screenshots

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Naming Fedora 18, The Beefy Miracle Successor

      There’s two months until Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, is officially released. However, already getting underway is the codename proposal period for Fedora 18. What will succeed the Beefy Miracle?

    • Fedora 18 Picks Up New Features, Rejects Systemd-Journal

      There’s still two months prior to the official Fedora 17 release — Fedora 17 Beta isn’t even out yet — but besides coming up with a new codename, we have our first technical glimpse at new features to Fedora 18, which will be released by Red Hat and the community in Q4’2012.

      At yesterday’s Fedora Engineering & Steering Committee (FESCo), they approved the first batch of Fedora 18 features now that Fedora 17 is well into its feature freeze. The items approved for the yet-to-be-codenamed Fedora 18 include:

• Debian Family

  • Debian Project News – March 19th, 2012

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Zorin OS 6 Lite Is Based on Lubuntu 11.10

          The Zorin OS development team proudly announced yesterday, March 19th, the immediate availability for download of the Zorin OS 6 Lite and Zorin OS 6 Educational Lite operating systems.

          This major release of the Zorin OS 6 Lite series is now based on the Lubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating sytem and takes advantage of the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, in order to provide an extremely fast and feature-packed desktop experience, especially for low-end machines.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google is the least open part of Android

      I have been an Android user since the release of the G1. I was a Linux server admin at the time, and the idea of an open source environment on my phone was something I had been thinking about for awhile. Before the release of the G1, I was even considering diving into the OpenMOKO project, which nobody remembers (as a result of the G1 launch). For me, open source meant that, like my computer, I could adjust things at will that I wasn’t happy with. I followed the Android Open Source Project with eager anticipation, and watched as this community of developers modify and build and bolt on features to the Android that we know today.

    • ZTE N910 clears the FCC with LTE support for AWS and PCS bands

    • Sony Xperia Neo L MT25i announced as the company’s first Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone

      Sony has officially unveiled its first smartphone to come with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich from day one: the Xperia Neo L MT25i, announced earlier today in China.

      As its name suggests, the Xperia Neo L is the successor to the Neo and Neo V (which were introduced last year running Android 2.3 Gingerbread), although it doesn’t bring major hardware enhancements.

    • Huawei myTouch Smartphone Discovered Hanging In The Wild

      If you have been eagerly awaiting a first look at the upcoming Huawei myTouch line heading to T-Mobile, then we have good news for you. Thanks to a TmoNews ninja we’ve got a quick look at the upcoming non-QWERTY myTouch device, expected to arrive on store shelves in the coming months. At this point we don’t know much about the device, though we suspect a WVGA 800×480 resolution display and some other mid-range specs. The myTouch line isn’t billed as a high-end line for T-Mobile anymore — more as a “family” phone that has something for everyone. Huawei marks the third such manufacturer to release a device under the myTouch branding for T-Mobile, after HTC and LG.

    • Getac releases PS326: Android-powered, Milspec-carrying beast of a handset

    • Sony Releases Open Source Archive For The Xperia S, Includes Handy Build Instructions

      Sony released the Xperia S open source archive today, providing all the tools necessary to build a kernel and start cooking up ROMs for the Xperia S from Sony’s source code. In a post to Sony Mobile’s developer blog today, the company also noted that the opening of the Xperia S archive marks the first time Sony has published source code for a product built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S3.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Archos 1.5GHz G9 Turbo tablets now shipping

    Just a quick heads up that Archos has begun shipping their Turbo editions of the G9 series of tablets. Available in either 8-inch or 10-inch models, you also get to choose between 8GB or 250GB of storage. Price start as low as $269.99 for the (8GB) 80 G9 and go up to $389.99 for the (250GB) 101 G9.

  • Sony cooking up a Tegra 3 tablet with Android 4.0?

    According to a recently spotted NenaMark benchmark test entry, the followup to the Sony Tablet S could be in the works — and it carries a quad-core Tegra 3 processor. The device that was subject to the test was running Android 4.0.3 and featured a display with a 1280×800 resolution (the same as the Tablet S).

  • Sharp intros underwhelming RW-T110 Gingerbread tablet with NFC, not much else on board

Big Switch Unveils ‘Open’ SDN Architecture

Killed email device Peek resurrected with open source app framework

Amol Sarva, the man behind Peek, recently made waves by giving away his remaining stock of discontinued Peek devices to hackers interested in reusing them for something interesting (the company is still around, but it’s focusing on cloud-based software services now — the hardware, and the cellular service that underpins it, is dead). This all happened less than two months ago, but we’ve already got an open source application framework from a coder by the name of Ryan Krumins available for Peek hackers to take advantage of.

Big data enters open-source hype cycle

Possibly. Open source was all the rage in the tech press for years as it promised to lower costs while improving enterprise IT freedom. Ultimately, a few start-ups cashed out big time (MySQL, JBoss), but for the most part the real value in open source came as both IT vendors and in-house IT organisations turned to open source to provide raw material for their software projects. Open source became less about sales and more about code, which was exactly what it was designed to do.

CARS Unveils Free Open-Source IBEAM Portal

Consolidated Asset Recovery Systems launched a new open-source, freeware version of its IBEAM Web portal to the agent and lender community.

The company highlighted this new version of IBEAM — available after April 15 — will be specific to repossession and invoice management, providing all the capabilities of asset tracking, real-time monitoring of updates, online condition reports and complete transparency throughout the recovery process.

8 Free Open Source Alternatives To Microsoft Exchange

NTIDA advocates open source software

The National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) says Nigerians need open source software if the country must be a full participant in the software industry.

SaaS

• EMC Intros Chorus Open-Source Big Data App

• EMC wants to be the Linux of big data

  To broaden its reach in the big-data arena, disk-array maker EMC’s Greenplum division, which peddles data warehousing and Hadoop appliances and software, announced that it will open source its Chorus management and collaboration tools. EMC also has acquired Pivotal Labs, experts in agile programming, to help it build better big-data software and, equally importantly, help others do so.

  EMC has always been serious about data, but in case you haven’t noticed it, the company is now very serious about big data and the software that is used to chew it up and regurgitate useful bits of information.

CMS

• DrupalCon 2012 Kicks Off in Denver

  The Drupal Association, hosts of the biannual DrupalCon conference, announced the opening of its North American DrupalCon in Denver, with more than 3,000 Website designers, developers, site architects and IT managers in attendance.

  The first day of full conference events at DrupalCon is March 20. Drupal is an open-source content management platform that powers millions of Websites and applications. Drupal is built, used and supported by a very active community of people from around the world, and that community comes together for DrupalCon.

Healthcare

• HHS Revamps Its Open-Source Software for HIEs

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GCC 5.0 set for a modular future?

  Version 4.7 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is due out in April 2012 – a second release candidate was released last week. Discussions on the future direction of the utilities collection are currently underway. Musings over making GCC 5.0 more modular have attracted considerable attention. These have been inspired by the increasingly popular Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM), a compiler infrastructure part-sponsored by Apple.

• Interview: Richard Stallman

  RMS: The term “investment” is not applicable here, because that implies spending money on a business to obtain a larger subsequent profit. I set out to do a large job, but it wasn’t a business and the purpose was something more important than profit.

  I quit my job at MIT when I started writing code for the GNU operating system because I wanted to make sure MIT would not be able to claim copyright on the code I wrote for GNU.

  Evidently, financial support was not crucial at the beginning, because I made progress on my own, which drew others to help.

Project Releases

• Denemo – News: New Release Candidate

• GnuTLS – News: Summer of code

Public Services/Government

• NSW Govt to open source digital archives software

  Files to remain in state-owned data centre for hundreds of years.

Programming

• What Boundary and DTrace Have in Common

  Is not – as Adam Leventhal, Jason Hoffman and Randy Bias hastened to point out – functionality. From a pure technology perspective, in fact, they could hardly be less distinct. Boundary is a SaaS based network monitoring service, DTrace an in kernel observation and tracing system. One is focused on the network at scale, the other on the performance and runtime characteristics of a single node.

• GlobalSign Launches Open Source PHP Library for Fully Automated SSL Secure Site Activation

Finance

• Founders Of Marvell Technology Group Are Among The Largest Victims Of Greed At Goldman Sachs

  In the news release, Founders of Marvell Technology Group Are Among the Largest Victims of Greed at Goldman Sachs, issued 19-Mar-2012 by Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP over PR Newswire, the source should be Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP, rather than Marvell Technology Group as originally issued. The complete, corrected release follows:

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

New Online Video Series Can Prepare You for Linux Certification

A Little Linklist Of Linux And Technology Themed Webcomics

Linux support for Macs still strong (as usual)

Recently I’ve had the pleasure of digging out a couple of old Mac computers to demonstrate to a few family members out of curiosity. I am definitely a believer in educating the next generation on computing of the past, and how we got from there to where we are today. So one of the computers I fired up is a Macintosh Quadra 900. As usual, it booted right up without problems after sitting for probably close to 8 years. Everybody was amused and it was actually a lot of fun showing them the Mac OS 8 operating system on it.

The next day, I remembered at one time I had a GNU/Linux server that had Netatalk running on it, so that I could connect from this Mac to the server and back up and transfer files. That server has since been upgraded, and I never really put in the time to get Netatalk running on it again until now. The server is a Pentium III 667 MHz system running CentOS 6.0, with X11 and all of the bells and whistles. The system runs good despite the fact that it is only a Pentium III. It also houses two 2 TB drives with the ext4 filesystem and runs very well.

Desktop

• New, High-End Laptop Offers Linux Preinstalled

  An attractive option for many reasons, though, is to buy the laptop with Linux preloaded, as I’ve noted before. You typically pay a little bit more, but you also avoid any headaches that may arise from getting everything to “just work.”

• The Linux Setup – Jon “maddog” Hall, Linux International

  Jon “maddog” Hall is a bit of a legend in the Linux community, so it’s truly an honor to have his participation here. Jon makes a number of interesting (and, of course, provactive points). For instance, he chooses his distribution based upon his client, rather than choosing what he personally prefers. And he gravitates toward software that offers the most functionality, rather than the easiest, which is an interesting counterpoint to the many in the “choose the simplest tool for the job” camp.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.3 Boosts Linux Mobility

• Android and Linux re-merge into one operating system

• New Power Management Phases For Linux 3.4 Kernel

  Just one day after the Linux 3.3 kernel was released, the power management pull request for the Linux 3.4 kernel has already been submitted.

  Rafael J. Wysocki submitted the email pull request with the power management changes for the 3.4 kernel. Key items include the introduction of early/late suspend/hibernation device call-backs, generic PM domains extensions and fixes, devfreq updates, device PM QoS updates, concurrency problem fixes, and system suspend and hibernation fixes.

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Haswell Graphics Code Begins Appearing

    Last month I mentioned that Intel Haswell graphics driver code would soon surface, it’s taken a bit longer than anticipated, but the Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are beginning to push the code publicly so that the hardware enablement can land in Linux distributions ahead of the hardware’s availability a year from now.

    Due to varying Linux release schedules and development cycles, plus that the open-source Linux graphics drivers can’t be easily updated by end-users without updating most of the system’s core components, Intel’s OTC developers are left to push out their new hardware support code quite early. Both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Linux driver code began appearing a year in advance, so it’s that time of the year for Haswell graphics code to begin appearing for the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, and the xf86-video-intel DDX.

Applications

• Advanced Firewall Configurations with ipset

• Proprietary

  • Omnesys announces release of its trading solution ‘OMNESYS NEST’ on Linux & Mobile platforms

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Enable WebGL in Firefox [For Blacklisted Graphic Cards]

  • How To Install Gnome Shell in Arch Linux

  • 5 Ways To Make Linux Boot Faster

  • How to Write Linux Init Scripts Based on LSB Init Standard

  • Automatically Updating Banned IPs With hosts.deny (or iptables)

  • Programmer’s friend – the editor: Part 1 – Introduction and vim

  • How To Secure DNS with DNSCrypt

• Games

  • A New Humble Bundle Launches Today

    Last month was the Humble Bundle Mojam for games made in a weekend while previous to that was their first Android-focused Humble Bundle, with the titles still being available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Desktop Environments

• Windows 8 and Linux: The perception of change

  This past week, I played around with Windows 8. One overriding thought forced its way to the front of my consciousness. How would the Windows users react to the drastic change?

  Change is a topic that has been much maligned and very heated over the last couple of years in technology. What brought this about? Within the framework of 2011 and 2012, the subject became a hotbed thanks to Ubuntu Unity and GNOME 3. Both desktops were drastically different than what users had grown accustomed to. What really surprised me was that the desktop metaphor had gone with little to no changes since the release of Windows 95. That’s quite a long time with little marked evolution. Both GNOME and KDE followed what Microsoft had declared the standard, and even both the open source heavy-hitters played along for quite some time. It wasn’t until the release of GNOME 2 and KDE 4 that noticeable change was on the way. When GNOME split its panels into two pieces, there was a little guff, but nothing more than a few ripples were heard. When KDE 4 came out, the Linux community was turned up on its head. But then, when Unity and GNOME 3 were released, one would have thought the Four Horsemen were about to make their apocalyptic appearances.

  But now, a change is coming to the Windows desktop that is nearly as drastic as was from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 or from Classic GNOME to Ubuntu Unity. Windows 8 begins a new era with the adoption of what looks like part Windows 7 and part Windows Mobile (and inspired by open source designs).

• What if Ubuntu were right?

  Last week, I had the chance to have a nice chat with Jonathan Riddell, Canonical employee and Kubuntu maintainer.

  For years, Jonathan was paid to maintain Kubuntu. In a recent move, Canonical announced that Kubuntu will become a community-only project. As a way to start the conversation, I poked him about that:
  — What happened? Is Canonical dropping KDE support?
  — Well, we are doing with KDE exactly what we did with GNOME.
  — Indeed. But what is the reason?
  — Canonical seems to think that none of them managed to reach a non-geek audience.

Distributions

• Do You Trust Your Linux Distro?

  Rogue Linux distributions aren’t something that I tend to put much thought into. After all, considering that Linux distributions make their source code open and transparent, how effective would it be for developers to attempt to include harmful elements?

  Yet despite this commonly held belief, it appears that one new Linux distribution wasn’t exactly it what claimed to be.

  The distribution referred to as anonymous OS wasn’t what many of those who downloaded it thought it would be. Those who tried the Ubuntu-based release thought they were going to be testing a distribution centered around personal privacy and remaining anonymous online.

• Simply improves and polishes

  There are a lot of Russians in the Linux world. Not only in Russia, but also in other parts of the world. The examples? Eugeni Dodonov lives in Brazil, Artyom Zorin lives in Ireland.

• Slackware Derivatives: The Superb Mini Server Project

• New Releases

  • Linpus Linux 1.7 “Lite Desktop” has been released

  • Clonezilla 1.2.12-33

  • CDlinux 0.9.7.1

  • Zorin OS 6 Lite is released

    The Zorin OS Team are proud to finally release Zorin OS 6 Lite, the latest evolution of the Zorin OS Lite series of operating systems, designed specifically for Windows users utilizing old or low-powered hardware.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 And GNOME Shell: Tested And Reviewed

      Ubuntu and Mint don’t want it; Linus called it an “unholy mess.” While most other distros are passing up or postponing GNOME Shell, Fedora is full steam ahead. Does Red Hat know something the rest of us don’t? Or is GNOME 3 really as bad as everyone says?

• Debian Family

  • Debian Edu interview: John Ingleby

    I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we weren’t able to convert many of them into sustainable installations.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 257

      • Ubuntu Linux and Canonical Moving Forward, Two Years After Leadership Change

        Two years ago in March of 2010, Mark Shuttleworth stepped down as CEO of Canonical Ubuntu Linux. Shuttleworth moved aside to deal with the strategic technical issues of the project and his Chief Operating Office Jane Silber stepped up to become the CEO.

      • Amazon EC2 Console Adds Official Ubuntu Support

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Mythbuntu To Offer LTS Only Releases

          The Mythbuntu team has announced that starting with the 12.04 release they will be moving to LTS only releases. Mythbuntu ISOs will only be released for LTS releases.

          The team will continue to provide MythTV packages for non-LTS releases in the standard Ubuntu repositories and the Mythbuntu provided repositories so the users will still be able to install MythTV on non LTS releases.

        • Xubuntu Project Lead Charlie Kravetz Resigns

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Cutting Off The Root: The Future Of Community Developed Android

      The CyanogenMod team made news last week when they announced that future versions of their venerable Android build would no longer include root-level access by default, a massive departure from essentially every other custom Android ROM. Some have questioned the move, claiming that removing root undermines the very idea of running a custom ROM.

    • Cyanogenmod announces 7.2 release candidate

      ANDROID DISTRIBUTION Cyanogenmod has announced that Cyanogenmod 7.2 finally entered release candidate status.
      Cyanogenmod’s popular Android distribution has been ported to many devices and while the outfit is busy readying Cyanogenmod 9 based on Android 4.0, it is still working on Cyanogenmod 7.2. The operating system, based on Android 2.3.7 Gingerbread, has finally reached release candidate status, supporting 70 devices.

    • The Humble Bundle for Android #2

    • Humble Android Bundle 2 Goes Live

    • Second Humble Bundle for Android includes Zen Bound 2, Canabalt

    • Projector Android Phone Samsung Galaxy Beam Coming To India

      Tweet

      Samsung’s projector phone Galaxy Beam is an impressive device. We played with the phone during the Mobile World Congress and liked it very much. While the release date of the phone is still unknown we got reports that Indians will be getting this phone in April. IBN Live reports that “The device will be launched in India in April”. There is no report on the price of the phone.

    • New Motorola phone elbows RAZR aside with bigger screen, gets caught on blurrycam

    • Samsung releases Galaxy S II Android 4.0 source code

      The update to Ice Cream Sandwich just started rolling out to the Samsung Galaxy S II last week and has yet to reach users in many regions, but the build’s code can now be found at Samsung’s open source portal. The release won’t be immediately useful for those looking to get Android 4.0 on their Galaxy S II right now, but it will make it a heck of a lot easier for the dev community to create custom software builds based on the latest version of Android.

    • Samsung Galaxy S III may build LTE into the chip

      Samsung’s long-in-development Galaxy S III may be the first smartphone with LTE-based 4G built into the processor. Apparent leaks from an executive to the Korea Times had a quad-core Exynos processor shipping with both LTE 4G and HSPA 3G inside. The move would supposedly be to reduce the “huge amounts” Samsung has to pay to Qualcomm to get 4G, the anonymous insider said.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Google’s Nexus Tablet Priced At $149?

    Tweet

    Last year in December when Google chairman Eric Schmidt said that “in the next six months we plan to market a tablet of the highest quality” it was not clear what he meant by that.

    The rumors were rife that Google was working on its own tablet on the lines on Nexus Phones. A Google tablet is due ever since Google announced ICS, which brings all Google devices under one OS. Now reports are coming that Google has picked ASUS for their tablet and it will be priced to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire. The tablet will have a 7-inch screen, according to reports.

  • iBerry Launches $198 ICS Tablet For India

    The tablet is running Android 4.0 aka Ice Cream Sandwich on 1.0 GHz ARM Cortex A8 system processor. The tablet features a 7-inch LCD capacitive touchscreen. It has a 2 megapixel main camera and a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera. The tablets has an impressive 1GB of RAM and comes with 4GB storage. It sports a microSDHC card slot (with up to 32GB supported) so you can expand as much storage as you want. It has a mini USB port and Rechargeable Li-poly 4000MAh battery. It claims to offer up to 25 hours of music, up to 5 hours of video and up to 6 hours of Web browsing.

MINIX 3.2.0 – the little operating system that could?

OFFICIAL: webOS Open Source Roadmap Update

Back in December, we announced that webOS would be going Open Source (thumbs up from me). Now, we have an official word from the webOS Developer blog: Enyo, the JavaScript app framework, is now available for download right here.

OSI’s new Board

Last Friday the OSI Board held a special meeting to fill vacancies that had arisen by the departure of three directors – Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. Michael Tiemann left the Board after serving as OSI President for many years and leaves a large gap which the board will only fill thoughtfully; as a consequence, Martin Michlmayr, currently OSI Secretary, was temporarily appointed Acting President and the election of a full new President scheduled for the first meeting of the new Board, on April 4th. The Board warmly thanks all three for the contribution they have made to OSI.

OSI reforms reach board level

The Open Source Initiative has announced three new board members: Mike Millinkovich, Luis Villa and Deb Bryant. From 1 April, they will be taking over seats on the open source advocating organisation’s board which were freed by the departure of Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. As announced at FOSDEM 2012, for the first time, the OSI board invited nominations for two of the seats from non-directors, specifically the new OSI affiliates; they retained one seat for a board-only appointment.

How to develop open-source software within any kind of company

Six Open-Source Recommendations Every Enterprise Should Know in 2012

Rackspace’s open source cocktail: Whiskey on Apache

Rackspace has been building what is arguably a reasonably respectable pedigree in open source technologies.

It was summer of 2010 that the company partnered with NASA to launch the open source cloud computing operating system OpenStack. Built to compete with VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Azure, the OpenStack project has seen a list of blue chip vendor names sign up as community members since its launch.

Akamai Introduces Open Source Mobile Test Agent

Sony launches open source volunteering app

From today people using Android smartphones will be able to access YouthNet’s online volunteering database, Do-it, through a mobile application.

VMware Announces New Spring Integrations for Open Framework

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox is about to get SPDY

  • Mozilla web platform chief Chris Blizzard exits for startup

    CNet reports that Blizzard joined Mozilla in 1998 and spearheaded efforts to transform the web from a series of documents into a software platform running across connected devices ranging from mobile phones and tablets to televisions and cars. Much of Blizzard’s work focused on the HTML5 web standard.

SaaS

• OpenStack: Cloud Computing Answer for Dell, HP and IBM Resellers?

  The cloud computing strategies at Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM have a common thread. It’s called OpenStack — the open source cloud platform. The VAR Guy therefore asks an obvious question: Is OpenStack a path forward for hardware resellers that are seeking to develop public and private cloud services strategies? Hmmm…

  First, here’s a bunch of background. Within the next two months or less, Hewlett-Packard is expected to unveil the HP Cloud — which will compete with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Windows Azure. Meanwhile, IBM quietly in joined the OpenStack effort in February 2012, though no major announcement was made. And Dell has been an OpenStack proponent since 2010.

• Does the Average CIO Know Enough About OpenStack?

CMS

• Joomla Jumps to the Enterprise

• Acquia Announces ‘Enterprise Drupal Gardens’

• Warner adopts more flexible Drupal-based platform for artist websites

• Fans of Drupal software connect in Denver

Education

• Are libraries resisting open source?

  My husband and I are librarians. We were talking recently about library training, the library profession, the open source movement, and how open source digital content is being distributed today in public libraries. We were struck by the way that open source thinking has infiltrated many areas—but not yet the profession or institution of librarians.

Healthcare

• DSS, Inc. Launches New vxVistA Extension Hub to Support the Department of Veterans Affairs Open Source VistA Application

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• An Interview with Richard Stallman on Freedom, Android, Amazon, Facebook, Steve Jobs…

• 23 years on and still people don’t get free software

• Talk Of GCC 5.0 To Be Modular, More Like LLVM

  Last week a large discussion began among GCC developers about their hopes and plans for GCC 5.0. The common theme is for GCC 5 to be more like the increasingly-popular LLVM compiler infrastructure project.

  David Malcolm, a Red Hat developer, initially forked a GCC development list thread and re-titled it to GCC 5? and laid out his views. In his lengthy message he talked about the ongoing work for moving more of the GNU Compiler Collection from being written in plain C to being in C++, the need for a proper GCC plug-in API, and moving GCC towards being a collection of libraries.

Project Releases

• Phoronix Test Suite 3.8-Bygland Officially Arrives

Openness/Sharing

• OpenROV: Open source robotics seek sharing, travel, gold
  

  OpenROV is a project that provides plans and software for a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). Currently, it’s a series of prototypes, with the goal of a fully-realized design of an underwater exploration device.

  It was originally created to explore Hall City Cave in northern California. The cave has a lake where robbers supposedly dropped gold. The ROV has made a successful journey into the lake, although it hasn’t yet struck gold.

• Open Data

  • Pushing for open data? 3 steps to consider

Programming

• Google Summer of Code 2012: mentoring organisations announced

  Google has announced the accepted mentoring organisations for its eighth annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event. According to Google Open Source Programs Office (OSPO) member Carol Smith, there were more than 400 mentoring applications for this year’s contest, of which 180 open source projects were accepted – 41 of these are new to GSoC.

Finance

• Greg Smith Isn’t the First to Leave Goldman Sachs Over Morals

  People are reflected in glass as they walk past Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City. Photo by Mario Tama via Getty Images.

• Reimagining capitalism—as principled, patient, and truly social

  While the global financial meltdown and its aftershocks have unleashed a flood of indignation, condemnation, and protest upon Wall Street, the crisis has exposed a deeper distrust and implacable resentment of capitalism itself.

  Capitalism might be the greatest engine of prosperity and progress ever devised, but in recent years, individuals and communities have grown increasingly disgruntled with the implicit contract that governs the rights and responsibilities of business. The global economy and the Internet have heightened our sense of interconnectedness and sharpened our awareness that when a business focuses only on enriching investors, managers view the interests of customers, employees, communities—and the fate of the planet—as little more than cost trade-offs in a quarter-by-quarter game.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • Demand Swift Rejection of ACTA

      Crucial discussions going on in the EU Parliament will determine the fate of ACTA. Whereas the rapporteur David Martin is siding with the EU Commission in attempting to defuse the debate and postpone the final vote on ACTA, other members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) insist on voting in the coming months, as originally planned. By urging for a swift rejection of ACTA ahead of next week’s meetings in the Parliament, EU citizens have a decisive role to play.