10.24.13
Posted in DRM at 11:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Digital handcuffs in Web standards are discussed in a new article from CMSWire
A week ago, following recent criticisms of DRM in HTML5 (going back to June), CMSWire asked me: “Will the decision by W3C to include encrypted media extensions into the HTML5.1 standard have a positive or negative effect on web experiences?” An article has just been published to address this subject and my take on it (which is in the second page, closing the article) was as follows:
Web experiences are not the sole factor to consider here. Several years ago, Microsoft used such arguments to promote Silverlight and Adobe had promoted Adobe Flash Player by saying it would enhance web experiences. This overlooks a lot of the attributes of the Web, including search/indexing, navigation by standard link structure, universal access, etc. But there are bigger issues here.
In order to effectively tackle the question we need to lay bear what DRM in HTML 5.x would mean. DRM is a mechanism that prevents access to information. It is designed to facilitate a particular business model of particular parties, which are only some of many. DRM denies the majority of people — or bots — the ability to obtain data. This in itself is against the raison detre or the spirit of the World Wide Web. If the Web was motivated by sharing, then it would best serve society by encouraging business models of abundance, not artificial scarcity.
The step taken by the W3C sought to make it easier for conglomerates that advocate DRM to advance their agenda which they had long lobbied for. We already know, based on experience, that many companies embraced a model of open access or open data, only to yield benefits to all sides, maximising access.
To pose this as a problem of “web experiences” is to present a loaded question. Everyone wants a good web experience, but the issue at stake is inherently one of power and control. Do we want to emancipate Web users or further empower the copyright monopoly? Whose interests are we promoting?
This response, quite frankly, was written too quickly, but it hopefully represents opposition to DRM in HTML5 adequately enough. █
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux, IBM, Microsoft, Office Suites, OpenOffice at 9:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The latest FUD from Forrester and who’s behind it; more on IBM’s Power PR and why it should not be taken at face value
AS we showed in previous years, the marketing company (masquerading as “analyst”) called Forrester is Microsoft’s go-to entity for Free software bashing and GNU/Linux FUD. Microsoft literally pays Forrester to produce reports that belittle GNU/Linux. It’s just a real damn shame that Forrester gets caught doing this and Microsoft’s red-handed actions have them red-faced in the international press.
As one who spent many years working with statistics (common tool in computer vision) I am quite familiar with ways of cheating and Forrester [via [1]] seems to be cheating again [2], in pretty much the same way that IDC cheapted for Microsoft several years ago. If one looks carefully enough at who Forrester has surveyed, it is “a survey of 155 Forrester clients with responsibility for those investments.” Who are those clients and what are their relative roles? It doesn’t say. Forrester is gleefully generalising based on this biased sample (geographically, economically, etc.); classic tactic. ‘Disclosure’ without even names.
ZDNet, the vile tabloid which gave Forrester a blog (conflict of interest), already covers this paid-for propaganda as though it is factual and also “news” [3], claiming (in the headline even) that “Microsoft Office fends off open source OpenOffice and LibreOffice” (no attribution to Forrester even).
“Forrester is gleefully generalising based on this biased sample (geographically, economically, etc.); classic tactic.”Really? Says who? Says Forrester. So is Forrester registering billions of users’ computers and then doing a census? Of course not, see the methodologies. It’s bogus, but Forrester tries to pass it off as “professional”. Well, professional FUD it sure is because it is penetrating the press and is proving effective (FUD well worth the money). Microsoft-friendly press puts that forth as some kind of universal fact, not even scrutinising the methods, the messengers, the funder, the polled population, etc. That’s not real journalism, it’s simply PR relayed via Forrester.
Taking into account what Rob Weir (of IBM) says this week [4], “[t]he OpenOffice brand is strong and growing. Over 30% of consumers surveyed had heard of it. Of those who had heard of it, 67% had given it a try.” He also says that “[o]f those who tried OpenOffice almost 78% continued to use OpenOffice.”
Sounds pretty decent, but the IBM-dominated Apache OpenOffice is not to be trusted either. IBM in general is not worth trusting, definitely not with it comes to “trusted computing”. Regarding IBM Power investments, which have had a Linux-themed PR campaign, some say that it’s partly about the NSA: [via Gary Edwards]
The Other Reason Why IBM Throws A Billion At Linux (With NSA- Designed Backdoor)
[...]
Then another boon for IBM. Experts at the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BIS) determined that Windows 8 is dangerous for data security. It allows Microsoft to control the computer remotely through a “special surveillance chip,” the wonderfully named Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and a backdoor in the software – with keys likely accessible to the NSA and possibly other third parties, such as the Chinese. Risks: “Loss of control over the operating system and the hardware” [read…. LEAKED: German Government Warns Key Entities Not To Use Windows 8 – Links The NSA.
Governments and companies overseas paid rapt attention. They’re big customers of our American tech heroes – and they’re having second thoughts, and some are cancelling orders. Tech companies are feeling the heat. A debacle IBM apparently decided not to let go to waste.
This is a story worth exploring in isolation.
What are the true numbers behind OpenOffice and LibreOffice adoption? It’s hard to tell without a census. Free software is being spread vertically and unless it’s improperly designed it also discourages spying that’s needed to count the number of active installations. If Forrester claims to know how OpenOffice and LibreOffice are doing, then it is lying; but on whose behalf? My wife uses OpenOffice at this very moment while I’m typing this. She uses a Live CD, so how can the likes of Forrester count it? They can’t. They can only pretend to be able to. █
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Nine out of 10 firms simply give staff the installed version of Office, with only six percent offering some or all employees a non-Microsoft alternative, according to a Forrester survey.
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The OpenOffice brand is strong and growing. Over 30% of consumers surveyed had heard of it. Of those who had heard of it, 67% had given it a try. That number is changed little. This is an opportunity for Apache OpenOffice marketing volunteers to improve both of these numbers. Of those who tried OpenOffice almost 78% continued to use OpenOffice. This is a modest increase, but there is certainly room to improve here. Put it altogether, and the estimated user share, the percentage of US internet users who use OpenOffice “sometimes” or “regularly” is 16.1%, nearly a 50% improvement year-over-year.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Hardware at 9:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The ascent of machines that are controlled by their users rather than by companies and sociopaths who may run them
ONCE upon a time, the likes of Bill Gates demonised and ostracised people who had shared code and ‘dared’ to suggest that control over software should be put in the hands of many (the users). But that selfish ideology is quickly eroding. Nowadays, devices that sell well are those which empower users, both at the hardware and software level. Raspberry Pi, for instance, is selling quite well [1] and creating jobs in the UK. The Raspberry Pi Foundation sure is thriving [2] and it is getting support from some large corporations. Arduino too is doing well [3] and it’s hardly alone; this is part of a trend now [4] — something we never saw in previous years.
Software freedom is very important, but it is not enough. If hardware refuses to boot particular bits of code (e.g. TiVoization) or if Free software like Ubuntu indirectly trasmits your search queries to strong CIA partners like Amazon, then freedom is seriously compromised. We need to work at many levels to assure that hackability (as in modifiability) returns to being the norm. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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For British computing this is quite a day. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that a million of the tiny cheap computers aimed at transforming education have now been made in the UK.
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The creators of the $25 credit-card-sized microcomputer Raspberry Pi didn’t intend to start a hacking revolution — they just wanted to encourage a new generation of young computer users to learn how to program.
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A Shenzhen-based startup called Wizarm has launched an Indiegogo campaign for a hackable media player with DVR recording, HDMI pass-through, Miracast support, and video overlay capabilities. The Wizarm device dual-boots Android and Linux on a Samsung Exynos 5250 system-on-chip, and offers SATA storage and extensive I/O including USB, HDMI in/out, DisplayPort, and S/PDIF.
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Posted in FUD, GNU/Linux at 8:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: What John Carmack actually said about GNU/Linux and what the press is trying to claim that he said
A RELATIVELY short while ago John Carmack spoke about about SteamOS [1] and some Web site said in its headline that “John Carmack thinks the Steam Machine’s biggest problem is Linux” (untrue). I was at first fooled by this headline. Others were too, and moreover they propagated this lie/distrotion. Having seen, not too long ago, how Carmack’s words had been warped by the anti-GNU/Linux camp to gather some malicious rhetoric, I decided to look closely at what he actually said [2]. Here is the complete quote: “I’m afraid that I might be at that same point right now where I’m like “making your own console OS? Are you crazy?” Maybe ten years from now they’re going to look like they’ve made billions of profits again with it. It still seems a little bit dicey to me, getting everything moved over to Linux, pushing from that side of things, but given their track record I’m a little hesitant to… if it were some other random company I would be pseudo-scornful but it’s Valve so I’m not.”
From the sound of it, the challenge — not the “problem” — is getting everything ported. That’s a very different thing from what the headline above insinuates. Moreover, as admitted by Carmack himself, the size of Valve makes him doubt somewhat any issues associated with feasibility. Carmack was misquoted when it comes to GNU/Linux before; he may be an ActiveX apologist at times, but don’t let his famous name (he is widely respected in his area) be misused by Microsoft boosters.
If people want to see some real GNU/Linux bashing, they look no further than the latest rant from Mr. Torvalds himself [3]. As someone said to me some hours ago: “I hope this inspires Fedora to get involved with Hurd and other kernels. This reliance on one kernel is a bit worrying. LT wrote a kernel, not a complete OS, nor does he roll out distros – but he doesn’t seem to give a shit about that side of things and their problems. On the other hand he takes the money of the big corporations such as intel, ibm etc.. Yeh, he has a contract which says he can do what he wants..” █
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At Nvidia’s Montreal conference, when asked for his opinion on Valve’s recently announced SteamOS and Steam Box, John Carmack initially called the plans “dicey”. Expanding on that he said “if it were some other random company I would be pseudo-scornful but it’s Valve so I’m not.”
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Ever since Valve announced its three-tier approach to bringing PC gaming to the living room — Steam OS, the Steam Machine, and the Steam Controller — people have been divided on whether or not it’s a sound idea. John Carmack, a man who changed the face of PC gaming at Id Software, thinks the Steam Machine’s odds of succeeding are “a bit dicey.”
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Linus Torvalds posted a very simple and direct message on Google+ addressed to the Fedora people. What followed next involved accusations and various veiled insults.
The father of Linux had a very simple question: how come the Fedora developers were not regenerating the distribution images with newer kernels and packages?
“Is there some basic reason why you never regenerate the install images? Right now the F19 install images use some ancient 3.9-based kernel. Which means that they may boot on most machines, but it’s missing wireless ID’s for new laptops etc, so making it useful is unnecessarily painful,” said Linus Torvalds.
The problem is that, if you have a new laptop and an old kernel, you might not get full functionality from it, especially if the wireless module is unrecognized by the kernel.
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Posted in GNOME, GNU/Linux, KDE at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: GNOME is ditched by Cinnamon, which is yet another example of users and developers taking control in the interest of users
DEALING with varying user requirements is hard. There is no one-size-fits-all paradigm when it comes to desktop environments. Just as we require many types of vehicles (trucks, vans, motorcycles, etc.) we need to facilitate a variety of needs, which vary from person to person. Microsoft and Apple ignore this and they try to shoehorn people into their own restrictive environments. GNU/Linux is different. Development of KDE, the world’s most advanced desktop, carries on [1,2] and documentation improves as well [3]. The KDE Community Forums turns 5 [4] and new users come to KDE [5], which is — although it is debatable — better than GNOME when it comes to applications but not as a desktop for new users [6] (KDE is very advanced, too much for some). Cinnamon 2.0, in the mean time, is forking GNOME [7] and even ditching it [8]. It is now available in Ubuntu 13.10 [9], which is Mirless [10]. Many distributions still use classic GNOME [11] or modified GNOME [12], but what’s clear overall is that over time we are left with more choices of desktop environments. KDE itself has been forked to satisfy those who wish to keep the KDE3 experience. This is a strength, not a weakness. █
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The Projectsite of the handbook is placed under: http://pactivehandbook.sf.net. There you can download a PDF in the english or german language. Also a XHTML version of the book is available in both languages there.
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I moved to Kubuntu early Sunday morning, and it was not without a few minor perils. I wanted a clean install, thus formatting /home was a must. I was coming from Linux Mint 14 XFCE to Kubuntu 13.04 which of course uses KDE as the default desktop manager. I really didn’t want any cross contamination in /home nor did I want to dual-boot. It was all in or nothing. So I chose the all in and I am glad I did.
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Video: While one desktop appears clearly superior to the other, its rival offers some better apps for key uses.
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Linux Mint’s Cinnamon 2.0 desktop fork of the GNOME Shell has been tagged and is being readied for release.
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Cinnamon, the desktop shell using in Linux Mint, has finally released v2.0, which features new window tiling and snapping, along with enhanced user management options. And there are lots of other changes under the hood too, including a new backend that no longer requires GNOME.
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Cinnamon 2.0, a fork of GNOME 3 desktop environment, developed by Clement Lefebvre, the father of Linux Mint, has been released to critical acclaim and now you have a chance to see it working in Ubuntu 13.10.
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After approximately two weeks of testing, the Arch Linux developers promoted earlier today, October 7, the recent GNOME 3.10 desktop environment to the stable channels, allowing users to upgrade their six-month-old GNOME 3.8 installation.
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Thanks to a leaked screenshot on Google+, we’ve recently discovered that the upcoming and highly anticipated SolusOS 2 Linux operating system will have a darkish and highly modified version of the recently released GNOME 3.10 desktop environment.
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Posted in Debian, GNU/Linux at 4:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
New goodies from Raphaël Hertzog
Summary: Some news from the land of Debian, which by some measures is the most widely used distribution of GNU/Linux
Debian 7,1 is still used by many (like myself or some derivatives [1]), but a new release is announced [2] and other Debian news [3,4] from key people [5] can suggest that a piece of software called Distro Tracker is created to enhance what we have. The new project page says that “Debian Package Tracker is a set of services tailored to distribution developers, package maintainers, and anybody who might have to interact with those people (upstream developers, bug reporters, advanced users, etc). It lets you follow almost everything related to the life of a package (or of a set of packages).” This will hopefully make Debian GNU/Linux even more excellent than it presently is. Thanks to Raphaël Hertzog for this. Credit also goes to Marko Lalic, who was funded by Google to work on this. █
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The other day I was pleased and surprised to discover that Marcelo Salvador had published a video on Youtube showing how to install the standalone Debian Edu / Skolelinux profile. This is the profile intended for use at home or on laptops that should not be integrated into the provided network services (no central home directory, no Kerberos / LDAP directory etc, in other word a single user machine). The result is 11 minutes long, and show some user applications (seem to be rather randomly picked). Missed a few of my favorites like celestia, planets and chromium showing the Zygote Body 3D model of the human body, but I guess he did not know about those or find other programs more interesting. 
And the video do not show the advantages I believe is one of the most valuable featuers in Debian Edu, its central school server making it possible to run hundreds of computers without hard drives by installing one central LTSP server.
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Debian 7.2, an update to the “Wheezy” branch, was released over the weekend fixing quite a few issues. As usual, The Debian Project encourages users to update through the package managers. Images are available for new installs.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Remember the “GNU/Linux costs more…” FUD from M$ and sycophants? Here’s what the French National Police found:
“Part of the TCO reduction comes in upfront costs: savings on licences and cost of licence access, and, when it comes to hardware purchasing, the force can buy desktops without an OS already installed, saving €100 or so per PC.
However, the savings aren’t just from software licences costs: the change has also meant a reduction in local tech support needed, while Canonical charges the organisation €1 per machine per year to provide support.”
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With the Mir display server failing to make the cut, Ubuntu 13.10, rather than being a stepping-stone on the way to form-factor convergence with 14.04, seems more like an obligatory release.
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Saucy, now officially known as Ubuntu 13.10, is a wonderful achievement by a very large and diverse collection of teams and individuals. Each of us is motivated by something different – in fact, we might have very different visions of what the ideal desktop looks like or what the default set of applications should be. But we manage, in the spirit of ubuntu, to work together to make something wonderful like 13.10, which serves the needs and goals of a very large number of people and communities.
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As the user types a search query in the Dash, the partial query is transmitted to Canonical’s servers, which will analyze the input and decide what to present. The new backend uses a number of heuristics to attempt to find the most relevant results to send back to the user. Some of the Internet sources that the new backend can tap include Github, reddit, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google News, The Weather Channel, and Yelp.
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Finally, the most expected distribution in Linux World, Ubuntu 13.10 ‘Saucy Salamander’ final has been released, there is no official release announcement yet, but the download page of Saucy has been updated with the final packages. Just like most of you, We also expected it very long. This awesome distribution has come with plenty of new features and improvements.
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LINUX DISTRIBUTOR Canonical has announced its free Ubuntu 13.10 Linux operating system (OS) release, which is available for both PCs and smartphones from today.
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Ubuntu 13.10 for servers and the cloud will feature OpenStack Havana, new deployment tools and other updates aimed at enhancing the scalability of the Linux-based operating system.
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Find out why Jack Wallen thinks that Ubuntu 13.10 is a solid, reliable platform that just works. Do you agree?
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While the Ubuntu 13.10 release is just over one week away, Mir still hasn’t officially landed in the Ubuntu Phone images as the new display server. There’s been some bugs but it looks like it will now be landing rather soon.
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Google’s now-famous driverless cars initiative seems to have kick-started a new kind of war. Various manufacturers are fighting tooth and nail to bring the most advanced driverless car technology to the market as fast as they can. But what’s even more intriguing to me was the presence of Ubuntu, first on Google’s driverless cars, and now here, on this Mercedes-Benz driverless research car. Autonomous long-distance drive technology demonstration on a Merc.
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Canonical announced that the next version of Ubuntu for server and cloud environments will be released on 17 October.
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Canonical continues to make the Ubuntu server edition speedier and more versatile in cloud environments.
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Ubuntu 13.10 may not be the most exciting desktop Linux, but it is very solid and contains many useful new features.
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After a few days of wrangling, the very latest Ubuntu Touch images have the Mir Display Server replacing Android’s SurfaceFlinger.
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Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) is scheduled for launch on October 17, but users of the previous operating systems from Canonical are wondering why they should upgrade at all, given the fact that the new one doesn’t seem to have too many features.
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The open-source Ubuntu Linux operating system, which in recent years has become one of the most popular distributions, is about to get a major update. On Oct. 17, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu project, will release Ubuntu 13.10, also referred to as the “Saucy Salamander,” with new desktop, server and cloud-facing features. On the desktop, the Saucy Salamander does not mark a dramatic visual departure from its predecessor, Ubuntu 13.04, also known as the “Raring Ringtail.” The 13.10 desktop does, however, benefit from a new Smart Scopes feature, which provides a unified search capability across local and network drives, as well search results from other user-definable online locations. With the Saucy Salamander, Ubuntu has also merged security and privacy settings into one system, making it easier to control and manage. In addition, the new Ubuntu release benefits from the recent Linux 3.11 kernel, providing improved performance and stability. For cloud users, Ubuntu 13.10 includes the latest OpenStack Havana release, as well as improvements to the Ubuntu Juju service orchestration system. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the features packed into the Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander release.
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Over the past few years Ubuntu has become somewhat divided from the rest of the Linux community and it could easily be renamed “Linux Marmite,” as you either love it or hate it.
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Criticism gives you two main choices: either you can learn from it, or ignore it and keep on with what you are doing. Sadly, with the introduction of Smart Scopes on to the dash, Ubuntu 13.10 is mostly opting to ignore criticism, pushing ahead with changes that few seem to want and violating Unity’s original design principles in favor of contradictory new ones.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #337 for the week September 30 – October 6, 2013, and the full version is available here.
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Users who wanted Ubuntu without Unity can now try a new distribution called Ubuntu Classic that provides all the features, without any of the Unity components.
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While we are on track to successfully deliver Mir for Ubuntu on smartphones, we are unfortunately not going to be able to deliver Mir + XMir + Unity 7 as the default experience on the desktop.
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In the early days of Ubuntu, it was always a challenge to promote an OS that was so new and little known to the market; we were often asked ‘Ubun what…?”! Over the years, Canonical has grown rapidly, has innovated even faster and the community has spread the word all across the globe. Today, with over 25 million users, Ubuntu is now a safe and perfect choice for customer, offering a stylish and intuitive interface that is fast, secure.
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There are lots of interesting things ahead for Ubuntu desktop users in the next release, but what’s really going to be important is how well Ubuntu does on the smartphone.
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I believe that in the entire history of Ubuntu we are at the most exciting time we have ever experienced.
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One week after writing about the sad state of RadeonSI / GLAMOR support in Ubuntu 13.10, the GLAMOR EGL library has made it through the Saucy Salamander’s queue and landed into the archive for next month’s Ubuntu 13.10 release.
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I have been using Ubuntu Touch 13.10 as a daily driver on my Nexus 7 for about two and a half months now. There are a few minor hiccups and setbacks, but I can honestly say that it has improved drastically from the original MWC Demo.
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I have talked in the past about how critical I feel app developers are to the Ubuntu convergence story. If developers can go from idea to implementation to publishing quickly and easily, it will make the overall Ubuntu platform more attractive and featureful for users, partners, OEMs, carriers and more.
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A powerful new Ubuntu PC has been revealed by Linux computer company System76.
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All in all, I was very happy with the book. It takes some difficult subjects and boils them down nicely, giving the reader a way to quickly get services up and running. The miscellaneous tips provided are quite useful and will probably save readers a good deal of time over the course of a career. Server administration sometimes comes across as a dark art and it is nice to see a book which so thoroughly shines a light onto the subject. Whether you are studying to become a system administrator or just looking to set up a server at home to handle personal e-mail, I think this is a good text to get newcomers started.
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Will Canonical offerings for PCs, smartphones, tablets catch on?
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AppGrid, the lightweight (but proprietary) Ubuntu Software Center alternative which we covered recently, was updated yesterday and it should now work on Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10 and 13.10. Initially, the application was only available for Ubuntu 13.04.
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Want a really easy orchestration tool for Ubuntu on Microsoft’s Azure cloud? It’s here now with Ubuntu Juju.
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Full Circle – the independent magazine for the Ubuntu Linux community
are proud to announce the release of our seventy seventh issue.
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Ubuntu continues to push the envelope and aggravate the community with each new release. In this newest version, there aren’t any “Unity” type changes to the UI, but one of the more controversial changes in recent memory is just about ready for prime time as they change the underlying Window Manager to “Mir”. Let’s take a quick look at that and some of the other changes from version 13.04 to 13.10.
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the final beta release of Ubuntu 13.10 Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.
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The distro before the LTS comes with some new toys in the shape of Canonical’s display server Mir. Is it a sign of good things to come?
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The final beta of Ubuntu 13.10 has been made available for download.
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After showing improved performance with the new VMware Fusio 6, are there any upgrades in moving virtual machines from Ubuntu 13.04 to the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 13.10?
As the latest Phoronix benchmarks to deliver, after I finished that VMware Fusion 6.0.0 testing on Ubuntu 13.04 from the Haswell-based MacBook Air system, I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 to see if there’s any performance improvements to find with the 13.10 “Saucy Salamander” packages over 13.04 stable.
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Ubuntu 13.10 , code-named Saucy Salamander, is set to hit a download mirror near you sometime next month. But that won’t happen until major bugs have been fixed.
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Along with the release of Ubuntu 13.10 Final Beta, Canonical also unveiled the second and final Beta version for the upcoming Ubuntu GNOME 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) Linux operating system.
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On the surface, based on the second beta just released, Ubuntu 13.10 is shaping up to be a solid, if slightly dull, Linux distro.
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Have an Android tablet or TV box with a Rockchip RK3188 processor, and wish it ran a desktop operating system rather than a mobile OS? A new build of PicUntu is available, bringing the full Ubuntu Linux experience to devices with RK3188 processors.
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Dobbie03 submitted his desktop to our Desktop Showcase, which is what you should do if you want your desktop featured here! All you have to do is post a nice big screenshot of your work to your kinja blog (the one that came with your commenter account), and include links to the wallpaper, widgets, skins, and tools you used to customize it!
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Canonical has assured its community that the Ubuntu desktop version is not lagging behind the Ubuntu Touch and that they are just aiming towards complete convergence.
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I, for one, am looking forward to comparing Wayland, Mir and X over the coming year to see which one best serves my needs. When we have options we all win.
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As we come up on just a few more days left to submit nominations for the Ubuntu Community Council, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write about my experiences on the council for the past 4 years (and 2 more if you’ll have me!) and why I highly encourage others to nominate themselves of folks in the community who they feel are qualified.
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Flavours and Variants
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Elementary OS 0.2 Luna is a linux distro that has become quite popular recently. It is based on Ubuntu and designed to look somewhat like a mac. There have been many attempts to get a mac like feel on the linux desktop and Pear OS is the most significant one. However all of them fall short somewhere or the other.
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1. Muelle by Manuel Puentes with 1261 Votes (15%)
2. Two Jack Lake by C Ayers with 1050 Votes (12%)
3. A Winter Magic by Luciash D’Being with 1033 Votes (12%)
4. Smolikas by George Blades Voulgarakis with 923 Votes (11%)
5. Moody by Robert Wicek with 813 Votes (10%)
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ArtistX 1.5, an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to enable artists and creators from a number of fields to work via a live and free environment, has just been released.
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Just when things were looking pretty dull today, I spotted an exciting tidbit of news. Jeff Hoogland announced a new release of Bodhi Linux today, September 12, 2013. It’s been six months since 2.3.0 was released and today’s announcement addresses that and future plans as well.
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Each Linux Mint release usually offers four flavors, to say nothing about LMDE: Mint Cinnamon, Mint MATE, Mint KDE and Mint Xfce. The MATE edition is based around a desktop environment forked from GNOME 2, featuring a similar interface and a familiar user interaction experience. MATE started as a need of some users to have the classic GNOME 2.x interface once GNOME 3 was released with huge interface changes. MATE does offer a classic, solid and familiar interface, and it also provides a compositing window manager for graphical effects and transparency.
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On October 3, David Tavares has announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the third and last Beta release of the upcoming Pear OS 8 Linux operating system.
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Every six months, my world gets thrown into a state of pure, blissful chaos.
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Kernel at 4:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Commentary about the Linux Foundation’s activities as of late
TThe Linux Foundation’s Web sites have been full of news and PR recently. There were some major events and also a new force for promotion. Scholarships were being granted [1,2,3], a paper was released about the Long-Term Support Initiative [4,5], several happenings in New Orleans were being noted [6,7], technical articles were published (e.g. [8,9,10]), and future events were being announced (e.g. for the car industry [11]). There are several other examples [12,13,14], but the latest interesting news may come from the UK.
“Amicable communication with the Linux Foundation can help correct what this marketing-led organisation sometimes says.”The LinuxCon Europe conference, which takes place in Edinburgh right now (this week), covers issues associated with licensing, including the GPL [15]. OIN speaks out (lawyers) and so does Mr. Zemlin, who is a branding/marketing person. They actually make some reasonable points and they don’t overuse propaganda terms like “intellectual property” (at least based on the report from IDG, which also tried to explain how to choose a Free software licence a few weeks ago [16]). A few weeks ago the Linux Foundation finally paid a small tribute to the GNU project, congratulating it on its 30th anniversary. Linux owes its success to the GPL, the GNU project which includes GCC, and of course the philosophy of GNU, which surely attracted many developers.
What’s noteworthy here is that despite our criticism of the Linux Foundation (most recently for revisionism) there are many good things to be said as well. Amicable communication with the Linux Foundation can help correct what this marketing-led organisation sometimes says. If terms like “cloud” or “intellectual property” ever take over the message of “Linux” (GNU/Linux), then we are losing credibility. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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As a first-generation Vietnamese-American, Nam Pho says he learned to make the most of limited resources and opportunities in many facets of his life. When it came to computing, this meant dealing with secondhand hardware. He built his Linux skills through frustrating, but educational, attempts to get old computers up and working again.
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Linux Foundation Training scholarship winner Andrew Dahl is relatively new to the Linux community but he’s already jumped in to help on the XFS file system, fixing bugs and reviewing a small number of patches. As a file system engineer at SGI, he works on NFS, XFS and SGI’s CXFS (Clustered XFS.) But in his spare time he likes to dabble in Qt application development and fix kernel bugs he finds on his current hardware.
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The Linux Foundation today is releasing a new paper that reports on the value of the Long-Term Support Initiative (LTSI), which is a common Linux kernel base for embedded products and is maintained by the Consumer Electronics Working Group at The Linux Foundation.
The paper reports the value of LTSI is $3 million per version. The authors of the paper arrived at the economic value of LTSI based on the methodology originally used in a highly-regarded study by David A. Wheeler and that was later used in a 2008 Linux Foundation study that estimated the value of Linux. Details of the methodology and results as applied to LTSI are on pages 5 and 6 of the report.
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One of the highlights of my time at LinuxCon and CloudOpen this year in New Orleans was the first-ever women in open source luncheon held the very first day of the conference. It was a real pleasure and an inspiration to see women from all backgrounds and levels of experience with Linux and open source come together to talk about their skills and interests in technology.
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High-availability (HA) Linux is increasingly being used to help companies meet market demands for fast-paced R&D and shorter product cycles. The medical industry, for example, is using server clusters to model the effect of drugs, conduct gene sequencing and develop personalized medication. Large telcos, banks and stock exchanges, ISPs and government agencies also rely on HA Linux to ensure minimal service disruptions in their mission critical workloads.
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Linus Torvalds released the 3.11 “Linux for workgroups” kernel on Monday with many new features and fixes that improve performance and lower power consumption. Changes are also in keeping with recent industry trends toward the energy-efficient ARM architecture and the use of solid state drives (SSD).
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Intel left plenty of room for speculation yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) when it announced a low-power, small-footprint processor family called the Quark. One of the biggest questions is whether it will support advanced platforms like Linux.
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A GitHub account may be one of the best ways for open source developers to showcase their technical skills to potential employers. But system administrators and DevOps engineers who don’t code, don’t have an easy equivalent for proving their skills in, say, spinning up a secure server.
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After more than 20 years of development, Linux is the largest, most successful collaborative project in the world. More than 10,000 developers from more than 1,000 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005, according to the foundation’s latest annual development report. It powers servers, mobile devices, stock exchanges, cars, appliances, air traffic control towers, the space station, genomics research… the list goes on and on. So, what’s next?
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To avoid legal difficulties when managing intellectual property for open-source projects, more tech savvy lawyers are needed, according to the Linux Foundation.
Educating lawyers, however, is not the only solution, argued other open-source insiders at the LinuxCon Europe conference in Edinburgh this week.
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Having lawyers with a better understanding of the technology involved in open-source projects would indeed be a way to overcome legal difficulties, said Deb Nicholson, community outreach director of the Open Innovation Network (OIN).
“I would agree that having more tech savvy lawyers that understand open-source legal issues would be good,” Nicholson said. “Smaller companies are desperate to find someone who can advise them,” she said, adding that even if they can pay them, finding an attorney who understands the issues can be difficult.
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While public licenses such as Creative Commons, the GNU General Public License or other free and open-source software licenses have emerged as relatively easy-to-use standardized copyright agreements, more work can be done to make licensing easier, according to Maracke.
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Getting the right license for your open source project can mean the difference between success and failure for your software.
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