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04.01.11

Links 1/4/2011: Linux 2.6.39 Previews, GNOME 3 Live Images

Posted in News Roundup at 3:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Google and ARM reportedly plan to establish standardization for Android/ARM platforms

    Google is reportedly considering a push for standardization of its Android 3.0 hoping the new strategy will help resolve the drawbacks of the operation system; meanwhile, Google may also negotiate with ARM over the possibility of implementing standardization for ARM architecture products, according to sources from notebook players.

  • Pacifistic SuperTux
  • Installing Linux to a Gateway NV53 laptop, a trial for five distros
  • An Introduction to the Linux Shell

    She sells seashells by the seashore. Well, yes… that may be true, but that’s not the type of shell we’re going to talk about here today.

  • Hardware review I

    How well do these components work with Ubuntu 10.10 (and probably other recent GNU/Linux distributions)? Perfectly.

  • Desktop

    • Dialog with the Girlfriend

      About a year ago I made a post about installing Linux on my girlfriend’s laptop. Just recently I was quoted on Linux Insider about how successful the installation had been a year later. I said that I believed it to have been a successful conversion of a Windows user to Linux. My descriptions were from my observations only, not my girlfriend’s. I had not thought at that time to ask my girlfriend what she thought about the change of operating system on her computer.

  • Server

    • Small Cheap Computers in the Server Room

      GNU/Linux on ARM should be a no-brainer for data-centres. There are outfits now jamming hundreds of ARMed cores into 2U.

    • Linux and the storage ecosystem

      Linux is many things, and its power lies in its ability to flexibly support vastly different usage models. But one of Linux’s most important strengths is serving as the workhorse of the storage domain. Thinking about Linux and storage commonly conjures an image of direct-attached disks or the latest file system, but there’s much more to storage and Linux than meets the eye. Elements in the Linux are not only stable but also cutting-edge.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux 2.6.39 Kernel Merge Window Closes With -rc1

      While we have already been benchmarking code for the Linux 2.6.39 kernel a fair amount at Phoronix with the Nouveau page-flipping and z-compression merge plus Nouveau Fermi acceleration, only this afternoon did Linus Torvalds tag the first release candidate for this next major kernel update.

    • Kernel Log: First release candidate for Linux 2.6.39
    • Linux Foundation announces the Linux.com Linux Gurus for 2011

      The non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting Linux, the Linux Foundation, has announced its top five 2011 Linux.com Linux Gurus. The awarding of Guru status is intended to recognise those individuals that have made the greatest contribution to the linux.com community through their participation on the site, by writing blog posts, answering questions, and so on. The contributors earn points as they participate on the site, and these are totalled each year during the period from 16 February to 15 February the following year. The top five points earners are awarded Guru status.

    • Android and the Kernel: It is Not that Simple
    • LM_Sensors 3.3 Brings More Sensory Goodness

      This user-space software project now has support for intrusion detection sensors and humidity sensors. LM_Sensors 3.3.0 also provides support for many sub-features implemented by new hwmon drivers, some arbitrary limits have been removed from libsensors, there’s new generic limit printing code in the sensors utility, and there’s new chips known by the sensors-detect program. There’s also been the variety of i2c/hwmon kernel driver updates in succeeding Linux kernel releases since the release of LM_Sensors 3.2 last October.

    • Linux 2.6.39 RC1 debuts new block device plugging model

      Both Fedora 15 and Ubuntu 11.04 are on track to use the recently released Linux 2.6.38 kernel, which introduced some significant performance gains.

    • APM, and the value in Linux

    • Graphics Stack

      • Here’s The Special AMD Present For Ubuntu Users

        As talked about at length yesterday, the Catalyst 11.3 driver that was just released is not compatible with the X.Org Server 1.10 final ABI. What this means is that this proprietary Linux driver update will not work on Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, and other Linux distributions experiencing major updates. AMD for at least the past seven Ubuntu releases has been seeding Canonical with driver pre-releases to meet the support deadline on new versions of this popular Linux operating system. Over last night, they did this once more.

      • Using Gallium3D On AMD FirePro Workstation GPUs

        How well do AMD’s FireGL/FirePro workstation graphics cards work with the open-source graphics drivers for Linux? It’s something we never have really focused on up to this point, since after all, most workstation users are satisfied with using proprietary display drivers on Linux. It is the workstation market that drives the proprietary Linux driver development after all for AMD and NVIDIA, and that is really the focus of development, not Linux gamers or enthusiasts. But curiosity got the best of me, so here’s what happens if you try to use an expensive FirePro graphics card with the open-source driver stack and the Mesa Gallium3D driver.

      • PowerXpress Support Notebooks Under Linux

        As mentioned this morning when AMD provided Canonical with a Catalyst 11.4 driver pre-release for proprietary Radeon / FirePro support under Ubuntu 11.04, there’s more than just support for Linux 2.6.38 kernel and X.Org Server 1.10. This Linux driver update also provides support for AMD PowerXpress with dual-GPU notebooks.

      • The AMD “Radeon HD 8000″ Open-Source Milestone

        The discussion surrounding issues with the Linux kernel DRM code has been quite interesting. From the 40+ comments so far, there’s been some interesting feedback from some of the key open-source driver developers along with AMD. In particular, the generation to succeed the next-generation of AMD graphics processors (what will be the “Radeon HD 8000 series” if they continue with the same marketing names) should be a pivotal moment for AMD’s open-source strategy.

      • NVIDIA GeForce 400 “Fermi” Series On Nouveau

        With NVIDIA still not providing any open-source support or technical documentation for their graphics processors, for those in the open-source community who seek to use their GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” GPUs without NVIDIA’s binary driver, they are left to use the reverse-engineered, community-created Nouveau driver. Fortunately, the support for the NVIDIA Fermi GPUs is coming along at a respectable pace — with even working OpenGL acceleration — considering that NVIDIA is providing no support at all. In this article are the first benchmarks of this experimental GeForce 400/500 “Nouveau NVC0″ driver versus NVIDIA’s official proprietary driver.

      • AMD Catalyst 11.3 Drops Support For Old X.Org

        With the month ending, Linux users were beginning to wonder where is this month’s proprietary driver update, but AMD’s web team has just uploaded the Catalyst 11.3 binary Linux driver. What’s changed though in this month’s update? Read on to find out.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • KDE or GNOME?

      Why KDE? I don’t know… I sat down once and decided to put all the pros and contras of KDE and GNOME in one list. Result was quite strange… Kubuntu had same number of “pros” and “contras” on KDE side. While GNOME only gave me “pros” and no significant “contra”. So, there is something irrational which makes me to choos KDE when I boot my laptop.

    • Common user interface mistakes in KDE applications, part 4: Being GNOME friendly

      This time I want to talk about being GNOME friendly. While that may sound odd for a KDE developer to think about GNOME, assuming we want our applications to reach the largest possible audience, we should try to ensure GNOME users get a pleasurable experience. After all, a user is a user, there are efforts going on to ensure KDE works well on Windows and Mac OS X, I think we should also take care of GNOME users. They are at least as likely if not more likely to contribute back to our applications.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • the fun in banging our heads together

        After sitting on a train for four hours that whisked me through the countryside of Switzerland and into Germany, I am sitting in a room in Darmstadt that is full of familiar faces, along with one or two less familiar ones.

        For instance, it’s been a few years since I had the opportunity to meet up with Eva, who was KDE e.V. president before I was, and even longer since I got to sit down with Stefan Werden and discuss high level topics about Free software, distributions, KDE, etc. In fact, I think the last time I met up with Stefan for an extended visit was at the Appeal meeting in Berlin all those years ago. We’ve passed each other at conferences a few times since, but today and tomorrow we’re sitting down to really bang our heads together about (what else?) Plasma.

      • Camp KDE: Latest Updates

        Camp KDE 2011 is nearly upon us, but that hasn’t stopped the organizers from continuing to add to the fun. Be sure to check out the Camp KDE web site for the final agenda as well as speaker bios.

      • KDE Software Powers New Consumer-Oriented Computer

        Damien Tardy-Panis interviewed Robert Konopka, one of the founders of Xompu, to find out more about the company and why they chose KDE software. Read on to find out more about Xompu, what they think of KDE and our software, and news on job opportunities with the company.

      • Modern Art: A Look at Krita 2.3
      • 5 More Intriguing KDE Apps

        Ever so often, I take a stroll over to KDE-Apps.org and look at some of the fantastic creations people from the KDE community develop. There are a wide range of apps in nearly every category, but I have selected 5 that stand out and would be very useful additions to my desktop and hopefully yours too. All of these apps are either new or have been recently updated within the past few months.

      • KDE’s Dolphin tips and tricks
      • Nostalgia for those ALSA mixer channels that KMix and GNOME Volume Control used to have?
      • Build a device scalable user interface
      • Menu Button inside Window Decorations

        Peter Penz blogged about removing the Menu from Dolphin. While this is very interesting and nice looking I have a better idea: why not move the menu into the decoration? All what we need is already there. We have the awesome DBus Menu which allows us to send the menu to any other application (in most cases Plasma). So we could use this technology to direct the menu from the window into its decoration. Of course the menu should not be presented in its full completeness but be compacted into one dropdown menu – just like in the Netbook Shell.

      • Buy digiKam Tricks Book, Win a Bag of Photo Goodies

        Time for another giveaway. This time, anyone who buys the digiKam Tricks book has a chance to win a classy f/stop Dial Wristband and a Lomography notebook. As always, the rules are simple: when you buy a copy of the digiKam book, you automatically enter the giveaway. If you buy the book via Amazon, please send me your order confirmation as proof of purchase.

      • New KDE Polishes Linux but Leaves a Few Little Streaks

        The latest KDE version is well worth moving from its GNOME counterpart.

      • the fun in banging our heads together

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome shell extension: new video shows-off the beast within
      • Adventures in the shell

        After months of envy, I decided that since GNOME 3 is to be released in almost two weeks, it was time to try it out. I must say that is is pretty damn cool. Yes, it has a few annoying bugs and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a first release. It is definitely going in the right direction.

      • GNOME 3 Hackfest, Day One

        We have three release team members present. They have told us that they, assisted by Ryan Lortie, will be doing ‘release team things’. The rest of us are mainly busy with marketing and GNOME.Asia organisation. Our websites are a particular focus for the marketing work. Andreas has already added Jason’s first GNOME 3 video to www.gnome3.org as well as a countdown timer. We’re also going to be doing a lot of work on the new gnome.org. We’ll keep you posted as the changes roll in.

      • gnome-color-manager and profiles

        GNOME Color Manager has shown 2D CIE 1931 plots for a couple of years now, but as all color savvy people know, a gamut is a 3D object, and a 2D slice can be horribly inaccurate and misleading sometimes.

      • GNOME3 Live Image version 0.3.0 released

        Release team decided to do another call for tarballs to fix some bugs across the entire GNOME3 platform, so 2.91.93 was released yesterday.

      • GnomeICU is no more

        On July 9, 2000, my first patch to a Free Software project was accepted. It was a patch to fix a small bug in GnomeICU, which was then the best ICQ client for GNOME.

      • On the road to GNOME 3.0
      • GNOME3 live image 0.3.1 released

        As always, you can download it from http://gnome3.org/tryit.html. If you want to install this image on a system, just add “liveinstall” on the boot command line.

      • Another way to try GNOME 3

        Frederik Crozat has been doing a fantastic job of making it easy to try out GNOME 3. To complement his OpenSuSE based live images, we are happy to present a Fedora-based GNOME 3 preview. While this image is based Fedora 15 (beta), it is not the same as the Fedora desktop spin, e.g. it is not installable. We expect to re-spin this image with the final bits for the 3.0 release next week.

      • GNOME:Ayatana – being populated
      • the book was better

        Here is a cute video of a benchmark I’ve been looking at in recent times. It’s nice because it not only shows the performance improvements, but also the themeing fixes that were applied. The benchmark shows glade starting up and loading a huge glade file with 4 different GTK versions. It starts with executing glade on the command line and ends with the app quitting when it’s done loading.

  • Distributions

    • Linux distros build on Conary package system

      The Foresight Linux project released Foresight Linux 2.5, the first major release of this rolling-release Linux distro in two years, featuring Linux 2.6.35, GNOME 2.32.1, KDE 4.6.1, and Xfce 4.8. Meanwhile, rPath released rPath X6, a specialized Linux distro and appliance-building system that, like Foresight, is based on the Conary package manager.

    • Slitaz Linux 3.0- An awesome 30 Mo Linux distribution

      SliTaz GNU/Linux is a mini distribution and live CD designed to run speedily on hardware with 256 MB of RAM. SliTaz uses BusyBox, a recent Linux kernel and GNU software.

    • My Move From Arch To Aptosid

      I recently moved over to Aptosid, and after a few days of using it I think it’s going to be a keeper as a replacement for Arch. While it’s fresh in my mind, I thought I would share my experience of moving – from the perspective of someone who has used Arch Linux for over a year. I’ll give a little background, then a brief summary, then some real details on how I got some things to work.

    • Reviews

      • Zenwalk Linux 7.0

        In summary, I am pretty impressed with Zenwalk Linux 7.0. It looks good and it works well, as long as you don’t have a netbook which needs the latest Broadcom wireless driver. I will probably keep it as the primary distribution on my HP 2133, and once the brcm80211 driver is included in it, I will be considering it for some of the others.

      • First looks at GhostBSD 2.0 and Kororaa Linux 14

    • New Releases

      • Announcing Foresight Linux 2.5.0
      • Foresight Linux 2.5.0!
      • Particularly Exciting Week in Linux

        Linux is usually exciting, but this past week brought several nice developments. Slackware announced another developmental milestone for their next version. Bodhi Linux reached 1.0. Foresight announced their first release in two years. Zenwalk developers released version 7.0. And SimplyMepis gets a release candidate.

      • Something about Slackware

        Slackware server hosting is one of the newest trends in domain hosting that is allowing many users to move from a Windows hosting platform. There are a lot of clients that are accustomed to Windows hosting, but loads of clients are seeking new hosting environments.

        Slackware isn’t exactly a new environment, but it has maintained a widespread use since its inception in 1993. It never quite gained the same popularity as Windows, but it has managed to be popular enough to move from one version to the next.

      • MEPIS 11 RC1: A Quick, Informal Glimpse

        Even though I’m already running MEPIS 11 Beta 3 as my production system, I downloaded the RC version 1 to test it.

        The Live DVD booted with no issue on my box. That’s great. I still need to try it on older systems, so I’ll wait a bit.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva Application Manager preview

        Today we have posted the first publicly available screencast of the new Mandriva Application Manager (MAM) on youtube. It shows the basic look&feel.

        [...]

        Soon we are are going to deliver the first alpha (at least a tech preview) too.

      • Mageia 1 Alpha2 — A Status Report

        On September 18, 2010, in response to Mandriva’s liquidation of its “Edge-IT” subsidiary and the attendant layoff of a substantial share of its developers, a group consisting of former Mandriva developers and Mandriva community contributers announced their intention to form a non-profit organization and release a fork of Mandriva Linux called Mageia Linux.

      • Awesome 3.4.9 available in Mageia

        I’m very glad to announce that awesome is available in Mageia since last week :-)

      • New Mageia Forums Bring Community Together

    • Red Hat Family

      • BPEL engine on Red Hat’s shopping list

        Open source operating system and middleware firm Red Hat may be about to bulk out is JBoss middleware line through acquisition, CBR has learned.

        The news was confirmed in a CBR interview with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who said that now that the firm is approaching the billion dollar revenue mark, acquisitions are on the cards.

      • Red Hat the Master Packager: Open Source and the $1bn annual runrate company
      • Red Hat Inc. (RHT) CEO & President James M Whitehurst sells 25,000 Shares
      • Sohaib Abbasi Joins Red Hat’s Board of Directors, Company Welcomes Back Dr. Steve Albrecht
      • Geek Of The Week: Máirín Duffy

        Duffy is a Senior Interaction Designer for Red Hat. She leads the Fedora design team. Máirín is an avid artist, and she happens to be very involved in the OSS (open source software) community. Needless to say, she is a huge fan of Inkscape. Duffy is also a contributor on the GNOME project, and co-founder of GNOMEWomen.

      • Are Companies Evil?

        Recently I saw a blog on Red Hat and its decision to pay a company for the use of that company’s royalty bearing patented software. The author of the column lambasted Red Hat because (in the author’s opinion) Red Hat had (on one hand) stated a policy against software patents, and (on the other hand) seemed to be “encouraging patent trolls”.

      • Red Hat targeting UK growth in ‘non-traditional sectors’

        Open source supplier Red Hat is growing its business quickly in non-traditional markets in the UK, mirroring US expansion, according to chief executive Jim Whitehurst.

        Whitehurst told Computerworld UK that while Linux had a deep presence in financial, telecoms and military sectors, Red Hat predicts fast growth in other markets where a number of companies are moving away from Unix.

      • Fedora

        • Introducing /run

          So, this is what is implemented for F15 now. For F16 we will make a
          minor change on top of this: /var/run and /var/lock will become symlinks to /run (resp /run/lock), so that we don’t have to use bind mounts anymore which are not the most beautiful thing to use by default, and confusing to the admin. Due to the implications of symlinks and RPM we didn’t want to make that change in F15.

        • My thoughts about Fedora 15

          In short, it is awesome.

        • Fedora 15 status and so on

          One thing I’ve found is that I’m liking GNOME 3 more and more recently.

        • Fedora 16 naming vote delay
        • Slipping over the edge

          On a Sunday a few weeks ago, I finally decided to take the plunge and install the Fedora 15 Alpha on my primary workstation. I’ve been using GNOME Shell pretty much exclusively since Fedora 13, and I was looking forward to an even cleaner setup as it got closer to its first official release. The installation went smoothly, and, soon enough, I had the new interface up and running, and, I have to say, it’s looking great!

        • Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04: The Battle for Linux Desktop Supremacy

          Though Fedora and Ubuntu have taken contrasting approaches, they’ll both offer the new-to-Linux user two high quality choices.

        • And so it ends now

          Now this guy was a Fedora Ambassador and imho a good one, promoting Fedora and teaching new users how to get their systems up and running. But now he is no more an Ambassador. Why?… because some guys here think that the Freedom preached by this community ends when it comes to talk about Fedora.

          So if you are a fedora ambassador, promote the freedom we provide under our terms!!… wait.. that sounds weird…. oh yes… its a bit of contradictory isnt it? This guy was banned as a fedora ambassador for teaching on a blog post how to configure some UI things in a Windows 7 virtual machine, how to install Flash player under Fedora (omg he’s so evil!!), for explaining his blog followers how hi did to get some stuff working even if they are not the Fedora ‘standards’ for doing things.

        • Fedora 15 & GNOME3, initial impression

          So I upgraded my machine to Fedora 15 last night using preupgrade, and spent hours in trying to clean up my /home from ancient stuff since way back to Fedora 5 as they were causing weird issues.

          To those who are wondering: No, Fedora 15 beta is not out yet, its still in late alpha. Beta should be released in few weeks time, but I’m too excited to wait :P. Check out the Fedora 15 schedule for details on release dates.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6 Squeeze review – nearly, but not quite…

        Debian Squeeze is a good choice if you want to run a server or a desktop with stable packages and a couple of years of security patches, even more if your hardware is from an exotic architecture.

      • Debian 6 – does it get the credit it deserves? Absolutely not!
      • Debian Project News – March 28th, 2011
      • Debian and Arch

        I’ve mentioned two or three times now that I have been spending a lot of time in Arch and Debian these days. I hold both distros in equally high regard for being fast, light and good starting points for outdated machines.

        Debian gets points for reaching all the way back to the 486 generation, which means I can use it on my very very old systems. At the same time though, I find myself floating back to Arch more often than not.

      • SimplyMEPIS 11.0 nears Final with RC1 Release

        Warren Woodford has uploaded SimplyMEPIS 10.9.94, the first release candidate of MEPIS 11.0. This RC is available from MEPIS and public mirrors. The ISO files for 32 and 64 bit processors are SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.94_32.iso and SimplyMEPIS-DVD-TEST_10.9.94_64.iso.

      • Fixed ISO images for Debian 6.0.1 released

        In each of the cases listed above, the failure case has been analysed and is understood. Fixes for all of the problems have been developed, and replacement images have been produced and tested. Following our normal naming scheme, the new images are versioned 6.0.1a to denote the bugfix rebuild.

      • Bits from the Release Team – Kicking off Wheezy

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Goodbye Ubuntu 9.10

          Dear Ubuntu 9.10 users, the time has come to say goodbye to the Karmic Koala release of the popular Ubuntu operating system. One month from today, on April 29th, it reaches end of life (EOL).

        • Ubuntu 9.10 reaches end-of-life on April 30 2011
        • First Look: Ubuntu 11.04 Beta

          Tomorrow, March 31st, Canonical will unleash to the world the first Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system, due for release on April 28th, 2011.

        • Amazon.com Releases Ubuntu & Linux Mint Compatible Music Cloud Drive and Player!
        • Ubuntu 11.04 Beta released, reviewed
        • Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Beta 1 Released – Review and Screenshots

          If you have used Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition interface, you will be familiar with Unity. Unity interface is made of a launcher on the left where active application windows, pinned application shortcuts and unity-places are shown. On the top left corner there is an Ubuntu icon that shows dash menu with shortcuts. The panel on top is not customizable and movable and on the right, all the app-indicators stack up. Unity launcher also supports quick-lists and some applications like Gwibber, Shutter, Take Screenshot etc. are already using them.

        • Full Circle #47 – out NOW!
        • First Command to Run After Installing Ubuntu
        • Balancing Freedom and Functionality: A Design Challenge
        • Narwhal rising

          That’s the first thing that went through my head when I learned that the next version of Ubuntu Linux, Release 11.04, would be codenamed Natty Narwhal, in keeping with the tradition of alliterative animal names.

          Since 1996, I’ve been through Dapper Drake, Edgy Eft, Feisty Fawn, Gusty Gibbon, Hardy Heron, Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope, Karmic Koala, Lucid Lynx and Maverick Meerkat, though I had skipped a version or two.

          A narwhal, as it turns out, is an arctic whale, a sign, perhaps, that cool things are coming with the next release of Ubuntu, which is expected on April 28. Earlier in March, Canonical, Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor, released the third alpha test version of the operating system, and was scheduled to make available two beta versions before the final release version.

        • Ubuntu’s Non-Free Parabox

          I’m a big proponent of “nonfree offsetting” (few people are, but I’m sticking to my guns); If Canonical wants to ship nonfree Flash instead of almost fully working GNU Gnash, then they should be willing to offset their balance with adequate investment into the free software alternative; i.e. they should be putting money into Gnash.

        • Ubuntu’s Contributions

          I’m not going to try and re-fight the old battles about who contributes and who doesn’t, or who contributes more or should contribute more. I just wanted to show one area where I think Ubuntu is a top contributor: putting the “community” in open source.

        • Here Is A Solution For Ubuntu’s Adobe Flash Problem
        • The Ubuntu Alien Conspiracy [Wallpaper]
        • Four New Features Coming to Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’

          The combination of Ubuntu Linux’s growing popularity with all the big changes coming up in the next version mean that Natty Narwhal, or Ubuntu 11.04, might just be the most widely and anxiously anticipated release of the open source operating system ever.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Elementary OS Pulling an Elive – Charging for Linux?

            Huh – pre-orders are usually needed only by software that requires a cost to download… Upon clicking on the link was I redirected to paypal with the item “elementary: Jupiter” in my order summary. I’ve read a few things around the internet about Elementary OS and I was keen to give it a try, but after having paid for Elive I don’t think I’ll ever be using a Linux based OS again that requires me to pony up some green for it.

          • Bodhi Linux 1.0 review

            I liked from the beginning the idea behind Bodhi Linux and so I followed the progress of this young version of Linux and take advantage of version 1.0 (congratulations to Jeff and the entire team) to make a review.

            For the uninitiated Bodhi Linux is a recent project that taking as a base Ubuntu 10.04 “reconstructs” the Enlightenment desktop, it use the login system manager of LXDE (and also as the terminal) and offers its own package system (.bod); The system being based on Ubuntu is still compatible with .deb and dpkg and aptitude can be used without problems.

          • Bodhi Linux: Interview with Jeff Hoogland

            I have recently become smitten with the Bodhi Linux distribution. It’s melding of the Enlightenment desktop and the Ubuntu distribution makes for quite a solid and speedy distribution. Because this distribution is fairly new to the scene, I thought it would be a good idea to interview one of the developers, so you can get a better idea where Bodhi Linux comes from.

            1. What made you decide to begin Bodhi Linux?

          • Pinguy OS 10.10 (64 bit)

            PinguyOS is one I hadn’t heard of until recently. It seems to be just a baby, in Linux distro terms, although I say that not due to size or its features, but because of its age. PinguyOS only came onto the scene sometime in 2010. The distribution is an offshoot of Ubuntu, and therefore follows its six-month release cycle and simple naming. PinguyOS 10.10 64bit. My new distro for the week.

            PinguyOS comes as a LiveDVD. As expected of a Live DVD, it comes packed with features! In fact, this has to be the most feature-packed distros I have seen to date.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • MeeGo and Symbian: How Long Will the Bodies Stay Warm?

          After Nokia revealed its partnership with Microsoft, many developers began regarding MeeGo and Symbian as sinking ships. However, they’re not being immediately ditched by the world’s biggest phone maker. Nokia’s still selling Symbian devices, and many millions still exist in the hands of consumers. But how long will it be before these platforms really do run out of gas for good?

      • Android

        • Android will lead smartphone market this year, says IDC
        • Android/Linux Predicted to have a Near-Monopoly of Smartphones by 2015

          IDC predicts 450million smart phones will ship in 2011. That’s a big number. About the same as “PC” shipments. Linux will be on a lot of them, about 39.5%.

        • Absolute Android apps

          With thousands of Android apps to choose from everyone has their favourite. These are some out our picks

          If you’re an Android user there are literally thousands of apps to choose from in the Android Market. Which is great for variety but a nightmare to find the ones that you really will use versus the ones that will simply take up space on your mobile phone or tablet PC.

        • Abandoning Android: Thoughts on the future of FOSS on modern devices

          Android’s development model has always been flawed. Google develops it behind closed doors and then makes the source available after each major release. This puts Android in the strange position of being FOSS only after development on a release is complete. During development it is closed. This has often raised my suspicion but I’ve never considered it more than an annoyance. I’d often wished that Android was developed out in the open by a larger community than just Google; however, having Android be FOSS by the time it got to me has always been sweet enough to stomach the sour taste of closed development. Now, with the recent announcement of Google’s intention to keep Android 3.0 closed source for some unknown length of time, it is clear this can no longer be ignored. Google, and thus Android, cannot be trusted.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Hercules Launches New eCAFE Netbooks

        Hercules has launched a new range of eCAFE netbooks, the eCAFE Slim HD and the eCAFE EX HD, both models are designed to be ultra portable, and the EX HD is designed to provide up to 13 hours of usage.

        Both models comes with a Cortex A8 processor, and Linux as the OS, you get 512MB of RAM a standard and 8GB of storage in the eCAFE Slim HD or 16GB of storage in the eCAFE EX HD, plus 50GB of online storage.

      • Linux and ARM Power New 10-Inch Netbooks

        Hardware maker Hercules this week gave Linux fans a nice boost by unveiling two new additions to its eCAFÉ netbook line that use ARM processors and run the open source operating system.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OSI: The Open Source Road Ahead

    http://robertogaloppini.net/2011/03/31/osi-the-open-source-road-ahead/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CommercialOpenSourceSoftware+%28Commercial+Open+Source+Software%29

  • It isn’t open source if it doesn’t pass “The patch test”.

    I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source. The license just helps pass the sniff test. I use one other test which I like to call “The Patch Test”.

  • NASA concludes first Open Source Summit, aims to make openness the default

    NASA has been implementing an Open Government Plan for nearly a year, and this week they held the first NASA Open Source Summit in Mountain View, CA. But the roots of open source at NASA go back much further, to its founding legislation in 1958, which designed NASA as a source that would “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information”–a goal perfectly suited to an open approach.

  • Google to NASA: Open source will not kill you

    Google open source guru Chris DiBona has called on NASA to use more open source code in its aerospace program, urging the government agency to test free software in unmanned flights and “blow-up some robots.”

    “I’ve heard people say: ‘We don’t want to endanger flights. We don’t want to endanger lives. Open source software comes from unknown sources.’ But that’s not what open source software is,” DiBona told gathered NASA employees on Wednesday at NASA’s inaugural Open Source Summit at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. “Open source software is still software. You have to make sure it fits your mission. You have to make sure it provides utility and security and the ‘bug-free-ed-ness’ you’re looking for. It’s just software.

  • My NASA presentation: “Open Source Governance for your Organization”

    Today I’m giving a presentation at the NASA Open Source Summit at the NASA Ames Conference Center in Mountain View, CA. The talk is called “Open Source Governance for your Organization” and is based on my experience within IBM in the last few years and what I have written in this blog.

  • Free Software needs Free Speech!

    You might think that a good program is all about good programming. But for a number of applications, the barrier to success isn’t programming at all. Some of the most interesting projects nowadays — speech recognition, for example — rely on machine-learning from databases of information. It’s not enough to write free software for these applications, we have to also provide that software with the right data. Contributing to these projects is needed from a much larger group of people, but it also can be very easy to do.

  • Yahoo Plans to Open Source Code for Non-core Technologies

    Yahoo plans to release some technologies, including storage technologies, to the open source community, a senior executive of the company said.

  • Open Source Software Tools And Directories: Where To Find Them, How To Evaluate Them
  • 8 Ways Companies Can Contribute to Open Source Communities

    Open source software (OSS) is recognized for the cost savings it delivers when compared with proprietary alternatives. As enterprises continue to adopt OSS, the open source communities, mostly made up of volunteers, have been calling on enterprises to make contributions and donations with the aim of fostering open source software innovation and growth.

    With more that 1,000 open source communities in existence today, enterprises have many options when choosing where to contribute. With each community potentially delivering enterprise-grade technology, large companies have many reasons to keep open source alive and well. How can enterprises evaluate which communities to work with and how to get involved? Here are some suggestions.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • FireSSH- A Firefox add-on to run SSH client in your browser
      • Mozilla’s Do Not Track header gaining ad industry support

        One of the new features that Mozilla introduced in Firefox 4 is a Do Not Track (DNT) setting. When the user enables the DNT option in the browser’s preference dialog, Firefox will transmit a custom header in HTTP requests that will inform servers that the user wants to opt out of Internet tracking. The concept has obvious merit because it provides a simpler, more predictable, and more consistent approach than the cookie-based mechanisms that are currently used today to signify opt-out status.

      • Firefox 4 leads IE9 in downloads and usage
      • Firefox 4 includes new feature for thwarting web attacks

        The latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox web browser, version 4, was released this week with a number of new security features, including a mechanism for preventing web-based attacks.

        One of the new security features, called Content Security Policy (CSP), is enabled by default and designed to stop common web-based attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and data injection, by providing a mechanism for sites to explicitly tell the browser which content is legitimate, according to Mozilla.

      • Firefox 4 borked by Compiz bug in Linux
      • 15 handy Firefox 4 tips and tricks

        Firefox 4 is the best Firefox yet, and it’s packed with useful tricks and features that can make your online life easier.

      • Firefox 5 Preview Available, Stable On April 13

        Mozilla is already offering a preview of the next-generation Firefox 5 for download and is planning on providing a stabilized version in about two weeks. Firefox 5 final is expected to arrive in the week of June 29.

      • 3 Best Ways To Speed Up Firefox 4 Browser

        Firefox 4 is special in many senses. Mozilla has made sure that this time users would love this browser in every aspect, whether it would be performance or display. We would be sharing some wonderful tips which would let you speed up Firefox 4.

      • Firefox 4 Tips: Bend the New Browser to Your Will

        Mozilla released Firefox 4 last week. I’m trying hard to like the new browser, but it keeps finding ways to annoy me. First, it moved the Reload button for no good reason (same for the Home button, but that’s just as easily fixed). Second, it put the tabs at the top of the screen (again, easily fixed). Third, and most important, a bunch of my favorite add-ons stopped working. Luckily, I’ve come up with a few ways to fix the interface quirks that are driving me nuts and solve the extension compatibility problem.

      • Firefox 5 Preview Available Now

        It turns out that Mozilla was not kidding. Firefox 5 is already in the works and can actually already be downloaded as a preview.

      • Mozilla kills embedding support for Gecko layout engine – Update

        Mozilla has officially ended support for embedding the Gecko layout engine in applications other than Mozilla core applications. The move will have an impact on any application which has used the Firefox layout engine in their applications and the first to announce that it will have to make significant changes is the Camino browser. A layout engine provides all the functionality needed to take HTML or other web content and convert it into a displayable form.

        In a posting to mozilla.dev.embedding, Embedding Module owner Benjamin Smedberg said that Mozilla had been considering the future for embedding Gecko in other applications. He cites the difficulty involved to date, the expected complexity of moving to a multiple process model and the desire to “strongly prioritize” Firefox as the key product of Mozilla. There is a possibility that embedding support could return in the future after Mozilla has moved Firefox to a multi-process model, but the developers are not going to prioritise that as a goal in their design work.

  • SaaS

    • Cloud Hype Can Mask Silver Lining

      When, as Gingras pointed out, it’s been reduced by Microsoft’s cloud commercials to the answer to all of life’s problems, we’ve clearly reached a level of complete absurdity. You need to fix that family picture? Go to the cloud. You bored at the airport? Go to the cloud.

    • Some Thoughts on Diaspora

  • Databases

    • A migrator’s guide to Drizzle

      The stable release of Drizzle has generated a lot of interest in migrating previous MySQL web sites to Drizzle. The good news for people attempting such migrations is that this isn’t incredibly difficult in many cases; this article will describe what to look out for and how to go about converting a web site or any other database related project.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Planning JDK 8, and beyond

      We already know what some of the big-ticket items are likely to be. There’ll be room for other features too, however, both large and small. It’s therefore time to define a simple process for collecting, sorting, reviewing, and prioritizing proposals and plans for new features, for JDK 8 and for later releases.

    • [LibreOffice] GSoc Ideas
    • 20 things we’d change about OpenOffice.org

      OpenOffice.org is a huge lumbering beast.

      Don’t get us wrong, we like it in principle and the practice is steadily getting better, but there’s still room for improvement.

      Here are 20 things we’d change about it to make it better.

    • Openoffice.org & Libreoffice- Personal/Family Budget Spreadsheet
    • The Document Foundation Marks Six Months of Freedom

      The Document Foundation published a summary today listing its achievements since its inception on September 28, 2010. Most users know of the widely publicized events such as the three releases of LibreOffice and the call for donations in order to fund the formation of a legal foundation. But activity has also encompassed, among other things, social and other media interaction, intellectual property protection, and distribution relationships.

    • LibreOffice Portable 3.3.2 (complete office suite) Released

      PortableApps.com and The Document Foundation are proud to announce the release of LibreOffice Portable 3.3.2. LibreOffice Portable is a full-featured office suite — including a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, drawing package and database — packaged as a portable app, so you can take all your documents and everything you need to work with them wherever you go.

    • Developer interview: Christina Rossmanith

  • CMS

    • Configuration management in Drupal 8

      In my DrupalCon keynote in Chicago, I talked about the key initiatives that I believe we should focus on for Drupal 8 core. One of those key initiatives that I talked about was configuration management.

  • Business

    • Beyond $1bn: Why Red Hat is a one off

      Others, which mix proprietary software and open source, fare little better. SourceFire is at $130m, while companies like Alfresco, SugarCRM, Pentaho, JasperSoft, etc. talk about reaching $100m as the likely threshold to filing for an IPO.

      But no one – no one – is anywhere near Red Hat’s $1bn. Why?

    • Red Hat: one in a billion

      It looks like it’s time again to ponder on Red Hat’s ability to (nearly) make $1bn in annual revenue and wonder why open source has not produced more billion dollar success stories.

    • Semi-Open Source

      • Open For Business: Open source for sale

        I have been asked to turn “Open for Business” into a monthly column, focusing on applying the open source way to business. Let the reader beware that I am not a millionaire. I don’t own multiple houses or drive a new car, but for the past eight years I have made a living running a business focused exclusively on open source software (and that’s without needing outside investment). The suggestions offered in this column fall in line with our business plan of “spend less than you earn.” I hope others will find them useful.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Government

    • The Openness of Government

      In November 1959, for TV Guide Magazine, John F. Kennedy wrote about television as “a force that has changed the political scene”. He had recently experienced the first televised Presidential debates, against Richard M. Nixon, and realised that things would never be the same again. But not even he foresaw that 50 years later, that same communication technology would still be rewriting the rules of politics and government, continuing to open up yet more aspects of political life — not least by bringing the workings of parliaments around the world into our homes.

    • Federal IT Dashboard goes open source

      Today, we’re excited to announce that our Civic Commons team, working with the White House and the Federal CIO, has made the cost-saving IT Dashboard, the technology behind IT.USAspending.gov, freely available for any government entity to use and customize. This development is the latest in a growing movement to cut government IT spending by sharing reusable technology, thereby reducing redundant development costs and encouraging cooperation between multiple branches and levels of government.

  • Licensing

    • Google open source guru: ‘Why we ban the AGPL’

      At the beginning of his talk, DiBona said that according to Google’s net crawlers, the web now contains over 31 million open source projects, spanning 2 billion lines of code. Forty-eight per cent of these projects are under the GPL, 23 per cent use the LGPL, 14 per cent use the BSD license, 6 per cent use Apache, and 5 per cent use the MIT license.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Greplin open sources Python tools

      Details about the utilities can be found a post on the Greplin:tech blog. Greplin also notes that, “As always: we love pull requests, issue reports, and comments!”. The tools are hosted on GitHub and are released under version 2.0 of the Apache License.

    • FOSS Development Is My Full-Time Job: Patricia Santana Cruz

      Last week we interviewed Luciana Fujii Pontello a representation of women power in the GNU/Linux world. This week we are publishing the interview of Patricia Santana Cruz who was played a critical role in the release of the latest version of Cheese.

    • SNAFU—Situation Normal, All Fouled Up! | The Joy of Programming

      The stories of software development projects in crisis are amazingly familiar to all experienced programmers and managers. In this column, we’ll see which aspects of projects in crisis are strikingly similar and how they relate to bugs.

      A software product is inseparable from underlying software process which resulted in creating it. Though bugs are technical in nature, it is the software development process that has the most impact on resulting in bugs. To illustrate this, see what happens in a new software project when – Raphus cucullatus, nicknamed Dodo – was given the responsibility of managing the project.

      All is well: Dodo kick starts the new project with a team of experienced developers. Dodo thinks that software can be produced under tight deadlines and creates a project plan. The customer is satisfied with the plan.

    • Announcing Penny Red

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Tagesschau.de awarded for the use of Open Standards

      Today the ARD internet platform Tagesschau.de will receive an award for the use of Open Standards at the “Document Freedom Day”. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII) for offering the broadcasted shows also in the free video format “Ogg Theora”.

      In Berlin FSFE and FFII will hand over a certificate and a cake with the “rOgg On!” label on to Sven Bruns, technical manager at tagesschau.de. In Hamburg, Sabine Klein, vice editorial director of tagesschau.de will accept a DFD cake on behalf of the editorial team.

    • OASIS ODF 1.2 Committee Specification Approved
    • Approval of OpenDocument Version 1.2 as Committee Specification(CS)

      Approval of OpenDocument Version 1.2 as Committee Specification(CS)

    • INT: ODF 1.2 is approved as a Committee Specification

      On 17 March 2011, the Technical Committee (TC) of the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument or ODF) officially and unanimously approved ODF 1.2 as a Committee Specification.

      The ODF TC is in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), the global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of standards for electronic business and web services, and which is the designated maintenance body for the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC34 IS26300 format. The next stage of the approval process is the official vote within OASIS to adopt this specification as an OASIS standard.

    • Celebrate Document Freedom Day!

      Today marks the annual observance of Document Freedom Day (DFD), a global day for document liberation.

      On this important occasion, let’s all recognize that progress has been made to promote and use open standards and to liberate documents. In January, India’s Department of Information Technology published its draft Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (IFEG), which lists ODF on its approved standards for e-governance in India.

    • HTML5 browser-based media player: plays your mp3′s & works offline

      “Yawn – yet another music player?” might be your first reaction at the sight of yet-another media player gracing the pages of OMG! Ubuntu, but this one is actually rather special.

      The HTML5-written media player runs in the browser (so what?) but is designed to play back your local media (oooh!): your entire music library can be added and played through it (super neat).

    • HOWTO: Unchain Yourself from Proprietary Formats

      Today being Document Freedom Day, I’m taking stock of how unencumbered my digital lifestyle is — both on the consumption as well as on the production side.

    • Document Freedom Day: UK releases Government ICT Strategy in .odt

      Today, the United Kingdom’s CabinetOffice released is official Government ICT Strategy – not only in .pdf and .doc, but also in .odt!

Leftovers

  • Council loses £2.5m claim against Big Blue

    Southwark Council’s claim for £2.5m in damages from IBM for supposedly faulty software has been dismissed.

    The court found that IBM had delivered the system as requested in 2007. It was bought through a framework agreement between the Treasury and IBM.

  • “Duty of Care”: Yesterday’s Hearing in Utah St. Court on Rosenberg v. Google
  • Google and Oracle File Claim Construction Statements & Fight Again About Discovery – Updated

    Google and Oracle have each now filed Claim Construction Statements, along with supporting declarations, in the Oracle v. Google patent litigation, and the previous dustup over discovery has broken out once again, with Oracle writing to the judge whining about Google’s responses to Oracle’s Interrogatories numbers 4-16.

  • Why Unix Is Superior

    The motivation of the post was a discussion in ##unix on Freenode.

    1. The command line interface.
    2. Various shells, including their script syntax.
    3. Builtin programming language support for many languages.

  • The rather petite Internet of 1995

    As you may know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, sometimes we like to take a trip down memory lane. It’s time for another one of those trips, to the murky past of the Internet and the dawning World Wide Web of 1995.

    Let’s start first with the people who actually use the Internet. How many were there back then?

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Fukushima radioactive fallout nears Chernobyl levels

      Japan’s damaged nuclear plant in Fukushima has been emitting radioactive iodine and caesium at levels approaching those seen in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Austrian researchers have used a worldwide network of radiation detectors – designed to spot clandestine nuclear bomb tests – to show that iodine-131 is being released at daily levels 73 per cent of those seen after the 1986 disaster. The daily amount of caesium-137 released from Fukushima Daiichi is around 60 per cent of the amount released from Chernobyl.

      The difference between this accident and Chernobyl, they say, is that at Chernobyl a huge fire released large amounts of many radioactive materials, including fuel particles, in smoke. At Fukushima Daiichi, only the volatile elements, such as iodine and caesium, are bubbling off the damaged fuel. But these substances could nevertheless pose a significant health risk outside the plant.

    • Japan may have lost race to save nuclear reactor

      The radioactive core in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and on to a concrete floor, experts say, raising fears of a major release of radiation at the site.

      The warning follows an analysis by a leading US expert of radiation levels at the plant. Readings from reactor two at the site have been made public by the Japanese authorities and Tepco, the utility that operates it.

      Richard Lahey, who was head of safety research for boiling-water reactors at General Electric when the company installed the units at Fukushima, told the Guardian workers at the site appeared to have “lost the race” to save the reactor, but said there was no danger of a Chernobyl-style catastrophe.

  • Finance

    • Brooksley Born Questions Lloyd Blankfein Over AIG And Derivatives Risk

      Since we can’t watch Lloyd on trial in the Galleon case, we present the next best thing – a few minutes of last January’s FCIC hearing with Brooksley Born, who warned more than a decade ago about a derivatives nightmare before being professionally silenced by Greenspan, Summers and Rubin.

    • Goldman Special Situation Profit Seen at Risk With Volcker

      For Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Special Situations Group, disasters can be a source of some of the biggest profits. Now the secretive investing operation faces its own potential calamity.

      Goldman Sachs already has shut two units that made bets with the company’s money because such proprietary trading by banks will be prohibited under the Volcker rule approved by Congress last year. Still, the Special Situations Group, known as SSG, continues to make investments and named a new global head last month. Executives have argued that SSG shouldn’t be affected because it’s more of a lending than a trading business.

    • Proprietary Trading Goes Under Cover: Michael Lewis

      A few weeks ago we asked a simple question: Why are the same Wall Street banks that lobbied so hard to dilute the passages in the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul bill banning proprietary trading now jettisoning their proprietary trading groups, without so much as a whimper?

  • Privacy

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Apple’s ‘App Store trademark’: A farce of Jobsian proportions

        Microsoft has once again stood up to Apple’s epically ridiculous attempt to trademark the term “app store”, filing another request that the US Patent and Trademark Office deny Apple’s trademark application in full.

        “Apple cannot escape the hard truth: when people talk about competitors’ stores, they call them ‘app stores.’ You don’t have to look far to find this generic use – The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs,” reads Microsoft’s latest filing with the US Trademark and Patent Office.

Clip of the Day

Japan Tsunami at full height from the ground level.


Credit: TinyOgg

03.30.11

Links 30/3/2011: OLPC Training and “Linux Today” Re-rectified

Posted in News Roundup at 8:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Ubuntu 10.10 Vs Windows 7 Vs Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

    Ubuntu is by far the fastest OS in our tests, until multi-tasking is brought into the picture, where it becomes a lot slower.

  • Mum’s the Word at “Linux Today”

    There seems to be trouble in the works over at Linux Today, and everybody’s keeping damn quiet about it.

    The first hint that something was wrong came on Saturday when the site posted no new content. This seemed odd, but not too unusual since weekend postings are often slim on the site. But when usually busy Monday came and went with still no new posts, the “what’s-up-with-that” factor was raised. Things started to get back to normal on Tuesday, however, when new posts began showing-up on the site again, though the pickings were slim, only six posts on a day when normally there would be four times as many.

    I figured that the folks at Linux Today had just experienced some kind of hiccup in their operations or that maybe everyone took the weekend off to celebrate some sort of open source spring break. Then, yesterday at about 1 pm EDT, the site posted a rather cryptic article, Picking Ourselves Up, Dusting Ourselves Off, by Michael Hall, a former managing editor at both Linux Today and Linux Planet who’s been spending the last several years working “on other sites in Linux Today’s parent company.”

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • FLOSS Weekly 158: The 2600hz Project

      The 2600hz Project is home to a collection of open-source telephony software that enables the use of the FreeSWITCH, Asterisk and YATE switching libraries.

    • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 395
    • Podcast Season 3 Episode 6

      In this episode: Canonical and Gnome may benefit from some relationship counselling. GTK+ 3.2 will enable you to run Gnome apps through a web browser. The Debian Derivatives Exchange (DEX) project has launched and Firefox 4 is here. Share our discoveries, listen to our marketing slogans and hear your own opinions in our Open Ballot.

  • Kernel Space

    • When does Linux turn 20?
    • Kernel-Switcher .38 GCC
    • Kernel Log: Development of 2.6.39 under way, series 33 revived

      Among the additions for kernel version .39 are the Xen network backend, support for ipset, and the rudimentary Poulsbo graphics driver; the kernel hackers have now also completely eradicated the BKL. Greg Kroah-Hartman has taken up maintaining the series 33 kernel again because it is the basis of the real-time branch.

    • “A Clear Example Of Why DRM Has Been Problematic”
    • I am now a Linux Kernel Developer

      I have no idea if the patch will be accepted, or even noticed, but I’ve done it and now anyone who gets the compile error…

    • Some Distributions Still Live In A KMS-Less World

      One of the most commonly mentioned terms at Phoronix is KMS, as in kernel mode-setting, whereby the GPU mode-setting is done in kernel-space rather than user-space with an X.Org DDX driver. The major open-source drivers were quick to adopt KMS support in their DRM drivers since it allows for cool features like a cleaner boot process, faster and more reliable VT switching, more reliable suspend-and-resume, greater security by running the X Server as a normal user, the ability to have a Linux kernel panic message (like a Windows BSOD), and for new technologies like the Wayland Display Server to emerge. However, not all Linux distributions are yet on this KMS bandwagon.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Wayland, Dumb Frame-Buffers & Embedded SoCs

        If you’re not following the many Linux development mailing lists out there, the latest major discussion surrounding the Wayland Display Server that’s spanned the Wayland, DRI/DRM, and Fbdev mailing lists has been about using Wayland on “dumb frame-buffers”, KMS vs. fbdev, and DRM drivers on embedded SoCs.

      • Will H.264 VA-API / VDPAU Finally Come To Gallium3D?

        Generic video decoding is not new to Gallium3D or even to being worked on with Google’s Summer of Code. Back in 2008 was the first attempts at Gallium3D video decoding when MPEG support in shaders and exposed by XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) was the target. It made progress with the Nouveau driver, but the work is not heavily used at this time.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • The Collaboration Imperative

      People tend to attribute what happens around us in the world to intentions. We believe things happen for a reason. This is quite a strong human tendency already present in very young children. Put a 3 year old in front of a room where stones are moved around by some invisible means like magnets. Ask the kid what is going on and he or she will describe the events in the room in terms of “the blue stone wants to talk to the red one”. We know stones usually don’t really want a lot – so why does the child perceive such intentions? This phenomenon not only forms the base of early religions (attributing ‘intentions’ to weather, trees or growth of crops) but also results in making conflicts worse. Psychologists call it “the fundamental attribution error” and it is fundamental (hence the name) to our perception of the world.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Connect to the Internet in More Than 10 Clicks (BUG)

        (As requested by my audience, I wish to make a distinction in pointing out that my post is mistaken in thinking that the described features of KDE are a default. They are, contrarily, a BUG with my own installation. Nevertheless, I will hold the secondary method of connecting to the internet as something that can be revised and improved.)

        As KDE worked on the new Network Manager for version 4, they decided to make the interface more powerful and through the use of the network manager widget, more accessible to users. The interface is indeed powerful and full of features aimed at working out every corner of customization on a given network. Wireless or wired network, they both have their particulars when it comes to connecting to the internet.

      • Qt Compositor For Wayland Is Made

        If you head on over to the Nokia Labs Qt Blog there is a post about “multi-process Lighthouse”, which is worth reading. It’s written by Jørgen Lind about how up until now Qt has lacked a multi-process client/server solution, but now they are looking for the Wayland Display Server to fill this void. Jørgen and other Qt developers ended up writing “Qt Compositor”, which is a Nokia Labs project for making Qt-based Wayland compositors.

      • The “bleeding edge” dilemma
      • KDE Commit Digest for 13 March
      • New Features in digiKam 2.0: Geolocation

        Geolocation is not a new feature, but in digiKam 2.0 it has been thoroughly reworked to streamline the process of geotagging photos. The new Geolocation interface (Image » Geo-location) aggregates all geotagging tools in one place. The interface itself consists of three parts: the map pane contains a map and a toolbar with several navigation tools; below the map pane, there is a list of selected photos; the sidebar on the right displays the currently active section.

      • platform ho-ooooOOO!
      • Moving media players into the future, and Camp KDE
      • Introducing: Phonon 4.5.0

        After 2 months of development the Phonons are proud to present Phonon 4.5.0, the new and incredibly awesome version of our multimedia abstraction library for Qt and KDE.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • With Days Left, GNOME Shell Continues Advancing

        The release candidate of GNOME 3.0 is due out, and the final release is just days away (6 April), but the GNOME Shell continues to advance with just days to go. GNOME Shell 2.91.92 is now available with a number of improvements.

      • GNOME Shell 3.0 Nears Release

        It’s only been a little over two weeks since the last developmental release, but a substantial list of bug reports have been closed. Several changes have occurred as well. Some of these include:

        * New network indicator for NetworkManager 0.9.

        * Multi monitor improvements

        – Enable workspaces_only_on_primary so that workspace switching only affects the primary monitor
        – In the overview, show windows for each monitor on that particular monitor
        – Use new “pointer barriers” to trap the mouse cursor at hot screen corners
        – Don’t use a slideout for the workspace selector if it’s at a monitor boundary

        * Greatly sped up search

        [...]

      • GNOME 3 live image release 0.2.0 is out

        This week release is version 0.2.0. It features GNOME 2.91.92, including :

        * soon to be released Network Manager 0.9 and new UI integrated in GNOME Shell and GNOME Control Center (be careful, it has still rough edges)
        * a11y support should be improved

  • Distributions

    • A New, Happy Pardus User!

      Pardus 2011 is not only beautiful; it’s also effective. A new, happy Pardus user may be right now playing with her laptop and she may be learning about a totally new–and certainly safer–computing experience.

    • Slackware 13.37… I Couldn’t Wait
    • LWN Picks Up On Package Signing

      The author, Nathan Willis, contacted me earlier this week to ask some questions, and I feel his article provides a very comprehensive review of the core issues, including the problems with Arch’s devs refusing contributions in this area and stalemating Arch’s security improvements for years. I think it’s great that LWN is reporting to their subscribers so candidly and giving this issue much needed visibility.

    • Sabayon Five Oh!

      Sabayon. I’m unsure if it got the name after an infamous Italian dessert. Still, it’s “the most beautiful linux distro out there” as some people would say. That might be the case out of the box, but we all know that we can modify any distro to any extent and make it look any way we want. I’ll admit, I’ve always wanted to try Sabayon. This gentoo-based distro is one of the rare that is quite popular, and that I haven’t ever tasted. It currently ranks #6 on DistroWatch (last 6 months ranking), but for some weird reason, none of my friends are running it – I even have some linuxy friends that have never even heard of it (!). But maybe I just have strange friends. Anyway, Sabayon comes in 2 versions: G and K. Obviously, these are the first letters to their respective desktop environments. It also comes with Xfce, LXDE, and E17, but the first two are the most “important” editions of Sabayon. What’s interesting is that neither G or K can be burned to a CD, as the ISO is over 2 GB in size. I smell a lot of crapware. Do continue reading about this interesting distro.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2010.12 Gnome – Rushed out too early

        PCLinuxOS 2010.12 is not as good as the spring edition. There are just too many errors, most of which could have been solved by a more careful system validation. After all, few or almost none of these showed up in the last two releases I’ve tested, so it’s nothing inherent in PCLinuxOS that is bad, it’s the integration of parts done in a sloppy manner. A bodge work, if you like, which fits nicely with my username, Roger Bodger.

        At the end of the day, PCLinuxOS worked, but it was scarred. There’s no benefit to its default scheduler, most people won’t notice or care. The 32-bit only architecture is not a dealbreaker, but it projects a certain reputation. Multimedia problems are a sore spot. But the worst thing is the package manager. You can’t really enjoy your Linux without it.

        I like PCLinuxOS and I hope it will break into the big league one day, but the Holiday release just shows how difficult this task is, without immense resources to check and double-check every little thing. Now, since PCLinuxOS is a rolling release, you can safely install an older edition and then upgrade it to the latest patch level, which is what I’d recommend. For me, PCLinuxOS 2010.12 Gnome is a missed opportunity.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Is CentOS Dieing?

        There’s apprehension that Centos is probably not going to survive for long. The developer group is really too small and the method that they use to prepare and subsequently deploy Centos is too slow. Scientific Linux and OEL are infinitely superior in every way (paid developers, planned schedules, better communication, etc). IMO, Scientific Linux is no less stable, it’s just that CentOS has gained the reputation for the earlier timely and good releases. And there’s this inertia of change on the mindshare. However, the recent irregularity will definitely force a lot of CentOS user to move to Scientific Linux, and it’s for good.

      • Is Scientific Linux 6 Right for You? The Review.

        Most of you will need no introduction to Scientific Linux, but, as it’s sort of customary for a review to give a short overview before getting started I’ll do just that.
        Scientific Linux is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) much like the CentOS project, rebuilding the distribution from upstream source rpms and removing and replacing the branding that vendor has applied to the installer, slides, wallpapers and whereever else in the system.
        Scientific Linux is put together predominantly by CERN and Fermilabs with the help of “various other labs and universities around the world” as the web site puts it. It provides a common install base while also leaving space for site specific customizations and modifications to fit more
        specialist needs for the labs, but can of course also just be installed as is. It is fully compatible with RHEL, being essentially the same product, but makes a few minor but important tweaks and additions, in contrast to CentOS. Being based on EL but having the additional layer of QA of the Scientific Linux community should make for a very stable product indeed, but you might as well use it because in a way you have paid towards it with your taxes, as long as you live in Europe. After all, I believe these institutions are all government and EU funded. Now, if that isn’t a good reason, finally we’re getting something for our money.

      • Red Hat and Ubuntu pushing buttons in the community….

        Both Red Hat and Ubuntu have been in the press a lot lately because of changes they are making in their distribution. What everyone seems to forget with both companies are just that companies not communities. While they do a great job of being great community members, people will always complain about them. Here is what we gleaned from the posts I read:

        For Red Hat the change is just how the distribute the kernel itself. They are now shipping just a completely patched Kernel. This is instead of shipping a patch set for each and every bug release that was available. Who does it affect? The folks that want to look in the kernel. As far as we can tell that’s it. We at Linuxinstall.net don’t think that this is an issue for them and more just a reason for people to complain and wish things were better the old way.

      • Red Hat’s Steady March to the Big Leagues

        The idea of an open source company pulling in a billion dollars in annual revenue probably would have been unimaginable a decade ago, but Red Hat has drawn close to that milestone — and it’s likely because of its commitment to Linux, not in spite of it. Red Hat’s continually evolving use of Linux and open source makes it “a more reliable multi-product, multi-service company,” observed Geek 2.0 blogger Steven Savage.

      • Red Hat Proves That Open Source Is Good for Business

        Critics of free and open source software are fond of making the argument that software must be locked up, patented and jealously guarded if it is to serve as the basis for a successful business. Well, Red Hat just refuted such claims in a big way this week with its fourth quarter earnings report, which blew away analysts’ expectations and placed the company well on track for billion-dollar revenues in the upcoming year.

      • Founder of Lulu.com and co-founder of Red Hat speaks at Wake Forest University

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • An introduction to Embedded Linux, BeagleBoard & its Linux kernel port

      Jon Masters takes a break from his usual kernel column format this month to introduce us to the world of embedded Linux with an overview of the BeagleBoard and its Linux kernel port…

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Dell Inspiron Duo Convertible welcomes Jolicloud

        The Dell Inspiron Duo is a netbook that can transform to a tablet and it uses the Dual Core processor. The screen is 10 inches with a resolution of 1366×768. It uses a capacitive touch display. The convertible feature was designed in a unique way so that it will not rely anymore on swivel that seems not too robust for many users.

    • OLPC

      • Over 900 Teachers to Get OLPC Training

        971 teachers from primary four to six, in all schools designated to receive laptops countrywide, will undergo an extensive training in using the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) computers.

        The second phase of the capacity building program kicked off yesterday in several primary schools in the Northern and Southern provinces.

      • African Union, OLPC laptop plan faces hurdles

        Although the African Union (AU) has sealed a deal with the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project to buy XO laptops for distribution in African schools, the project still faces funding and organizational hurdles.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Free software, a form of escapism?
  • 5 things to consider when evaluating open source

    According to Kareem, following 5 factors must be considered when deciding whether or not to use open source software:

    1) Cost reduction
    2) Speed of implementation
    3) May not have a foundation to support future desired functionality
    4) Code ownership may be a problem
    5) May need to change systems to match the OSS application

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • ING using Drupal

      You know when a piece of software is mature when it starts being adopted by financial services organizations. ING Financial Services recently moved a number of sites from Oracle Stellent to Drupal. Among these sites are http://ing.us, the main portal for their US market. The driver behind this migration was to move to a platform that was more dynamic and provided faster time to market.

    • Upstream release monitoring for Drupal modules.

      Today I added a couple examples to the Fedora wiki’s upstream release monitoring page that will allow maintainers to track new releases of Drupal modules. You can simply follow the template to add yours.

      The upstream release monitoring system is provided through the courtesy of long-time Fedora contributor Till Maas, whose cnucnu software informs participating maintainers by filing a bug when the upstream releases a new copy of their software. Although most if not all maintainers monitor feeds and mailing lists, the bug is a reminder of what’s left to do, and doesn’t require the maintainer to stop what they’re doing when they get an email or RSS notification. Instead, they can trust their bug list.

  • Business

    • Cutting the cost of innovation

      Open source software might be free to download, but it ends up costing as much as traditional software because of the complexities of supporting it, or inflexible licensing structures. Or so the argument goes.

      You would expect to hear this from Steve Ballmer, Larry Ellison or any of the other grand old men of proprietary software. It is more surprising when you hear such thoughts being aired by the head of corporate services at Canonical, the commercial operation behind Ubuntu-flavoured Linux.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • 2010 Free Software Awards announced

      This year, it was given to Rob Savoye. Savoye is a long-time free software hacker, who has worked on GNU and other free software for over 20 years. He has contributed to dozens of projects including GCC, GDB, DejaGnu, Newlib, Libgloss, Cygwin, eCos, Expect, multiple major GNU/Linux distributions, and One Laptop Per Child. Savoye has led the effort to produce a free software Flash player, Gnash. This work has enabled free software users to avoid dependency on a pervasive piece of proprietary software. Rob is also CTO and founder of Open Media Now, a nonprofit dedicated to producing a freely licensed media infrastructure.

    • Fellowship interview with Dan Leinir

      Chris Woolfrey: Can you explain what GamingFreedom.org is, and it’s relationship with Gluon?

      Dan Leinir Turthra Jensen: GamingFreedom is a social network for makers and players of games, based on the concept that there are very few people who make games who don’t also play them. So, rather than view game distribution as a way of pushing a product to the users in order to make back the money that was invested, GamingFreedom views it as a social thing: you have an idea for a game, you build that game, and you distribute the game to some repository, which in our case is GamingFreedom.org. From there you can download the game and play it, and you can then provide feedback if you want; through ratings, commenting, even user submitted screenshots and other such things.

  • Government

    • Cost savings in The Netherlands: Now you see it, now you don’t

      Interestingly, a headline from the Court of Audit’s own news excerpt is: “Ministries already use a lot of open source.”

      This report, too, doesn’t seem to be available, except for a summary in English.

      Headlines from outfits covering the story have read “Netherlands open source report says no savings can be made.” Discussion boards have chimed in stoking a conspiracy to cook numbers, government succumbing to Microsoft lobbying, and so on.

      My take: Much ado about nothing.

      First, I think we can agree The Netherlands has an issue with transparency, at least when it comes to handling this issue. But, beyond that I doubt there is any behind-the-scenes-lurking.

      When the Open Source Observatory wrote about the first report, they noted it was written by one person in the Ministry of Interior, and largely meant for an internal audience. Only after pressure from representatives in Parliament did the Ministry send over the report.

      Report, here, may even be the wrong word. Governments do a lot of internal prospecting via memos, briefs, etc. just like any other organization. Similar to the issues I brought up about the relationship between the US Congress and its Congressional Research Service, government needs some room to think on its own. Not every document amounts to an answer that should be translated into policy.

      It could be that in this case the Parliament caught wind of someone’s quick calculations and wanted to see the analysis without any word on how “official” the document was, the background of the writer, or the vetting process, if any, the report was put through. In all reality, it may be a “bad” report.

  • Licensing

    • Are Your Licenses Compliant?

      The moral of the story is this. Do not wait until the phone rings. Do not wait until the lawyers are sharpening their pencils. Make sure you are in good shape now. The costs — monetary, health, and welfare — are not worth it.

      For more on how you can get your hands around Open Source licensing, read my post from Day 1 of LinuxCon 2010 and visit the Linux Foundation for more details on their license programs.

    • HTC are still incredible ********s

      As has been discussed before, HTC have a somewhat “interesting” interpretation of the GPL that allows them to claim they don’t need to provide source code until between 90 and 120 days after the release of binaries. It’s probably noteworthy that the FSF (who, you know, wrote the license and all) disagree with this interpretation, as do the kernel copyright holders (who, you know, wrote the code that the license covers) I’ve talked to about it. Anyway, after a pile of screaming and shouting from all sides HTC have tended to release their source code in a timely manner. So things seemed better.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • DRM

    • Judge Spero Rules on Jurisdictional Discovery in SCEA v. Hotz

      The telephonic hearing in SCEA v. Hotz was yesterday, the one about how to handle jurisdictional discovery, and here’s what Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero decided to do. Keep in mind, though, that this is still not the main event. This was about how to handle George Hotz’s impounded devices, which is related to Sony’s expressed need to do discovery to oppose Hotz’s motion to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds. So we’re still in the buildup phase, where SCEA is fighting like the devil to find a way to pin Hotz to California’s jurisidiction, which so far it has been unable to do. It’s a split decision, you might say, with Hotz winning some and losing some and ditto for SCEA.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Paramount goes with no DRM bittorrent distribution

        I almost fell off my chair when I heard the news that Paramount will be releasing the Tunnel for free on bit torrent with no DRM of any kind!

        No matter what the film is like, Paramount and the guys behind the tunnel have basically won. A film which would have gone straight to DVD somewhere in a junk bin somewhere could just have been elevated to the most downloaded movie of May (maybe).

Clip of the Day

Bodhi Linux v1.0.0 Distro Review with Enlightment Desktop


Credit: TinyOgg

03.29.11

Links 29/3/2011: Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, Bodhi Linux 1.0.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 5:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • The Issues With The Linux Kernel DRM, Continued

      Yesterday Linus voiced his anger towards DRM, once again.

    • Upstart Improved Documentation and New Features for Ubuntu Natty Release

      “Jobs and Events are the primary Upstart concepts,” writes James Hunt Ubuntu Upstart maintainer at Canonical. “The version of Upstart provided with Ubuntu Natty provides a new “initctl” command “show-config” which when coupled with a new tool “initctl2dot” allows these interactions to be understood visually.”

    • Linux Foundation 20th Anniversary of Linux Campaign and Video Contest

      It’s the 20th Anniversary of Linux in August and the Linux Foundation is kicking off celebrations at The Collaboration Summit which takes place April 6-8, 2011 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. A highlight of the campaign is the annual Video Contest, which this year focuses on the 20 year celebration and will be judged by Linux Linus Torvalds himself.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe Under LLVM 2.9

        Version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is set to be released in a little more than a week, but what will it mean much for users in terms of performance? We will be looking at the LLVM 2.9 and Clang performance in the coming days (along with GCC 4.6, which was just released). We are beginning this weekend by providing a look at how using LLVM 2.9 affects the performance of the Mesa Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver relative to the previous LLVM 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 releases.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3 – This is the end, it seems

        I believe Gnome 2.X will be the last version of Gnome I will be using, at least based on my current findings, but hey, anything can change. And despite major progress with KDE, I’m not looking forward to the inevitable switch down the road, should the jab come to stab.

  • Distributions

    • The King of Linux Distros

      How is Debian the king of Linux distros

      As with everything else in software, every distro is much loved by its followers and there is great difference of opinion on which is the best of linux distros. Debian is a point in example of what a good linux distro should be and is the template for almost every other distro to have ever appeared. Hence the discussion was more on how powerful the features of Debian are rather than proving others are no match to this classic distro. Almost every distro has powerful features that set the tone for the entire distro to develop and evolve. Debian is perhaps the only linux distro that is so feature rich that every feature by itself can be spun into an effective application or tweaked to become another distro.

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1

        Less than five months after releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0, Linux distributor Red Hat has now announced the beta phase of the first RHEL6 update. As usual in this phase of the RHEL version families’ seven to ten-year life cycle, minor release 6.1 offers not only bug fixes and minor improvements, but also various new functions and hardware drivers.

      • Fedora

        • How Many People Use GNU/Linux? Lots!

          According to Wikipedia, 2,350,000 hits came from Fedora of 111,806,000 hits that came from GNU/Linux (including Android/Linux). Unfortunately some of Fedora’s counts may be for multiple IP addresses to the same machine (DHCP), and some of the machines could be servers.

        • Update on Fedora 15 Development – GNOME 3 Shell Updates

          I’ve been keeping up with Fedora 15 development. I installed a nightly build on my wife’s dual-boot computer. I setup a Fedora 15 KVM virtual machine in preparation for my remix compose… which isn’t quite there yet.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Community Wallpapers for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Released, The Best Collection So Far IMO

          Community contributed wallpapers collection for Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” is finally released. The collection include 17 brand new wallpapers and this latest set of community contributed wallpapers for Ubuntu is definitely the best so far in my opinion.

        • Uplink, Darwinia released on Ubuntu Software Centre

          Introversion Software, indie developer of hits Darwinia and Uplink, have now launched the aforementioned titles on the Ubuntu Software Centre. The titles are currently selling for US$10 each.

        • Are there 10 reasons to upgrade to 10.10?

          But, as I asked before… Are there 10 reasons to upgrade to 10.10? Probably not. Canonical itself says that most improvements in 10.10 compared to 10.04 are related to netbooks, cloud computing, photo applications and fonts. Are you netbook user? If you’re working on 10.04 and happy with it, why worry? Just use whatever fits you better. Don’t get into arms race!

        • How about a Ubuntu LTS Backports repository?
        • How About Firefox 4′s Panorama Like Workspace Manager in Ubuntu Unity?
        • Ubuntu will not default to installing Flash
        • Ubuntu Software Center Lets You Test-Drive Applications Without Installing Them [Ubuntu 11.04]

          Ubuntu Software Center got a really cool feature in Ubuntu 11.04: it lets you test drive applications without having to install them.

        • Ubuntu: Even the Computer-Averse Can Use It

          Yesterday, I was talking to one of my relatives (whom I shall refer to as $relative) about computers, and I inquired as to whether $relative was still using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” that I had installed on $relative’s laptop shortly before I left for college. Do note that $relative is pretty computer-averse when it comes to anything other than using a browser or using a productivity suite. To my surprise, $relative said yes! I also asked if $relative’s printing issues were sorted out, because the printer connected is made by Lexmark, and Lexmark printers play as badly with Linux as Broadcom wireless cards do (i.e. they don’t mix). To my further surprise, $relative said yes again!

        • New Ubuntu/Canonical Web Ads Up and Running

          These ads were spotted running on www.theregister.co.uk through Google/DoubleClick ad services.

        • F-PROT Antivirus ‘Fire & Ice’ Software Certified on Ubuntu 10.04

          FRISK Software International, the developer of the world famous F-PROT Anti-virus ‘Fire & Ice’ family of software, is proud to announce that the Virus Bulletin has certified its Home and Enterprise editions on Ubuntu, Long-Term Support Version 10.04. Ubuntu is one of the leading Linux distributions and is maintained by Canonical Ltd., an Open Source software company founded by Mark Shuttleworth.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Many a Tux Do Not Exist

            In case you didn’t know, Wikipedia articles are case sensitive. The page that had stuck around for about two weeks was located at Bodhi_Linux. Another of our users (not realizing we already had one) put up another page with the title Bodhi_linux. This page was correctly flagged as a duplicate and promptly deleted – the issue? The moderator that deleted the duplicated page also took a look at previous page and this moderator decided there was not enough about the project there for the page to exist. Never mind the fact that it had already been up for two weeks and had already been approved by another moderator.

          • Bodhi Linux sticks with design principles

            After your first fifty distribution reviews, a certain ennui creeps in. Most have the same selection of software, and GNOME or KDE for a desktop, and, if they are new, are derived from Ubuntu. Under these circumstances, features worth writing about tend to be rare. That is why Bodhi Linux has been attracting attention from reviewers — because it has actually done a few things differently.

            Not that Bodhi is revolutionary. You can find other distributions with small footprints, such as Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux, and other distributions such as Elive that use the Enlightenment window manager as a desktop. However, except for using Ubuntu’s Lucid repositories for packages, Bodhi’s choices are not exactly routine, either, and their integration are enough to make Bodhi stand out among the army of clones that are the typical modern distribution.

          • Review: Bodhi Linux 1.0.0

            Hats off to Jeff Hoogland and the Bodhi Linux team!

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Foremay ships world’s smallest solid state disk

      Foremay is shipping a NAND solid state drive (SSD) claimed to be the world’s smallest SSD “disk-on-chip.” Its OC177 DOC chip measures only 0.87 x 0.87 x 0.07 inches (22 x 22 x 1.8mm), supports standard IDE or SATA host interfaces, and is available in 32GB capacities, with a read/write speed of up to 70/40MB/sec, says the company.

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Hands on: Google Chrome OS netbook review

        We first glimpsed the CR-48 prototype Google Chrome OS netbook at CES in January and they’ve finally appeared in the UK courtesy of the Big G.

      • Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Is a Notebook in Disguise

        Asus’ latest swing at the tablet scene is the Eee Pad Transformer, a Honeycomb tablet that can be combined with an optional keyboard docking station that turns it into a notebook computer, more or less. The Transformer’s guts seem to be on par with most other Honeycomb tablets in the field, but will its keyboard accessory be enough to make it stand out in an increasingly crowded space?

    • Tablets

      • Acer locates ‘missing’ tablet strategy
      • 2011: Revolution in IT

        That is all changing with the move to notebooks and smart thingies. Notebooks are over 50% of shipping units and smart thingies shipments are expected to exceed x86-like PCs in 2011. This has changed how people use their person computers and how IT is done. More people are using stuff from outside the monopoly at home and bringing it to work. I saw it last year, out in the bush… People were bringing all kinds of web-enabled gadgets to school even though there were rules against doing so for students. Many of the gadgets were from Apple but now Android/Linux and other Linux variations are appearing.

      • Neat Product, Awful Price

        The floodgates of products that look somewhat like “normal” personal computers but run ARM and Android/Linux are cracking open. One by ASUS is great but priced too high for wide adoption. ASUS and others do want to recoup costs of development and there is a market for “new” at any price.

      • The first great Android Tablet: Nook Color

        Let’s get real. There are only two great tablets out there today: Apple’s iPad and the iPad 2. Android has always had the potential to be a wonderful tablet operating system, but most Android tablets have been non-starters and, even the best of them, the Samsung Galaxy Tab aren’t as good as an iPad. But, the iPad may soon have a serious Android opponent: Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color.

      • Customizable tablets and panel PCs run Linux, Android

        Sparkpad has begun selling customizable display computers at sizes ranging from eight to 15 inches, complete with a touch-ready, Lua-based Linux SDK and promised Android support. Sparkpad’s Wi-Fi enabled tablets and panel PCs run on ARM11-based Telechips 8902 processors, and are touted as enabling customers to develop and deploy their own touch panels, digital signage systems, and tablets quickly.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Awards Highlight Impact of Open Source Software

    It’s hard to beat stellar earnings as proof of a technology’s business value, and Red Hat provided that for Linux with its Q4 report last week. Adding further fuel to the celebratory open source fires over the past few days, however, have been several batches of awards recognizing the global impact of various free software projects and contributors.

  • Documentation and free software

    As a former technical writer and a sometime reviewer of software, I don’t need anyone to tell me how important documentation is — nor how often it is the last part of a project if it is considered at all. But recently, I had a frustrating reminder.

    The reminder came when I was setting up my new computer. All went smoothly through my backup, installation, and restore, during which I suffered nothing worse than boredom. I was just wrapping up the final touches, indulging in the obligatory musings about how, these days, I hardly had to worry about GNU/Linux hardware compatibility — when, suddenly, I found myself in undocumented territory.

  • Open Goldberg Variations Raises $16,000 in 20 Days for “Open Source Bach”

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • I’m not jumping on Firefox 4 or GNOME 3 just yet
      • The Day Firefox Left IE in the Dust

        Firefox 4′s victory is “just another sign that Microsoft is past its prime when it comes to generating excitement,” opined Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot. “For decades users have internalized the ‘upgrading Microsoft products can put you in a world of hurt’ meme: ‘What I’ve got works. Let someone else be the guinea pig.’ Can you blame them?”

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Computers in the Classroom

      I recommended some changes that could be made:

      * Using GNU/Linux would reduce licensing costs and improve performance,
      * using thin clients would reduce the workload of staff while improving performance, and
      * mounting monitors and thin clients on the wall might make better use of space.

      A lot of FLOSS has been written by teachers and used by teachers in just such situations. It works for us.

    • How to Sell Linux to Schools

      In my view the best Linux distro for the job of being used in a school which is both fast and user-friendly would have to be Ubuntu, as it has a great community and lots of support available. Certainly the Ubuntu distro which I would chose would have to Lucid Lynx (10.04) which is a Long Term Support (normally called LTS)distro meaning that it will be updated as much as possible for around 3 to 4 years by the Ubuntu developers and community. In some respects Linux Mint 9 would be a better choice for schools because most children and teenagers won’t have tried Linux before and Mint is more like Windows in the menu aspect of it. Mint is also a spin-off of Ubuntu so it is like it in many ways including the Software Center and the different applications available for it alongside the the ability to install .deb files easily.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • The pragmatism of free software idealism

      “Propriety and single interest divides the people of a land and the whole world into parties and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere” – Gerrard Winstanley, 1649

      “If you want to accomplish something in the world, idealism isn’t enough – you need to choose a method that works to achieve the goal. In other words, you need to be pragmatic” – Richard Stallman

      Free software is and was an idealistic proposition. Its aim was to change the world and the way we live, work and play, albeit with particular reference to computer programs and the way they are put together.

      In the beginning, the idea that software should be free was deemed unrealistic and laughable, and then unworkable. Now, for the most part, it is deemed acceptable and desirable – not just as a workable approach to writing software, but as a means of writing better software.

      Free and open source software is no longer a fringe movement. But, as Dan Cohen points out, “if the movement toward shared digital openness,” (he is also writing about the wider issues of open access and digital freedom), “seems like a single groundswell, it masks an underlying tension between pragmatism and idealism.”

  • Licensing

    • RMS weighs into Google GPL debate

      Free Software Foundation chairman Richard Stallman has weighed into the debate over whether Google may be guilty of a GPL violation or not by saying that what the search giant has done is not limited by copyright.

    • Open sourcers urged to adopt dancing poultry license

      In an effort to revolutionize the world of open source, a free software advocate has submitted a new license to the Open Source Initiative. The document is two years in the making, and it’s known as the CDL, short for Chicken Dance License.

    • Google’s ‘clean’ Linux headers: Are they really that dirty?

      The trouble with open source is that most coders aren’t lawyers and most lawyers aren’t coders. And even if everyone did wear both hats, there would still be ample room for disagreement. The law, you must remember, is subjective.

      Two intellectual-property lawyers have told the world that Android is at risk of legal attack because it uses Googly versions of the original Linux header files. But Linux daddy Linus Torvalds says this is “totally bogus”. The truth lies somewhere in between. But good luck finding it.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • The Freeloading Digital Economy

      This is the terrible bargain of free content: in exchange for content we don’t have to pay for, everyone pays in crappy content, ads masquerading as news and reviews, and wholesale invasion and exploitation of our privacy and personal business. We already have crappy advertiser-controlled TV and radio, why would anyone want to extend that to movies, books, and music?

      Jose_X wrote an interesting comment on the hurdles to making money in a digital economy. This shiny new digital marketplace is completely nuts, and I think it’s going to settle into a tip jar economy, which Jose_X talked about, whether we want it that way or not. It’s already most of the way there because despite the best efforts of the brainiacs at Sony, RIAA, MPAA, and our other beloved titans of the entertainment and publishing industries, treating copyright infringement like shoplifting doesn’t work.

      Digital copying and distribution are so easy, and making people pay for it is so hard, it seems obvious that trying to keep the old retail model going is not going to work. Market value is irrational in so many ways. I think digital media should be worth more– you can copy it to multiple devices and modify it in all kinds of ways to suit your own needs, for example run an ebook through a reader so you can listen to it, get glorious color copies without the high cost of color printing, print out just the pages you want, copy and paste and assemble selected passages onto one page. With movies and music you can erase the dirty words if that is your desire, do-it-yourself karaoke, put yourself in the movie, convert them to lower-fi formats, store thousands of them on a single small computer, copy to multiple devices. It’s the ultimate in convenience and flexibility.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Document Freedom Day 2011

      “In cooperation with the Dutch Digital heritage Foundation and the Club for History and ICT, we will be celebrating Document Freedom Day 2011 in Royal Library (National Library for the Netherlands) in The Hague this year on March 30th. The theme for this event will be “Open Heritage”. The importance of information and open formats is in this branche very well known, because of broad availability, openness of information and endurable access.

Leftovers

  • Science

    • Scottish invention ‘improves phone storage’

      Scottish researchers have helped to create a device which improves memory storage for technology including MP3s, smartphones and cameras.

    • Understanding Parallel Computing: Amdahl’s Law

      More cores mean better performance, right? That’s not what Amdahl says. Learn one of the foundations of parallel computing in “Amdahl’s Law.” Prepare yourself for math. And lawn mowing.

    • Security

    • Defence/Police/Aggression

      • Sudan to unleash cyber jihadists

        Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party has warned that its “cyber jihadists” will “crush” internet-based dissent.

        It follows an increase in anti-government campaigns organised on Facebook and Twitter.

        Senior NCP official Mandur al-Mahdi warned opposition groups that its “cyber battalion” was leading “online defence operations”.

    • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

      • Adorable loris videos: maimed, tortured, dying endangered trafficked animals on YouTube

        You may be one of the millions of people who’ve enjoyed videos of slow lorises behaving adorably while being tickled or clutching tiny cocktail umbrellas. However, according to animal rights activists, these endangered lorises have been illegally trafficked, brutally mutilated, and are doomed to die from infection, covered in their own feces and urine.

    • Finance

      • The Collapse of Globalization

        They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty.

        They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.

    • Privacy

      • France fines Google over Street View data blunder

        Google has been hit with a fine by France’s privacy watchdog CNIL over the personal data it mistakenly gathered when setting up Street View.

        The £87,000 (100,000 euro) penalty is the largest ever handed out by CNIL.

      • No Privacy on Amazon’s Cloud Drive

        Don’t believe me? Read the Amazon Cloud Drive Terms of Use for yourself. In particular, take a glance at: Section 5.2:

        “5.2 Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law”

    • DRM

      • US hacker denies fleeing justice

        The American hacker who unlocked Sony’s PS3 has denied fleeing the country to avoid legal action.

        George Hotz, also known as Geohot, said his trip had been planned for months and added that he was still in contact with his lawyers.

        Sony had raised questions about the reason for his sudden disappearance in recent legal papers that it filed in California.

    • Digital Economy (UK)/HADOPI

      • Digital Act heads to High Court

        Parts of the Digital Economy Act that deal with illegal file-sharing are being challenged in the High Court.

        Internet providers BT and TalkTalk demanded the judicial review, arguing that the legislation was rushed through parliament without proper debate.

Clip of the Day

Customising The GDM Login Screen


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 29/3/2011: IBM Celebrates Linux, Android Gets Java Father

Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Editor’s Note: Picking Ourselves Up, Dusting Ourselves Off

  • IBM

    • The Era of Open Innovation

      In 2011, Linux is a fundamental component of IBM business—embedded deeply in hardware, software, services and internal development. It is present in every IBM business, geography and workload, and its use only continues to increase.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • REVIEW: GhostBSD 2.0 (LiveCD)

        Looking at GhostBSD from the view of a migrating Windows user, again there is nothing wrong with what’s on offer here but I think for someone who has led a Windows lifestyle, they are going to want more “bells and whistles”. I say that though with a little reservation since I have seen nothing from the developers which suggests its specifically aimed at such a user.

        For established Linux users, again, I cannot see anything which would tempt them over. I say that not to create flame as I would really love to say that GhostBSD offers something really special, much hard work has obviously gone into this but as it stands I can best sum up the distro as: stable, solid and “does what it says on the tin”.

        The homepage for GhostBSD is certainly starting to look the part. I say starting because it has typos and incomplete sections to it. I would stress that this is not a harsh criticism because a lot of hard work has gone into the distro and its very generous of the GhostBSD devs to spend their time working on this great project. With that in mind I think new users will not be filled with confidence in a project where the site intended to promote it has so many obvious errors and omissions. This is a shame because GhostBSD is in no way lacking functionality or stability and I think errors on its homepage will undersell GhostBSD.

        In closing, I would expect it’s a welcome release for established GhostBSD users but new users may find that it’s neither polished or packaged as fully as they would like.

    • Red Hat Family

      • S&P 500′s Top Performers :RHT , NVDA , MU

        Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is the S&P 500′s top performer this morning with the stock trading at $46.77 representing 17.01% versus the previous trading session. Shares of Red Hat, the world’s leading open source technology solutions provider have defined support at $38.47 and resistance at $41.98.

      • Red Hat Global Support Team Honored as a Leader in Support Excellence
      • Piper Jaffray Reiterates OW Rating, $57 PT On RHT

        “Strong demand for open source Cloud infrastructure drove billings growth of 31%, materially above consensus of 17%. Results correlated to our recent survey findings, which indicated resellers finished above plan and observed an improving pace of business,” Piper Jaffray writes. “We see ongoing catalysts, as inroads into the large Windows market have only just begun and RHEL6 adoption won’t peak for 6 to 12 months.

      • Red Hat profit up as sales increase 25%

        Red Hat Inc. /quotes/comstock/13*!rht/quotes/nls/rht (RHT 46.09, -0.25, -0.54%) said Wednesday its fourth-quarter net income rose to $33.5 million, or 17 cents a share, compared to $23.4 million, or 12 cents a share in the same period a year earlier. The provider of open-source business software said total revenue for the period ended Feb. 28 rose 25% to $244.8 million. On an adjusted basis, Red Hat said earnings for the quarter were 26 cents a share. Red Hat said earnings benefited by 2 cents share in the quarter, thanks to the U.S. research tax credit. Analysts polled by FactSet Research had expected Red Hat to report adjusted earnings of 22 cents a share, and $235.9 million in revenue.

      • Red Hat, Micron climb after financial reports

        Investors sent shares of Red Hat Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. higher Tuesday evening after each company issued quarterly results that surpassed Wall Street’s projections.

      • Red Hat Close to Resistance
      • Red Hat Closes in on $1 Billion in Revenue

        Three years ago, Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) CEO Jim Whitehurst predicted that his company would be the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in revenues. Red Hat is now nearly there.

    • Debian Family

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu technical board: no non-free software by default
        • Ubuntu nixes Netbook Remix for good, starting Natty Narwhal

          Canonical has nixed Ubuntu Netbook Remix from it’s plans, and it will not appear starting version 11.04, which is also Natty Narwhal. So we say goodbye to an experiment that lasted a few distros at the time netbooks were the “in-thing.”

          The core around Ubuntu Netbook Remix will now be integrated an edition called Ubuntu Desktop edition for laptops, Ubuntu said in a blog entry on March 9.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • AriOS Review – Yet Another Ubuntu Derived Linux Distro

            Recently, the distribution AriOS made it to DistroWatch’s database. I had read Dedoimedo’s review of AriOS earlier, where he said that it is a user-friendly and very pleasant distribution to use, and it is much better than its predecessor mFatOS. Intrigued, I decided to try it out.

          • Tux Which Does Not Exist…

            I managed to get Zorin OS 4 distributive downloaded. This OS has several versions, and some of them are not free. You need either purchase DVD with distributive or donate to get a download link. But there are still Core and some other versions available for free. Moreover, Core is available in 32 and 64 bit. My choice was for 32 bit.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • LiMo 4 spec adds support for Linux tablets

      The LiMo Foundation says it has approved four mobile device class specifications for the LiMo 4 mobile Linux stack. Citing first-time tablet support plus three different smartphone specs, the Foundation projects commercial releases within multiple LiMo classes starting in the second half of this year.

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • Android

        • Google Holds Honeycomb Tight

          In the great mobile-device wars, Google (GOOG) has portrayed itself as the open-source crusader doing battle against the leaders in proprietary software—Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and Research In Motion (RIM:CN).

          Unlike its rivals, Google makes the underlying code for its popular Android operating system publicly available, and anyone can access it and tailor it for use in mobile phones, tablets, television set-top boxes, even automobiles.

        • Java creator hangs his shingle at Google

          The Java world got a bit of a surprise this morning when Java creator James Gosling revealed that he is now working for Google.

          In his blog entry today, Gosling announced the news in brief fashion:

          “Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying ‘no’ to a bunch of other excellent possibilities.”

          One can only imagine the opportunities Gosling has been offered since he left his former employer Oracle last year. But Google, it seems, is his next landing pad.

        • Android on top in the US, Microsoft in decline

          he latest quarterly statistics showing US smartphone market share show Microsoft’s task with Windows Phone 7 is daunting, as the new OS is already losing ground. The latest US smartphones figures from comScore cover November of last year through the end of January, and while the figures are largely as expected the drop of market share by Microsoft is a bit of a surprise.

        • The Android OS Update Problem

          The reasons that Android phones are either slow to get system updates, or fail to get them entirely are pretty clear. The process of getting an update ready to push to a handset is decidedly non-trivial:

          1. Google creates, tests and releases a system update.
          2. Handset manufacturers take the system update and apply their vendo-specific tweaks to it (MotoBlur, HTC Sense, etc.), then test it on their various devices.
          3. Carriers then test the update, certify it, and push it out to the handsets.

        • Google Announces Nexus S 4G
        • Motorola XOOM Wi-Fi Coming To Canada This April

          Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi, the Android-powered tablet will be available in Canada this April.

        • Why Android Could Help Amazon and the Kindle Threaten the iPad

          Quick, across the entire history of Amazon, and all the types of products that the site has sold, what is its top selling product ever? The answer is that the Kindle eBook reader is, and that feat was attained while the Kindle functioned as a reading device, without the bells and whistles found on popular tablet devices. No Harry Potter book or other product comes close to the sales Amazon has reaped from the Kindle, and those sales have, of course, driven sales of lots of content from Amazon. For these reasons, and because of the increasing unpopularity of Apple’s policies regarding in-app purchasing, the Kindle could emerge as the biggest competitor to Apple’s iPad, if Amazon plays its cards right.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Source Junction: cross-platform mobile apps

    The open source mobile app space is getting increasingly crowded. The recent opportunities for developers to produce and distribute mobile apps through a range of app stores is taking the developer world by storm. If, as the saying goes, all people dream of writing a poem at least once in a lifetime, then perhaps there aren’t many developers out there either who haven’t dreamed of building a great mobile app themselves.

  • Why What FOSS Needs is a Unified Message

    Of course, the FOSS movement has had notable leaders over the years, ranging from Linus Torvalds to Richard Stallman, but there is no single charismatic leader who regularly keeps open source and open standards topics alive in public conversations. While one person with enough charisma might make a big difference, though, what FOSS really needs is more unified messaging, and on the commercial open source front, more unified marketing.

  • Open source communities: trust vs. control

    u can succeed in starting an open source community:

    * Be honest with those people you are trying to recruit about your reasons for working in open source. Clearly state your goals and how you will measure success for yourself and the community.
    * Contribute your code, but accept improvements or better solutions.
    * Give up sole control of the project to a more democratic leadership in order to get a better code base that you can use, at a lower development cost to yourself. Don’t stack the leadership group with cronies or puppets.
    * Don’t act like a prima donna just because you started the project.
    * Trust that if you and everyone else plays fairly but works hard, you’ll get something of great value that many can use.

  • FFmpeg Becomes Multi-Threaded Happy

    Last week following a dispute among several core FFmpeg developers, FFmpeg was forked as libav. The group remaining in the “FFmpeg” this week have now merged the ffmpeg-mt branch to their SVN trunk code-base. This is the code that’s been worked on now for nearly three years to provide multi-threaded decoding support in FFmpeg.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Education

    • How To: Founding an Open Source Software Center at a University

      Raising open source awareness in any organization is a very important, and sometimes difficult, task. Particularly important is open source awareness among college students. These are the engineers and computer scientists of the next generation who will be able to usher these modern practices into their workplace. This article discusses the process that was used to form the Rensselaer Center for Open Source (RCOS), a very successful open source center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Programming

    • Tiny Core Fraud on Source Forge

      If you watch new projects that are added to source forge then two weeks ago you might have noticed that Tiny Core Linux was added to their projects.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open Network Foundation to Promote New Network Architecture

      This morning brings news of what may become another new and important consortium – the Open Network Foundation (ONF). This time the goal is to adapt network architecture to streamline its interoperation with cloud computing. And while the news is intriguing, the way in which it has been broken is a bit odd, on which more below.

Leftovers

  • [Old] IT panel endorses adopting Google

  • Science

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • China activist Liu Xianbin jailed for 10 years

      A Chinese democracy activist has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for inciting subversion of state power.

      Liu Xianbin was charged after writing a series of articles calling for democratic reforms.

      He was convicted after a trial lasting only a few hours; the third time he has been sent to jail for his activism.

      Dozens of lawyers and activists have been arrested or detained in China recently following calls for Middle East-style protests.

    • Chapeau Sarkozy – the brilliant strike against Qaddafi

      The escalation and the attack on Qaddafi’s Lybia to enforce the no-fly zone is a brilliant strategic move of Nicolas Sarkozy and the French nation. Sarkozy’s right wing challenger Marine Le Pen took a more traditional French position, and voiced scepticism in recent days. Even Internal Market Commissioner Barnier intervened in the matter, a highly unusual move for an EU official. It is common knowledge that France had good relations with Qaddafi which makes the French intervention and Sarkozy more credible. Even the abstention of Germany in the UN security council perfectly fits the scene because it strenghtened the leadership of the neighbour on the matter.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Nuclear Optimism and the Reality of How Humans Price Risk

      The cataclysm visited upon Japan this March has produced an understandable debate over the future of nuclear power. As so often is the case, however, these post-crisis conversations presume the freedom to decide new policy choices when such choices, by society, have already been made. Decades after the advent of nuclear power, this modern energy source still provides only 5% of total global primary energy supply. Reality tested, risk adjudicated, and cost denoted, nuclear power has been given more than enough time to be adopted. We can talk all we like. There is little reason for nuclear optimism. | see: Global Energy Use by Source 2010 (estimate).

  • Finance

    • Credit Unions Want Their Money Back – IRA Takes on PMI

      I got into writing financial blogs three years ago for one reason. It was the mortgage insurance industry “PMI” that got me out in the open. I saw first hand what a terrible concept this was. I saw (in advance of the problem) that PMI was going to result in a mortgage explosion for the country. Of course it did.

      I had a family member working at one of the big PMI firms. I argued with them regarding the insanity of what they were doing. Before the crisis the response was always the same, “We’re doing God’s work of getting people into their own homes. Plus we’re making a boatload in the process.”

    • Goldman Sachs’s Revelatory E-mails: 2006-2007

      It is interesting that Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, is appearing before the court as a witness for the prosecution of Rajat Gupta, ex-member of Goldman Sachs’s board. Blankfein confirmed that Gupta violated the company’s “confidentiality policies” when he gave tips to outsiders about Goldman Sachs’s financial position.

      It’s the pot calling the kettle black!

    • Goldman Sachs and the Mortgage Market

      This part of the memo ( pages 7-10 with footnotes omitted) explains Goldman Sachs’s Conflict Between Proprietary and Client Trading, and its Shorting the Mortgage Market. It is easy to see the role that Goldman Sachs played in bringing the financial system to its knees and the CEO was not above lying about the profits GS made.

    • Goldman Sachs: Here’s What You Are

      If someone described a bank by what it does rather than by what it says, he/she would find that getting high fees for risky and poor quality products is what matters; that creating junk CDOs for investors and using CDSs for making a huge profit is common practice; that taking a short position on the toxic mortgage market and thereby cashing in with billions of dollars at others’ expense is the way to do business; that taking advantage of clients’ positions and creating a conflict of interest is not material; that paying a small fine for a civil action suit where clients were not properly informed is a small price to pay for profit; and that, finally, using naked CDSs on assets it did not own to bet against the mortgage market and making huge amounts of revenue for itself shows little in the way of ethical conscience. That would be Goldman Sachs!

    • Pension funds to lead suit vs. Goldman over Abacus

      A Manhattan federal judge on Friday named three pension funds as co-lead plaintiffs in an investor lawsuit against Goldman Sachs Group Inc to recover losses tied to the Wall Street’s bank’s alleged misleading statements about Abacus, a product linked to subprime mortgages.

    • All My (Economist) Friends Get High: California Jobs

      California reported its job numbers on Friday, and once again it was not good news. Although total California employment in January “rose” to 15.905 million people, this is only because December was revised down from 15.945 million to 15.878 million people.

    • US equivalents

      IT HAS long been true that California on its own would rank as one of the biggest economies of the world. These days, it would rank eighth, falling between Italy and Brazil on a nominal exchange-rate basis. But how do other American states compare with other countries? Taking the nearest equivalent country from 2009 data reveals some surprises. Who would have thought that, despite years of auto-industry hardship, the economy of Michigan is still the same size as Taiwan’s?

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • US military creates fake online personas

      The $2.76m contract was won by Ntrepid, a Californian firm, and called for an “online persona management service” that would enable 50 military spies to manage 10 fake identities each.

      The personas should be “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent”, a US Central Command (Centcom) tender document said.

    • Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media

      The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

      A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

      The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.

    • Twitter Powers of Ten

      This is essentially the situation we find ourselves in with Twitter. They do have APIs that can be used to query their user data. But it is all “rate-limited”, meaning only a certain number of requests can be made per IP address per day. So it is impossible to get a running stream of all activity (a “video”) or even a snapshot of all activity at a single time (a “still camera”). But what we can do is access the “Twitter Public Timeline“, which will give you the most recent 20 tweets. This can be queried every 60 seconds, up to your daily limit.

      I’ve been capturing the Twitter Public Timeline since late 2009. I have now nearly 6 million records, each one containing the message, of course, but also the name of the user and their “Followers” and “Following” count at that point in time. I started doing scatter plots of this data and was amazed at the detailed structure evident in the data, that illustrate some interesting ways in which Twitter is being used. No single graph can show it all, so I’m giving you a series of charts, each one showing an area of the Following/Followers phase space 10ox larger.

    • Is Samsung’s New Galaxy Tab Fibbing About Its Figure? And About Those Galaxy Tab Fans…

      [FURTHER THOUGHTS: Did Samsung mean for us to understand that these were imaginary users or not? The more I think about it, the more befuddled I get. The Raw Feed's Mike Elgan points out that the company's PR director earnestly described the "project" during the event in a way that made it sound real. And commenter Karl notes that Samsung referred to the users' tales as "true-life stories." But the bits with Hess and Kolinski are so profoundly artificial that they could have involved Madge the Manicurist and the Maytag Repairman. Actually, Kolinski seems to be channeling a certain real-life "leading New York real-estate CEO."]

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Intellectual Property: Silly or Sinister?

      Now imagine that some lobbyists have staked out part of Antarctica and brought suit in federal court against tourists who trespassed on “their” land. Fine, you say: After all the lobbyists got there first. Replace “Antarctica” with “ideas” and you have the surreal world of “intellectual property.” Unfortunately, while you and I cannot both mine for gold in the same spot, we can certainly make use of the same idea, and therein lies the heart of this story.

      A good spot to start the tale is in 1998, when a panel of judges ruled that software was patentable, thereby starting the intellectual property equivalent of the California gold rush (State Street Bank & Trust v. Signature Financial Group). Every child knows how to answer the door: “Knock knock.” “Who is there?” But what if I taught a computer how to say, “Who is there,” and patented the idea? Absurd, you say. Well, we all understand how to run an auction—but do not try doing it with a computer because the holder of U.S. Patent 7,702,540 (also known as e-Bay) will sue you. And that in a nutshell is what software patents are all about.

    • Copyrights

      • Google Books Settlement Rejected

        We applaud the rejection by Judge Denny Chin of the Google Books class action settlement with authors and publishers regarding the digitization of books. SFLC filed a letter with the court on behalf of the Free Software Foundation and author Karl Fogel, urging the court to reject the settlement as it was last proposed and asking the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses.

      • Judge rejects Google’s attempt to create a universal library

        Google’s vision of a universal library archiving all books ever published on Earth is once again at odds with laws protecting the authors of those books.

        A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a settlement deal Google hammered out with publishers over its controversial Google Books archive, saying the proposed agreement went too far in giving Google control over the digitalization of books.

        “The question presented is whether the [settlement agreement] is fair, adequate, and reasonable,” Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court in New York City wrote in his 48-page ruling. “I conclude that it is not.”

Clip of the Day

PullQuote


Credit: TinyOgg

03.23.11

Links 23/3/2011: Firefox 4, Gnash 0.8.9

Posted in News Roundup at 5:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • HP Declares its (web)Os Independence

    Last week at HP CEO’s Leo Apotheker’s coming out party, he came off as a smart, competent leader with a vision for taking his organization forward, while helping us leave the whole sordid Mark Hurd affair in the rear view.

    I wrote a post (HP Jumps on Cloud Bandwagon) concentrating on Apotheker’s cloud vision, but there was much more to the speech than that, chiefly a declaration of (web)OS Independence from Microsoft with a promise of webOS running on every HP consumer device (including printers).

  • Apotheker Seeks to Save HP’s ‘Lost Soul’ With Software Growth
  • 66% Pass Rate For East Africa Linux Training Workshop
  • 10 Ways Linux Is Making Life Better

    Linux has long played a leading role in the world of servers, due in large part to its stability, security and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). What many don’t realize, however, is just how ubiquitous it’s becoming in other parts of life as well.

  • Desktop

    • Installation Report: My Mother

      First, she requested the KDE main menu to be switched to classic mode, calling it more familiar.

    • A Compliment for the Linux Adoption Curve!

      I believe this is a mis-calculation. The hardware vendors will only invest in our ecosystem, when we are attractive compliments to their products. But they aren’t going to invest in their old discontinued products, but only into their new products. This leaves the old products without support and it just so happens that a great number of our main-stream users have made investments into hardware and are not willing to simply buy new hardware just yet. in conclusion, I think we can count on hardware makers providing us with drivers eventually; but for as long as they are not, we should be investing in all their old product lines and making sure they work with our desktop distributions.

    • Long live the laptop

      Good one, Tom. The fact of the matter is — and Tom eloquently outlines it in his blog, so I won’t be echoing it here (except to say, “I agree!”) — there’s a big difference between the tablet which, for all its conveniences, isn’t really a computer, and the desktop or laptop you use for getting things done.

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • The Linux graphics stack from X to Wayland

        In the early 1980s, MIT computer scientist Bob Scheifler set about laying down the principles for a new windowing system. He had decided to call it X, because it was an improvement on the W graphical system, which naturally resided on the V operating system. Little did Bob know at the time, but the X Window System that he and fellow researches would eventually create would go on to cause a revolution. It became the standard graphical interface of virtually all UNIX based operating systems, because it provided features and concepts far superior to its competition. It took only a few short years for the UNIX community to embrace the X windowing system en masse.

        In this article, we’ll take a look at the development of the Linux graphics stack, from the initial X client/server system to the modern Wayland effort.

        [...]

        X is the oldest lady at the dance, and she insists on dancing with everyone. X has millions of lines of source, but most of it was written long ago, when there were no GPUs, and no specialized transistors to do programmable shading or rotation and translation of vertexes. The hardware had no notion of oversampling and interpolation to reduce aliasing, nor was it capable of producing extremely precise color spaces. The time has come for the old lady to take a chair.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Linux for seniors? KiWi PC builds a Linux PC for grandma and grandpa

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • shoot the messenger

        This really isn’t about individual developers, and I do not paint every person in GNOME with the same brush in my mind. I don’t do that for KDE, either: there is variety, some productive and some counter-productive, in any large group of people and our communities are not exceptions to that. However, casting me as some sort of “I hate all of you!” villain is not useful. Even if it were true, then people should simply ignore me as an individual actor in it and look at the large, long-term patterns that really do exist and really do need fixing. I am not personally responsible for everything, I was not even involved most of episodes that exhibited the unfortunate patterns we’ve been experiencing. So even if the messenger really, truly sucks and you really don’t like them as a person, try to address the issues anyways. Avoid indulging in shooting the messenger as a way of dismissing issues and thereby relieving the perceived pain. It’s only a distraction, and nothing gets improved that way.

      • Battling Misconceptions: What is KDE?

        Now, Tony is an experienced user of free software as well as a scientist and – from his emails – clearly an intelligent and inquisitive man. So it was a real surprise to me that he and other LXer readers were so ignorant about how KDE works. I do not mean ‘ignorant’ in any kind of offensive sense here, merely that both Tony and the other LXer readers really did not seem to understand how KDE operates or who we are. Here are a few questions (paraphrased) that really took my by surprise:

        * Who controls KDE?
        * Who funds KDE?
        * Can we contact KDE?

        These show a few things to me. First, some (many?) people think of us as having a hierarchy like a company, as if we have a leader or set of leaders who tell everyone else what to do. Maybe these are the people who pay us and if it is possible to get in contact with those leaders then they might be persuaded to redirect the efforts of all the code monkeys.


      • battling misconceptions, even within KDE :)

        One of Stuart’s points was that KDE doesn’t have top-down leaders that can tell random other people what to do in a way that they are beholden to follow. This is quite true, and it’s a strength in that it prevents KDE from hijacked by any one interest, or requiring that we bet our future on any one group consistently and always making the best decisions.

      • Kupfer v204 (QuickLauncher) Released With New Gwibber Plugin, Lots More [PPA]

        Kupfer v204 was released a couple of days ago and today it was finally uploaded to the Kupfer PPA. The most interesting new feature in this new Kupfer version is a Gwibber plugin which allows you to easily send an update to Twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook and so on (all the services supported by Gwibber). I’ll tell you how to use this later on.

      • New Features in digiKam 2.0: Color Labels and Picks

        To add a color label to an individual photo, right-click on it, choose Assign Labels » Color, and pick the color you want. Each color label has its own shortcut, so you can quickly label photos using the keyboard. For example, to assign the Magenta label, press Ctrl+Alt+6. To quickly remove a color label from a photo, press Ctrl+Alt+0. The Picks feature works in a similar manner: you can assign one of three picks — Pending, Accepted, or Rejected — to any photo in digiKam via the Assign Labels » Pick context menu, or using the default shortcuts.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME marketing contract: week 3

        Last week, most of my contract time was taken up with two big tasks. I wrote a history of the GNOME 3 design for a press query, and I also wrote the first draft of the release notes (woo hoo!) That draft will be going off to various people for feedback and fact checking very soon.

      • Will GNOME 3.0 Repeat the User Revolt of KDE 4.0?

        KDE 4.0 was too radical a change, too lacking in features or stability, too much a triumph of developer’s interests over user’s — the accusations seemed endless, and only began to quiet six months later when KDE 4.1 began addressing the shortcomings. Partly, the hostility continues to this day, although for many the KDE 4 series has long ago proved itself.

        This April, GNOME 3.0 is scheduled for release. Just as KDE 4.0 was a radical departure from KDE 3.5, so GNOME 3.0 is a radical departure from GNOME 2.32. But will its release trigger another user revolt? Or has the GNOME project — perhaps learning from KDE’s experience — managed expectations well enough to prevent history from repeating itself?

        Certainly, GNOME has tried much harder to handle its own break with the past differently than KDE managed KDE 4.0. But the KDE revolt resulted from multiple causes, and, although GNOME has addressed some of those causes, the underlying problems of the project’s relationship to its users remains in some ways disturbingly similar to those faced by KDE three years ago.

  • Distributions

    • 7 Surprises From Turkey

      I made several reviews of Operation systems originating from Eastern Europe: SLAX, Agilia Linux, Alt Linux, Austrumi. This time I will aim little bit to the South, on the place where Europe meets Asia.
      How many countries do you know which are placed in Europe and Asia both? Russia? Anything else? Yes, that is Turkey. Not the most well known country in the world, although European culture would be different if this country would not exist. Byzantium, Constantinople… They are all parts of Turkish history.

    • Bodhi Linux: E17 and Ubuntu make a great combination

      As anyone who has read my ramblings long enough knows, I am a big fan of the Enlightenment desktop. I’ve been enjoying this take on the Linux desktop since the early E16 days. For a while, however, I left E17 for GNOME simply because the combination of Ubuntu and GNOME made perfect sense. Not only was Ubuntu a very stable distribution, GNOME had come a long, long way.

      You will also have more than likely read my recent trepidation regarding the changes coming to the Ubuntu desktop (Unity). Although Ubuntu 11.04 will offer a traditional GNOME desktop selection at log in, I realized that Ubuntu Unity is just not the desktop for me. So, I decided it was time to head back to the land of Enlightenment. But instead of going through the paces of installing E17 on top of Ubuntu, I decided to search out a distribution that would combine the two.

    • Reviews

      • Lazy Linux Distro Reviews

        Whenever I took the time to write a distribution review, I always made it a point to actually install the distribution on my system and use it as my main operating system for a minimum of a few days. Sure this takes a little bit more effort, but it is necessary if you are going to write an informed article. I amazes me how many people that write reviews simply boot a distribution in virtual box (some don’t even install it!) take a few screen shots and then call it a day. Some don’t even load any of the default applications or even look at the project’s website. Sure it is OK to load the distribution as a virtual machine, but this should not be the only method of testing it for the purposes of a review.

      • Review: Chakra 2011.02 “Cyrus”

        The live and installed sessions worked quite well, the latter certainly much better than in the last version, where X11 refused to start.

    • New Releases

      • Saline 1.3
      • AUSTRUMI 2.3.2
      • Chakra 2011.04-ms3
      • Macpup 520

        Macpup 520 is the latest and is based on Puppy Linux 5.2 ,”Lucid Puppy”, An official woof build of puppy Linux that is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages. MP520 contains all the apps from Lucid puppy with the addition of Firefox 4 RC 1. Extra apps like Opera or Gimp are available for easy download from the Quickpet App on the ibar or the Puppy Package Manager. MP511 also includes the Enlightenment E17 window manager. The EFL libraries version 1.0.0 and E17 version 55225 where compiled and installed from source.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 Includes Enterprise-Class Open Source Data Virtualization Solution

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1, which includes new extensions for data services integration.

      • Red Hat Puts Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to the Test

        When we released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in November 2010, we discussed the many performance improvements featured in the release – these included improvements in network rates, multi-user filesystem workloads and virtualization I/O enhancements allowing for increased consolidation while simultaneously reducing I/O overhead in comparison to baremetal.

        Today, we’re excited to announce that in internal testing conducted by Red Hat engineering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has set a new standard in storage performance. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Intel-based systems and Fusion-io Solid State Storage devices delivered results measuring 30 percent faster performance than previously published results* based on proprietary systems.

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • An introduction to Embedded Linux, BeagleBoard & its Linux kernel port

      BeagleBoard comes with a 4GB microSD card containing validation software that you can use (actually, a release of the Angstrom distribution) and which should boot after you insert the card and power on the board. If you have set things up correctly, you will see a simple banner and be able to type shell commands. There are various alternative images available on the BeagleBoard website, so you can replace the ‘validation’ factory image with a version of Android built for BeagleBoard, or Ubuntu, and so on. I chose to install Debian Squeeze on my BeagleBoard, following instructions on the BeagleBoard wiki and using the updated kernel images available from Robert Nelson to get started. At this point, the latest upstream kernels (from 2.6.38 onwards) support most of the hardware out of the box without requiring patching or modification.

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

        • Digia to acquire Qt commercial licensing business from Nokia
        • The Linux Foundation Announces MeeGo TV Working Group

          MeeGo Smart TV Working Group begins its work to bring open framework and innovation to television ecosystem

          LONDON {IPTV World Forum}, March 22, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the formation of the MeeGo™ Smart TV Working Group.

          MeeGo is an open source Linux project targeting multiple segments including automotive systems, netbooks, tablets, TV’s, and set-top boxes, among others, and uses Qt to enable cross-device applications. The Working Group is designed to help drive the evolution of MeeGo within the television ecosystem and provide an open framework for industry creativity and innovation.

      • Android

        • Sencha Releases Android Event Recorder to Speed Development of Android Web Apps
        • Android media players hot up

          Android’s default media players are reasonable enough but if you want a little more from your mobile media player then there is good news. The number of great media players now available for Android is growing daily and includes the likes of stalwarts such as Winamp as well as some new names.

        • A Look at Firefox Mobile

          As Firefox inches slowly towards its March 26 release date, the Mozilla folks are also working on Firefox Mobile for Android — a port of the beloved Firefox browser to the Android platform. Can Mozilla make significant headway on mobile devices? Signs point to yes.

          Bearing in mind that Firefox 4 on Android is still in beta, I went to try it out for a bit and see how well it fares on my Nexus One. Note that I recently got the Gingerbread update on the Nexus, though I’m not sure if that has any impact on Firefox performance or not compared to earlier Android releases.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Top open source developers coming

    This week’s Palmetto Open Source Software Conference — or POSSCON — is bringing some of the nation’s leading software developers to Columbia.

    The conference, which will be held Wednesday through Friday at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center, will focus on the latest issues for developers, executives, government leaders and educators.

    The conference is unique on the East Coast, said conference chairman Todd Lewis, managing partner of Columbia’s Palmetto Computer Labs. Most open source conferences are held on the West Coast, such as in Silicon Valley. And it is significantly cheaper — $99 for advance tickets and $149 at the door — compared with $800 and up for West Coast conferences, Lewis said.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Download Firefox 4 Final for Linux

        Ladies and gentlemen, Mozilla has finally made available for download the latest and stable version of the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 4.0 web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures are supported!

        Yes! The final version of Firefox 4 is finally here, and it brings an amazing new look, faster start-up times, lots and lots of improvements, support for 3D graphics, HTML5, WebM, CSS3, SVG, hardware acceleration, JavaScript improvements, privacy enhancements, crash protection, and much more!

      • Mozilla Firefox 4 Improves Memory Use

        That’s no longer the case as the browser is set to exit development and become generally available on March 22.

      • FireSSH – SSH in a Browser (Firefox addon)

        FireSSH is a free, cross-platform SSH terminal client for Mozilla Firefox. Written entirely in Javascript!

      • Mozilla’s Leaner, Meaner Firefox 4 Arrives
      • Mozilla’s Firefox 4 bags 1M downloads in 3 hours

        Firefox 4 got off to a strong start today, with 1 million copies of the new browser downloaded in the first three hours.

        If it keeps up the early pace, Firefox 4 will easily beat Microsoft’s claim that users downloaded 2.4 million copies of its Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) in the first 24 hours of availability last week.

      • Firefox 4 Heats Up the Browser Wars
      • The 10 Best Features In Firefox 4
      • 12 new features in Mozilla Firefox 4

        D-day is here for Mozilla Firefox 4, almost 8 months after its first beta release. The launch comes eight days after Microsoft IE 9′s official launch. Firefox 4 was originally scheduled to launch in November 2010. Damon Sicore, Mozilla’s senior director of platform engineering, said in a message on a company forum, “Today’s triage session concluded with all systems go for a Firefox 4 launch on March 22.”

      • Mozilla Launches Firefox 4 and Delivers a Fast, Sleek and Customizable Browsing Experience to More Than 400 Million Users Worldwide

        Mozilla, a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Web better, is proud to release Mozilla Firefox 4, the newest version of the popular, free and open source Web browser. Firefox puts users in control of their Web experience, providing a streamlined user interface, fun new features, a boost in speed and support for modern Web technologies.

  • SaaS

    • What the Cloud Means for the Open-Source Desktop

      In this scenario, open-source operating systems win big. They’re free, but even more importantly, they’re highly modular and scalable, making it simple for vendors and users to cut out overhead that becomes useless in a cloud-based world.

    • Zarafa CEO Brian Joseph On Open-Source, the Cloud, and the World

      While cautioning that the open-source licensing of Zarafa’s software is “not the most important” factor in its success, Joseph emphasized the unique selling points that the product enjoys vis-à-vis proprietary competitors because of its open-source nature. Above all, the ability of customers to tweak the software freely provides an advantage wholly unavailable from most of Zarafa’s competitors.

  • Databases

    • Percona Delivers MySQL Support to 1000th Customer

      Percona, the oldest and largest independent provider of support and consulting services for the MySQL database, is proud to celebrate the 1000-customer milestone. Percona was founded in 2006 and employs a staff of nearly 50 people globally. Customers include Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Groupon, the BBC, and StumbleUpon. Companies who purchase MySQL support contracts from Percona testify that they enjoy lower system downtime, faster time to market, cost savings, access to state-of-the-art solutions that raise their capabilities to the next level, and greater business agility.

    • Ingres Announces Innovative Cloud Solutions and Strategic Roadmap

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Acquia Launches Web Solution Powerhouse Drupal Gardens 1.0

      Acquia, the enterprise guide to Drupal, today announced the general availability release of Drupal Gardens 1.0 with new capabilities and pricing plans. The powerful new Views functionality makes Drupal Gardens the most robust web solution to rapidly assemble and deploy extraordinary social sites. With more than 40,000 sites created in the last year, Drupal Gardens is the fastest way to build content-rich, dynamic sites.

      Views, a capability unique to Drupal, provides Drupal Gardens with an incomparable collection of tools for site builders with the simplicity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery. Without writing any code, Views makes it possible to create custom mashups or combinations of content, media, user profiles, and more. Site builders can point and click to pull together any information on their site and craft dynamic lists, grids, tables, reports, RSS feeds, and navigation. Views can also be configured to display different results based on visitor interactions, such as displaying posts submitted over the past month versus the most popular. With Views, Drupal Gardens sites can be easily assembled and deployed with completely custom dynamic content.

    • Investor.gov using Drupal

      Investor.gov recently switched to Drupal from WordPress. The site houses a lot of information for investors.

      The new investor.gov is a good looking site that also seems to be 508 compliant (for accessibility). The site is easy to use, making it easy for users to get the information they need without being overwhelmed.

  • Education

    • Open University offers Linux certification

      The six month OU course, from which students gain credits towards their degree, has been running for one year, during which over 1,000 students completed the program. A further 500 are expected to register for the third course, starting in May 2011. The course is aimed at complete beginners, and introduces them to the history and value of open source, installation and management of the operating system and web server, and basic functionality.

    • PL: School curriculum to be modernised with courses on free software

      The Polish Foundation on Open and Free Software (Fwioo) is establishing a team of ten experts to help develop courses on free and open source software, meant to be used in secondary schools as well as in technical schools.

  • Business

    • Addressing a Big New Audience: VMware Acquires WaveMaker

      This acquisition furthers VMware’s cloud application platform strategy by empowering additional developers to build and run modern applications that share information with underlying infrastructure to maximize performance, quality of service and infrastructure utilization.

    • When commercial open source goes bad

      Another example involves a company set up by some prominent former employees of one of the big names in open source software. The first version was released using an open source license but was never updated, as the company focused all its attention on the closed source version instead.

      Meanwhile one of the prominent “open source” systems management vendors appears to have removed all mention of its Community Edition software from its website, while the Community Edition itself has not been updated for 15 months. While the project is not officially “dead” it is, to say the least, “pining for the fjords” and the company in question could be said to be open source in name only.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Call: An open source Skype

      Free software world announces ambitious plans to build an open source Skype alternative.

      In an effort to create a free software alternative to Skype the GNU Project has announced plans for GNU Call. The project hopes to provide secure over-the-internet calls to all users and rival the popular Skype VoIP service.

    • Gnash 0.8.9 advances open source Flash

      The new 0.8.9 release improves on the usability and stability of the platform.

  • Government

    • AU: Government moves to encourage use of Open Source Software

      On 27 January 2011, Special Minister of State Gary Gray released the revised Australian Government Open Source Software Policy, which requires agencies to consider both open source and proprietary software for all ICT procurements.

      Mr Gray said: “The revised policy further strengthens agency software procurement processes by requiring agencies to consider both open source and proprietary software when undertaking all software procurement.”

      The government’s previous position on open source software, established in 2005, was one of ‘informed neutrality’. This ensured an unbiased position that did not favour the selection of either open source or proprietary software. Both the previous and the new policy positions ensure ‘value for money’ and ‘fit for purpose’ decisions in accordance with the Commonwealth Procurement Guidelines.

  • Licensing

    • Google GPL violation claims speculative: expert

      He pointed out that the same thing had been done twice before with glibc and uClibc, both under a weak LGPL licence. Google had merely provided a third alternative.

    • Open source and app stores: Where they mix, where they don’t

      App stores are all the rage these days, with companies vying to release their software ahead of competitors. Not surprisingly, open source components are being used to speed development of these applications. But companies need to ensure their open source usage fits within the requirements of both the app stores and open source component licenses — or risk removal from these outlets (and not just Apple’s).

    • Linus on Android headers: claims “seem totally bogus”

      The recent uncertainty cast over Android’s Bionic library and its use of Linux kernel headers “seems totally bogus”, according to Linus Torvalds. In an interview with Brian Proffitt at ITWorld, Torvalds said “I haven’t looked at exactly what Google does with the kernel headers but I can’t see they they’d want to do anything fundamentally different from glibc in this respect”. He also pointed out that he has said making use of the kernel’s system call interfaces, as described in the headers, does not “in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL”.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open source Kimono Lanterns to the rescue

      The devastation in Japan is heart rending and compels each of one of us to contribute to help improve the situation. Similar thoughts have been running through developers at Freaklabs . At the hackerspace they are involved with, a solar rechargeable lantern was designed for garden and patio use. Called the Kimono Lantern, today they are able to put it to better use. Donating the complete design to the open source hardware community, they are indeed standing true to the commitments of the Open Source community.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Science

    • The tiny cube that could cut your cell phone bill

      It’s called lightRadio, a Rubik’s cube-sized device made by Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) that takes all of the components of a cell phone tower and compresses them down into a 2.3-inch block. Unlike today’s cell towers and antennas, which are large, inefficient and expensive to maintain, lightRadio is tiny, capacious and power-sipping.

  • Security

    • PHP.net breach: Concern over safety of source code

      Maintainers of the PHP programming language spent the past few days scouring their source code for malicious modifications after discovering the security of one of their servers had been breached.

      The compromise of wiki.php.net allowed the intruders to steal account credentials that could be used to access the PHP repository, the maintainers wrote in a brief note. They continue to investigate details of the attack, which exploited a vulnerability in the Wiki software and a separate security flaw in Linux. The site has been down since at least Friday.

  • Finance

Clip of the Day

Ubuntu 11.04 Trailer HD (version en español)


Credit: TinyOgg

03.21.11

Links 21/3/2011: KDE and Red Hat Raves

Posted in News Roundup at 7:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A bid to keep LUGs relevant

    Hence the question of the relevancy of LUGs does come up for discussion at least occasionally. It’s something the president of the Perth Linux User Group, James Bromberger, has been thinking about.

    “For a LUG to survive, it needs energy from the members. There’s a lot to talk about on this subject,” Bromberger told iTWire. “Linux is mainstream these days compared with 10 years ago, and access to remote resources is trivial. LUGs used to be the only lifeline that people had to share ideas, but as an enabling technology, the internet has shifted people’s reliance on local resources.”

  • Desktop

    • Introducing Your Honey to Linux

      “A couple years ago, I bought my wife a new Thinkpad,” Slashdot blogger Chris Travers recalled. “She made a specific request: ‘I don’t want to use something weird, like Linux.’” Though the laptop came with Vista, it “never worked right. It had video card issues, power management issues and networking issues.” After a few days, Travers’ wife asked him to “‘do anything you can to make this work or return it,’” he said. “So I installed Fedora Linux.”

    • Should I Switch to Linux?

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Graphics Stack

      • Gallium3D OpenGL 4.1 State Tracker Redux

        There was a Gallium3D OpenGL 4.1 State Tracker proposed for this year’s Google Summer of Code to benefit X.Org / Mesa. As this state tracker was going to be written from scratch and without any dependence on Mesa itself, the consensus among the core developers was that the work was simply too ambitious for a lone student developer to complete over the course of a summer. A new proposal has now been drafted by Denis Steckelmacher, the Belgian student developer interested in open-source OpenGL 4.1 support.

      • Gordon’s Thoughts On Open-Source GPU Drivers

        Being discussed this week in our forums is an interview that Ryan “Icculus” Gordon gave last week to the Czech AbcLinuxu web-site. In particular, comments made by Ryan regarding the state of open-source graphics drivers and how they basically are just in bad shape.

        Ryan Gordon is perhaps the most well known Linux game developer that began at Loki Software and since then has independently been responsible for porting various games to Linux and Mac OS X such as Unreal Tournament 2004, America’s Army, and many others. He’s also been involved with Google Earth on Linux and various other projects, including the defunct Unreal Tournament 3 port.

      • Nouveau’s OpenGL Performance Approaches The NVIDIA Driver

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Holding on to KDE 3.5.x and Gnome 2.x in 2011

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Towards a declarative Plasma: Containments and tablets

        In the KDE Plasma Workspace 4.6 there was for the first time the possibility to write Plasmoids completely with a mix of the QML declarative language and Javascript, part of QtQUICK, this makes development dramatically faster (and with dramatically I mean that in around 2 days, c++ plasmoids developed since 4.0 can been rewritten from scratch)

      • Small applications missing in KDE 4

        I have been working in the last weeks in the removal of the last pieces of KDE 3 from the Debian archive and I have found there are a lot of packages that is sad having to remove.

      • KDE Look Part 6: 4 Months In

        So, in general, I’m still loving KDE. I hate that I can’t use it at work. It makes everything about using a computer a pleasure. I love that I’ve been able to customize it to my specific needs and I look forward to doing that even more once KDE 4.6 lands in Fedora and I can make better use of Activities. It makes me really feel that Gnome 3 and its rigidity is probably not for me. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t do radical customization of my desktops. But I do like to make it work for my unique situation. I’m going to reserve final judgement until I get to use it. Who knows, maybe it sucks me into its madness. But somehow I doubt that will be the case. I’m really loving KDE too much.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME 3 Live image, release 0.1.1

        This week release is a polish release :

        * very few package changes
        * many services are disabled when booting live CD, improving its loading speed
        * password is no longer asked at all in live CD for root or standard (tux) user
        * when installing the image on a system (add liveinstall parameter on bootloader), some services are enabled back (apparmor, preload, firewall), thanks to Chris comments

  • Distributions

    • Reviews

      • Looking over Crux again

        If you recall a speed jump when you moved from something gluttonous and bloated, like Ubuntu, to something sparse and clean, like Arch … well, you’ll see the same improvement when you move to something skeletal and streamlined.

    • New Releases

      • Gentoo Linux 11.0 Released, Try It Now

        Gentoo team has announced the release of version 11.0. Gentoo is traditionally known for geeks who want to compile the distro from scratch to optimize performance. But, Gentoo is well suited for regular users as well, if you are successful in installing it.

    • Red Hat Family

      • GPL expert gives Red Hat the all-clear

        Well-known free software activist and GPL expert Bradley Kuhn says Red Hat’s recent change of policy with regard to provision of its kernel source appears, on the surface, to be GPL-compliant.

      • Red Hat Global Support Team Honored As A Leader In Support Excellence

        “Red Hat’s Global Support Services team is responsible for earning and maintaining the loyalty of our subscribing customers. Through the reliable products we offer, the collaborative work we engage in with customers and partners and the high level of service we provide, we place our customer needs first,” said Marco Bill-Peter, vice president, Global Support Services at Red Hat. “We’re excited to be recognized by HDI for the updates we have been driving to improve our support delivery to our global customers and extend the value of our subscriptions.”

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Sqeeze Gets First Update

        The Debian project has announced the first update for the stable version of Debian, 6.0 aka Squeeze. According to the mailing list post, this udate mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

        This version doesn’t mean a new version of Debian, it just updates some of the packages. There is no need to throw away 6.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

      • “It’s called Debian”
      • DEX: Bridging Gaps Between Debian and Derivatives

        Zimmerman explains, “DEX is all about action: merging patches, fixing bugs, crunching data, whatever is necessary to get changes from derivatives into Debian proper. DEX doesn’t try to change the way any existing project works, but adds a “fast path” for getting code from one place to another.”

        Ubuntu has been accused of not contributing code back to upstream projects, but Debain acknowledged that the process for this has been difficult to navigate. The Debian Front Desk seems limited to linking interested parties, but DEX is an attempt to grease the wheels by actually merging code, recording statistics, and updating bug reports. It appears it is going to do the dirty work.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Is Natty Heading In The Wrong Direction?

          Canonical is investing quite a lot of resources in 11.04. I do appreciate the way Natty looks and feels at the moment, but to whom does it matter? When you tested Alpha of Natty what was the new feature that amazed you? Was there a new application that let you do things in a better way? Did Natty address any problem which GNU/Linux distros face in general?

          I like Ubuntu for 3 reasons: 1) It is based on Debian and I love the way apt-get resolves dependencies. 2) I like Ubuntu Software Center as it makes my job quite easier to install apps. 3) PPAs allow me to add applications without much worry.

        • Yay for Open Source!

          So I’ve avoided talking about the latest kerfuffle in Ubuntuland because I might be biased, working as I do for Canonical.

          [...]

          Not that such discussions aren’t worth having, but it’s easy to get caught up in navel-gazing. We’re all on the same team. We’re trying to change the world, and it’s worth remembering every now and then that we are succeeding!

        • Ubuntu Manual Project calling for Project Leader, Editor-in-Chief
        • An Interview with CharlesA
        • Open Ballot: is Canonical good for free software?

          On the other hand, Canonical would argue that it’s trying hard to give back to the community, for instance with the new DEX project. We want your opinions for our upcoming podcast: do you think, on the whole, that Canonical is a good or bad force for free software and Linux?

        • Ubuntu is NOT part of Google Summer of Code 2011
        • Razing the Stakes

          Ubuntu cheerleading blog OMG! Ubuntu asks the question, “Has the new Ubuntu One Control Panel raised the stakes in app appearances?”

        • Has the new Ubuntu One Control Panel raised the stakes in app appearances?

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Expect Better Collaboration Between Linux Mint And Lancelot

            Ivan Čukić recently blogged about the status of collaboration within FOSS projects. He was pointing at one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions Linux Mint. The Debian/Ubuntu based operating system uses Lancelot as the default menu in Linux Mint. But it seems Ivan was not even aware of it. He wrote that he found about it through a bug report.

            The report stated that, “This is also the reason Mint 10 KDE could not use Lancelot as the default launcher. This bug was considered a showstopper for one of the world’s most popular Linux distributions.”

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Apple and Android app marketplace insight

          Apple still dominates the mobile device app market but Android is gaining strength

          For some time Apple has dominated the app marketplace space, outpacing rivals with literally hundreds of thousands of applications on offer – but Android is catching up and could well surpass Apple’s app share.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Best Linux distros for netbooks

        There are now some fantastic varieties of Linux that make ideal replacements for the operating system that’s currently installed on your netbook.

        The latest version of Ubuntu UNR, for example, features brilliant hardware support alongside the expanding Unity interface, which Canonical is pinning its hopes on as a Gnome replacement for the next mainstream Ubuntu release.

      • Killing Linpus Linux, reaching for Ubuntu on netbooks

        One final note, Ubuntu on an Acer netbook is sweet, but it is slower than Linpus, so balance that factor too before you go diving in.

    • Tablets

      • Creative Upgrades ZiiO Tablet To Android 2.2, 10 Inch Tablet Expected In April

        Creative has upgraded its Android powered tablet ZiiO 7″ to the version 2.2. The company says in a statement that “Current Creative ZiiO 7″ owners will be able to enjoy a free upgrade via support.creative.com or the ZiiO Space portal found on their tablets, beginning 25 March 2011.”

        The company will also start shipping new Creative ZiiO 7″ with Android 2.2 on 18 March 2011. The 10″ version of ZiiO is expected to ship with Android 2.2 by April 2011.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OSI Landmark

    The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Board meet this weekend in San Francisco for its annual face-to-face meeting. There were two significant topics on the agenda. First, we had to review the substantial number of nominations for the two Board seats that become vacant on March 31st when Danese Cooper and Russ Nelson leave the Board due to term limits after a decade each of service.

    After a long series of discussions which finally had to come down to a vote, we elected Karl Fogel, Jim Jagielski and Mike Godwin (yes, that Godwin) serve as Board members in 2011-12. That’s one more than the number of new vacancies, but we really could not pick between the three successful candidates so we used our discretion to create an eleventh Board seat to accommodate all three of them. If it’s not obvious to you why, just take a look at their respective web pages!

  • Web Browsers

    • No FAFSA for FOSS Users

      Now even though three of these browsers are cross platform, the only operating systems you are able to use with these browsers are Windows and OSX. The kicker at the end of all this? At the very bottom of the page there is a citing of standards compliance as the reason for certain browsers being redirected:

      “For the past few years, every major Web browser released has been built around a set of open standards designated by the World Wide Web Consortium, a non-profit organization charged with overseeing the continuing development of the Web. What this means is that one piece of code now looks the same on every modern browser, whether it be Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, or others. The majority of our users are using these modern browsers, so we can present content which is optimized for them. “

    • Mozilla

      • Taming Firefox 4 – The annoyance-less guide

        Firefox 4 remains utterly configurable, as it always was, which is one of its strongest selling points. You will be able to restore old looks and feel easily, with a bit of hard work and only a handful of extra extensions. That said, I expect existing profiles not to be changed and not to remove the Status bar for Firefox 3.6 users.

      • Mozilla Releases Firefox 4 RC2

        It turns out that we were a bit quick to quote Mozilla that the first release candidate of Firefox 4 would also be the last and be published as the final version of the browser. Mozilla unexpectedly released a second release candidate. Future Firefox updates will not be referred to by version numbers anymore, but by codenames, which will be released in alphabetical order.

  • Education

    • Not enough open source in schools?

      FOSS is a feminist issue.

      Schools are highly feminised workplaces. Overall over 70% of the teachers are women and 90% of the admin and class support staff (which broadly are equal in number to the teaching staff) which means that the overwhelming majority of adult computer users in schools are female.

      So unless you believe that men and women have similar attitudes and dispositions to technology, schools present a gender-skewed marketing challenge.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • News: Gnash 0.8.9 released

      …Gnash community are happy to announce the release of Gnash v0.8.9. Gnash the GNU Flash player is a free/libre SWF movie player, with all the source code released under GPLv3.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • ‘Free’ Culture Folks Discuss Models For Sustainable Creativity

      Last year, I was invited to attend the FCForum’s event on creating sustainable models for creativity in the digital age in Barcelona. Unfortunately, due to timing and conflicts, I was unable to attend, though I heard from many who were able to make it and enjoyed it. Out of that event, the FCForum has released their version 1.0 document which is described as a “How to for Sustainable Creativity.” I take a bit of an issue with the title, which implicitly seems to suggest that creativity isn’t naturally sustainable, and needs some sort of outside help. However, the document itself is an interesting read. It digs into what the current state of the market is in music, filmmaking, writing & publishing, fashion and software, and then looks at various economic models that can be used to support all of those.

    • Crowd-sourcing aids Japan crisis

      People living close to the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan are collaborating to plot local radiation levels.

      The RDTN.org website allows people to submit their own radiation readings and maps them alongside official data.

    • Open Data

      • TileMill Puts Web GIS on the Map

        If you’re anything like me, you love a good map graphic, particularly one that brings what would otherwise be dull and boring data to life. The technical term for tools that render statistics into visual form with maps are geographic information systems (GIS). Open source has a wealth of top-notch GIS tools like GRASS and gvSIG, but their power comes with a learning curve. TileMill is a new tool that bucks the trend, letting complete newcomers to GIS build slick looking static or interactive maps with minimal fuss.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Five Things the Internet Brought About That I Can Live Without…

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Ellsberg: Wikileaks Logs Show Clear US War Crimes in Iraq—Manning Was Reportedly Motivated By Conscience

      Edited transcript of today’s Democracy Now interview with Daniel Ellsberg

      ELLSBERG: The conditions under which Manning is being held clearly violate the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution against cruel and unusual punishment—even for someone being punished, having been convicted. Here we have someone who has not yet been tried, not yet convicted, being held in isolation, solitary confinement, for something over 9 months. This is something that is likely to drive a person mad, and may be the intent of what’s going on here.

      The Wikileaks revelations that Manning is charged with having revealed, having to do with Iraq, show that in fact the US military in which Manning was a part, turns over suspect to the Iraqis with the knowledge that they will be and are being tortured. Turning these suspects over, with that knowledge, is a clear violation of our own laws and of international law. It makes us as much culpable for the torture as if we were doing it ourselves.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • A legacy from the 1800s leaves Tokyo facing blackouts

      East Japan entered its fifth day of power rationing on Friday, with no end to the planned blackouts in sight. The power shortages began last week when a massive earthquake and tsunami knocked nuclear power stations offline. The local electrical utility can’t make up the shortfall by importing power from another region, though, because Japan lacks a national power grid, a consequence of a decision taken in the late 1800s.

      Japan’s electricity system got its start in 1883 with the founding of Tokyo Electric Light Co. Demand quickly grew and in 1895 the company bought electricity generation equipment from Germany’s AEG. In west Japan the same evolution was taking place, and Osaka Electric Lamp imported equipment from General Electric.

  • Finance

    • Ex-Goldman Banker Behind WSJ ‘Smear Campaign’ Against Elizabeth Warren

      A Wall Street Journal editorial writer who has been closely involved with the paper’s recent attacks on Elizabeth Warren is a former Goldman Sachs banker. The same editorial writer, Mary Kissel, is readying another piece critical of Warren and the new consumer agency, according to a source familiar with the coming article.

      Like most major newspapers, the Journal does not disclose the authors of its editorials. Kissel recently appeared on the John Batchelor radio show as a representative of the Journal’s editorial board to discuss Warren, and repeated the main arguments used in the editorials.

    • Let Them Eat…iPads!: William Dudley Antoinette Visits Queens

      Dudley, a former chief economist for Goldman Sachs, gave a speech in Queens in which he spoke about the economy’s progress and the Fed’s successes. When the question and answer period rolled around, people in the audience wanted to know why the prices for food and gas were rising. As noted in a Wall Street Journal article—“the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of “core” inflation.”

      Dudley told his listeners that the economy was recovering and that inflation was under control. He tried to explain to his audience that the prices of some goods and products were indeed falling. “Today you can buy an iPad 2 that costs the same as an iPad 1 that is twice as powerful,” he said. “You have to look at the prices of all things.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • ISPs defend plans for two-tier net

      ISPs have defended their right to operate a two-speed internet, at a key debate into the future of the web.

      The debate was organised by the government, which is keen to see the principles of a free and equal net maintained.

      ISPs are increasingly looking to prioritise some traffic on their networks and block some.

      After the meeting the BBC called for the creation of a broadband content group to represent content providers.

Clip of the Day

Rap News 7: #Revolution


Credit: TinyOgg

03.20.11

Links 20/3/2011: ext4, ZFS for Linux, and Gentoo 11.0

Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Clickety clack, Linux won’t bite back.

    It seems to be human nature to fear the unknown. Sure there are a lot of brave souls who love to go out in to the unkown and learn new things. To those we are greatfull. Without those types of people we would not have the technological toys that are so much fun to play with.

    The average human is different. We seem to get stuck in a rut. We wake up, go through our morning rituals, hopefully go to work, then come home, play a bit and off to bed. Only to repeat this same cycle for as long as our health allows. We are fine with that, in fact we are downright comfortable with it. We are happy and secure in the little comfort zone we have carved out for ourselves in this big bad old world.

  • Desktop

    • Growing Linux Users

      There are two things that can be associated to new Linux users and that is tragic and magic. And as to what part an individual would experience depends on a lot of factors. The first factor would be the ease of use, certainly Linux would be a user friendly application but since you are not used to it, the first experience on Linux would really be difficult. If the new user will tend to see things so complex to understand, he will surely forget about the idea and carry on with using his old operating system.

    • HeliOS is on the Move…

      They were impressed enough to offer us an extremely generous deal on a 2200 square foot building for our use.

      [...]

      This is a huge step in the evolution of The HeliOS Project. We will be able to impact entire neighborhoods and area’s, not households in one’s and two’s. We will finally have some autonomy and freedom in our operation, and as always, it will be the Free Software and Linux Communities that makes it happen.

    • Windows Vs. Linux: The Breakdown

      The graphical user interface (GUI) is certainly one of the most sought-after features of any operating system. A typical Ubuntu setup can have one of the three major Linux GUIs, including XFCE, KDE, and the most popular, Gnome.

    • Windows Users: Here Is Why You Need A Linux Live CD

      In my experience Windows tends to have a habit of going wrong when you least expect, and at crucial moments. If you dread that sinking feeling as your system screws the pooch on startup, maybe it’s time to make a Linux live CD.

      There are plenty of reasons the average Windows user may want to create a Linux live CD or USB stick before it’s too late. A USB-based distribution will be speedier (you’ll need Unetbootin) or you can simply burn a CD/DVD with something like ImgBurn.

  • Kernel Space

    • Tim Burke: ext4 Is Not Going Anywhere Any Time Soon

      To add some details that they did not mention in either summary, we also have a lot of new code in the NFS client in 2.6.38 that will be the building blocks for parallel NFS (a way to make clustered NFS servers much higher performance).

    • ZFS for Linux 0.7.0 released

      The ZFS for Linux FUSE (File-systems in User Space) driver has been updated to version 0.7.0, nine months after it’s last release (0.6.9). New features in the version include updates to pool version 23 of the Sun code and the incorporation of all of Sun’s bug fixes, robust rollback handling, improved init scripts, bash completion and a more reliable zpool export and destroy.

    • PingWin Software Joins Linux Foundation

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that PingWin Software is its newest member.

      PingWin Software is a leading systems integrator in Russia and is focused on Linux and open source software integration. PingWin Software is the first Russian company to join The Linux Foundation.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Webconverger: Linux for Libraries?

      In conclusion, Webconverger is limited, but useful precisely because of its limits. For an initial investment in time and money than can be counted in minutes and cents, those who deploy Webconverger will reap the benefit of never having to even think about the software on their machines, while knowing that their users’ security and privacy are ensured.

    • Minty Freshness: New LMDE Theme Based On Orta, Created By SkiesOfAzel

      It appears that SkiesOfAzel, the Orta theme developer was contacted by a LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) developer to create a similar theme for LMDE and the initial result can already be tested (not just on LMDE – you can use it on any Linux distribution obviously). If you thought Orta is amazing,

    • Linux: Awesome is Awesome!

      I decided to give Awesome a try. Awesome is a tiling window manager like xmonad. I’ve been using it for about a month, and I like it a lot.

      It integrates with GNOME much better than dwm. Most users of dwm don’t use GNOME, but I do. Its default settings are a lot nicer than xmonad’s. When I use xmonad, I spend all my time futzing with my .xmonad.hs, but I haven’t had to tweak Awesome at all the whole time I’ve used it. For instance, Awesome comes with a ton of layouts built in.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Join KDE for Google Summer of Code 2011

        For the 7th year in a row KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code. We are delighted to be able to work with great students throughout the summer again. To find out more about the program visit the GSoC website and pay special attention to the FAQ and timeline.

      • It’s not an address book

        It began about ten years ago, when I rewrote the KDE address book library. I implemented a nice API, vCard parsing, and a representation of something I called an Addressee back then, a contact, the data belonging to a person or any other entity, closely modelled after the fields of vCard, which is a fine standard for storing and exchanging address book data.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 6 March 2011
      • Project Neon is back!

        So, without further ado: Project Neon is back with much more stuff in stock. Those of you who have been around KDE for a while might remember the old one developed by everyone’s favourite (or NOT) apachelogger which offered daily builds of Amarok. Well, that one kind of died but new Project Neon Team managed to revive it with new features. Thanks to ingenious Launchpad Source Builds feature we set up nightly builds of the KDE Software Compilation trunk and we are currently working on getting Amarok there too.

      • Design Decisions #1

        I want to thank who ever it was that made the decision to NOT force KDE to develop a composited desktop with a fall-back to a totally different looking un-compositied desktop in the event the computer has a driver failure/poor videocard. (Edit: I know kde has compositing, but those are effects and the overall design of kde looks basically the same whether you have the compositing on or off).

        I say this in light of the development work on Unity and Gnome3. Which falls back to gnome2 when 3d acceleration is not available. Why?

      • On switching to KDE/Xfce

        Unlike with the panel, in GNOME 3, I can no longer choose to have the clock where I want it, remove some of the unnecessary icons, or even add weather applets and information to the screen. At the same time, I am supposed to believe everything is now an “Activity” with a single menu button being used to drive everything I do, rather than various shortcuts and icons around the screen. I can’t even have desktop icons or launch a terminal via the right click menu (which now doesn’t exist in the default setup). I’m also not at all fond of the effects, or the new window manager. In fact, where GNOME 2.x did almost everything I wanted, it seems that GNOME 3 does the opposite. Where it used to be about productivity, it’s now about appearance and effects, at the cost of more experienced users.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • gnome tweak tool – A GUI to customize advanced GNOME 3 options

        gnome-tweak-tool is a GUI to customize advanced settings beautify desktop environment in coming Gnome 3.

      • Understanding Gnome 3 – Without the min, max buttons

        While you are waiting for the Gnome 3 impatiently for the April 2011 release, you could attempt peaking at new shell. Those who have had a go at it come away excited at the substantial changes. The desktop design is spanking new and definitely appealing. New intuitive messaging, without have to switch, that allows you to reply are some of the distinctive and immediately identifiable changes. GNOME3 is essentially the next generation shell and several legacies of the GNOME 2 have disappeared because there is no room for them in the new shell design.

      • What will the new GNOME desktops mean for other Linux desktops?

        It’s almost time. Soon a new paradigm of GNOME is going to drop onto the desktops of suspecting (and unsuspecting) users. When this does there is going to be reaction. As with any major change to the computer industry, users are going to have both negative and positive reactions. Some will go so far as to switch distributions to avoid this change. Some users, on the other hand, will seek solace elsewhere. What exactly does that mean to the landscape of Linux? Let’s don our speculation caps and take a look.

      • GNOME-KDE wars are back again

        There have been two recent instances where Canonical has acted in a way that has displeased GNOME – one was when it decided to use its own interface, Unity, for the next version of Ubuntu, instead of the forthcoming GNOME 3 shell.

      • Faenza 0.9 Released – Brings More Polish, New “Darkest” Theme & Lots More

        Faenza icon theme is arguably *the* most beautiful icon theme for GNOME and also has support for the widest range of applications in Ubuntu GNOME. Faenza 0.9 was released a day ago and it brings in a number of major upgrades including a new “darkest” theme and many other openly visible as well as subtle changes.

      • GNOME marketing contract: week 2
      • In response to “the libappindicator story”

        It’s fine for you to state Canonical did not follow the process, but to not link to a doc or provide a post showing the process as approved by either GNOME or the team within GNOME responsible for this particular area, it’s quite frankly irresponsible.

      • Use Getting Things GNOME to get things done

        One of the most fundamentally life-altering books that I have ever read was Getting Things Done by David Allen. This book is inspiring, eye-opening, and has allowed me to work more efficiently than I ever had before reading it. The GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology has quite literally changed the way that I work and approach tasks.

        I’ve played with a number of GTD-inspired applications on the Mac with varying degrees of success. Currently my app of choice on the Mac is OmniFocus, which is a great application. Unfortunately, it does not run on Linux and I do like to keep work and home-related tasks separate, so while I use a Mac for the home stuff, I use Linux for work. That meant I needed a good GTD app for Linux.

  • Distributions

    • Exotic Linux distros: A walk on the wild side

      Linux seems to offer a distribution for every occasion. Among these obscurer flavours are a few that you may not have encountered, but could be just what you need, says Jack Wallen.

    • Continued Adventures in Distro Remixing

      I’ve been making a personal Fedora remix for a while now… since Fedora 10. While that might sound hard, thanks to Fedora’s livecd-tools package and their livecd-creator script, it is really quite easy. I even made a screencast about it. I recently started making a remix of Scientific Linux 6.0 and wanted to share.

      As you may recall, I prefer Fedora on my personal desktops but on servers I prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux or a RHEL clone. There are actually a few clones to pick from and I’ve been using CentOS for a number of years. One thing I like about CentOS is that one of its goals is to stay as true to RHEL as possible by attempting to be 100% binary compatible with it, bugs and all. Unfortunately the CentOS developers have gotten somewhat backlogged with the onslaught of RHEL releases over the last few months (6.0, 5.6, and 4.9) and have taken a lot of criticism for release delays as well as falling behind on security updates in the process.

    • Had A Gnuff?

      Yesterday a reader dropped me a link to Gnuffy, which is an offshoot of Arch Linux started about three years ago. Looking over what has been accomplished with it thus far, I was very impressed with their ideas on expanding Arch (many already implemented), and given a few new ideas of my own.

      At this point Gnuffy appears to consist of a package manager called Spaceman and some user repositories. Gnuffy can use any of Arch Linux’s repos in addition to its own, and can use the standard PKGBUILDs in addition to its own improved version of PKGBUILD, which includes some Gentoo-style USE flags and other enhancements. Packages on Gnuffy’s repos are GPG signed with the key of the packager, and Spaceman checks signatures. Nice work! It was a bit like suddenly being transported into the future of Arch.

    • Linux From Scratch 6.8 is released! Step-by-step instructions on how to build your own Linux-based OS from scratch

      It also includes editorial work on the explanatory material throughout the book, improving both the clarity and accuracy of the text.

    • Puppy Linux — could it replace Debian on my oldest hardware?

      I’ve run Puppy Linux before. Many times. I started with Puppy 2.13 and still remember that release very, very fondly.

      I have half an entry (not yet published) on the Lenny to Squeeze upgrade for my Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop — a 1999 throwback with Pentium II MMX at 233 MHz, 144 MB of RAM and a 3 GB hard drive. I’ve written dozens of articles about this laptop, and I’ve run everything from OpenBSD and TinyCore to Slackware and Debian Lenny and now Squeeze on it.

    • Puppy in 2011 on a laptop in 1999 — I’m sticking with Debian
    • Gentoo 11.0 Screenshots
    • Top Linux Distros For Every Level User

      In this article, I’ll highlight some of the top Linux distributions for advanced users as well as some great ones for those who are intermediate and newer users. In each case, I’ll include distributions for those wanting to learn more about using Linux effectively.

    • Reviews

      • Tiny Core 3.5 review – a blend of the brilliant and the infuriating

        Tiny Core is a light and modular Linux distribution. Its main purpose is to allow the easy construction of simple but powerful appliance-like desktops. Michael Reed tests the latest release…

      • Pardus 2011 – Best KDE4 around, but could be better

        Pardus is easily one of the lesser known bigger surprise Linux distributions. Developed in Turkey, it does not strike you as a top choice for your desktop, does it? But it is a top-notch distribution with a handful of clever tricks that make it a great candidate for daily use. I was mightily impressed with the 2009 version, which is why I’m testing this year’s release.

      • A peek at Bodhi Linux 0.1.6

        I can’t deny Bodhi brings something new to the table; the desktop it provides is certainly different. Judging from the number of downloads the project has experienced thus far it must be appealing to quite a lot of people. However, I didn’t find anything to recommend the distro. It is, in my opinion, mostly glitter and little substance.

    • New Releases

      • Trisquel 4.5 Slaine Release Candidate is ready

        The release candidate images for the 4.5 release of Trisquel, “Slaine”
        are ready for testing. Note that this images will become the final
        release if no bugs are found. Minor bugs would be fixed via updates.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat teams with RIT to help deaf children

        Raleigh-based Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is sponsoring open source workshops at the Rochester Institute of Technology this summer that have the potential of improving technology for deaf and hard of hearing children.

        Three RIT students who are alumni of the Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience workshops have developed an open source prototype video chat package to produce smooth sign language video for One Laptop Per Child’s XO laptops.

      • Fedora

        • Playing With Fire, Fedora 15 and Gnome 3

          There are concern among users that Gnome 3 or Unity is a wrong decision; that it needs a learning curve and not many users are ready or willing to do so. I disagree. The fact is people like status-quo; they don’t like changes. But that’s not how world works. Not changing for sake of user’s reluctance also keeps technologies from evolving.

        • My Wife Loves Gnome 3

          I downloaded and installed Fedora 15 alpha (Gnome 3) after reading this review. I was looking forward to this opportunity as I knew that sooner or later it will be ‘between the Devil and the deep blue sea’. I will have to choose from between Unity and Gnome Shell 3. Or, I will resist the change and migrate to a distro which will continue to invest on Gnome 2? I believe I will go with Unity or Gnome 3. It’s not fair to not embrace newer technologies. The incident that I am going to share with you strengthened my trust in Gnome 3.

    • Debian Family

      • Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.1 released

        The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 6.0 (codename “squeeze”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

      • Ubuntu Linux aims to give back with Debian Dex

        About five years ago, the Debian Common Core Alliance (DCCA) got started as an effort to help encourage collaboration among Debian derivatives. The DCCA failed.

      • Debian Project News – March 14th, 2011
      • Debian 6.0 “Squeeze”: What’s New?

        Debian 6 was in many ways an important and path-breaking release of Debian, but is it really relevant today? Debian as a desktop system isn’t really something you’d like to use—it’s too old. Debian for servers? Well, it does the job extremely well, but Ubuntu Server, while providing LTS releases every 2 years (which coincides with Debian’s new release cycle), has better support from applications, built-in support for EC2 clouds, and commercial support from Canonical (with stuff like Landscape, which even Red Hat cannot boast of).

        Moreover, day by day, Debian is getting more purist in its approach. For a server OS, it beats me why SELinux or AppArmor wasn’t included, and the fact remains that even if I use it as a desktop, it still needs a bit of tinkering around with configuration files in /etc to fully realise the potential of the system. Although yes, porting in Software Center from Ubuntu was a very nice touch, and it does make managing repositories and installing software a lot easier.

        There’s only one thing I can say about Debian 6: it may have released just yesterday, but it was outdated 6 months ago. So unless you have a reason for using Debian, both on the server front and desktop front, I’d recommend Ubuntu. On the other hand, if you do have that reason for using Debian, go ahead and upgrade, because you will be blown away by the amount of polish that has gone into this release. Debian 6 is indeed a worthy upgrade to Debian 5, but not really from other distros.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Gallery: Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3

          Ubuntu Linux 11.04 now uses the “Unity” user interface, which features a prominent “Task Bar” on the left hand side that acts as both a task manager in addition to a common application launcher. Shown on the desktop is LibreOffice Writer, the word processing program that comes with the new LibreOffice productivity suite which replaces OpenOffice 3 in previous versions of Ubuntu.

        • Ubuntu Will Run On Tablets With Better Multi-touch Support

          So, what is going on at Canonical when it comes to the multi-touch devices? It appears a lot is going on behind the scene. Future versions of Ubuntu will have better support for mult-touch devices and if vendors like it they might start putting Ubuntu on tablets.

          Chase Douglas of Canonical has written in his blog post, “One of my key goals for Ubuntu 11.04 has been to introduce full multitouch support through X.org. In technical terms, this means adding touch support to the XInput protocol. You may see others refer to multitouch in X.org as simply XInput 2.1. We hatched our plan back at UDS-N to push hard on developing the XInput 2.1 protocol and implementing it as best as possible in 11.04. The idea was that Ubuntu would be a test bed for the protocol before it is adopted by X.org upstream.”

        • Canonical pares Ubuntu down to 2 editions

          Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu distribution of Debian Linux, is going to make it easier for people to consume its operating system.

          Gerry Carr, director of platform marketing at Canonical, says in a blog post that beginning with the “Natty Narwhal” release in April, the company is going back to the way it did things ahead of its server launch, with a single release for any kind of PC. That new release will be called simply Ubuntu 11.04, and the server edition will be called Ubuntu Server 11.04.

        • Ubuntu: Really a Cloud Operating System?

          It’s no secret that Canonical’s been pushing Ubuntu’s cloud-centric features hard in recent months. We’ve written frequently here about new tools, like cloud-init, that give Ubuntu a leg up vis-à-vis other distributions in the cloud niche, as well as development trends that place the cloud at the center of the longterm vision for Ubuntu Server Edition.

        • Beyond Natty: The next version of Ubuntu Linux

          Well, we dodged a bullet. Instead of Octopoid Octopus, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux and its parent company Canonical, has chosen Oneiric Ocelot for Ubuntu’s November 2011 version name.

          Unless you’re a film maven, your first question is probably: “What’s Oneiric!?” I know it as a film criticism term for dream sequences in a movie. Or as Shuttleworth explained, “Oneiric means “dreamy”, and the combination with Ocelot reminds me of the way innovation happens: part daydream, part discipline.” I’ll buy that. But, let’s get down to brass tacks: What does this mean? What can we expect from this version?

        • Canonical intelligently reinvents the scrollbar for Ubuntu

          Such a lack of scrollbars gave the design team at Canonical an idea. Could they remove the permanent scrollbars at the edge of windows in Ubuntu to free up more space for content while still allowing them to work with a cursor? The answer was a definite yes, and the re-design is now being experimented with.

          The two videos included here give you a good idea of how the experimental scrollbars, called overlay scrollbars, work. They are effectively the same as before functionality wise, but invisible until your cursor enters the area of the screen you would normally expect to find them. At that point a scrollbar appears as an overlay and you can click and drag to scroll around.

        • Ubuntu Linux 11.04: A whale of changes for Canonical’s user base

          I recently had a chance to take a look at the Alpha 3 release of Ubuntu 11.04, the latest version of Canonical’s Linux desktop OS that is due in April. 11.04 is considered to be a major release for Ubuntu because it represents a significant departure from the default GNOME UI to the new Unity UI.

        • 15 Very New and Unique Ubuntu Wallpapers

          It has been really long since we featured any new collection of wallpapers for Ubuntu or Linux. Article featuring Ubuntu/Linux wallpaper packs was the last in this particular category and even that was several months ago. So here is it once again, a nice and simple collection of 15 Ubuntu branded wallpapers from across the web. Enjoy!

        • Ubuntu Netbook Remix is dead. Long Live Ubuntu

          The Netbook Remix was a personal favorite of mine, as it made it easy for me to point my netbook friends at it, as an easy replacement for whatever OS was installed by default on their device.

        • Ubuntu using Windows key(Super key) to Launch Gnome Main Menu

          If you’d like Super key as keyboard shortcut to launch Gnome Main menu in Ubuntu, follow this simple tutorial.

        • Six Conceptual Unity behaviour mock-ups

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ultimate Edition 2.9 has been released!

            Ultimate Edition 2.9 has been released! according to the announcement, this release was built off Ultimate Edition 2.8 which is built off Ubuntu 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’. All updates fully updated / upgraded, old kernels purged, new initrd and vmlinuz rebuilt. Ultimate Edition 2.9, as with all odd release numbers, was built with KDE users in mind. Ultimate Edition 2.9 has KDE, GNOME, Openbox and Xfce environments, user selectable at login. A crisp new theme (121 to choose from) and tons of new software. LXDE was broken at time of build on the 32-bit side, so it did not make the cut.

          • 10 Ubuntu re-spins I’d like to see

            In the Linux-verse, a re-spin is basically a new distribution that has been “spun off” from another distribution. We’ve already seen the likes of this with just about every major distribution. Ubuntu is one of the distributions that has enjoyed a number of good re-spins. Based on what is going down with the current releases of Ubuntu, this favorite distribution of new users will be in need of a few newer re-spins.

            With that in mind, I thought it would be a fun exercise to come up with a few re-spins of my own that would combine various bits and pieces (and a few philosophies) from other operating systems or developers. Some of these distributions would be quite possible, whereas some may not. I’ll leave it up to you which of them should actually happen.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Puppet, DevOps key to data center surge, says Constant Contact

    Email marketing firm Constant Contact said it selected Puppet Labs’ Puppet configuration management and automation framework to help scale its environment from a couple hundred servers to several thousand in under two years time.

    If all goes as planned, that trend will continue unabated, as the company grows and adds new applications like a Cassandra distributed database cluster.

  • Open source systems management: Hits and misses

    With open source technology now in the mainstream, IT shops now have plenty of options for systems management. But IT administrators — even those with open source skills — agree that these tools have some significant drawbacks.

  • The Quality of FOSS Blogs
  • 6 More of the Best Free Linux Blog Software

    Weblog software (also known as blog software) is a type of application which is designed to help users effortlessly create and maintain weblogs.

  • Events

    • Texas Linux Fest – It’s on Bay-bee….

      This year, TXLF will be held at the spacious and opulent Downtown Hilton hotel. I’ve been in aircraft hangers that were not as big as the speaking halls and let’s face it…it’s the Hilton. I believe current numbers are already surpassing last year’s attendance.

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Rackspace, Dell push OpenStack cloud OS

      Rackspace will help enterprises build private clouds using the OpenStack cloud operating system, the company announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, Dell is seeking enterprises and service providers for proof-of-concept OpenStack trials with its Dell PowerEdge C family of servers.

    • S3TC For Mesa Is Talked About Some More

      Discussions surrounding S3TC Texture Compression support for mainline Mesa (right now it’s an external library) is becoming an increasingly common occurrence. Newer games and OpenGL applications depend upon S3TC support and open-source developers are unable to provide “out of the box” support due to patent concerns.

      There was a hopeful discussion about S3TC and floating point support for Mesa a little more than a week ago, but that discussion died before anything materialized in Mesa Git. The push there was for mainlining the S3TC and OpenGL floating point support but to not build it by default if not using the hidden –enable-patented option.

  • Databases

    • Couchbase Unleashes Open Source NoSQL Database

      What happens when you bring together two open source database technologies? In the case of vendors Membase and CouchOne, you end up with a new company called Couchbase and a new product called the Couchbase Server.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Beautiful Looking LibreOffice Splash Screen, A Must Try!

      As you all should know by now, LibreOffice is already the new default office suite for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. You can even install latest LibreOffice in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid easily via LibreOffice PPA by following the instructions here. Now, here is a very good looking and very creative LibreOffice splash screen that demands your attention.

    • 6 of the Best Free Linux Office Software

      The risk was deemed so serious that many developers decided to form the Document Foundation in September 2010 to manage and develop a fork called LibreOffice. There have already been a number of significant features added to the OpenOffice.org codebase in recent months. However, it is likely that there will be a significant delay before the corporate world readily embraces LibreOffice, in part because of concerns about the Document Foundation itself. Nevertheless, their fork is a comprehensive desktop productivity suite with a number of significant features not found in OpenOffice.org.

    • Oracle kills Sun.com after starvation diet
    • Gosling: Oracle’s self-interest requires good Java stewardship

      Although Java founder James Gosling left Oracle last year after a short, dissatisfying experience with the company following its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, he nonetheless sees Oracle as having no choice but to do a good job in its stewardship of Java.

      In discussions Wednesday morning at the TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas, Gosling stressed that a large faction of Oracle’s business is based on Java. For example, Oracle Fusion Middleware, including the WebLogic application server, is based on enterprise Java. “It’s in their own self interest to not be aggressively stupid,” said Gosling, who was a prominent Sun engineer and has been called the father of Java.

  • Business

    • Is it really a business vs. open source world?

      It seems like there’s no such thing as a non-controversial Linux distribution anymore.

      Look at the news and the blogosphere, and lately it seems like every major distro company’s in some kind of hot water with various elements of the community.

    • Semi-Open Source

      • The Slur “Open Core”: Toward More Diligent Analysis

        Later — shortly after I pointed out Mark Shuttleworth’s fascination with and leanings towards this practice — I realized that it was better to use the preexisting, tried-and-true term for the practice: “proprietary relicensing”. I’ve been pretty consistent in avoiding the term “Open Core” since then. I called on Shuttleworth to adopt the FSF’s recommendations to show Canonical, Ltd. isn’t seeking proprietary relicensing and left the whole thing at that. (Shuttleworth, of course, has refused to even respond, BTW.)

  • Funding

    • Packt Publishing Believes in Open Source, Donates Over $300K to Projects

      Packt today announced that its donations to open source projects have surpassed the $300,000 mark. Following its first donation to the phpMyAdmin project in April 2004, the company has gone on to provide sustained support for over 70 different open source projects.

    • Open source news publishing platform gets $975,000 grant

      The Knight Foundation has given a $975,000 grant to The Texas Tribune and The Bay Citizen, both non-profit news organisations, to develop a free and open source publishing platform for other online news organisations. Online local news is a growing sector in the United States and the Foundation wants to enable local news organisations to engage with readers more and manage content easily while being able to raise revenue. The Knight Foundation is dedicated to funding local news and journalism in the digital age.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • When Freedom Rings

      I was both surprised and pleased with the community response to the announcement for GNU Free Call. Rather unfortunately our hosting for the wiki, Ibiblio, was down, as they were doing a large move on Tuesday. Even more amusing, Haakon’s email provider also decided to do some relocation this week.

    • Volunteer to help the new Savannah maintainer

      Sylvain Beucler, who was instrumental in modernizing and maintaining Savannah for the last seven years, has decided to step down and look for new challenges. Many, many, thanks to Sylvain and best wishes.

  • Project Releases

    • A Group Of FFmpeg Developers Just Forked As Libav

      Following a number of internal disputes among FFmpeg developers in recent weeks, a group of these developers have stepped away from the project and have forked off of the FFmpeg code-base to create a new project called the “libav” project.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • GCC 4.6 Release Candidate Comes w/o P1 Regressions

      The GNU developers responsible for GCC have eliminated all of the P1 regressions (their most serious class of regressions in this open-source compiler) in the GNU Compiler Collection 4.6.0 code-base, so they have went ahead and tagged the first release candidate.

      Red Hat’s Jakub Jelinek issued a new status report on the progress of GCC 4.6. The P1 regression count is now at zero, after the last four bugs were corrected in the past week. There have also been seven P2 regressions fixed, but three new regressions of P3 status discovered.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Has the Battle for the Digital Car Been Won?

      This week a new consortium was launched that may signal who will finally own the last great, unclaimed consumer computing platform – the automobile. The new organization is the Car Connectivity Consortium, and the winner is . . . well, we’ll come back to that a little later. Suffice it to say for now that the fifteen year battle to control the digital future of the automobile could be at an end, and that its resolution may tell us something about the future of the digital desktop as well.

Leftovers

  • Crowd-Sourcing System Requirements For Free Software

    Over the weekend into OpenBenchmarking.org I pushed the OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classification Index (OPCI) feature. Read that blog post for all of the features, but it comes down to now indexing the most commonly tested hardware and classifying the performance of all test results into low, mid, and high-end segments. So you can easily see a list of overall — for all tests hosted by OpenBenchmarking.org — a list of the rated processors, graphics cards, motherboards, and disks that are self-hosting. The OpenBenchmarking.org Performance Classification Index was then resolved down to the test profile level to be able to answer questions like what is the best graphics card for this game?

  • Oracle accused of stifling HP TPC benchmark

    Oracle has been accused of stifling the publication of an HP/Oracle DBMS benchmark that indicates its own SPARC SuperCluster world-record benchmark system cost almost 60 per cent more per transaction than a similar test on an HP Proliant system.

    The record TPC-C benchmark result is held by a $30.53m, 108 processor, SPARC Supercluster, which achieved 30,249,688 transactions per minute (TPM) at a cost of $1.01/TPM.

  • Jury: Blogger Johnny Northside must pay $60,000 to fired community leader

    Though blogger John (Johnny Northside) Hoff told the truth when he linked ex-community leader Jerry Moore to a high-profile mortgage fraud, the scathing blog post that got Moore fired justifies $60,000 in damages, a Hennepin County jury decided Friday.

  • Hardware

    • Replacing DVD, a Hollywood cliffhanger

      UltraViolet (UV) is the name of new technology standards expected to debut this summer that Hollywood hopes will help reignite the public’s interest in collecting movies and cauterize the bleeding in their home-video divisions. UV was created by a consortium that includes all the big film studios–with the exception of Disney–and numerous movie-sector allies, such as Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Comcast and Netflix. UV managers said in January that the technology will ensure consumers will be able to play their movies and TV shows on a wide range of devices and services.

  • Security

    • Arbor Networks Researchers Find U.S.-Based DDoS Botnet
    • Why Pwn2Own doesn’t target Linux

      “Linux is not an operating system that has widespread use with any one particular distribution, flavor or configuration,” Portnoy said.

    • Is Linux Antivirus Software Worth It?

      Some friends who are in the computer business took exception to my position on anti-virus (AV) software, saying “for Linux, we don’t clog up our computers with anti-virus software.” And that remark deserves some elaboration.

      Windows is such a booby-trap for malware of all kinds, that Windows AV software works in the “always-active” mode. Emails are scanned the moment they arrive. If you insert a storage device or download a file, that gets scanned. This requires a big chunk of the AV software to be permanently loaded in memory, and continuously running, so yes, it does “clog up” your computer to some extent, making it run slower. But you need this continuous vigilance to keep your Windows PC safe.

    • Social media passwords off limits, Simons says

      A politician running to lead the B.C. New Democrats says he is refusing to comply with a requirement of leadership hopefuls to hand over the passwords to their social media accounts.

      Nicholas Simons, an NDP MLA who’s hoping to run in the leadership race, says he’s left that information off his nomination package.

    • Google to enforce SSL encryption on developer APIs

      Google will soon require the use of SSL encryption with three of its developer-facing APIs.

      Beginning September 15, Google will require all developers to use SSL connections for all requests through its Google Documents List, Google Spreadsheet, and Google Sites APIs. In other words, these APIs will only accept requests via HTTPS. If you make a request to an old HTTP address, such as http://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full, it will no longer work. You must use https://docs.google.com/feeds/default/private/full.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • US military brig officials order whistle-blowing suspect to sleep naked

      United States soldier Bradley Manning, accused of leaking US state secrets to WikiLeaks and detained under restrictive conditions at the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia since July 2010, was ordered Wednesday to sleep stripped of all clothing. According to his attorney, this condition was imposed because Manning made a “sarcastic quip” about the harsh conditions of his confinement.

    • Administration Forces PJ Crowley Out Of The State Dept. After He Admits That Manning Is Being Mistreated

      When President Obama was campaigning and elected, one of the things he frequently talked about was how he was influenced by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, and how President Lincoln brought together may dissenting voices into his cabinet. There were, clearly, political reasons for doing so, but part of the benefit was that it allowed voices of dissent to be heard. However, in practice, it’s appearing that President Obama has no real interest in allowing the same thing to occur in his administration, and that’s really unfortunate.

    • Suspect in MLK bomb tied to racist movement

      Federal agents today arrested an ex-soldier with ties to the white supremacist movement and charged him with planting the backpack bomb along the planned route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day march in downtown Spokane.

    • Defamation Lawsuit Against NYT by Informant in Plot to Bomb 2008 RNC May Have a Chance

      A former FBI informant who helped foil a bomb plot at the 2008 Republican National Convention has sued the New York Times for libel and defamation.

      A Times story from February 22 claimed that Brandon Darby had “encouraged” others to bomb the RNC, when in fact he had been essential to law enforcement efforts that disrupted the plot.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Japan Radiation Levels (In English)

      While media around the world continue to present the Fukushima nuclear crisis as an Armageddon moment for Japan and the world, Japanese media is going out and taking measurements of radiation levels all around the Kanto region. Because I have not been able to find this type of information easily in English I have translated a radiation map of Japan into English and created a clear overview for you here.

    • Let There Be Light

      The response from an Energy Department official nicely illustrated the paternalistic, know-it-all attitude Paul was criticizing. “I’m pro-choice on bulbs,” insisted Kathleen Hogan, the deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency. “My view is, what you want is lighting.” And the government, in its infinite wisdom, will tell you what kind of lighting is best for you.

  • Finance

    • Wisconsin protests—now with farmers (and tractors)

      Tens of thousands of people were in Madison, Wisconsin, again this weekend, continuing to protest Governor Scott Walkers attempt to do away with collective bargaining for some state employees. We’re at Day 18 now, if you’re keeping track.

    • Wis. defeat could help launch counterattack on GOP

      With the labor movement suffering an epic defeat in Wisconsin and perhaps other states, union leaders plan to use the setback to fire up working people nationwide and mount a major counterattack against Republicans at the ballot box in 2012.Wis. defeat could help launch counterattack on GOP

    • Tiny Cuts, Big Complaints

      Republicans and Democrats squabble over crumbs as the layer cake of debt keeps rising.

    • Oil Price Shocks and the Recession of 2011?

      Oil prices surged to near $107 per barrel yesterday and regular gasoline is going for $3.51 per gallon. Last March oil sold for around $80 per barrel and gas cost about $2.79 per gallon. The uprisings throughout the Middle East are in part responsible for the recent uptick in prices. For example, the fighting in Libya has reduced global oil production by about one million barrels per day. On the other hand, members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are boosting their output by a similar amount to make up for the shortfall. Democrats in Congress are calling upon President Barack Obama to damp down prices by selling off oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

    • Michigan Republicans create “financial martial law”; appointees to replace elected local officials

      Republican Michigan governor Rick Snyder, along with the state’s Republican house and senate, have passed a controversial bill that allows the governor to dissolve the elected governments of Michigan’s towns and cities, replacing them with unaccountable “emergency financial managers” who can eliminate services, merge or eliminate school boards, and lay off or renegotiate unionized public employees without recourse. Republican senator Jack Brandenburg — who supported the measure — calls it “financial martial law.”

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Glenn Beck’s syndicator runs a astroturf-on-demand call-in service for radio programs

      Premiere On Call, a division of the Clear Channel subsidiary that distributes Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, is a service that hires actors to call into radio shows and read a script that purports to be a true story presented by the public.

    • Fox DMCA Takedowns Order Google to Remove Fox DMCA Takedowns

      Sending DMCA takedown notices in bulk has become increasingly fashionable during recent years but thanks to the database at Chilling Effects, we are able to see who is sending what to whom. As concerns mount over the amount of checking carried out before items are taken down, it appears that Fox has managed to get Google to delist DMCA complaints on Chilling Effects, which were originally sent by Fox themselves and submitted to Chilling Effects by Google.

      The Chilling Effects web archive was founded in 2001 as a response to the usually secretive practice of sending so-called ‘takedown notices’ to have content removed from the web. This, according to the activists involved, was having a ‘chilling effect’ on free speech.

    • Hatchet Job: The Video Hit Piece that Made Both NPR and Its Critics Look Bad

      In the video, NPR fundraiser Ron Schiller and a colleague met with two members of a fictional Muslim group dangling a $5 million donation. Prodded by the “donors,” Schiller said liberals “might be more educated” than conservatives, described Republicans as “anti-intellectual” and said the GOP had been “hijacked” by the “racist” Tea Party.

  • Censorship

    • French Court Tosses Ridiculous Criminal Complaint By Israeli Against An American Over Book Review By A German

      Last year, we wrote about a horrendous lawsuit brought by an Israeli author/law professor, Karin Calvo-Goller, who had written a book on The Trial Proceedings of the International Criminal Court. Another law professor, Thomas Weigand, in Germany, reviewed the book for Global Law Books, and didn’t think the book lived up to its potential. I’ve read plenty of book reviews, and while this one is negative, it’s hardly a scathing book review. Weigand just didn’t think the book was all that good. It happens. Move on.

      But Calvo-Goller did not move on. She claimed that the review was libelous, and contacted the editor of the journal — an American named Joseph Weiler — who responded quite reasonably to Calvo-Goller, pointing out that the review wasn’t that bad and that he did not believe the review was libelous (and explained in detail why not), and then offered Calvo-Goller the right to write a response that he would publish as well. He also pointed out that her reputation would likely take a much larger hit from trying to suppress a negative book review, than from the review itself.

    • SF Plastic Surgeon Files Defamation Claim Against Negative Reviewers Across The Country To Avoid SLAPP

      Paul Alan Levy points us to the news of how a San Francisco-based plastic surgeon, Usha Rajagopal, has sued some people who wrote negative reviews of her work for defamation. However, he notes, despite the fact that she’s in California and the reviews she’s upset about appeared on Google — a California-based company, she filed her suit in Virginia. Levy suggests that this was done to avoid California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which would have allowed for immediate dismissal and the possibility of attorney’s fees being awarded for the filing.

    • Photographers Respond to Lady Gaga’s New Copyright Demands

      Lady Gaga is now demanding that photographers surrender the copyright of photos taken at her concerts – and photographers are incensed.

      Washington, D.C. website TBD.com made this practice public on Friday when they published the release form given to their photographer Jay Westcott. In addition to standard release restrictions regarding the use of images shot at her concerts, the document states that any photos taken at the show become the property of Lady Gaga. This an especially bold demand as the government has established that copyright exists the moment when a work is created, which in this case is the moment when a photographer clicks their shutter button.

    • Bill Spooner sues AP writer over tweet

      An NBA referee has sued The Associated Press and one of its sports writers over a Twitter message suggesting he intentionally made a bad call to make up for a previous bad call that went against the Minnesota Timberwolves.

      In a federal lawsuit filed Monday in Minneapolis, veteran NBA referee William Spooner claimed AP sports writer Jon Krawczynski defamed him in the Twitter message, sent while he was covering the Jan. 24 Rockets-Timberwolves game.

    • French Constitutional Council Validates Internet Censorship

      Judges held that article 4 of the bill, which allows the executive branch to censor the Net under the pretext of fighting child pornography, is not contrary to the Constitution. In doing so, the constitutional court has failed to protect fundamental freedoms on the Internet, and in particular freedom of expression. Hopes lie now in European institutions, which are the only ones with the power to prohibit or at least supervise administrative website blocking and its inherent risks of abuse.

    • Bev Stayart Loses Yet Again In Her Quixotic Quest To Blame Search Engines For Search Results She Doesn’t Like

      We’ve covered Beverly “Bev” Stayart a few times — and even been legally threatened by Stayart and her lawyer (also named Stayart). As you may recall, Stayart sued Yahoo/Overture after doing a search on her name, and seeing a suggestion that included “levitra” and “cialis.” Stayart took offense to such terms being associated with her name. She tried a few different questionable legal theories including “privacy rights” and that because the search engine made the suggestions, the search engines have liability for impermissably selling her name. It had also kicked off with a trademark claim over her name, despite the lack of any trademark in her name. The threat against us was because she didn’t like some of our comments, which necessitated us having our lawyer explain Section 230 to her as well, after which we never heard from Stayart again. However, after losing in her lawsuit against Yahoo, she sued Google over the same “levitra” connection. Oh, and she appealed and lost her original loss against Yahoo.

  • Privacy

    • Noprivacyville

      I heard a report on NPR about an auto insurance company giving drivers the options of putting GPS tracking devices on their vehicles to lower insurance rates by as much as 30%. The idea is that, for example, the device could confirm to the insurance company that the car wasn’t being used in high risk situations, such as commute traffic. Safe driving situations would be rewarded with lower rates.

    • Judge Won’t Stop WikiLeaks Twitter-Records Request

      The U.S. government is getting closer to getting data from Twitter about various associates of WikiLeaks.

      The people whose Twitter records were being requested had moved to throw out the government’s request for data, but a judge denied that motion Friday, ruling that the associates don’t have standing to challenge it.

      The judge also denied a request to unseal the government’s application for the Twitter order.

    • US government wants a privacy bill of rights

      Sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal said that the US assistant secretary of commerce, Lawrence Strickling, is going to bring up the Obama administration’s legislative initiative at the Senate Commerce Committee.

      The US administration is expected to push for a privacy bill of rights as it wants to give the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) more powers. Back in December, The INQUIRER reported that the FTC called for a “Do Not Track” mechanism to be installed in consumers’ web browsers.

    • Court Refuses to Set Aside Order Requiring Disclosure of Twitter Users’ IP Addresses

      A federal magistrate judge refused to vacate a previously issued order granting the government’s request to reveal information regarding various Twitter accounts for people allegedly associated with Wikileaks.

  • Civil Rights

    • Man With 4th Amendment Written on Chest Sues Over Airport Arrest

      A 21-year-old Virginia man who wrote an abbreviated version of the Fourth Amendment on his body and stripped to his shorts at an airport security screening area is demanding $250,000 in damages for being detained on a disorderly conduct charge.

      Aaron Tobey claims in a civil rights lawsuit (.pdf) that in December he was handcuffed and held for about 90 minutes by the Transportation Security Administration at the Richmond International Airport after he began removing his clothing to display on his chest a magic-marker protest of airport security measures.

      “Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated,” his chest and gut read.

    • Judges focus on technicality, not constitutionality of TSA scanners

      A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared unlikely to block the use and ongoing deployment of the so-called “nude” airport body scanners, which the government maintains are necessary to protect the airways from terrorists.

      Still, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which hears challenges to Department of Homeland Security policies, did not indicate during an hour-long oral argument here whether it agreed with allegations that the machines are an unconstitutional privacy invasion, ineffective, and unhealthy. Instead, the three-judge panel, which did not indicate when it would rule, appeared stuck in the procedural muck, and spent little time on those bread-and-butter issues.

    • TSA to retest airport body scanners for radiation

      The Transportation Security Administration announced Friday that it would retest every full-body X-ray scanner that emits ionizing radiation — 247 machines at 38 airports — after maintenance records on some of the devices showed radiation levels 10 times higher than expected.

    • Court Unlikely to Halt ‘Nude’ Airport Body Scanners

      A federal appeals court on Thursday appeared unlikely it would block the use and ongoing deployment of the so-called “nude” airport body scanners, which the government maintains are necessary to protect the airways from terrorists.

    • Manning’s Father Condemns Treatment of Imprisoned Son

      The father of suspected WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning says the military has crossed a line in its treatment of his son and called the conditions under which he was being imprisoned “shocking.”

      Brian Manning broke his silence to a PBS Frontline correspondent this week after the U.S. Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia, where his 23-year-old son is being held, stripped the soldier of his clothing and forced him to stand at attention in the nude and sleep naked. Manning’s defense attorney has called the brig’s move “inexcusable” and “degrading treatment.”

    • ACLU Protests Manning’s Treatment in Letter to Pentagon

      The American Civil Liberties Union calls the treatment of WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning unconstitutional and “gratuitously harsh.” The remarks came in a letter sent Wednesday to U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

      “The Supreme Court has long held that the government violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment whenever it ‘unnecessarily and wantonly inflicts pain,’ the ACLU’s letter read. “No legitimate purpose is served by keeping Private Manning stripped naked; in prolonged isolated confinement and utter idleness; subjected to sleep deprivation through repeated physical inspections throughout the night; deprived of any meaningful opportunity to exercise, even in his cell; and stripped of his reading glasses so that he cannot read. Absent any evident justification, such treatment is clearly forbidden by our Constitution.”

    • Police just rubber-stamping US data slurp

      Members of the European Parliament have condemned the first six months of data sharing with US terror spooks as an abject failure of data protection.

      The SWIFT agreement gives US authorities access to Europeans’ banking information, but MEPs were told that in the first six months of operation data requests were so abstract it was impossible to tell if they complied with data protection rules or not.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

    • House subcommittee votes to kill net neutrality

      A U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee has voted in favor of a resolution to throw out the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s recently adopted net neutrality rules.

      The communications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 15-8 along party lines for a resolution of disapproval that would overturn the FCC’s rules. Those rules would prohibit broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web traffic.

    • Obama admin calls for more ICANN accountability

      The Obama administration today called for improvements in the mechanisms used to oversee Internet domain names, saying changes are needed to make the process more “accountable” and “transparent.”

      Larry Strickling, a Commerce Department assistant secretary, said that the California nonprofit group created in 1998 to oversee these functions–the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN–”needs” to do more to explain the reasoning for its decisions and to heed the advice of national governments.

  • DRM/SCOny

    • Sony wins subpoena for PS3 hacker’s PayPal records

      Tuesday’s order by US Magistrate Judge Joseph C. Spero said the information subject to Sony’s subpoena “shall be provided on an Attorneys’ Eyes Only basis” and is limited to information relating to whether Hotz has enough ties to Northern California to be sued in federal court in that district. Hotz, who goes by the hacking moniker GeoHot, is a resident of New Jersey, and has argued that the court lacks the authority to try him.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Massive Research Report On ‘Piracy’ In Emerging Economies Released; Debunks Entire Foundation Of US Foreign IP Policy

      Joe Karaganis, from the Social Science Research Council was kind enough to reach out to me last week and send me an advance copy of the (somewhat epic) report that SSRC just released this week, exploring “Media Piracy in Emerging Economies.” It’s a rather massive 440 pages of research into a variety of issues having to do with infringement, specifically focused on emerging markets. While it was nice of Karaganis to send it to me, I was a bit disappointed to find out that they’re not releasing the report for free (for most). Instead, it’s released under a “Consumer’s Dilemma” license, where they want people in developed countries to pay $8 for the report, but will offer it for free to those in less developed countries (though, it looks like Canadians can get it for free).

    • George Lucas’ Lawsuit Over Stormtrooper Costumes Goes to U.K. Supreme Court

      The ‘Star Wars’ creator argues prop designer Andrew Ainsworth doesn’t have the rights to sell the replica suits.

    • Lawmakers tell Biden to push Russia on antipiracy

      If Russia wants to prove the country is a good trade partner, then the country must be more aggressive in fighting online piracy. That’s the message a group of U.S. congressmen wants Vice President Joe Biden to send during his visit to Moscow this week.

    • And I Thought Rupert Murdoch Thought Copying Stories From Other Publications Was ‘Stealing’

      Of course, around that time, we highlighted the fact that Murdoch, himself, owned a whole bunch of aggregators, many of which acted much worse than the sites — such as Google — that Murdoch was complaining about.

      However, over the weekend there was a nice example of how one of Murdoch’s publications clearly copied a story from another publication and did not give any credit for it whatsoever. We noted earlier how Broadband Reports broke the story of AT&T deciding to put in place metered billing. Broadband Reports got a tip with a leaked email showing the new rules, and got confirmation from AT&T. Nearly every other report on the story credited Broadband Reports with breaking the story. However, when the WSJ (via Dow Jones Newswire) wrote the story, by reporter Roger Cheng, there is no mention whatsoever of Broadband Reports breaking the story.

    • Administration’s New IP Enforcement Recommendations Will Only Serve To Make IP Less Respected

      But, really, the bigger question is what does this have to do with enforcement? I’m fine with Espinel going beyond just focusing on enforcement, if she’s going to look for ways to actually help IP live up to its Constitutional mandate of promoting the progress. But this recommendation seems completely out of place in a document focused entirely on enforcement with this one non-enforcement issue tossed in at the end.

      The thing is, every time the government ratchets up IP laws in ways that don’t match with the way most people view the world, the less respected those laws become. Rather than actually increasing enforcement, these moves decrease respect for those laws.

    • Questionable ‘Piracy’ Study Found; Details Show It’s Even More Ridiculous Than Expected

      Thanks to G Thompson for pointing us to where the BSA has stashed a copy of that mysterious “piracy” research report we were just talking about, which was apparently written by someone named Emilio Ferrer. It’s embedded below, and it’s even more ridiculous than we had initially expected. First, the entire thing is based on the massively and completely debunked TERA report from last year, that used such outrageous assumptions as to not even pass the most basic sniff test. The researchers here appear to have made no attempt to determine the accuracy of the TERA report, nor to respond to any of the debunked points.

    • Trademarks

      • Which Does More Damage To Your Reputation: A Non-Competitor Using A Similar Name, Or Filing A Lawsuit That Pisses Off Many Potential Clients?

        Judith Lindenau points us to the news that a guy named Daniel Rothamel, who is apparently a well-known, well-respected blogger in the real estate world, is facing a questionable trademark infringement lawsuit because he blogs under the name the Real Estate Zebra. The company suing him, the Lones Group, claims to publish a blog and newsletter under the names The Zebra Blog and The Zebra Report. So, they’re claiming infringement, because there can apparently be only one zebra in the real estate world. It’s worth pointing out here that the Lones Group apparently is not actually in the real estate business itself, but provides marketing services to real estate agents.

      • Lady Gaga takes on Baby Gaga in breast milk ice-cream battle

        The planet’s most flamboyantly dressed pop star is threatening legal action against British manufacturers of the world’s most bizarrely flavoured ice-cream.

        Lady Gaga has told a store in Covent Garden, central London, to stop selling its latest brand, Baby Gaga – ice-cream made from human breast milk, blended with vanilla pods and lemon.

        The US singer, whose last entanglement with foodstuffs involved wearing a dress stitched together from raw meat to an awards ceremony, appears unaware that the product she complained about disappeared off the company’s shelves last week.

        The day after it went on sale inspectors from Westminster council’s food standards department confiscated the remaining scoops of Baby Gaga to check whether it met hygiene requirements.

      • Breaking: Zynga files for trademark on the word “Ville” in Europe

        On March 1, 2011, Zynga filed for a trademark on the word: ville. The trademark was filed with the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the official trade marks and designs office of the European Union.

        Zynga’s trademark representative is Rouse, a specialist in international IP business whose client list ranges from Honeywell and BP to Christian Dior and Starbucks Coffee.

      • Finally: Clear Ruling That Realizes That Just Buying Ads On Trademarked Keywords Is Not Infringing

        For the better part of a decade, there have been a ton of lawsuits about keyword advertising, and whether or not it’s a trademark violation to buy an advertisement on a competitor’s trademark. All along, we’ve argued that this is not, at all, a trademark violation. The main purpose of trademark law, of course, is to prevent consumer confusion — and advertising a competing product when people are looking for one brand is not a trademark violation. Just think of supermarkets where they have those little coupon dispensing machines that pop out competitor’s coupons all the time. Keyword advertising is basically the same thing. Tragically, despite a large number of these cases, the courts have really skirted the issue. Some of the cases have blamed Google, but thankfully there have been a growing number of cases that have ruled Google clearly has no liability here as a third party. But the company buying the ads? Well, we’ve been waiting for a clear ruling… and we’re getting closer.

      • Bath & Body Works Sues Summit Over Twilight Toiletries

        Bath & Body Works is suing Twilight distributor Summit Entertainment, hoping to get a declaratory judgment that its “Twilight Woods” line of lotions, shower gels and other products doesn’t infringe the trademark on the hit vampire film franchise.

      • Utahn in dispute with Pac-10 over Pac12 website

        There’s an unexpected Utah connection in the online battle for the website Pac12.com.

      • Why Redskins Insider lost its name

        Maybe you’ve wondered why the Redskins Insider Live videocast became the Football Insider Live videocast. Or why the Redskins Insider blog became The Insider blog. Or why the Redskins Insider twitter feed became the Insider twitter feed.

    • Copyrights

      • Liberal MP Dan McTeague: Repeat Copyright Infringer?

        Liberal MP Dan McTeague has responded to my recent post on his linkages with CRIA in a 2,200 word “rebuttal.” The McTeague post confirms that his earlier letter to the editor came directly from content supplied by CRIA and adopts the contradictory position that when CRIA launches a lawsuit, it is only an unproven claim that should not have an impact on copyright reform, but when isoHunt files a lawsuit it demonstrates that there is a “legislative holiday” in Canada that demands immediate action.

        The McTeague post provided the opportunity to take a closer look at his website, which reveals what may be widespread copyright infringement. Since the introduction of Bill C-32, McTeague has posted dozens of full-text articles from mainstream media organizations on his website, at times without attribution. In addition to the articles, McTeague has also reposted many photographs associated with the articles. While it is possible that McTeague has fully licensed the reproduction and posting of each article and photograph, this seems unlikely since the licences offered by many organizations do not even permit this form of reproduction. No other Liberal MP appears to have established a similar practice.

      • Girl Talk As Fair Use Martyr

        We saw today on the Creative Generalist blog a post about a film entitled Rip! A Remix Manifesto. The film, according to the Open Source Cinema Web site, is “an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary.”

      • Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Important Copyright Case: Will Review First Amendment vs. Copyright Issue

        Eldred and Kahle, both ended up in losses, but they did get the court to establish some boundaries for when and how the US could retroactively change copyright law. As a very quick review, Eldred argued that the ongoing extension of copyright violated the “limited” part of the copyright clause in the Constitution.

      • 111-111-1111

        The blog garnered a small audience on Tumblr and a following in the newsroom of The Times. When it came to the attention of the company’s Senior Counsel, he asked that I remove all copyrighted New York Times content. This request effectively ended Ten Ones.

      • Congresswoman: Websites Mistakenly Seized By ICE Should Sue Government

        Speaking at a Silicon Valley legal conference this morning, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said that the recent website shutdown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement COICA are way out of line, and an abuse of due process. In particular, she pointed out a recent episode during which, while pursuing a handful of websites allegedly connected to child pornography, ICE agents accidentally shut down more than 80,000 unrelated websites and tarnished them with child porn-related accusations.

      • RIAA Not Happy With Rep. Lofgren Calling Out ICE For Web Censorship

        We’ve covered how Rep. Zoe Lofgren is one of the only Representatives in Congress (along with Senator Wyden on the other side of the Capitol building), who appears to actually be concerned that Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) group is seizing web domains on questionable authority, without due process, and likely in violation of basic First Amendment rights against prior restraint. Of course, even with just one Congressional Rep. speaking out about this, apparently the RIAA wishes to stomp out any dissent. Yesterday, they sent Rep. Lofgren an unsolicited letter in response to her comments. You can see the full letter embedded below, but let’s go through a few of the “highlights.”

      • Silicon Valley Congresswoman: Web seizures trample due process (and break the law)

        At 9:30pm PST on February 11, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized the domain mooo.com. They ordered the domain name’s registrar to redirect all traffic headed for mooo.com to a government IP address, one which displayed a single stark warning that the domain name had been seized for involvement with child pornography.

        But the mooo.com domain name was shared between 84,000 sites; every one suddenly displayed the child pornography warning. The mistake was soon corrected, but the free domain name provider running mooo.com warned users that removal of the banner from their sites might “take as long as 3 days.”

        One outraged user took to his blog to tell ICE to “get out of my Internet. You’d get no argument from me that there are truly distasteful and illegal things on the Internet. That’s true of any society. But there are also proper ways to deal with these problems. Pulling a total domain, sweeping up innocent people along the way, feeling that you don’t have to comply with due process of law and indicating that you don’t give a damn is wrong. It’s not as wrong as child pornography or counterfeiting, but it’s still wrong… That’s to say nothing of any damage done to my name or reputation.”

      • More Reasons Why Homeland Security Seizing Domain Names Is Unconstitutional

        We’ve raised a number of reasons as to why the federal government’s domain name seizures (via Homeland Security’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement group) are almost certainly not Constitutional. And while we’ve run these arguments by a number of well respected Constitutional lawyers who are extremely interested in these issues (and may be getting involved in various ways), some in our comments have insisted that our points could be ignored because we are not lawyers. And while I’ve asked some of the lawyers I regularly speak to if they would write blog posts commenting on these issues, many are quite busy trying to actually do something about these issues, and that seems a bit more important.

      • CCIA: copyright wiretaps are Hollywood’s “PATRIOT Act”

        CCIA: copyright wiretaps are Hollywood’s “PATRIOT Act”
        Yesterday’s White House wish list of new intellectual property laws focused on things like counterfeit medicines, but it also included proposals to extend wiretaps into copyright cases and to ensure that illegal streaming video is a felony. A DC trade group representing companies like AMD, Facebook, Oracle, Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft today objected loudly to the plan, saying that legitimate concerns about counterfeiting have been “hijacked to create draconian proposals to alleviate the content industry of the burden of protecting its own interest using its own extensive resources.”

      • Coming soon: Pirated movies in 3D

        IN AN effort to keep audiences flocking to the cinemas to see the latest movies, studios and theatres are gambling on the 3D movie experience.

      • Music Publishers Settle With Limewire; Afraid To Have To Prove They Actually Owned Copyrights In Question

        We were a bit surprised last summer when the major music publishers piled on to the bandwagon and sued Limewire. After all, the major record labels (who own most of the major publishers anyway) were already involved in a lawsuit with Limewire and had won a pretty complete victory over the file sharing system.

      • Judge eviscerates P2P lawyer: “I accepted you at your word”

        As a lawyer, you know it’s going to be bad when a federal judge summons you to his courtroom at nine in the morning to talk about your “ill-considered lawsuit” that has “abused the litigation system in more than one way.”

        Federal judge Milton Shadur, who keeps a “Now, 3 for 10¢… Federal Judge!” sign beside him in his 23rd floor Chicago courtroom, summoned file-sharing lawyer John Steele to court this morning with those words. At issue was Steele’s representation of CP Productions, an Arizona porn producer suing 300 anonymous individuals for illegally sharing a film called (ahem) Cowgirl Creampie.

      • Feds Really Do Seem To Think That Linking To Infringing Content Can Be A Jailable Offense

        Last week we covered the somewhat surprising arrest of Brian McCarthy, the operator of Channelsurfing.net, on charges of criminal copyright infringement. As we noted at the time, this seemed like a pretty questionable charge. I could potentially see a civil charge against him using the court-created concept of “inducing” infringement (a concept that Congress rejected…), but there is no inducement standard in criminal infringement. It’s possible that the feds could go with an aiding and abetting charge, but that requires a much higher standard, and it’s not clear that the feds have enough to make such a claim really stick. At the time, we didn’t have the complaint, but the folks at DemandProgress have obtained a copy of the complaint, which we’ve also embedded below.

      • US Congress will decide if video streaming is a felony

        According to Espinel, the current law makes it unclear whether streaming copyrighted works is subject to felony penalties, meaning prison time, because the penalty is “predicated on the defendant either illegally reproducing or distributing the copyrighted work”. The question lies in the legal definition of “distribution”, as streaming isn’t the transfer of complete files.

      • Google Found Guilty Of Copyright Infringement In France For Not Magically Blocking Infringing Movie

        The latest in confused secondary liability rulings comes from France, where Google has lost a lawsuit and been fined for copyright infringement, because of links and an uploaded video of a movie from producers Mondovino.

      • Righthaven Really Pushing Its Luck: Sues Canadian Newspaper For Misattributing Photo

        For a while Righthaven and its corporate owners/partners at the Las Vegas Review Journal positioned Righthaven as being about big newspapers standing up to the grubby internet folks posting copies of newspaper articles on blogs and forums. In fact, it kept trying to get other big media operations to sign up — with the only other paper to sign on so far being the Denver Post. Since then, Righthaven has gone a bit ballistic in suing all sorts of websites for posting a particular photo from the Denver Post (of a TSA patdown) that had gone viral. Rather than recognizing the positive benefits of the image going viral, Righthaven and the Denver Post has just seen it as a way to do a short-term money grab by suing everyone they can — of course, without any notice or takedown requests.

      • 99 Cent Books

        I am having trouble convincing myself why digital books will not cost 99 cents within 5 years. All books, on average. Just as the price of music does not in general change on the length or quality.

      • Netflix spooks Hollywood more than ever

        Hollywood film executives want you to know that they are not at war with Netflix or the Internet.

      • Even WIPO Realizing That Copyright Law May Have Gone Too Far

        Of course, WIPO certainly hasn’t gone too far away from its traditional position, but it has been showing more and more signs of moving away from copyright maximalism. TechnoLlama points us to a recent keynote speech given by Dr. Francis Gurry, the Director General of WIPO, on the issue of “future directions in copyright law.”

      • An Internet Levy is a Terrible Idea

        The notion that all Internet users should somehow pay the old copyright monopoly structures a monthly fee, to compensate them for file sharing, has popped up again. It does from time to time. It’s a terrible idea, and for several good reasons. It fails to meet basic quality standards for lawmaking. But the most elusive and strongest reason is that it’s a last-ditch attempt to maintain the old power structures where a small pseudonobility were the only ones allowed to create culture.

      • NYTimes: When We Do It, It’s Journalism, When HuffPo Does It, It’s ‘Piracy’

        The latest sad example of this overvaluing of one’s own work and talking down about someone else’s work comes from the NY Times’ Executive Editor Bill Keller (also a driving force behind the NYT’s plan for a paywall). In a weird and somewhat rambling discussion, which eventually gets around to the future of news, Keller decides to attack the Huffington Post as a bunch of sniveling copyists, compared to his high minded version of journalism…

      • Sean Parker, Music Mogul? Facebook Billionaire Mulling Warner Music Bid

        Sean Parker helped create Napster, which kicked off the long and steep decline of the big music labels. Soon he might own part of one.

        The digital entrepreneur is considering putting his money into a consortium bidding on Warner Music Group, which put itself on the block earlier this year. Sources tell me that Parker isn’t part of the formal bid, but is aligned with a group led by investors Ron Burkle and Doug Teitelbaum.

      • Report: Piracy a “global pricing problem” with only one solution

        A major new report from a consortium of academic researchers concludes that media piracy can’t be stopped through “three strikes” Internet disconnections, Web censorship, more police powers, higher statutory damages, or tougher criminal penalties. That’s because the piracy of movies, music, video games, and software is “better described as a global pricing problem.” And the only way to solve it is by changing the price.

      • Cutting prices is the only way to stop piracy

        The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That’s the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won’t be halted by ‘three strikes’ broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA.

        The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is “better described as a global pricing problem” – and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares.

      • White House wants new copyright law crackdown

        The White House today proposed sweeping revisions to U.S. copyright law, including making “illegal streaming” of audio or video a federal felony and allowing FBI agents to wiretap suspected infringers.

        In a 20-page white paper (PDF), the Obama administration called on the U.S. Congress to fix “deficiencies that could hinder enforcement” of intellectual property laws.

      • New Music Locker Startup Looks More Like Sucker’s Bet To Transfer Cash From Investors To Music Labels

        A few weeks ago, at the Digital Music Forum East event, right before I went on stage to interview Gary Shapiro from CEA, there was a presentation from a new music startup I’d never heard of, called Beyond Oblivion. The presentation (which is embedded below) was interesting, if incredibly vague. It looks like they’re trying to create a music locker of sorts, but to avoid the various legal woes of other such music lockers by throwing a ton of cash at the labels. It’s basically “don’t sue us” money. Literally, the company has promised to pay $500 million to labels.

      • Starve Copyright ‘Parasites,’ Official Urges

        The most effective way to target foreign Websites that illegally stream copyrighted material may be to cut off their funding, Maria Pallante, acting register of copyrights, told a House subcommittee Monday.

        “The parasites who operate so-called rogue websites build businesses on piracy, counterfeiting and other unlawful activity, in part based on the expectation of weak enforcement,” Pallante told the House Intellectual Property, Competition, and the Internet Subcommittee.

      • Jon Bon Jovi slams Steve Jobs for ‘killing’ music

        Jon Bon Jovi has taken aim at Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, accusing him of “killing” the music industry with iTunes.

        The rocker is saddened that the “magical” experience of buying records in a store is disappearing, brick-and-mortars stores being eroded in part due to iTunes’ success.

      • Inauspicious Start For Chris Dodd At MPAA; Starts Off With ‘Infringement No Different Than Theft’ Claim

        No surprise, really, but former Senator Chris “I won’t become a lobbyist” Dodd has begun his new tenure as a lobbyist for the MPAA on an inauspicious note — by falsely claiming that infringement is no different than “looting.”

      • Associated Press sues retailers over iconic Obama image

        The Associated Press has sued several retailers including Urban Outfitters for the unauthorised use of the Hope image created by artist Shepard Fairey.

        Artist Fairey used an AP photo without permission to create the image, and was sued by the news agency for violating copyright. That case was settled.

      • 8-Track Piracy Is Killing The Music Business…. In 1976

        It really is amusing at times to go back and look at the historical moral panics by the recording industry over the “threats” of piracy. It’s the same story every year, from the player piano (killing live music!) to the tape recorder (home taping is killing music!) to the MP3 player (illegal!). Sometimes such stories get lost to history, but Boing Boing has an amusing image from a 1976 record album sleeve, where the cover is devoted to telling people to fight the scourge of 8-track piracy.

Clip of the Day

Ubuntu Games: IConquerU


Credit: TinyOgg

03.19.11

Links 19/3/2011: KiWi PC Bring GNU/Linux to Seniors, ASUS Comes Back to Linux for Sub-notebooks

Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Luciana Fujii Pontello: The GNU/Linux Girl Who Says Cheese!

    Daniel G Seigel, creator of Cheese, recently announced the new version of Cheese. He mentioned that the new version was driven by ‘three lovely ladies’. Out of these three Charlie’s Angels one was Luciana Fuji Pontello, who was responsible for the camerabin port and gobject introspection support. It couldn’t have been timed better as this week we celebrated the International Women Day. So, we reached out to Luciana Fuji Pontello to understand the role of women in the FOSS world.

  • Why the Linux Desktop is Still Not #Winning

    Mobile devices like tablet computers and smartphones have started to pull a lot of people away from using traditional PCs. But I think we shouldn’t blame the fate of the Linux desktop solely on these devices because personal computers are far from being irrelevant and is still preferred by many, including myself, for getting things done. So why do I think Linux is still not winning in the desktop space?

  • Waxing Nostalgic About Old-School Linux

    Back in the early days of Linux, distros were nice and small, admins knew what they were doing, and systems could run just fine with double-digit megabytes of RAM. That’s how some remember it, anyway. A recent post at TechRepublic from Jack Wallen has the FOSS community reminiscing fondly — and not so fondly — about Linux’s formative years.

  • Desktop

    • Finally A Sub $500 Ubuntu Linux Based Desktop PC for Senior Citizens!

      We just got word that KiWi PC has released a very interesting looking Linux based desktop computer for senior citizens. The KiWi PC is said to help the elderly remain connected with the world and up-to-date in the fast paced world of technology by offering a user-friendly desktop providing immediate access to customizable email, internet and software applications.

    • KiWi PC Aims its Ubuntu Desktop Computer At Seniors

      KiWi PC is offering the system for $499.99, which seems a bit steep for a desktop machine running a free, open source operating system, but the color-coded keyboard and some aspects of the desktop interface may appeal to some seniors.

    • Sick of Windows? Try Linux!

      If you’re tired of Windows, there are other operating systems that you might use.

      For instance, you might buy a Mac; of course this is an expensive solution, and one that can be avoided if you first try one of the many Linux operating systems.

  • Server

    • Survey Reveals Churn in Server OS Market

      The 90% figure for Linux usage is up from 84% in the previous year’s study.

    • New Linux landscape emerging

      Given we have described 2011 as the year of Linux in the clouds, we will be watching closely to see how the market, the use of Linux and the various distributions and their backers continue to evolve. This will also be the focus of a new special report from The 451 Group that is coming soon.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • IBM

    • 11 Years of Linux at IBM

      Last year, Dan Frye gave a keynote about how IBM got involved in Linux and how IBM changed and changed Linux. The process started in 1998 and by 2004/5 Linux was ready for anything. That was the time period my usage went from using GNU/Linux on random PCs in my classroom to using it on servers and whole laboratories. GNU/Linux was ready for anything in education.

  • Kernel Space

    • Gentoo-sources 2.6.38 released
    • Btrfs LZO Compression Performance

      While the performance of the Btrfs file-system with its default mount options didn’t change much with the just-released Linux 2.6.38 kernel as shown by our large HDD and SSD file-system comparison, this new kernel does bring LZO file-system compression support to Btrfs. This Oracle-sponsored file-system has supported Gzip compression for months as a means to boost performance and preserve disk space, but now there’s support for using LZO compression. In this article we are looking at the Btrfs performance with its default options and then when using the transparent Zlib and LZO compression.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Wayland & The Network; Gallium3D Netpipe?

        In recent days on the Wayland development mailing list there’s been a discussion about a HPC (High Performance Compute) architecture for Wayland. A few interesting ideas have been brought up.

        Essentially this HPC idea comes down to a per-program VNC-like system where for example you could run the Blender animation program from a netbook or tablet computer and have that forwarded to a more powerful system, via Wayland. Though with the original proposal, this wouldn’t end up being solely the work of Wayland but other components would need to come into play too for all of this to work out. This discussion though has brought up some discussions regarding the serializing of application windows to suspend-and-resume them, etc.

      • Directing Lemmings

        Legally there’s nothing stopping anyone from licensing s3tc or floating point patents, forking Mesa3D and shipping closed source version of it with code handling both.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Some E17 tips and tricks

      I’ve been really impressed with the work being done on Bodhi Linux, so I’ve been giving both it and E17 a bit more love lately. To that end, I thought I would highlight a few cool tips and tricks. Some of these will make you slap your forehead they are so simple (and handy). Some of them you might not even use. Regardless, you can never have too many tips and tricks for the Enlightenment desktop.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KTorrent 4.1 adds super-seeding support

        Version 4.1 of the KTorrent BitTorrent client for the KDE desktop is now available to download, a major release that adds several new features. The user interface has been redesigned to make better use of KDE’s KParts technologies and support for super-seeding has been added.

      • Qt4 GUI Styles

        Qt4 is a cross-platform application and UI framework. It has a configuration manager in System>Preferences (or enter qtconfig-qt4) in a terminal.
        If Qt4 applications don’t look quite right on your desktop, try changing the GUI style.

      • Kraft: A No-Nonsense Office Assistant That Gets Straight to Work

        Small-business users with a fondness for open source apps could get a lot of mileage out of Kraft, an application for creating, customizing and managing correspondence and planning. It settles into its job easily, then presents you with an intuitive and familiar interface. Its adherence to XML and PDF is good, but it could stand to learn a few other types of formats as well.

      • openSUSE Community Manager Jos Poortvliet (Nvidia users should avoid KDE)

        Not so long ago I blogged about my brief experience with the then just released openSUSE 11.4, simply put I stated its disappointing and I will never try openSUSE in the foreseeable future.

      • KDE 4.6.1 Almost Perfect

        When KDE 4 was released, I hated it. It seemed a lot of my favorite customizations had changed, moved, or been removed. It was heavy and a resource hog. It didn’t seem to work real well, things were either slow and crashy or didn’t function properly. Subsequent updates did little to help. Until 4.6.1. I think KDE 4 is finally maturing into a stable and usable interface.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gtk+ 3.2 Will Let You Run Any Application In A Browser (Remotely Too)

        Gtk+ 3.2 will let you run any application in a browser thanks to the new HTML5 gdk backend. That means you’ll be able to run GIMP, Gedit, a video editor or whatever, remotely (or on the same computer), using a web browser.

      • Moving the needle in GNOME

        Software development is an immature branch of the discipline known as “change management”. The weapons are different, but the war is the same: Improvement generally requires change, but change involves investment and risk. So we invent convoluted schemes, tools and rituals to make change easy, but not dangerous.

      • SciTE – Lightweight GTK-based Programming Editor

        SciTE is a SCIntilla based Text Editor. Originally built to demonstrate Scintilla, it has grown to be a generally useful editor with facilities for building and running programs. It is best used for jobs with simple configurations – I use it for building test and demonstration programs as well as SciTE and Scintilla, themselves.

      • Short Review of GNOME Shell

        It feels a bit weird to be part of KDE land and be a bit of the conservative guy these days. We had our first Plasma Desktop release three years ago and the first fully user-targeted 4.2 release two years ago. Since then things improved on a steady but not revolutionary pace. Well, that’s not entirely true for our back-ends as I feel that eg. QML is a very revolutionary move for developers but the desktop experience from a user’s POV stayed largely the same.

      • How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Shell

        So far, I’ve used GNOME-Shell for at least 10 minutes and Unity for at least 15. And it was six months ago. Just to tell you how much I’m competent on the subject. And I didn’t like them. Not at all. I’ve my own ideas about the desktop.

      • Vincent Untz: I Wonder Why We Have All Our Distributions Around

        The GNU/Linux landscape is changing dramatically. 2011 is a very important year for Gnome and GNU/Linux. Gnome is the default desktop environment used by some of the major distros and it is going through a major transition with version 3. At the same time openSuse community is driving many ambitious initiatives such as the AppStream project. We talked to Vincent Untz, an openSUSE Booster, and the GNOME release manager to understand what’s going on with these projects. He talks about Unity, Gnome 3, Mono and much more. Go ahead and read on…

      • Ubo Icons Theme – Not Glossy, Drawn With Ballpoint Pen, Colored in GIMP, Looks Sweet!

        When we featured this collection of top 10 most popular icon themes for Ubuntu GNOME some time ago, Ubo Icons was probably one among the most promising set of icons for GNOME in that list, though it was still a project yet to be completed back then. Well, the first alpha release of Ubu Icons is here and it looks quite stunning.

      • The GNOME Journal March 2011

  • Distributions

    • 7 Surprises From Turkey

      I made several reviews of Operation systems originating from Eastern Europe: SLAX, Agilia Linux, Alt Linux, Austrumi. This time I will aim little bit to the South, on the place where Europe meets Asia.
      How many countries do you know which are placed in Europe and Asia both? Russia? Anything else? Yes, that is Turkey. Not the most well known country in the world, although European culture would be different if this country would not exist. Byzantium, Constantinople… They are all parts of Turkish history.

    • Pinguy OS 11.04 Pre-Alpha

      I am happy to announce the release of Pinguy OS 11.04 Pre-Alpha. This version has the ability to do OEM installs. XBMC and Ultracopier added as default apps. TED has been removed because of peoples fears of legal use. mvPod has been replaced with Arista Transcoder as this can encode video for more devices then just the iPod.

      Things that still need to be added is Elementary-Nautilus, rapid-photo-downloader and Native ZFS File system. Also replace openjdk-6-jre with Oracle Java as openjdk-6-jre is not allowed with a few bank sites.

    • In Search of the King of the Linux Distros

      Here in the Linux community, debating the relative merits of various distributions is a common pastime. So when it was proclaimed in an article recently that “Debian is the most influential Linux distribution ever,” it was a rare geek who didn’t sit up and take notice.

      Sure enough, that’s just what Datamation’s Bruce Byfield asserted in a recent article, adding that “not everyone uses Debian, but, both alone and second hand through Ubuntu, it is the source of more derivative distributions than any other.”

    • Distro Testing

      I’ve been gradually experimenting with both FreeBSD and Gentoo. I have some extra partitions I use to test new setups, so I can take my time and always boot back into my primary partition when I’ve had enough. I highly recommend this approach, especially with distros like these.

    • Reviews

      • Puppy Linux sit! roll over, there now – good dog

        Puppy Linux born on June 2003, delivered by Barry Kauler. The community that has developed is completely open, without any formal agenda or structure – and the product is completely free.

        One word of balance, it sounds like this is a good dog doesn’t it? But Jollicloud appears to be more popular so I hope to look at that soon.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia Moves Forward, Releases Alpha 2

        The Mageia project announced the release of Alpha 2 of their inaugural version 1, expected June 1. Developers have made a clear statement that this release is only for developers and bug hunters. It is not for daily use, any kind of production environment, or review. Tsk, tsk, they should know better than that. Reviews are inevitable.

      • Mandriva Enterprise Server 5.2 is out

        andriva Enterprise Server 5.2 – the simple, high-performance and accessible Linux server – is now available.

        MES 5.2 features a broader set of drivers to support more devices during the installation process and an updated Linux kernel (version 2.6.33). It highlights advanced virtualization on top of KVM or Xen, a user-friendly software setup and configuration wizard, an easy-to-use LDAP directory management – Mandriva Directory Server, powerful backup solutions and many other services in the fields of messaging, file and printer sharing, web hosting, network management and more.

      • Mandriva Releases 2011 Beta 1

        One new feature mentioned in the release announcement is a “plasma-applet-stackfolder application.” The announcement goes on to explains, “To see it in action, simple drag any folder from dolphin to KDE taskbar, and have fun.” Well, all it did for me was create a launcher. Was it supposed to do anything else? I have to say, that wasn’t much fun. Surely, I just didn’t hold my mouth just right while dragging and dropping.

      • Mandriva 2011 beta1 errata

        shortly after the release of 2011 beta1, we have discovered that the 32bit version was unable to boot in some cases (as it was pointed out at https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=62792).

    • Red Hat Family

      • Ok, I’m committed now

        Well, I’ve been working for Red Hat for two years, one month, and 14 days now. It’s actually amazing how time flies. I guess when you’re doing something you love, with amazing people you respect and enjoy working with, time has no real bearing on anything. When I first started working for Linux-Mandrake (now Mandriva) back in 2000, I got Tux inked on the back of one leg. Tux is fairly generic and represented the beginning of my journey with Linux (well, the beginning of my paid journey anyways!). Tux is also much cooler to tattoo than the (sorry, but it’s true) silly top hat and magic wand that was the logo for Linux-Mandrake back in the day.

      • Red Hat Near the 200 Day
      • Red Hat and the Kernel Kerfluffle
      • Red Hat Open Source Day: Rome, 14 June 2011
      • Open Source Revenue Models: Red Hat’s Tactics and Strategies

        Red Hat’s decision might be ‘debatable’ for some, while others are ok with that. The whole point to me seems to be a completely different question, though. Tactic decisions to prevent others from appropriating returns from the (Red Hat) commons are not a substitute to a (long-term) strategy focused on renewal rates, an area where Red Hat is using effective business strategies.

      • What if Hewlett-Packard Bought Red Hat?

        Still, the idea of a Red Hat acquisition by a major technology player remains interesting. After Sun Microsystems and Novell were both bought by technology giants last year, that left Red Hat as the only public, U.S. company focused on open source. Open source is increasingly contributing to the commercial efforts of countless companies, and large companies like Gap Inc. have successfully moved to Red Hat’s platform. One has to ask how long it will be before a major technology player sees the kind of value in Red Hat’s proven software-plus-support business that Oracle and Attachmate saw in Sun and Novell.

      • Fedora

        • It’s not about you

          The F15 Alpha experience so far has been great — the T30 just hums along with KDE 4.6.1 in a way that’s incredibly eerie. Alphas aren’t supposed to run this error-free, I say, knocking hard on wood. The desktop box with “desktop” also hums along as well, error-free like the laptop, but there’s something I can’t put my finger on regarding the GNOME 3 experience so far that is . . . .

        • Fedora 14

          Fedora does have a heavy focus on Open Source Software, as stated in their previously mentioned FAQ. Although I have not had any issues, for some users this may be not be congruent with their values regarding Open Source vs. Compatability with Closed Source Software and Non-Open Formats. Also, certain things (such as the package manager) may not appeal to users with less experience. I felt like the lack of an office suite makes this a less-than-optimal distribution for first time users. Advanced users may not like the fact that it comes with applications that some may consider unnessecary, but it does come with some nice tools to manage and improve the security (A Firewall and SELinux are two big things that you get with Fedora 14).

          The short lifespan of 13 months, and a new release every 6 months, means that it may not be the best option for those who want to be able to stick to one version for more than a year without losing support.

          In summary, I think that this distro best suits users with moderate to high levels of experience who aren’t looking for a minimalist distribution, want something that can easily be adapted to fit a wide spectrum of uses, but don’t need to stick to one version for an extended period of time. If this looks like the distro for you, you can get it here.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian CUT, a new rolling release?

        It looks like 2011 started well for Debian. The project won awards in two out of seven categories at the Linux New Media Awards 2011 (“Best Open Source Server Distribution” and “Outstanding Contribution to Open Source/Linux/Free Software”). Just recently Internet.com declared Debian the most influential distribution ever, stating that “~63% of all distributions now being developed come ultimately from Debian.”

        However, my intention for this article is not solely to praise Debian for its recent awards, but rather to focus on a new project, Debian CUT. Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard about CUT; it seems most Debian community hasn’t either. Then again, maybe it’s because it is only labelled as unofficial/development so far.

      • In praise of Debian 5

        But what you can make of it is a remote music player with a slideshow visualizer, and probably for less money than it would cost you to feed your belly.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • What’s wrong with Unity & how we can fix it

          Unity is Ubuntu’s innovative new user interface, designed to catapult Ubuntu into the revolution of contextual search, launchers and social integration. The unique design provides an enticing alternative to the likes of Windows and OS X.

        • Lessons Learned from Canonical, Banshee, and GNOME

          With the brouhaha begun by Canonical’s changing of the Banshee affiliate code dying down there are some important lessons to be learned by all sides involved. One of the most important is that protracted in-fighting causes long term harm in the area of good will and public appearances. While Canonical was painted the villain by the community at large, GNOME, who was already battling negativity from controversial moves in its new GNOME 3 Shell, didn’t come out of it unscathed. In essence, there were no winners here.

        • Add Realtime Earth Wallpaper to Ubuntu with xplanetFX

          Xplanetfx_with_cairo-dock_main

          Ubuntu Linux (currently at version 10.10) comes with some really nice desktop wallpapers. I particularly like the “Blue Marble” static image of Earth from space. But recently I discovered a much more interesting way to add a real-time, continually-updated satellite image of Earth to your desktop with an app called xplanetFX. You can configure the app to change the globe’s size, attributes, and view specific coordinates on Earth. It’s pretty cool. Here’s a screenshot of my xplanetFX desktop, also running the Cairo-Dock app with the Chrome Round icon theme.

        • Ubuntu: a complete guide

          The reasons to try out Ubuntu are manifold. From breathing new life into ageing PC hardware to running a safer alternative to Windows for the kids’ computer, or simply stretching yourself with something other than the Microsoft homogeny, Ubuntu has become the alternative OS of choice.

        • Multitouch in Ubuntu 11.04

          One of my key goals for Ubuntu 11.04 has been to introduce full multitouch support through X.org. In technical terms, this means adding touch support to the XInput protocol. You may see others refer to multitouch in X.org as simply XInput 2.1. We hatched our plan back at UDS-N to push hard on developing the XInput 2.1 protocol and implementing it as best as possible in 11.04. The idea was that Ubuntu would be a test bed for the protocol before it is adopted by X.org upstream.

          We’re now past feature freeze for Ubuntu 11.04 and nearing the beta release. How well has the plan worked? I believe we’ve been mostly successful. 11.04 includes a pre-release version of XInput 2.1, and we’ve even got support for multitouch through Qt! However, working around issues in the existing X protocol has provided many challenges that became visible only after the initial implementation was developed. In 11.04 we have support for the major pieces of XInput 2.1, but we have since encountered a few corner cases that require a bit more work to get right. I will be writing another post about these challenges to give a better overview of the issues we are facing.

        • A Year With Ubuntu

          This time last year I got a new work laptop, a Dell E6400, dual core 2.8GHz, 4GB, enough hard disk capacity that I’ve forgotten what it is. I dutifully installed the corporate Windows XP image and eventually after the ubiquituous reboots got to a nice clean desktop, looking forward to a nice jump in computing power, I hit the start button to get on with installing the rest of the software I’m going to need, and nothing happens. Of course that always seems to happen on XP, you have to wait seconds to minutes after the desktop displaying before things have settled down enough to get anything to happen.

          At that instant I gave up on Windows, my next action was to download a 64bit Ubuntu .iso, and burn it to DVD. I’d played with virtualization and dual booting before, but on the spur of the moment I decided I was just going to wipe the hard disk one more time and throw my lot in with Ubuntu, I’d figure out how to manage without the few Windows only applications I needed somehow, it’d be better than gritting my teeth at my unresponsive desktop every morning.

        • Thunderbird and Ubuntu One: First Thoughts, First Roadblock (or Prior Art and RDF’d)

          Hedera is a Thunderbird extension, and probably the most direct solution to the Thunderbird and Ubuntu One integration problem. With Hedera, all contacts in all address books are sent off to Ubuntu One, with metadata to keep the contacts in the right address books. Metadata is also included to keep contacts distinct from one Thunderbird profile to the next (if you’re one of the rare users of profiles).

          As of late, the extension has gotten a bit dusty – the author, James Tait, is currently working at Canonical, and hasn’t had much time to maintain it.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 10 LXDE Released

            If you are interested in a very solid Linux Distribution with a lightweight desktop (rather than the typical Gnome or KDE desktops), there was very good news for you yesterday. Linux Mint 10 (Julia) LXDE is now available. When I have previously looked at lightweight desktops it has been Xfce, but that seems to be getting slowly but steadily larger and more complex, and I have heard a lot of good things about LXDE recently, so I decided to give it a whirl.

          • Linux: lubuntu

            If you already have Ubuntu installed, trying lubuntu is really easy; just run “sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop”.

            In summary, it’s very pretty, super fast, and crazy small. In fact, its memory usage was almost laughable considering I was running it on a 4GB MacBook Pro. I think my total memory usage was something in the 200-300MB range.

          • Linux Mint: Getting Debian via the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) – and making it more Debian-like

            A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to have at least one copy of all the major branches of Linux distributions on this laptop, if only for troubleshooting and having a reference point. Debian or something derived from it has been missing from all my machines for a while now, so with the release of “Squeeze” it seemed like a good time to put a copy back on.

          • Xubuntu Natty default wallpaper

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Embedding Ubuntu

      There are hundreds of versions of Linux, including embedded-specific distributions like TimeSys, MontaVista and Wind River Linux, and well-known desktop/server distributions such as Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE.
      They are all derived from common core Linux components, such as the standard Linux kernel (freely available from www.kernel.org), several graphical application environments (GNOME, KDE, etc), various system utilities and tools, both free and proprietary device drivers, and thousands of application programs. Yet the Linux desktop/server market was disrupted by the arrival of Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com).

    • Phones

      • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

      • Android

        • Motorola Revs Up Devs at Android Conference

          Motorola VP Christy Wyatt addressed an audience at the Android Developers Conference 2011 Tuesday, telling them that the opportunity to monetize around Android will exceed that of any other platform. One area of opportunity for devs is the enterprise market, Wyatt said. “The reason I find this really exciting, and you should think it’s exciting, is this has been a captive market for some time,” she said.

        • Fixing the Fragmented Face of Android

          Android 3.0, aka “Honeycomb,” took center stage at Wednesday’s AnDevCon keynote address, and LinuxInsider joined about 200 Android developers in a small room at the Marriott Hotel in San Mateo, Calif., to listen in.

    • Sub-notebooks

      • Asustek to launch US$200-250 netbook in June

        Asustek Computer is set to launch a new netbook priced at US$200-250 in June in cooperation with Intel, and hopes to achieve its goal of shipping six million netbooks in 2011, according to sources from upstream component makers.

    • OLPC

      • Welcoming two new Xo’s (and one is red! :-)

        This is the second version of the first activity in Etoys (with scripts) that I uploaded to the Squeakland Showcase. Through this activity we discuss and analyze more deeply the first story of the book (the story about the 35 camels).

        I was thinking of starting to include older kids (over 12) in the activities which will be present the programming skill. In my opinion, in this way, the little kids (that touched a computer and a mouse for the first time, since this project started) will have the support of the older ones, which are somehow a bit more accustomed to a computer. Through this integration, I think all kids can work to collaborate together on developing different skills as we move forward.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Does FOSS Need a Charismatic Leader?

    Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has Steve Jobs; Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has Bill Gates. The question on hand in the Linux community lately has been, does FOSS need someone similar?

    That, indeed, was the topic of a recent poll on TuxRadar, and it’s sparked quite a debate.

    “Does free software need a figurehead?” the TuxRadar crew began. “We all talk about the freedom and democracy that FLOSS brings — but does it also help to have a strong character at the top keeping us on the right path?”

  • What does Community really mean? (Part 2)

    The very first comment that somewhat counters’ Phipps’ s model is that it ignores the fundamentally dynamical nature of FOSS communities and the inherent sociological rejection of any real “stable” state of the social structure inside these communities. It means two things: That anyone from the end-user community may turn into a core developer provided he/she has the skills and provides relevant contributions in the relevant way (in my example, the end-user would have to contribute code patches in a regular fashion to become a core developer); second, that the members of these communities have no status that is carved in stone. You are not born a core developer, you become one, but you won’t remain one until you keep contributing. This in turn highlights two notions that are essential inside FOSS communities and that may be seen, as I wrote earlier, as an additional, yet necessary description of the way FOSS communities work through and beyond the typology enunciated by Simon.

  • How can open source survive in a post-PC World?

    The open source world has been fixated so long on the “Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop” that it runs the risk of failing to notice that the desktop is no longer the key platform. That’s been evident for some time in the developing world, where cost and power constraints mean that big, expensive PCs are simply impractical for most people. But with the rise of smartphones like the iPhone and Android devices, many people in western countries are also ditching their desk-bound systems in favour of powerful, more pocketable ones.

    Alongside this trend, there is the new passion for tabs, which many are proclaiming as the coup de grâce for traditional PCs. The idea is that for most users – that is, those who do not need to work with huge spreadsheets or massive databases, say – a lightweight touchscreen tablet will become the default way of computing, whether at work, at home, or on the move.

  • AWESOME!

    Really, OpenSource is about choice. If someone has a view of doing this like so, and others do have another view, let’s fork it, change it, see if it works. Other projects or stakeholders or companies will take what they need, and leave the rest to the sharks.

  • Apache Harmony loses project manager

    Tim Ellison, Project Management Chair at Apache Harmony, the Java implementation at the Apache Software Foundation, has announced his resignation as chair of the open source project. The IBM employee says that after IBM stepped back from the project in autumn 2010 and after years of discussions with Sun and then with Oracle about licences for Java Test Compatibility Kits (TCK), the participation in Harmony has shrunk so much that there is no longer any properly working project management.

  • Open Source’s Kith and Kindred

    One of the things that interests me is the way that the ideas underlying open source are being applied in other fields. That’s something that I normally cover in my other blog, but sometimes things happen in those other domains that have ramifications back in the world of open source, and so may be of interest here.

  • The future of open source is on its way

    As an industry analyst, I am always looking toward the future — mostly based on conversations and experiences with open source vendors and, increasingly, customers and end users. Still, to get the most accurate prediction and picture of the future, it is essential to check these ideas, theories, trends and with a larger pool of open source software providers, consumers and pundits. Thus, we’re encouraging anyone who has an interest or stake in enterprise open source software to offer their input via the just-released, fifth annual Future of Open Source Survey. The 451 Group is pleased to have been more closely involved in the survey this year along with North Bridge Venture Partners and Computerworld.

  • 59 Open Source Tools That Can Replace Popular Security Software

  • Events

    • Open source pow-wow kicks off Linux’ 20th anniversary

      The Linux Foundation announced keynotes and programming for its Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, scheduled for April 6-8 in San Francisco. The event will also kick off the year’s Linux 20th anniversary celebrations, leading up to the official celebration in August.

  • Web Browsers

    • Major Browser Makers Agree: HTML 5 is the Future

      There is no doubt that that last point makes sense. Everyone benefits from a common standard. Meanwhile, Mozilla has been showcasing what Firefox 4 can do with HTML 5 on its Web o’ Wonder site, and the company has been quite vocal about the promise of HTML 5.

    • Chrome 10, Firefox 4.0, or IE9? The Browser Choice

    • Chrome

      • Google Chrome OS Director Joins Chorus of Praise for HTML5

        Shepherds of the web, from execs at Firefox to directors at Internet Explorer, have heralded HTML5 as the future of the Internet. Simply put, HTML5 is the latest revision to HTML, the core coding language of the web and the backbone of the Internet. It’s a modern standard designed to complete modern online tasks–audio, video, multimedia, etc.–and every browser maker has touted its capabilities when showing off the newest versions of their software.

      • Google claims to have sped up the web

        ADVERTISING BROKER Google claims to have speeded up the web thanks to improvements in the Javascript it uses to display adverts.

        Google has updated the show_ads.js Javascript that is used by millions of websites to display Google’s Adsense adverts. The new turn of speed comes from embedding the heavy lifting of the script in an iframe, resulting in the browser not stalling while the Javascript is working out what adverts to display.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla To Ship Firefox 4 Final On March 22

        Mozilla’s Damon Sicore today told developers that the company is aiming for a March 22 ship date for Firefox 4.

      • Mozilla Takes Aim At Internet Explorer, Which Faces More Challenges Than Ever
      • Firefox 4: New streamlined interface, ‘app tabs’
      • Firefox 4 Gets CEO Approval

        Mozilla has officially confirmed March 22 as the launch date of Firefox 4. A recently discovered Java bug will not be fixed for the final version.

      • 10 Things to Drool Over in Firefox 4

        Mozilla’s Firefox 4 is now officially expected to debut on Tuesday March 22, following hard on the heels of Google’s Chrome 10 and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9.

      • Mozilla outlines 16-week Firefox development cycle

        Although Mozilla is still readying Firefox 4 for its official release, the organization is already laying out its plans for subsequent versions of the open source Web browser. In a roadmap published earlier this year, Mozilla revealed plans to issue three more major releases during 2011–bringing the browser’s version number up to seven.

        As we discussed in our coverage of the roadmap, Mozilla’s plan is ambitious and will require a dramatic overhaul of the Firefox development process. Mozilla—which has historically had lengthy development cycles and protracted beta testing—will have to transition to a faster and less-conservative approach to release management. The organization has authored a document that describes how such a transition could potentially be achieved.

      • Firefox 5.0 to Launch 16 Weeks after 4.0, Firefox 6.0 Just 6 Weeks after 5.0

        I have already told you that Mozilla plans to release Firefox 5.0, Firefox 6.0 and Firefox 7.0 by the end of 2011, following the acceleration of its release schedule per the Google Chrome model.

      • Check out What’s Coming Soon in Firefox 4

        Mozilla Firefox 4 is almost here! We updated the Firefox 4 release candidate with some minor security fixes and updates to several localizations, including the addition of a Vietnamese localized version. Firefox will now ship in 80 languages. We’re excited to deliver the new features, look and speed of Firefox 4 to our more than 400 million users worldwide.

  • Databases

  • Drupal/CMS

  • Education

    • Schools take the open road

      TAKING advantage of free and open source software, a government program has been bringing computers and the skills to use them to public high schools nationwide in an effort to narrow the digital divide.

      “We’ve been advocates of free and open source software from the start,” says Antonette Torres, manager of the iSchools project, which has set up computer labs in 1,000 public high schools since 2007.

      Each recipient school gets 19 desktop computers, a server and a laptop, all running Edubuntu, a variant of Ubuntu Linux designed for classroom use. Fifteen of the desktop PCs go to a computer lab, two are allocated for faculty use, one goes to the library and another goes to the principal.

  • Healthcare

    • Open-Source Software Is Actually More Secure for Health Care IT, Study Suggests

      Globally the sale of health care information systems is a multibillion dollar industry. The vast costs, frequent failed systems, and inability of systems to talk to each other regularly attract media comment. However policy makers still shy away from a class of software, Open Source, that could address many of these problems, because of worries about the safety and security of Open Source systems. Now new research by the University of Warwick’s Institute for Digital Healthcare, and the Centre for Health Informatics and Multiprofessional Education at UCL Medical School, finds that Open Source software may actually be more secure than its often more expensive alternatives.

  • Funding

    • DE: Company network to be funded to develop open source business software

      A group of companies will receive federal funding for the integration of business software to open source, it was announced in March 2011.

      The network of 16 software companies and a research institute have developed a ‘building block’ solution with an open source basis. The objective is to offer solutions that are compatible and flexible. The new software will be named Open Source Integration Initiative (OSII) and will be established with support from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMWi), in German). During the first year project period the network was awarded with the ‘National Innovation Programme for SMEs’ by the Ministry. MFG Baden-Württemberg, the public Innovation Agency for ICT and Media, is responsible for the management of the business network.

  • BSD

    • GhostBSD 2.0 is released

      Great news for this release of GhostBSD 2.0 will now be support auto mount of USB Devices! There could be some problems across a few system and if you find one please report it to one of the email address below.

    • m0n0wall 1.33 released

      m0n0wall 1.33 adds a new image type for generic PCs with a serial console, further improves IPv6 support, includes a driver for newer Realtek network chipsets and contains various small changes and bug fixes.

    • PC-BSD 9.0-current
    • The Wonders Of Blender

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GnuCash 2.4.4 released

      The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.4.4, the fourth bug fix release in a series of stable of the GnuCash Free Accounting Software. With this new release series, GnuCash can use an SQL database using SQLite3, MySQL or PostgreSQL. It runs on GNU/Linux, *BSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.

    • Ten years of the Free Software Foundation Europe

      Founded in 2001, the Free Software Foundation Europe is the European sister organisation to the Free Software Foundation in the United States, and today, it celebrates its tenth anniversary. In 2000, physicist Georg Greve saw the need for a European organisation to help Europe’s open source and free software developers in struggling with EU specific policy and the consequences of EU law for free software. The organisation sees itself not as a smaller European partner for the Richard Stallman-founded FSF in the US, but as an autonomous organisation culturally rooted in Europe that takes into account the complexities and differences in the conditions of the continent.

    • How to install and and start GNU Smalltalk

      Hi everyone, This short video show you how to install and start GNU Smalltalk on Ubuntu.

    • Create Your Own Local Mirror of the Ubuntu Repositories
    • Introduction to tmux: A GNU Screen Alternative

  • Government

    • Local government ‘detached’ from open source benefits

      Whitehall is becoming one of the strongest supporters of open source, but local authorities across the UK are ‘stubbornly wedded’ into proprietary ICT, writes Graham Taylor, CEO of Openforum Europe

      Three new government initiatives in the field of open public sector computing in the past month show that at a national level at least, the UK is one of the strongest supporters of open standards and open source software in Europe.

      Unfortunately at grass roots level, local government around the UK remains stubbornly wedded to proprietary computer systems that lock them and their citizens’ data into closed computer systems.

    • Government takes action on open technology

      It’s been an interesting few weeks in regard to open source. From being what in the past I classified a ‘laggard’ (that was the polite form) in Europe, the UK government is now intent on matching its Action Plan on Open Source, Open Standards and Re-use with….well, action! And in doing so it has shamed some other European countries that have been content to limit deliverables to a paper strategy.

    • Governments could save millions by reducing their dependence on a single desktop PC software vendor

  • Licensing

  • Programming

    • PHP 5.3.6 closes five security holes

      The PHP developers have released PHP 5.3.6, a maintenance update to the PHP interpreter. Among over 60 bug fixes are a number of fixes for security related problems.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • WebODF

      WebODF is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to add Open Document Format (ODF) support to your website and to your mobile or desktop application. It uses HTML and CSS to display ODF documents.

      WebODF is a Free Software project. All code is available under the AGPL. This means that you can use the code free of charge, investigate how it works, and share it with others.

    • Best Practices for Authoring Interoperable ODF Documents

      In the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC we have recently started work on a new document, a “Committee Note” which will be called, “Best Practices for Authoring Interoperable ODF Documents”.

      I will be the editor for this document.

      If you are not yet familiar with a “Committee Note”, it is a new category of document that has recently been added to the OASIS process. Think of it being analogous to an ISO Technical Report. A Committee Note (or CN) goes through the same level of review and approval with a Technical Committee, the same public review requirement, etc. But it does not get approved as a standard, so it does not define, for example, conformance requirements. It is intended for things like implementation guides, best practices, white papers, etc.

Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Obama’s new executive order on Guantanamo

      President Obama yesterday signed an Executive Order which, as The Washington Post described it, “will create a formal system of indefinite detention for those held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay” and “all but cements Guantanamo Bay’s continuing role in U.S. counterterrorism policy.”

    • Taking the “war” out of air war

      Admittedly, by then American air-power films had long been in decline. In Vietnam, the U.S. had used its air superiority to devastating effect, bombing the north and blasting the south, but go to American Vietnam films and, while that U.S. patrol walks endlessly into a South Vietnamese village with mayhem to come, the air is largely devoid of planes.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Energy Revolution in Germany

      Triggered by the catastrophic developments in Japan Germany undergoes an energy revolution. Friedbert Pflüger (CDU) openly speaks of a “revolution” and describes the approach of his party to back nuclear technology as a mistake.

  • Finance

    • How The Wealthy Plan to Finance The American Aristocracy With Middle Class Dollars

      The quest for influence, power and control at all levels of government has long played out through large political contributions and the big bucks paid to lobbyists to accomplish special interest objectives. And while the game has often been ‘rigged’ to benefit the wealthy in our society, there was always a role to be played by the nation’s unions -thanks, in no small part, to their substantial treasuries filled by the dues paying membership.

  • Censorship

    • US military blocks social media sites

      Sites at least temporaly affected by their measure include:

      * Youtube.com
      * Googlevideo.com
      * Amazon.com
      * ESPN.go.com
      * eBay.com
      * Doubleclick.com
      * Eyewonder.com
      * Pandora.com
      * streamtheworld.com
      * Mtv.com
      * Ifilm.com
      * Myspace.com
      * Metacafe.com

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies: the Video

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • EU ACTA negotiators’ notes still secret

          Pedro Velasco Martins, EU ACTA negotiator, today answered FFII’s 30 December 2010 questions on the initialling of ACTA. ACTA was initialed on 25 November 2010, through an electronic procedure. The Commission chief-negotiator initialled all the pages of the text, including the criminal measures.

          The Commission added negotiators’ notes in the course of the negotiations. The EU has not decided yet whether it will publish its negotiators’ notes. Negotiators’ notes may influence the interpretation of ACTA. According to the Commission ACTA will fall under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The FFII believes the notes should be published.

        • FFII supports asking an ECJ opinion on ACTA

          The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) supports asking the European Court of Justice an opinion on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). On Monday 21 March 2011 the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee may vote on a proposal for such a request. Unbalanced enforcement measures may heighten market entrance risks for innovators, according to the FFII. Startup companies are often confronted with patent minefields. Even a mere allegation of infringement may easily lead to market exclusion. Startup companies often do not have enough resources to litigate.

Clip of the Day

HOW TO INSTALL WINE ON UBUNTU 10.10


Credit: TinyOgg

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