• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger sings the praises of Linux

Linux Hardening – Quick Wins

The best way to ensure that your Linux server is secure is to build it from scratch with a minimum amount of code that can be exploited by a hacker — a custom compiled kernel and the bare minimum of packages needed for the server to do its intended job.

Kernel Space

• LinuxCon North America 2011

  As most are already aware, LinuxCon North America 2011 is taking place this week in Vancouver, Canada. What makes this year’s Linux Foundation conference special is that it’s celebrating the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. Here are some photos from the special event.

• LinuxCon wishes happy 20th to Linux

  The LinuxCon conference that ended Aug. 19 in Vancouver featured a 20th Anniversary Gala for Linux and plenty of discussions on a fast changing industry. Highlights included a call for a long-term Linux kernel, keynotes from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurstand IBM Linux guru Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and fork-loving Linus Torvalds taking a mellow approach to the code rift with Android.

• LinuxCon: the present and future of Linux

  This year’s LinuxCon North America 2011 is celebrating the imminent 20th anniversary of Linux – an opportunity to reflect on the current significance and future development of Linux. Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman talked about the Linux kernel, the new version scheme, the challenges and successes of the development process, and the increasing importance of the ARM platform.

Applications

• InstallJammer Development Discontinued

  After more than 10 years of (mostly) active development, I am discontinuing development of InstallJammer. I’ve wrestled with this decision for more than a year now, and in my heart I always thought that I would come back and continue the work. As time went on and other projects started bubbling to the surface, I realized that I no longer had the heart to continue with InstallJammer.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Install Linux Kernel 3.0 on Ubuntu 11.04

  • Xtables-Addons On Centos 6 & Iptables GeoIP Filtering

  • How To Take Screenshots Of Your Android Smartphone

  • Information about Power of Linux Data Recovery Tool to directly Recover Linux Files

Distributions

• New Releases

  • IPFire 2.9 – Core Update 51 released

  • BackTrack 5 R1 Is Available for Download

    Offensive Security, leaders in Online information security training, proudly announced on August 18th, the immediate availability for download of the first point release of the very popular BackTrack 5 operating system.

• Red Hat Family

  • Joyent debuts SmartOS with KVM, an open source operating system

• Debian Family

  • Icedove 5.0 available for Debian Squeeze

  • Derivatives

    • Puppy Linux update the “fastest and friendliest” yet

      The Puppy Linux development team has released version 5.2.8 of its minimal Linux distribution. According to project coordinator Larry Short, the latest release of Lucid Puppy is “the fastest and friendliest Lucid yet” thanks to several under-the-hood changes.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Choosing sides in the cloud game

        Canonical has softly announced it would be offering the Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) tool in Ubuntu 11.10, a move that marks a noted preference away from a similar offering from Red Hat.

      • Ubuntu tweaks Unity UI, adds ARM for servers

        Ubuntu’s controversial UI Unity is set for a few tweaks in the next version of the open-source operating system, as well as ARM support for the server edition.

        Mark Shuttleworth, founder of developer Canonical, unveiled a screenshot of the “Dash” in the next version, Ubuntu 11.10 – nicknamed Oneiric Ocelot.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River Linux 4 gains new graphics stack

  Embedded specialist Wind River has announced the release of Update Pack 2 for version 4 of Wind River Linux. According to the Intel subsidiary, the update to its commercial embedded Linux runtime and development platform provides a fully integrated graphics software stack.

  The pre-integrated graphics stack in Update Pack 2 includes the Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite, GTK, Qt, and X.Org, and works with the latest Intel and Texas Instruments’ processors. The release also offers a Web 2.0 Cross Web Development Toolkit, a Qt Development Toolkit, and new security features like the open source strongSwan VPN solution, which improves IP security, and the SEEdit policy editor.

• Phones

  • What HP Should Do With WebOS?

    HP has announced that it is considering the spin-off or sale of its PC business unit. The announcement was made yesterday, part of the company’s Q3 2011 Earnings results. HP’s PC unit includes the WebOS-based smartphone and tablet computer business.

    If you recall, HP inherited WebOS, a Linux distribution originally designed for smartphones, but that can scale to larger computing devices, including tablet computers and desktops.

  • Should Google Buy HP’s PC Business?

  • Android

    • GridOS a new Android based OS

      A new Android based operating system is developed, with a complete new graphical user interface, called GridOS

    • HTC Unlocks Phone To Upset Google, May Join Microsoft?

      Android is under attack by Microsoft and Apple (who instead of competing by better products are trying to use messy patent system to kill competition) and it needed a patent portfolio to defend its partners like HTC and Samsung.

      Google chairman recently said that they will not let HTC lose. It must be noted that there were no direct cases on Google. Trolls like Microsoft were attacking HTC and Samsung. So, the deal was needed to offer Android playes with the much needed ammunition to ward off trolls. This was the reason why Google bought Motorola. Every other theory is just an attempt to divert our attention.

      Kevin also mentions the statement by Nokia CEO who was president of Microsoft Business Division before joining Nokia only to turn the company into a mistress of Microsoft. Elop’s statement holds no credibility as he has a clear bias here. Microsoft is known for sinking companies they sign exclusive deals with — Nortel, Novell and now Nokia. Nokia should have continued work on MeeGo and created yet another competitor to Microsoft and Apple. But, with Microsoft’s ex-president in-charge nothing else was expected.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Lenova’s IdeaPad K1 doesn’t measure up to iPad, Galaxy Tab

    Two months before Steve Jobs revealed the original iPad in 2010, Lenovo arrived at CES with a product called the IdeaPad U1. The U1 was a tablet with an innovative keyboard dock — the tablet itself ran a custom Linux interface (called Skylight) and when inserted into the dock it booted Windows 7. It was one of the most captivating products revealed that year, but like many gadgets shown at the mega tradeshow, it morphed into an entirely different go-to-market device. Before the year was up, the U1 had turned into the Lenovo LePad in China; the dock was sadly scrapped and the Skylight OS replaced with Android 2.2.

Lustre file system set for spit ‘n’ polish

Whamcloud, the startup created in July 2010 to continue development of the open source Lustre supercomputer file system, has secured a $2.1m contract from OpenSFS to spruce it up with new features and functions.

Luster – used on about 60 per cent of the largest supercomputers in the world – is a parallel clustered file system designed for both supporting petabytes of files and giving high-speed access to the data stored on the file system. Lustre was created by Peter Braam when he was a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and was commercialized when he created Cluster File Systems in 2001.

Whamcloud Expanding Lustre

The OpenSFS Lustre community group has contracted Lustre services firm Whamcloud in a multi-year deal to add new functionality. Lustre is an open source storage filesystem that has its origins at Sun and migrated to Oracle after the acquisition. Whamcloud and OpenSFS have not disclosed the financial terms of the deal.

Startup Whamcloud has been pushing Lustre forward where it can since last year in an effort to help expand capabilities. Lustre is a highly scalable open source storage system used in HPC computing.

Working group on community metrics

Are you one of us few, lucky people who attempt to keep track of the health of one or more communities?

SGI Acquires OpenCFD Ltd., the Leader in Open Source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Software

Twitter launches Bootstrap, open-source tools for making web apps

Bootstrap is an open source set of files written in CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets, a programming language used to dictate how a website or web app looks and works) that covers some of the building blocks of most web apps, such as buttons, tables and forms, page templates, app navigation and even stylistic matters such as typography and color gradients.

Sirius Open Source Support now Open all hours!

Most myths about Open Source have gone down in flames over the past few years as more and more serious enterprises, financial institutions, Governments and technology startups have moved to it. Perhaps the last remaining, and most persistent, is that “you can’t get support for it”…

Britain’s most-respected and best-established Open Source business, Sirius, is celebrating six months uninterrupted 24/7 support operation by opening it’s doors and making the service available to all. Plus, until the end of August, the company is giving away round-the-clock support for the cost of business hours to the first twenty organisations taking it up.

Open source Initiative provides free JTAG/Boundary Scan Software and a number of hardware Kits

GOEPEL electronics Ltd. recently announced the accession to the open source initiative goJTAG™ (gojtag.com). The networking founded and joined by various universities and several Companies pursues the goal to provide JTAG/Boundary Scan tools and knowledge based on an independent and non-commercial platform, sustainably accelerating the wide adoption of standardized IEEE 1194.x test methods. GOEPEL electronics engages in providing 20 hardware kits free of charge and according reference designs for interested parties in the UK.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Considers Burying Firefox Version Numbers

    Quite a debate has arisen after a discussion on a Mozilla forum about how upcoming versions of the Firefox browser should not carry a version number in the familiar “About” box. As Computeworld has noted, on the online discussion, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler, a director of Firefox, wrote: “We’re moving to a more Web-like convention where it’s simply not important what version you’re using as long as it’s the latest version. We have a goal to make version numbers irrelevant to our consumer audience.” While the backlash against this has become a little overblown, it is definitely not a good idea.

SaaS

• Evolving Roles, Welcome Stefano Maffulli to the Community

  The explosion of OpenStack over the past year has once again highlighted the significant impact that an open source community can have on an industry. Within a single year, over 100 participating companies and 1,300 community members have joined together to create the de-facto open source cloud computing standard.

• Data Integrity and Availability in Apache Hadoop HDFS

  Data integrity and availability are important for Apache Hadoop, especially for enterprises that use Apache Hadoop to store critical data. This blog will focus on a few important questions about Apache Hadoop’s track record for data integrity and availability and provide a glimpse into what is coming in terms of automatic failover for HDFS NameNode.

• Cloud Foundry Platform as a Service (PaaS) in Ubuntu 11.10

• Marten Mickos Says: Keep the Cloud Open

  Marten Mickos CEO of Eucalyptus Systems, formerly CEO of MySQL AB, echoed a common concern in his keynote at LinuxCon North America 2011. While celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linux and the past decade of accomplishments of open source, Mickos cautioned the audience gathered in Vancouver, BC that they need to be worried about protecting the “share and share alike” nature of open source in the cloud.

Databases

• SkySQL Partners With Sphinx Search to Offer Customers Commercial Support for the Sphinx Search Server

Public Services/Government

• Bristol website launch highlights limitations of government SME policy

  The launch of Bristol City Council’s open source website this week has exposed the limitations of government SME procurement policy, with the authority relying on a contract with IT services giant Capgemini to do work it had promised to small local firms.

  The launch was the first substantial achievement of the council’s sometimes problematic September 2010 ICT policy, which aimed to use open source software as a platform for local economic regeneration as well as modernisation of its own systems.

  After unveiling the plans to 70 local firms last year and declaring its intention to break its website overhaul into smaller chunks of work that could be shared among a wider variety of suppliers, the council was seen as at the vanguard of coalition government IT policy that promised an end to all-encompassing outsourcing contracts with large suppliers.

Licensing

• Linux Foundation eases open source licensing woes

  The Linux Foundation has a truly altruistic stance and openly states that its remit is to serve as a neutral spokesperson for Linux and to “generate original research and content” that advances the understanding of the Linux platform.

  As such, the foundation sponsors a number of working groups who are each tasked with specific goals and directives.

• Mozilla Public License 2.0 Release Candidate 1 and Draft FAQs Released

• If Only They’d Actually Help Enforce GPL

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Open-Source Architecture: WikiHouse Puts Housing Design in Your Hands

    Prefab housing has been around since the 1940s. The entire point of prefab was not to have to worry about the construction–all that happened somewhere off-site. It was anonymous and standardized, and led to perfectly serviceable homes that lacked even a breath of personality. After decades in which prefab was relegated to postmodernist architects, the modern DIY movement got to it, resulting in WikiHouse: a mix of Wiki software, computer-aided design programming, and CNC machining techniques that puts building design straight into the hands of the end users.

Programming

• The Cilk plus language goes open source

  Cilk Plus is an extension to C/C++ designed to make parallel programming easier. Intel owns it but it has now made it open source as part of the GCC compiler project.

Security

• Researchers identify first flaws in the Advanced Encryption Standard

• New module for Metasploit Framework

  The new module, called “page_collector,” takes a range of hosts in the typical RHOSTS fashion and checks a user-definable list of ports for web services using both HTTP and HTTPS. Each successfully identified web server then gets a corresponding iFrame in an output file.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Police got the wrong man: Salford teen charged with Miss Selfridge arson during Manchester riots is cleared

  Dane Williamson has spoken of his ‘hell’ after spending nine days behind bars for a crime he did not commit.

  Dane, 18, was arrested just hours after the Manchester riots and accused of setting fire to the Miss Selfridge store on Market Street. Despite denying being involved in the attack, which caused almost £500,000 worth of damage, he was later charged with criminal damage and recklessly endangering life and remanded in custody in Forest Bank prison.

  While behind bars, his flat in Salford was damaged by fire and he lost all of his possessions.
  But the case against him has been sensationally dropped.

  A 50-year-old man has now been arrested in connection with the incident but Greater Manchester Police are still hunting the suspect who started the Miss Selfridge blaze.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux and multi-form factor platforms

About Mothers and Linux

I read constantly that “Linux is not ready for Mom” but I cannot help ask myself which distribution….or, to be more specific, which mother.

Three days ago, we celebrated Mother’s Day in my country. Thus, my brother and I wanted to surprise our mother and my wife (who recently became the mother of a cute baby girl). We wanted to give them a memorable present, something that they could use both for entertainment and, why not, to learn. In an unplanned visit to a computer store, my eyes fixed upon the classic Asus Eee PC 900, the tiny netbook that drew me to the world of Linux with its version of Xandros. Next to it sat the Asus Eee PC 901. Temptation was formidable, so we ended up buying both despite the clerk never quite understood why we rejected his offer of some other netbooks (preloaded with the rip off known as Windows 7 Starter).

[...]

So, there you go: that’s two mothers who are happy with Linux.

Ten tenets the Linux world needs to rethink

So much of the landscape of business and home computing has changed since the beginnings of the GPL and the Linux operating system. The time has surely come to reassess some of the movement’s fundamental thinking. All I would ask is that the points I list here be examined as possible areas for improvement that could help the public at large take up open source and Linux more fully.

Linux Journal Goes 100% Digital

We’re going all-digital. That’s the news. Starting with our next issue, #209, we’re going off-rack and off-mailbox, but staying on-email and on-Web, where we can grow and improve. It’s the only path open to us, but it’s also a good one. Hang with me as I explain why. (See also Experience the New Linux Journal for details about the new format.)

Linux and the Tyranny of the Default

Pariser’s point suddenly has implications for the Linux community. While default settings are changeable, it’s not a trivial act. For a default to be changed, a user must know the setting is changeable and how to change it. So to make a change to a piece of software or a distribution and say “The user can always change it back” is, as Pariser points out in his own example, a bit disingenuous.

Jumping between operating systems

I was very pleased to find out that I was allowed to make a choice between two operating systems when I started in my new job. Of course, the choice was to be made between OS X and Windows. At the moment, Linux is used only on our development servers.

Desktop

• Yes, GNU/Linux is on Desktops and Notebooks and Many Other Types of Computer

  Zemlin is still joking about The Year of The Linux Desktop. He’s so busy catering to big business he has forgotten that most “desktop” PCs (Personal Computers with a GUI, say) are run by ordinary people like my wife (GNU/Linux user for a couple of months now and my service calls are way down… ), and GNU/Linux works very well for them. The “Year” has come and gone a long time ago but GNU/Linux is still performing well on millions of desktops.

Server

• Zentyal The Linux Small Business Server

  Zentyal, formerly known as eBox Platform, is a multi-purpose Linux Ubuntu remastered and it’s based on Ubuntu server 10.04 (LTS). It can function as a network gateway, unified threat manager, office server, infrastructure manager, and a unified communications server. The project’s source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. Zentyal is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Spanish company eBox Technologies S.L., which holds the copyright to the codebase

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 3 Episode 16

  In this episode: Google spends $12.5 billion acquiring Motorola’s smart phone division. Linus switches from Gnome to Xfce and KDE 5 development is about to start. We discover things, draw our own boxes, and listen to your views in the open ballot.

• #147 Computer America #41

• Linux Outlaws 223 – Did You Say Orgy?

• Full Circle Podcast 23: OGGCamp Part One

Kernel Space

• Maddog, Moglen, and Frye: Icons of the Linux community discuss their first twenty years with Linux and its future

  In the afternoon keynotes of the first day of LinuxCon, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin sat down to talk about the twentieth anniversary of Linux with Jon “Maddog” Hall, Eben Moglen, and Dan Frye, or as Zemlin called them, The Godfather, The Lawyer, and The Suit.

• Linus Torvalds Tells All as Linux Hits 20

  Many people in the world consider Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, to be a visionary. Linus Torvalds himself does not.

  In a session at LinuxCon with kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, Torvalds detailed his view of what he does and what is wrong and right in the kernel world.

  “I’m not really a visionary guy,” Torvalds said. “My vision extends to pragmatic issues for the next kernel release.”

• The biggest Linux FUD hits of all time?

  I managed to catch Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin’s keynote for LinuxCon yesterday, and watched what was a combination of a Linux cheerleading session and a pretty tongue-in-cheek slam-fest of all things Microsoft.

• Linux: Where it’s been and where it’s going

  WAITING FOR THE START OF Linux – A Short Retrospective and an Opinion on the Future, a talk by Dr Irving Wladawsky-Berger at Linuxcon North America, The INQUIRER was treated to two songs, ‘Hey Ya’ by rappers Outkast, and ‘Paper Planes’ by MIA.

  The songs are not similar. MIA’s, which samples ‘Straight to Hell’ by the Clash, is a piece of braggy call to arms in which the singer offers to “take your money”. The other, at least if you accompany a listen with viewing the video, is a celebration of being different, attention seeking and wacky.

• The Next 20 Years? Who Knows?

  Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, took the stage in Vancouver, BC to talk about the challenges that Linux will face in the next 20 years. Whitehurst’s topic meshed nicely with the lead-in keynote from Jim Zemlin. While Zemlin examined the world without Linux, Whitehurst took a look at the next stage — Linux over the next 20 years.

• Graphics Stack

  • It’s Time For The 2011 Linux Graphics Survey

    It’s time for the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey on Phoronix. Since 2007 (see the 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 results) we have been running an annual Linux graphics survey. The purpose of this survey is to help graphics driver developers, software / application developers, and other organizations understand the hardware/software configurations and features currently being used by Linux desktop users. It’s now time for the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey.

  • Remote Wayland Server Project: Does It Work Yet?

    With the 2011 Google Summer of Code, we now know how the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker and morphological anti-aliasing (MLAA) turned out, but how did the remote display capabilities for the Wayland Display Server evolve over the summer? It’s something that hasn’t yet been reported about on Phoronix.

    The aim of the remote display for Wayland GSoC project was to pair a proxy compositing server with the client, a psuedo-client with the real compositing server, and enabling network communication between the pseudo-client and proxy compositor. Under this design, it would then be possible to run Wayland clients remotely in a seamless manner.

  • NVIDIA Releases 285.03 Beta Linux Driver

    While some NVIDIA Linux developers are up here in Vancouver for LinuxCon (met some friendly and informative NVIDIA engineers at the Linux Foundation gala last night), the NVIDIA Linux desktop team back in Santa Clara has put out the first 285.xx Linux driver series beta now that the 280 driver was made official earlier in the month.

  • Thoughts about Network Trancparency

    Every time there is an article about Wayland you can see that there a lots of uneducated comments about the “fact” that Wayland does not support network trancparency and because of that it is completely wrong to go for network trancparency. These discussions contain a lot of myths and even FUD and I consider it important to share my thoughts about these concerns as I am belonging to those who actively work to bring the benefits of Wayland to the KDE Plasma Workspaces.

Applications

• List of useful backup Utilities for Linux

• Three Great Mindmapping Tools for the Linux Desktop

  Sometimes, you run into a problem that you just can’t work through with mental brute force alone. Brainstorming with others works, but that’s not always an option.

  One popular and effective way of beating a problem or releasing your creativity is mindmapping. While you can go old school and use pen and paper, there is quite a bit of mindmapping software out there for the desktop and on the web.

  There are a number of really solid mindmapping tools for the Linux desktop. Let’s take a closer look at three of them.

• OpenELEC, a media center based on XBMC

  OpenELEC is an embedded operating system built specifically to run XBMC, the open source entertainment media hub. The idea behind OpenELEC is to allow people to use their Home Theatre PC (HTPC) like any other device you might have attached to your TV, like a DVD player or Sky box.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Use Gnome Dictionary Offline For Faster Searches

  • Ubuntu update bricked Lenovo T500 with ATI graphic card

  • Ubuntu update bricked Lenovo T500 with ATI graphic card

  • Makefiles

  • Bash Script Backup

  • Change Ubuntu Unity configuration settings

  • Hidden Linux : Multiple LibreOffice installations

  • Positioning windows automatically in Gnome 3

  • The Beginner’s Guide to Shell Scripting 4: Conditions & If-Then Statements

  • How to get your full disc space back on ext filesystems

  • How to use Libre Office in Ubuntu to create a Client Database | Libreoffice Tutorial Part 2

  • Linux Hardening – Quick Wins

  • Four Steps to Build a Test Web Server

  • Pimp My Irssi – Part 2

  • CentOS 5: Mount samba share in read-write mode

  • Share an interactive ssh session b/n two users with ‘tmux’

  • Test Your Own WEP Network Strength

  • Build a better bash

• Games

  • Game Drift Linux review

    Game Drift Linux is a brand new Ubuntu-based distro from the Danish company, Linos. The firm specialises in creating Ubuntu derivatives for various special uses. As well as Game Drift, for example, the company also offers GoSchool, an Ubuntu-based live distro used by Danish schools to allow students to carry out exams on their own computers while still ensuring an identical software set and, more importantly, a secure and level playing field. Another project (still on the Linos drawing board at the time of writing) is DGSP, or Dedicated Game Server Platform. Although little is known about it at the moment, we understand it’s designed to make the running of a dedicated gaming server a much simpler task than it is right now.

  • Conquest Of Elysium 3 Is Coming To GNU/Linux !

  • [Gaming] FlightGear 2.4 Released with Exciting New Features

    Open Source and Cross Platform flight simulator game FlightGear has reached version 2.4 after being in development for 6 months bringing in many impressive new features and fixes.

  • Introducing Cobalt

    Early on, even as we were founding Mojang, we talked about the idea of collaborating with other indie game studios to release more great games. We wanted to find studios who have our philosophy of developing games, which is staying close to the community and treating it as a service. Today we’re announcing our first game developed by a 3rd party: Cobalt by Oxeye Game Studios.

  • Trine 2 New Co-op Trailer

  • Asylum

  • Dead Cyborg Brings Excitement, At First

    have to confess that even as I grow older, I still love computer gaming and get excited when someone releases a commercial quality game for Linux. When Dead Cyborg Episode 1 was released on August 15, I thought perhaps this could be my next purchase (or, more accurately, donation).

    The early screenshots looked great and the story line was intriguing. I guess Dead Cyborg could be described as a first person adventure puzzle game “about the meaning of life… and death… in a rusty post-apocalyptic metal and concrete world.” I love first person games: shooters, adventures, horror, puzzle… The game itself is available as a tarball of binaries or, it is said, one can run it in their browser. I didn’t have much luck with that.

  • Linux Free Mega Games Pack (FreeMGP)

    Free Mega Games Pack (FreeMGP) Vol. 1 for Linux is an endeavor by LastOS team at cyvoc.net to create a free mega compilation of open-source and freeware games with light system requirements. The games are packaged into a large archive managed by a Permanent Portable Games (ppGames) system. You open a sort of a browser window, choose which games you want to install and you deploy them on your system. Installations are done using Wine.

  • Dirk 2 Testers needed!

Desktop Environments

• Oil Drilling Threatens Arctic Ecosystem; Indigenous Ways Of Life

  The final frontier. Now that Shell and BP are mere steps away from drilling exploratory wells off the Coast of Alaska and Russia, everyone’s playfully referring to the Arctic as the “final frontier” for petroleum development.

• Tar Sands Action to Commence Saturday at White House

  Saturday marks the commencement of the Tar Sands Action, which will take place in front of the White House.

  It is a two-week long civil disobedience campaign, planned to last through September 3, demanding that the Obama Administration turn down the proposal to build the Keystone XL Pipeline.

  The 1,980-mile pipeline is slated to transport the dirtiest oil in the world from Alberta’s tar sands down to southeast Texas. The pipeline’s route overlaps with the Ogallala Aquifer, which supplies 82 percent of the people that live within the aquifer’s boundary their drinking water. It would also snake through the Nebraska Sand Hills, which is a vital wetland ecosystem, containing a diverse array of plant and animal life.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Enjoy A Clean, Improved Desktop With KDE 4.7

    One of Linux‘s most popular desktop environments, KDE, released their latest series (version 4.7) at the end of July. This version improves on work done in previous releases by adding new features while improving performance and stability.

    However, this new version does not provide a drastic change such as GNOME 3, as most changes are under the hood and are not visually reflected. Needless to say, you will still see an improvement while working, but they do not fall under the aesthetics category.

  • Taiwan, or: no rest for the weary

    Tomorrow evening I leave to participate in the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters, or COSCUP, in Teipei, Taiwan. I will be presenting on Plasma Active and helping spread the KDE and Qt story (and love!) while I am there.

  • every new beginning

    The Berlin Desktop Summit was a roaring success from my experience at it. We, as they say, pushed forward on all fronts: cross-project collaboration, KDE Frameworks (the next major version of KDE’s libraries and runtime requirements), application development and, of course near to my heart, our Plasma workspaces.

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 14th August 2011

  • Wireless sharing with Plasma NM 0.9 (part 2)

    In my last post about shared connections I asked how I could make shared connections easier to setup. I have received some suggestions, but some of them were not that easy to implement (drag’n drop one connection onto an interface widget in Plasma NM’s main window) or still not easy to understand how to use. Then I got an idea to just add a new entry in the “Add” button, similar to when creating VPN connections. I am here to ask what you all think about this change to the connection editor:

  • KWin turns 12

    As we can see KWin has its root in KWM from KDE 1 (there are still one or two comments in KWin source tree saying KWM) and it seems like the capitalizations was added in later times

• GNOME Desktop

  • A Fork Of GNOME 2: The Mate Desktop

    A lot of people hate Canonical’s Unity desktop, but a lot of people also hate the current state of the GNOME 3.0 Shell too. For those that are still fond of the GNOME 2.x environment, there is a fork of GNOME2 that’s been little talked about up to this point. This fork is called the Mate Desktop Environment.

  • Marples-black – gtk2/3 dark style themes for Gnome

    Marples is a (gtk2/3) theme, for those who like dark themes. the name marples is derived and pays homage to Marp-1-blue theme by Malys777.

    The theme is beta right now. The writer is working on the theme everyday, so it is coming along nicely.

Distributions

• How a Linux Distribution Review Should be Done

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Countdown to Mandriva 2011, Codename Announced

    In counting down the release to Mandriva 2011 Viacheslav “multik” Kaloshin, from ROSA Labs, has been blogging about a new significant changes in the works. So far they’ve been a bit ho-hum, but today he announced the 2011 official codename.

    “Some times ago, we asked in cooker and engineering mailing list about new codename for Mandriva 2011. This topic generated lots of emails, where suggestions were from star names to animals,” was said of the process. After a bit of discussion they narrowed the suggestions down to the Periodic Table of Elements. So, today the official codename for Mandriva 2011 is “Hydrogen.”

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat CEO thinks the desktop is becoming a legacy application

    A running joke at this years LinuxCon is that “X is the year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Zemlin, head of the conference’s sponsoring organization, The Linux Foundation, started it with his keynote in noting how often he’d made that prediction and how often he’s been wrong. The current prediction, which I believe Linus Torvalds made last night was : “2031! The year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has another year in mind for the Linux desktop though: Never. Oh, and the Windows and Mac desktops? Get ready to say good-bye to them soon.

  • What’s New in CentOS 6

• Debian Family

  • SFLC Co-Hosts The Community Distribution Patent Policy FAQ with Debian

    Software patents increasingly threaten both large technology firms and independent developers. Naturally, this has caused uncertainty in the free software community. To help free and open source software developers better understand patents, the real risks they pose, and the limits to their reach, the Software Freedom Law Center is publishing on its website the Community Distribution Patent Policy FAQ.

  • Derivatives

    • Parsix 3.7 review

      Parsix is a Linux distribution based on Debian Testing. It is a community distribution with roots in Iran. It is not as popular as other community distributions, but development is active and well. The only previous review of Parsix on this website was of Parsix 3.2, which was more than a year ago. This article provides a detailed review of the latest stable version, Parsix 3.7, which was released on August 14, 2011. It is code-named Raul, after a character in Happy Feet, a computer-animated family film.

    • Linux Mint Debian 201108 RC (Gnome and Xfce) released!

      The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 201108 RC with updated ISOs for Gnome and Xfce.

    • How system update can break love

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Will Ubuntu lead the next generation of Desktop computing?

      • Ubuntu Development Update

        Last week we hit Feature Freeze. This is the big date that all developer dread the most. Now features and new upstream versions have to have landed, everything else will be a matter the release team has to decide upon. We are rushing towards release with UI Freeze and Beta Freeze coming up next week. Exciting times!

      • Understanding Unity

        Search Focus: Today many people are search focused. With search engines (or url bars) being a primary way of reaching both information and applications. This is a easy and natural design to adapt to.

        Large Footprint Dash: The dash is not invoked lightly. It takes up a large footprint because a user shifts from task to data search mindset. A large foot print gives the opportunity to create distinguishable visual representations of data. Instead of small text driven ones.

      • Introduction To The Ubuntu Unity Desktop

      • Lucid Lives: 10 Apps Still Updated for Ubuntu 10.04

        With Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 long since out, and Ubuntu 11.10 stirring up excitement with every update, it’s easy to forget that the 16 month old Long Term Support release of Ubuntu 10.04 remains installed on many a users computer.

      • Ubuntu 11.04 by Canonical

      • Android vs. Ubuntu – An open letter to Mark Shuttleworth

        The news of Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s mobile business is a potential game changer for the mobile computing market. The reasons Google made this purchase were obvious; they needed an arsenal of patents to fight the illegitimate battles of the patent wars to protect Android. As I have described in my previous post, these wars are an unfair and obtrusive burden on the entire tech industry, preventing innovation and bogging down our legal system. It’s too bad Google had to do this. I must admit I feel bad for their position. There may also have been the incentive to prevent fragmentation of the Android landscape by gaining more control of Android implementation. This incentive would have been secondary at best given the threat of the current law suits.

      • Behold The Power Cog [Minor Oneiric update alert]

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Will Nokia Ever Realize Open Source Is Not a Panacea?

    I was pretty sure there was something wrong with the whole thing in fall of 2009, when they first asked me. A Nokia employee contacted me to ask if I’d be willing to be a director of the Symbian Foundation (or so I thought that’s what they were asking — read on). I wrote them a thoughtful response explaining my then-current concerns about Symbian:

    * the poor choice of the Eclipse Public License for the eventual code,
    * the fact that Symbian couldn’t be built in any software freedom system environment, and
    * that the Symbian source code that had been released thus far didn’t actually run on any existing phones.

    I nevertheless offered to serve as a director for one year, and I would resign at that point if the problems that I’d listed weren’t resolved.

  • Android

    • Motorola Droid HD seen in wild with Droid Bionic

      Images of a super-thin Motorola Droid HD phone popped up on the web along with the latest iteration of the delayed, but soon-to-be-released Droid Bionic. The Droid HD appears to feature Android 2.3, a 4.5-inch qHD or higher resolution display, and an eight-megapixel camera.

    • Android GPLv2 termination worries: one more reason to upgrade to GPLv3

      Distributors lose their rights when they violate GPLv2, but the Free Software Foundation is more forgiving in its license enforcement to encourage continued participation in the free software community. GPLv3 has improved termination provisions to codify this approach, giving developers one more reason to upgrade.

    • Motorola Atrix Lapdock

      The Motorola Atrix Android handset has a suite of accessories that go beyond the typical docking options to transform it from a dual core Android smartphone into an multimedia hub or even a netbook. With the latter, the Atrix slots into the back of a very slimline looking notebook and phone’s CPU runs the show.

    • Android 3.1 coming to Google TV boxes soon

      Notwithstanding the Logitech Revue Google TV system’s drastic price reduction to $99, all new and existing devices will soon be updated to Google TV version 2, based on Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”).

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • World’s largest single-school XO laptop solar power deployment

    We successfully carried out our first solar photovoltaic school deployment in Haiti, last week! The EFACAP school in Lascahobas, Haiti now has 2.4KW of solar pv capability to charge 500 laptops with a DC only designed and wired system. According to our research and to OLPC, our installation has the distinction of being the world’s largest single-school solar laptop charging deployment!

San Diego open-source software makers meet up and geek out

A gaggle of software developers and an Internet celebrity sit down for a nighttime talk in the bowels of a massive computer-chip-development company …

There’s no punch line, and for the San Diego techies who gather twice monthly in Qualcomm’s massive research facility to discuss the who’s who and what’s what of the computer world, this meeting was no joke. Rather, it was chance to network, to meet with kindred spirits and, perhaps most importantly, an opportunity to discuss some pretty geeky stuff.

Mårten Mickos: “F” as in freedom, and in fun, and in the future

If you haven’t heard a keynote about the wonders of the cloud, you haven’t been to an open source conference lately. But Mårten Mickos’ LinuxCon cloud keynote was more than that–it was really a freedom keynote.

Events

• Not-So-Angry Birds Need to Flock Together

  While we were out at dinner, the conversation drifted toward the FOSS company and how these two great guys were making the company profitable, but were working themselves to death doing it.

  Now as a consultant I often wear two hats, the technical side and the business side. As we sat there I became aware of my business hat being put on, but the fascinating part was when I turned to Julien, his hat was already on, and pointing in the same direction as mine. I love it when that happens….

  “You guys have to fix that problem”, he said. “You have to make the time to grow the company to bring in more people so you can focus more on running it and less on just ‘keeping it alive’”.

  All I had to do was just nod my head.

  “We do not have the time to build our company,” they said.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox’s Tablet UI Scheduled for Firefox 9 Integration

    Firefox 7, for example will bring the Azure 2D graphics API and memory enhancements, Firefox 8 will make add-ons much safer to deal with and we now hear that Firefox 9 is likely to get the much anticipated tablet UI. Mozilla just posted the tablet UI as a deliverable for Firefox 9.

  • Firefox 7 beta brings major cuts in memory usage

    Just days after Mozilla released Firefox 6, the clock is already ticking on Firefox 7, which tipped up in the Firefox beta channel yesterday. There are all the usual improvements including enhancements to Firefox Sync, increased performance for HTML5 Canvas animation and better CSS3 support, but none of those really matter because there’s one important improvement that isn’t even visible to the user.

  • Major performance changes mark Firefox 7 beta

    Two days after Mozilla delivered Firefox 6 to its wide-release stable channel, Firefox 7 and its much-anticipated spate of better memory management and reduced load times got promoted from the developer’s Aurora build to the Beta channel. You can download Firefox 7 Beta for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• DK: 25,000 hospital staff Copenhagen region to use open source office suite

  Almost all of the 25,000 workers at thirteen hospitals in the Copenhagen region will over the next year begin to use Libre Office, an open source suite of office productivity tools. The group of hospitals is phasing out a proprietary alternative, ‘for long term strategic reasons’, which at the same time saves the group some 40 million Kroner (about 5.3 million euro) worth of proprietary licences.

CMS

• Over 20% of new active domains run WordPress

  WordPress announced Friday that its open source blogging platform now powers 14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5 percent. Astonishingly, the company found that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.

Public Services/Government

• National meet on Free Open Source Software

  he Federal Institute of Science and Technology will organise a two-day national conference on Free Open Source Software. The conference organised by the Computer Science Department of FISAT and the FISAT Free Software Cell will be held on FISAT campus on August 26 and 27.

  In the two-day meet, Praseed Pai, author of ‘Slang For .net’, will speak on Cross Platform Development. Shakti Kannan, Ambassador of Fedora, Pune, and Ranjith Siji, Chief Technology Officer of Walking Ant Technologies will speak on other sessions. Workshops on Android, Robotics and Open Source, PYQT and nS2 protocol simulator will be conducted by Soham Mondal of Android ECCO System, Bangalore, KPN Unni of CEO, KRIATE, Chennai, and Jyothish K John of FIT.

Licensing

• Linux Compliance Hits Milestone with SPDX 1.0

  That’s where the new Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) standard comes into play. The SPDX 1.0 release is being made at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon event in Vancouver. SPDX is a working group of the Linux Foundation.

  According to the Linux Foundation, the SPDX standard defines a standard file format that lists detailed license and copyright information for a software package and each file it comprises.

Programming

• Interview: SciRuby Team

  This week we interviewed three members of the SciRuby team (a collection of tools for scientific computation written in the Ruby language): John Woods, John Prince and Claudio Bustos. We think you will find this a very interesting an throurogh interview.

• Future of Python programming language on a Linux platform

Health/Nutrition

• Taking on Bachmann, Whose Pants Are Always On Fire

  If NBC’s David Gregory had asked just a couple of follow-up questions of Michele Bachmann on Meet the Press on Sunday, August 14, he would have found that her anecdote about how “Obamacare” will lead to economic ruin doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

  In fact, he would have found that the financial problems of the Iowa employer she cites to bolster her point are far more likely the result of the economic policies of former President George W. Bush.

  In answering Gregory’s question about how she would “turn the economy around within several months” if elected president, as she recently promised to do, Bachmann pledged to repeal both the health care reform law and the Dodd-Frank Act, which Congress enacted last year to reform the way financial institutions are regulated.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• 60% of Toronto arrests lead to strip searches

  More than 60 per cent of people arrested by Toronto police last year were forced to undergo a strip search, according to police statistics.

  But a police accountability group says routine searches are against the law and alleges Toronto police are using the practice to humiliate and intimidate people.

  Police figures show that 31,072 people were strip-searched in 2010, up from 29,789 the previous year.

Finance

• Bank Consolidations Must Stop

  The trend of bank consolidations in this country must stop. The era of Too Big To Fail must end. In fact, it is time for many banking giants to be broken up and return to more manageable size with more emphasis on customer service then on over stated profits. Banks like any other company should grow and profit through increased revenue derived from competitive business practices serving and servicing their customers.

• Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

  Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – “Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?” No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record.

• Goldman Sachs attorneys MNAT IPO/Bankruptcy Fraud eToys

• Why Goldman Sachs (and Warren Buffett) Always Win

  What you can see from this is that Goldman Sachs principal reason for existing is to pay its employees a lot of money. But, they employ a whole lot of other people’s money to do this. If you look at their Balance Sheet in 2008, you may be stunned to see that their total liabilities were $820,178,000,000. Yes, that is billions. This is definitely a lot of other people’s money. Let’s put this into perspective. Goldman Sachs total debt exceeds the publicly held debt of 22 of the 27 nations of the European Economic Community.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• What are Murdoch’s American misdeeds?

  In Britain, the phone hacking scandal at the heart of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is a yarn that seemingly never stops unleashing juicy new details.

  As the week began, a letter emerged alleging that senior News Corp. editors routinely discussed phone hacking — suggesting that executives likely knew about their newspapers’ illegal eavesdropping on voicemail messages of celebrities, politicians and crime victims. That revelation called into question whether Murdoch’s son James, a senior executive, misled Parliament in his recent testimony, when he said he was unaware of the practice.

• New Documentary Explores Subconscious Manipulation by Corporations and Others

  Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, and Congressman Dennis Kucinich are among a diverse group interviewed in Jeff Warrick’s new documentary, “Programming the Nation.” The film is being released by the International Film Circuit and opens Friday, August 19th, at Quad Cinema in New York City. Warrick both directed and produced the film.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• FLOSS Weekly 178: Synergy

  We talk about Synergy, which lets you use the same mouse and keyboard across multiple computers on your desk.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 416

Kernel Space

• Improving The Linux Kernel’s Memory Performance

  Over the past few days there’s been an active discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list surrounding the memory copy (the memcpy function to copy blocks of memory) performance within the kernel. In particular, an application vendor claims to have boosted their application (a video recorder) performance by 12% when implementing an “optimized” memory copy function that takes advantage of SSE3.

  This vendor hasn’t yet published the patches to this “optimized” memcpy that’s meant to replace what the developer says is “suboptimal” currently in the Linux kernel, but the patches are being cleaned up and should then be released. Besides a 12.2% boost in the application frame-rate from Atom Z5xx hardware, the C0 residency managed to drop from 75% to 67%, which means lower power consumption too.

• Linux Foundation director takes a swipe at Microsoft

  To address the question, “what would the world look like without Linux?”, Zemlin started with a blue screen and then a Windows XP boot screen, then a boot screen again, simulating what the world would be like if it still ran only on Windows. He said, “This is gonna be about 20 minutes.”

• Linus Torvalds on Android, the Linux fork

  There’s still a lot of distance between Google’s Android and its parent operating system Linux, but eventually, the gap will close… eventually.

• Pictures: 20th Anniversay of Linux Gala

• IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger Talks Linux Then and Now

  The second day of LinuxCon North America 2011 kicked off with a key figure to Linux’s success, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Formerly responsible for IBM’s response to emerging technologies, Wladawsky-Berger talked about the disruptive force of Linux then and now, and IBM’s relationship with Linux through the years.

• Linux turns 20

  Only in the second of the last two decades have consumers considered Apple a real alternative to a Microsoft-powered PC. That whole time there’s been a third player quietly – at least from the perspective of consumers – building a formidable reputation as the operation system developer to rely on.

  That third player is Linux and it’s celebrating its 20th birthday.

• 11 Milestones In Linux History

  Linux has come a long way since the early tinkerings of Torvalds in 1991. The OS has proliferated around the world and into every kind of computer, from smartphones to supercomputers. Here are 11 major milestones in the 20-year history of Linux.

• A Look at the Changing Linux Landscape

  Jay Lyman, senior analyst for the 451 Group, spoke at LinuxCon North America 2011 on the changing Linux landscape. Sessions are short at LinuxCon – about 50 minutes in total, give or take. So there’s not a lot of time to get deep into the nitty gritty and perform a detailed analysis or explanation of a market that’s now nearly 20 years old. Lyman went through a brief discussion of the major players in the market, and touched on the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) for each.

• Graphics Stack

  • AMD’s Open-Source Radeon Driver After Four Years

  • Gallium3D OpenCL GSoC Near-Final Status Update

Applications

• Cha-ching!

  So, I am releasing Photobomb in my PPA. It is a free app. You can use it for free, and it’s Free software. So, enjoy.

• Top Free Android Podcast Players

• Social Media Player Tomahawk 0.2 Released

  A new version for Tomahawk Social Media Player has been released. This version brings improved stability as well as lots of UI polish to the application.

• Proprietary

  • Abandon Skype all ye who enter here

    With the purchase of Skype by Microsoft, there’s a question that has been bugging me for quite a while.

    Why Skype?

    What properties made Skype the 800lbs gorilla of software phones?

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Measure tomcat Performance with ab

  • How To Take Screenshots Of Your Android Smartphone

  • Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): Domain control

  • How to back up your Linux computer

  • Printing and scanning with HP Deskjet 3050 on Fedora 15

  • Getting started with the new Red Hat 5 STIG

  • Refactoring Deeply Nested Code

  • ExifTool comes to the rescue when I need to fix the date and time in a batch of photo files

  • ATI Underscan Fix for Linux, Ubuntu etc

  • Install Squirrel Mail on Ubuntu Server

  • How to back up your Linux computer

  • Introduction to GIT on Linux – Install, Create Project, Commit Files

  • 4 way to administer Linux with a web interface

  • Creating a Centralized Syslog Server

• Games

  • Telepath RPG: Servants of God

  • Dead Cyborg Ep 1 released

    You are a human being who has waken up in a cryotank… you have no memories, but you find some messages from the past… from yourself…
    You don’t feel good… maybe this is a radioactive and toxic place … you may not have much time… You find some stupid robots… with strange answers to your questions.

  • [Gaming] Dead Cyborg Linux Version is Out Now

    Our Dead Cyborg Preview article can be read from here. Developed by just one person, Endre Barath has done all the coding, designing and has even written the story. The game seems to be inspired by Amnesia series but is more like a text based, first person hybrid adventure. The controls take a bit of getting used to as there is no mouse control. You can move your character with WSAD and rotate camera by arrow keys. The sound effects and music is good which adds quite an atmospheric feel to the game. Fans of adventure games will have a great time playing this.

  • Lil Additions

    Helena the 3rd is coming along nicely, we are 1-2 weeks away from completion now. Although any production has been very slow over the last couple of days due to the birth of my son Liam. If anything, now we are all home and safe this has spurred me on to get this game wrapped up, and I may see him playing Helena in a few years time!

  • FlightGear 2.4.0 overhauls weather module

    The FlightGear project has announced the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulator. According to the developers, FlightGear 2.4.0 is the result of more than one and a half years of work, and it incorporates a number of new features.

Desktop Environments

• Three reasons you might want to install PCMANFM – The LXDE File Manager

• No “year of the Linux desktop” after 2 decades? LinuxCon keynote: “so what?”

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Tuquito 5 “Pampa” Liberado! – Edición CD

  • Salix LXDE 13.37

    Salix LXDE 13.37 has been officially released! This release is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. For everyone that has used our previous LXDE releases there are no surprises here. The application selection has stayed the same for the most part, with all applications being upgraded to newer versions of course. Important changes in this release are the inclusion of Sourcery, our new graphical tool for managing and installing packages from SlackBuilds, which has been developed from scratch for Salix and which is featured in all our 13.37 releases so far and also the replacement of SCIM with IBus as the default input platform for Chinese, Japanese etc. IBus is more modern than SCIM and should work better with all applications. Of course, all relevant system tools have been updated to accommodate this replacement. GTKMan, a simple GUI for viewing manual pages, developed also in-house, has also been added to this release.

• Red Hat Family

  • Shrek’s swamp built on a Red Hat cloud at DreamWorks

    Yesterday saw the beta launch of Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization version 3.0 offering. The company says that it has worked with industry partners to help establish the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) to promote Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an open alternative to proprietary virtualisation solutions

  • Linux ‘is no longer the challenger’, says Red Hat CEO

    He said, “It’s gone from catching up, to leading innovation. And everyone, or nearly everyone, is getting in on the act. When you’re looking at innovation, you’re looking at open source.”

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0: A True VMware Rival?

    Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 has entered beta testing. The key goals: Improving RHEV’s management, performance and scalability. Red Hat is positioning RHEV 3.0 for just about everything — server virtualization, desktop virtualization, public clouds and private clouds. But can RHEV 3.0 help Red Hat to gain some ground on VMware? And will Red Hat channel partners rally around RHEV 3.0? The VAR Guy has some strong opinions on this topic.

• Debian Family

  • People behind Debian: Peter Palfrader, Debian System Administrator

    You might not know who Peter is because he’s not very visible on Debian mailing lists. He’s very active however and in particular on IRC. He was an admin of the OFTC IRC network at the time Debian switched from Freenode to OFTC. Nowadays he’s a member of the Debian System Administration team who runs all the debian.org servers.

    If you went to a Debconf you probably met him since he’s always looking for new signatures of his GPG key. He owns the best connected key in the PGP web of trust. He also wrote caff a popular GPG key signing tool.

  • Derivatives

    • Linux Mint Debian Edition(s) – Rolling and Updates

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Features Improved Unity Interface

        Mark Shuttleworth proudly announced last evening on his blog that the Unity interface introduced in the Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) release, will be much improved for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

      • Ubuntu’s Next Unity Begins to Take Shape

        With the possible exception of GNOME 3, few recent innovations in the Linux world have proven as controversial as the Unity desktop included in Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal.”

      • Quick wallpaper update

      • Linux Wallpaper App ‘Wallch’ Adds Unity Support

        You’re either into wallpaper, or your not. And if you are then chances are you’re constantly changing it.

      • Controversial Unity desktop gets UI makeover in Ubuntu 11.10

      • VMware’s Cloud Foundry to Play Prominent Role on Ubuntu 11.10

        Many new cloud computing platforms–including OpenStack, which is backed by heavy-hitting tech titans–have been beating the war drums for the last couple of years, and VMware’s Cloud Foundry, which is billed to allow deployment and scalability of cloud apps in seconds, is now getting a lot of notice. Right out of the gate, Cloud Foundry experienced some performance hiccups that caused some to question the platform’s stability, but VMware’s platform will get a boost now that Canonical has announced that it will ship client and server components of Cloud Foundry in Ubuntu 11.10–the next major release of Ubuntu.

      • Ubuntu erects stairway to VMware code cloud

        Ubuntu 11.10 will ship with both the client and server components of Cloud Foundry, the “platform cloud” VMware open sourced this spring.

      • Canonical ARMs Ubuntu for microserver wars

        Canonical is suiting up for the coming microserver wars, confirming that Ubuntu Server 11.10 will run on ARM chips.

        Just under three years ago when ARM-based netbooks were taking the PC market by storm and iPad tablets were just a gleam in Steve Job’s eye, Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distro, made ARM processors full peers with x64 processors running its Ubuntu Desktop variant. And now, perhaps at the dawn of an ARM-based server era that will see the x64 architecture get some tough competition for the first time in a decade, Canonical is getting out on the bleeding edge by supporting Ubuntu Server on ARM-based servers.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 to support the Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service

        anonical has announced that October’s Ubuntu 11.10, Oneric Ocelot, will now include VMware’s Cloud Foundry, the open source Platform-as-a-Service cloud environment. Cloud Foundry was launched in April and already supports Spring, Grails, Rails, Sinatra, Node.js and Scala applications.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Review: Linux Mint 11 “Katya” LXDE

          But this LXDE edition is supposed to be lightweight but still easy to use, yet I’ve found that it is both harder to use and just as heavy on resources as the main GNOME edition, so I see no reason to recommend it over the main GNOME edition.

Devices/Embedded

• Q&A: Eben Upton from The Raspberry Pi Foundation

  What’s coming up next on your IT agenda?

  The initial boards will go out with a fairly vanilla install of Ubuntu, but in the longer term we intend to provide educational software with a common look and feel. Once we have boards in the field, we’ll be focusing our attention on this.

• H-P kills webOS handsets and tablets

• HP’s webOS moves out of tablet foxhole into appliance mode

  HP is set to spread the wings of its operating system for its smartphones and TouchPad tablet, webOS, and plant it into a wider technology space of an OS for cars and household appliances. HP’s webOS chief, Stephen DeWitt, who leads the webOS global business unit, is on an HP mission to build up an ecosystem of developers and manufacturers, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. DeWitt said HP is looking into webOS embedded into cars and appliances. He said HP was into talks with auto and appliance makers but he did not specify any company names. HP’s webOS has a touchscreen interface and Internet connectivity.

• H-P to Spin Off PCs, Exit Tablets

• HP: If you want folks to hack the TouchPad, then Open Source it.

  I’ve expressed my views on this extensively in the past, such as when I returned the Motorola XOOM the first time around and pointed at my colleague Scott Raymond’s comparative success with it when rooting the device and installing a special kernel to give him access to his MicroSD card and overclock capability.

  We all know Android has these issues because it is a licensed and Open Source platform that is largely experiencing these problems due to fragmentation and loss of control when it gets in the hands of the OEMs/ODMs. And yes, I know that Google has committed itself as of late to try to solve a number of these problems.

  But Hewlett-Packard has no such excuses. They fully control the WebOS platform and they control the hardware that it runs on. They’ve got nobody to blame for the TouchPad not performing up to par but themselves.

• Phones

  • Community Linux support for Penguin phones floated

    Plans are afoot to establish a long-term support system for new versions of the Linux kernel to help slide the penguin into more smartphones.

    One of the Linux kernel’s top maintainers has suggested that the Linux community each year picks a version of the kernel that they will commit to maintain for a period of two years, before dropping it for a new kernel.

    Such a long-term support commitment would mean that the chosen version of the kernel receives big fixes, security and hardware updates from maintainers.

  • Android

    • Do You Really Know What Your Android Is Capable Of?

      You don’t always get what you expect when you push a button on your Android smartphone. In fact, if you know all the right moves, you can get a lot more. Android uses a combination of touches, drags, double-touches, stabs, flicks and pinches to control what you see on your display. For example, a button can be briefly touched to initiate one response, but it can also be touched and held to initiate a different response.

    • In U.S. Smartphone Market, Android is Top Operating System, Apple is Top Manufacturer

Exclusive: How LinkedIn used Node.js and HTML5 to build a better, faster app

This morning, LinkedIn launched its gorgeously overhauled mobile app. We’ve already told you all about the new features, but for developers, the most exciting part is what’s going on under the hood.

Google Sponsors MIT Mobile Education Research

Google and MIT have worked together on multiple projects in the past, and each collaborative project has given a good idea of Google’s mid- to long-term priorities. Their most recent investment is in the “MIT Center for Mobile Learning,” which is researching ways to ”transform learning and education through innovation in mobile computing.” Google Android will be the starting point for much of this innovation.

Over And Out? Recording App Audioboo Makes Its Android Effort Open Source

Audioboo, voice recording app, was once a darling of the app world. It has gone a little more quiet of late, as a rush of other apps, such as Sound Cloud, have also entered the space. Now, it is taking the Android version of its app open source, as it prepares to launch a premium, paid version of its app for the iOS public. Mark Rock, Audioboo’s founder and CEO, told paidContent that the decision to make its Android app was not a light one, but that it was a necessary step in managing the app for a company that only has five full-time employees.

AudioBoo plans to make Android app open source

Why 2011 Is The Year Of Open Source

This week, The Linux Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linux – giving many observers the opportunity to consider whether it’s achieved much traction beyond heavy, iron-based server solutions or niche technologies. Pardon the cliche, but those questions miss the forest for the trees.

Linux revolutionized the concept of sharing and collaborating on technology through the open-source model, a model that not only holds up 20 years later but is accelerating. With Google open-sourcing Android, NASA and RackSpace open-sourcing OpenStack, Oracle continuing to open-source MySQL, the list goes on and on with critical contributions of “community” to all aspects of consumer and enterprise technology.

Open source movement sheds hippy image in battle for corporate mindshare

Events

• Siggraph 2011

  Blender Foundation was active on Siggraph 2011 in several areas.

• The Community of One

  I had the good fortune of being present for Jono Bacon’s excellent community session at OSCON a few weeks ago. (The 40 minute version, not the 15 minute keynote version with which he was wholly dissatisfied.) As the open source model matures, community management as a discipline is maturing with it, and Jono did an excellent job of bringing together some of his own best practices in a concise and useful presentation. He promised to have his deck uploaded soon, so as soon as he does, I’ll link to it. (Jono: hint hint.)

• 245 Desktop Summit Names to Find

• OggCamp11 – Fear & Loathing In Farnham

  Hello again folks. I’ve been very busy over the last 2 weeks. Not least with a little thing called OggCamp11. So in lieu of my normal Weekly Rewind I’ve decided to write about events since last Friday Aug 12th. There’s probably enough in there to make a novel on its own. If you’re reading this blog for the first time you might like to know that OggCamp is a 2 day event bringing together Open Source / Free Software fans and Free Culture peeps, along with Makers, Artists, Musicians and anyone else we can grab. I’m one of the organisers and this year it was held in Farnham, Surrey. So, if you’re all sitting comfortably I’ll begin…

Web Browsers

• Chromofox

  Once upon a time God gathered all the animals in one place and commanded: clever ones should go to the left, beautiful ones should go to the right. All the animals made their choice. And only a monkey stayed in the middle. She could not tear herself into 2 parts.

• Firefox, Chrome spruce up

  New releases of two of the world’s most popular browsers hit user desktops.

Licensing

• SPDX spec standardizes open source compliance reporting

Apple sells world’s most expensive flash drive

Office 363.5

Since 2011-6-28, Office 365 has been down six hours. I guess they should rename the product, Office 363.5, and I think M$ should not be saying the are “all-in”. Obviously they are holding back.

Still More Google-Bashing

You can tell when a business is doing well, rats come out of the woodwork to bash it:

* “It’s too big.”
* “It’s growing too fast.”
* “It’s acquiring other businesses.”
* “It’s copying what works.”
* “People who bet against it lose.”

…and lots of other whining. Much of the world laughed at Google and its business model but Google persisted and made search work. They provided the world with what the world wanted.

Security

• Check WordPress for Exploits

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Phone hacking: News of the World Hollywood reporter is arrested

  James Desborough, an award-winning reporter at the former News of the World newspaper, has been arrested by officers investigating the phone-hacking scandal.

• Damn or fear it, the truth is that it’s an insurrection

  For the young at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and patronage and poverty that is modern Britain – mostly the black, the marginalised and resentful, the envious and hopeless – there is never surprise. Their relationship with authority is integral to their obsolescence as young adults. Half of all black British youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are unemployed, the result of deliberate policies since Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in British history. Forget plasma TVs; this was pano­ramic looting.

• Democracies learn from Mubarak’s example

  Following days of rioting in London, British Prime Minister David Cameron proposed looking at “whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality” and noted that he had “asked the police if they need any other new powers”, going on to suggest that Twitter, Facebook, and BlackBerry ought to consider removing messages that might spur further unrest in the country.

Cablegate

• Brandeis on WikiLeaks: An argument for truth

Finance

• Is It Now a Crime to be Poor?

  Earlier this month, events resulting from genuine grievances were collectively painted only as vandalism and looting, even though that is a gross generalisation – an oversimplification to be exploited by opportunistic politicians . The real issues were left buried under the rug and a mesmerising picture of buildings/buses on fire was implanted in people’s minds in order to make oppressive new legal instruments seem acceptable and even necessary.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Server

• SGI Folds In CFD Business

  The OpenFOAM acquisition brings the entire OpenCFD team onto SGI’s payroll along with a commitment to continue the development of the software under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Kernel Space

• Imagining a World Without Linux: Jim Zemlin Opens LinuxCon North America

  Despite Microsoft and SCO, Zemlin says that Linux is the “largest force in computing,” because of freedom. Linux, says Zemlin, is larger than one product or one company and it’s not just the technology. “Sharing works,” says Zemlin.

  “It’s not about the $10 billion invested in Linux… It’s about something all of you have taught the rest of the world, there are 100s of bestselling books that chronicle what you have accomplished… that you can better yourself while bettering others. That no one of us is smarter than all of us. You have shared this with the world, and that is an incredible accomplishment.”

  Thanks to Linux, says Zemlin, “the world is not a scary, black and white, place where the wicked witch rules, it’s a colorful place… thanks to all of you.”

• LinuxCon: The Right Side of History

  Vancouver. LinuxCon 2011 officially kicked off this AM as the celebration of the 20th anniversay of Linux begins.
  One of the first things that attendees will see at the show is the 20th Anniversary of Linux showcase loaded with all kinds of Linux memorabilia and a timeline of history. The items range from a book about TurboLinux (remember them?) to an iconic Red Hat (donated by Red Hat, who else?).

• Imagining a World Without Linux: Jim Zemlin Opens LinuxCon North America

  What would the world be like without Linux? That’s the question posed by Jim Zemlin in the opening keynote for LinuxCon North America 2011. At first glance, it might seem like a world without Linux would be much the same — but if you think about it (as Zemlin has) things would be a lot different.

• After 20 Years, Linux Looks Better Than Ever

  The Linux Foundation’s annual LinuxCon North America event kicks off today in Vancouver, B.C., and its primary focus this year is the 20th anniversary of the free and open source operating system.

• A Conversation with Linus Torvalds

• Do You Like Tux the Penguin?

  In another episode of Open Ballot, TuxRadar is now asking its readers “Does Tux help or hinder Linux?” They concede that penguins are cute, but is Tux a good mascot for an operating system? “Would a more conventional logo make us look more professional?”

  Well, I think Linus Torvalds’ view is germane to the debate. According to Wikipedia, he chose the penguin as the mascot after being nipped by a penguin at a zoo and contracting penguinitis. Wikipedia writes, “Torvalds was looking for something fun and sympathetic to associate with Linux, and a slightly fat penguin sitting down after having had a great meal perfectly fit the bill.”

Applications

• Linux Backup Utility Provider Grows Market Share

• CA Ramps Up Linux Mainframe Developer Tools

  CA Technologies (the company formerly known as Computer Associates) has announced a new version release of its CA VM: Manager Suite for Linux on IBM System z and a new capability for CA Solve Operations Automation.

  Targeting Linux on the mainframe with this product, CA maintains that this is a fast-growing segment of the data management market. More specifically, CA is directing this product at enterprise Linux application developers looking to “optimize management of their Linux apps and resources” in mainframe and hybrid computing environments.

• Best Video Converters for Linux

  Linux, with the massive usability leaps it has made over the years, is inching closer towards becoming the perfect Windows and Mac replacement. However, there are some areas in which Linux still lags behind the two bigwigs.

  A few years ago, watching a video was just limited to the PC or DVD. But now, all kinds of gadgets have sprung up which allow you to watch the same video anywhere you want to. As convenient as it may seem, the average gadget-blessed Linux user usually runs against a stonewall while getting that video to work on his or her device (s).

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 Review

    In my recent King of KDistros poll, several readers wanted me to include Mandriva in the comparison, claiming it had become a KDE exclusive distro and that it was doing a great job with its latest release, Mandriva 2011. Having tested Mandriva 2010 not so long ago and feeling disappointed by its apparent lack of progress, I decided to leave Mandriva out of the poll. I felt PCLinuxOS already somewhat represented the heart of Mandriva, but I have to admit I was not aware of the latest changes and progress at Mandriva camp.

    Intrigued by those recommendations, I decided to download Mandriva 2011 RC2, the last of the release candidates, which with the exception of a few bug fixes, should not differ much from the latest official release. I must admit Mandriva 2011 pleasantly surprised me, showcasing a lot of refreshing ideas and quite an impressive amount of customization that is not usually found in KDE releases.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Revs up Virtualization, Without Windows

    As a Linux vendor, Red Hat obviously wants its customers to run its technologies on Linux. In the case of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) management system, customers to date have had to run the system on Microsoft Windows.

  • Joyent ports KVM onto SmartOS

    The cloud vendor combines the power of hardware and software virtualisation in its operating system.

    Cloud software and virtualisation company Joyent announced it has ported an open-source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor to its operating system (OS).

    As a result, Joyent is claiming to be the first to have developed its own OS hypervisor in five years, to rival those of VMware and Citrix.

    The addition of KVM capability will enable Joyent users to run other OSs on top of its SmartOS, which basically turns a server into a multi-tenant application hosting platform.

  • Red Hat CEO: Google, Facebook owe it all to Linux, open source

    Google and Facebook owe their success largely to Linux — not the technology per se, but to the cheap innovation and mass collaboration it enables, Red Hat’s CEO says.

    Yes, free, as in freedom, but also free as in free beer, said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat.

  • Jim Whitehurst on the next twenty years of Linux

    LinuxCon 2011 kicked off this morning with a retrospective from Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, on the accomplishments of Linux in its first twenty years. Self-professed geek and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, whose Linux use started with Slackware in the late 90s, followed by Fedora, followed Zemlin with a keynote addressing the next 20 years of Linux.

  • Red Hat aims to double India business this year

    World’s leading open so­urce software company Red Hat targets to double busin­ess in India this year. The firm is expanding its ch­annel presence, deepening re­lationships with leading sy­stem integrators and lau­nc­hing new products in ev­olving technologies including virtualisation and clo­ud, senior firm official said.

  • Red Hat CEO At LinuxCon: I Have No Idea What’s Next

    im Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, just delivered a terrific opening keynote presentation for LinuxCon. Whitehurst isn’t just a businessman, he’s also a geek. He used Linux and open source before joining Red Hat, and the opportunity to be CEO of the world’s most successful open source company was a dream come true for him. After a quick summary of some of the major milestones Linux has seen over the last twenty years, he jumped into the heart of his keynote: what’s next? Whitehurst wasted no time in answering this question: “I have no idea.”

  • Red Hat CEO: Linux Isn’t Just About Technology

    Jim Whitehurst took the stage at the LinuxCon conference today to provide a view of where he sees Linux going. Whitehurst stressed that while the technology is important it’s the collaborative user-driven innovation that will make the most impact in the future.

    Whitehurst told the LinuxCon audience that the general view of Linux coming from analyst groups is that Linux has done a solid job and is a viable alternative to tradional stacks. He noted that to him, that doesn’t tell the whole story.

  • Six years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

    Every year since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released we’ve published a risk report where we look at the state of security of the distribution. We investigate the key vulnerabilities, metrics on vulnerability counts, and how users could have been exploited by them. The Six Years of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 report (PDF) covering Feb 2005-2011 was published today.

  • Red Hat: Where recessions are good news

    But at least one company must be looking at the impending doom and smiling ear to ear: Red Hat. Quarter after quarter, through good times and bad, Red Hat delivers excellent performance.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10′s Unity Dash is taking shape

        Mark Shuttleworth, has dedicated a blog posting to the new features that the developers plan to integrate into the distribution’s Unity interface in Ubuntu 11.10. Most of the changes affect the Dash, where “places” will increasingly be replaced by “lenses” and “scopes”.

      • Ubuntu Quietly Upgrades Firefox To Version 6

      • Taking a quick look at Ubuntu Tweak

        If there’s one thing that I like to do it’s tweak my Ubuntu system. Nothing too drastic. Just modifying the look and feel of my desktop, fiddling with how certain settings, that sort of thing. I don’t do it too often, and when I do … well, let’s just say it beats working!

Devices/Embedded

• HP planning to bring WebOS to appliances, cars?

  Hewlett-Packard is currently working to bring its WebOS mobile operating system to cars and appliances, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

  According to the Journal, HP can see a world where many of the products consumers currently use in the home or while on the road will have touch screens that connect to the Web and deliver WebOS functionality.

• HP Pre 3 debuts in the U.K. as TouchPad struggles stateside

  The WebOS-based HP Pre 3 smartphone is now available in Europe, and will “soon” be arriving in the U.S., says HP. Meanwhile, HP TouchPad sales are sluggish despite 20 percent price cuts on the tablets, and HP is now trying to push WebOS into cars and kitchen appliances, say two separate reports.

• Wind River Linux gets Qt-enabled GUI development stack

  Wind River has updated its Linux distro with a graphics stack based on GTK, X.Org, the Qt framework, and Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite. Wind River Linux 4, Update Pack 2 offers Linux Standard Base (LSB) certification, Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 registration, and Intel Atom and Texas Instruments AM3x Sitara and OMAP35x processor optimization, the company says.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Acquisition of Motorola not to displace open source Android OS: Google

      Google Chief Executive Larry Page, however, said Motorola will remain a separate unit while Google maintains Android away and entirely neutral from the acquistion.

    • Android Poised to Dominate the Developing World

Financial analytics software OpenGamma 0.9 released

Version 0.9 of the open source financial analytics software OpenGamma is now available to download. The application, which is written in Java, is aimed at financial services companies. It queries data from a number of sources, such as Bloomberg and Thompson Reuters, and uses it to generate risk analyses and other reports.

Awesome but often unknown Linux commands and tools

Open Source The Eskimo

While I was there recently I pondered the possibility of small amounts of residual radiation in the area. I quickly forgot the thought until I ran across a post by Jeff Keyzer (mightyohm.com) about an open source geiger counter he designed.

Well, who could resist the chance to build a geiger counter and run it around looking for bad stuff at the former sight of a nuclear power plant. Not me. Here at Screaming Circuits, we specialize in surface mount, so I thought it would make sense to re-layout the PCB for SMT components. Which I did. That’s the cool thing about open source. (one of the cool things) The design files are accessible.

Social sound platform Audioboo open sources its Android app: “It suits the platform”

The last update Audioboo will make to the Android codebase will be to enable support for blind users. It will then release the code in its entirety under a standard, free to use MIT license to enable others to tweak and reuse the components.

Dell tunes Crowbar tool to Cloud Foundry

A couple weeks ago, Dell turned Crowbar toward another open source product in Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution. That partnership involves an entire package that includes a Dell hardware architecture and services, as well as the Cloudera Enterprise management software.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Chrome 13 Stable as Google Pays 17K for Bug Fixes

    Google’s Chrome browser version 13 is stable, featuring Instant Pages predictive search technology, print preview for Windows and Linux machines, as well as a better omnibox. Also featuring: 30 bug fixes.

• Mozilla

  • Chase.com goes down, but only for Firefox users

    Firefox users may have had trouble accessing JPMorgan Chase’s website chase.com today when the bank experienced problems with an outdated security certificate.

    According to a Chase spokesman, the Firefox certificate was updated on the bank’s servers in about 45 minutes, resolving the issue.

  • At Version 6, Firefox Stabilizes And Turns Into Gmail

  • Firefox 6: 4 Reasons to Upgrade

    The first reason is speed, although that point is debatable. According to Mozilla, startup times with Firefox 6 are better than its predecessor, especially if a user is using Firefox’s Panorama feature. Panorama allows users to organize tabs into groups. Having Firefox launch several groups on startup has been a sure-fire way to bog down that process in the past.

SaaS

• Open Source – Open Cloud?

  The vacation season is hitting continental Europe right now. Some of us in the more Nordic parts of Europe have already spent our vacation for this year and are back in business. Wondering what I’ve missed in the past weeks I looked through the blogosphere. The launch of the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) caught my eye as it has close ties to the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

  I read Simon Phipps’s blog about the OCI with interest. He says, “The Open Cloud Initiative aims to reinterpret the principles of software freedom for a new generation of computing, just as OSI did at the end of the 90’s.”

• OpenStack Turns One; What’s Next For The Open Source Cloud?

  Since OpenStack’s launch on July 19, 2010, which included 25 contributing member companies, OpenStack quickly ballooned to include 80 participating companies and 217 developers. Participating companies include major players like Cisco, Citrix, Dell and others; and startups like Piston Cloud Computing, Nephoscale and Sonian.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Whamcloud Expanding Lustre

  The OpenSFS Lustre community group has contracted Lustre services firm Whamcloud in a multi-year deal to add new functionality. Lustre is an open source storage filesystem that has its origins at Sun and migrated to Oracle after the acquisition. Whamcloud and OpenSFS have not disclosed the financial terms of the deal.

CMS

• Open Source CMS No Stranger on IBM i

  There are a lot of options available to IBM i shops looking for a software package that allows them to run a website on their favorite box. But one class of tools that seems to be gaining lots of traction these days is the group of open source, PHP-based content management systems (CMS). The big three in this category include Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress, and you might be surprised to learn about some of the prominent IBM i industry websites that are using these systems.

• Acquia Expands Drupal Professional Offerings with Security and Migration Products and Services

  Acquia (news, site), provider of Drupal services and support has announced that it is introducing two new Drupal service offerings and that it has acquired two companies.

Business

• Open Source Business Intelligence Heats Up

  Open source business intelligence is growing faster than the rest of the BI market, according to a recent study.

• EBay acquires Magento for open source e-commerce

Public Services/Government

• Romanian government tender prohibits open source

  According to a report on OSOR.eu, the EU’s Open Source Observatory and Repository, an IT procurement tender issued by the Romanian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) explicitly bans the use of open source software in any offer made in response. The tender concerns the development of an “Information System of Romanian Criminal Records (Rocris)”, with a budget of approximately 2.85 million euros.

• RO: Interoperability requirements force Ministry to block open source

  The Romanian ministry of Internal Affairs (MAI) says that internal and European interoperability requirements are forcing it to ban the use of open source software in the building of a system to manage criminal records.

• Pentagon Software Sharing May Create Competition for Cerner

• Opening government, the Chicago way

  Cities are experimenting with releasing more public data, engaging with citizens on social networks, adopting open source software, and finding ways to use new technologies to work with their citizens. They’ve been doing it through the depth of the Great Recession, amidst aging infrastructure, spiraling costs and flat or falling budgets. In that context, using technology and the Internet to make government work better and cities smarter is no longer a “nice to have” … it’s become a must-have.

Licensing

• Open Compliance Program Celebrates One-Year Anniversary

Openness/Sharing

• Open source WiFi software to make community broadband cheap or free

• Open Hardware

  • Video: What counts as Open Source Hardware?

    I know we concentrate largely on Linux in this blog, but its remit is a lot wider – open source hardware as well as open source software.’Open Source Engineering’ in the widest sense…

  • JOURNAL: Entrepreneurs and Open Source Hardware

  • A look at CERN’s promising open hardware license

Programming

• Parallel programming: Intel Cilk Plus becomes open source project

  Intel Cilk Plus has become an open source project. The C and C++ extension adds three keywords that are designed to simplify the development of parallel applications. Applications that are optimised in this way reportedly perform better particularly in multi-core environments.

Google Apache mod speeds into outside world

Health/Nutrition

• CMD Urges EPA to More Closely Regulate Nanoscale Materials in Pesticides

  The Center for Media and Democracy has joined a coalition of environmental, consumer and worker’s groups in signing onto a letter of comment by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) plan to obtain information about the presence of nanoscale materials in pesticide products.

Finance

• Walker Lets Tax Cheats and Campaign Contributors Off The Hook

  As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker pushes austerity as the only solution to reducing the state’s deficit spending, it seems as though there are a few exceptions to his idea of “shared sacrifice.” S.C. Johnson & Son, one of the state’s wealthiest firms, is one of many companies that pays nothing in state income tax — increasing the burden on citizen taxpayers, according to a new project by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

A Look At How Far Linux Has Come In 20 Years [INFOGRAPHIC]

Can you believe Linux has been going strong for 20 years now?

It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds first announced that he had built his own operating system. He released it as an open source project that’s captured the effort of developers, both professional and casual, ever since.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Legal Basics for Developers

  Bradley and Karen play and comment on a talk recording of Aaron Williamson’s and Karen’s presentation at OSCON 2011, entitled Legal Basics for Developers.

Roundups

• Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 160

  The following Linux-based operating systems have been announced last week: Tiny Core Linux 3.8, Gentoo Linux 11.2 LiveDVD, Monomaxos 6.0 and Network Security Toolkit 2.15.0. In other news: Softpedia prepared a Top 5 Ubuntu Alternatives article for newbies in Linux; Canonical announced the it will replace Evolution Mail and Calendar with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client as default for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot); Canonical implemented the new login manager for the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system. For this week we’ve prepared an interesting review for the AssaultCube 1.1.0.4 game. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the new and updated Linux distributions, and the development releases.

• Samba Advances and Red Hat Shifts to the Cloud

• TLWIR 13: C++11, Google Buys Motorola, and Linux No Longer a Threat

Kernel Space

• Two Years With Linux BFS, The Brain Fuck Scheduler

  This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.1 – Part 1 – Networking

  Among the most important advancements of Linux 3.1 are improvements for all major Wi-Fi drivers and virtualisation optimisations.

• Linux 3.0.2

• #LinuxCon : Sessions You Don’t Want to Miss

  This week the Linux community celebrates the 20th anniversary of Linux at LinuxCon.

  With three full days and six concurrent tracks there is no shortage of Linux content to take in. While I personally have often wanted to be in more than one place at the same time, there are certainly some really key presentations that attendees should not miss.

• Longterm kernel proposal signals ongoing Linux growth

  The Linux kernel development process may be getting a little tweaking if a proposal by -stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman is accepted; tweaking needed to meet growing commercial interest in Linux.

  The proposal is simple, on the surface and all the way down: Currently, the 2.6.32 kernel is maintained as a -longterm kernel, a kernel release that is maintained as a stable release with bug fixes and patches for a relatively lengthy period of time. This is opposed to the official -stable release of the Linux kernel, which is the kernel release most suitable for general use, and is dropped when the next release is moved into the -stable category. (The current -stable release, for example, is the 3.0.1 kernel.)

• Linux 3.1 Kernel Supports Wake On Wireless LAN

  While Linux has supported WOL (Wake-On-LAN) for wired network adapters, the Linux 3.1 kernel prepares support for WWOL, or Wake On Wireless LAN.

• Ars at LinuxCon: Ryan Paul at the Media Roundtable panel

  The annual LinuxCon event is taking place this week in Vancouver. The Linux Foundation is taking the opportunity to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Linux kernel. The week will include festivities, serious keynotes from open source industry leaders, and some technical panels with prominent Linux developers.

• LinuxCon 2011 talks streaming live Aug. 17-19

  All keynote sessions from the LinuxCon 2011 conference held in Vancouver this week are being made available for free public streaming today through Friday (Aug. 17-19). However, the sessions are streaming on a fixed schedule, as detailed in this post.

• LinuxCon, 20th Anniversary of Linux Celebration Kicks Off

  oday is a big day for the Linux community. I’m writing this from Vancouver, B.C. where Users, SysAdmins, developers and business executives have gathered for the third annual LinuxCon and the official celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux.

• Graphics Stack

  • Intel Developers Publish A Load Of Mesa Patches

    Intel’s Eric Anholt and Ian Romanick have each published a large number of patches to the Mesa development list. Eric dropped a series of 37 patches that implement his MapTextureImage work for OpenGL while Ian Romanick has nine patches today for his Mesa IR cleaning.

  • OpenCL Is Coming To The GIMP Via GEGL

    Outside of the direct X.Org / Mesa / Linux work being done this year as part of Google’s Summer of Code, one of the more interesting projects is work by a student developer with GIMP who is bringing OpenCL support to the graphics program’s GEGL image library.

  • Native Display Auto-Detection For EGL

  • Gallium3D Post-Processing, MLAA Nearly Ready

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • All Your BASH Are Belong To Us

  • Change Screen Resolution on Linux Mint 11 LXDE

  • Internet & LAN Over VPN Using OpenVPN – Linux Server – Windows/Linux Clients – Works For Gaming & Through Firewalls

  • Refactoring Deeply Nested Code

  • stat Command

  • HowTo: run Flickering Lights on Linux

• Games

  • Hacker Evolution Duality Released !

    The developers of the Hacker-Evolution series (and other games) Exosyphen Studios is proud to announce the release of their latest and biggest game Hacking Evolution Duality !

    Also the developer of the game, Robert Muresan kindly offered LGN 5 licenses to our readers, so I’ll need to think of a contest and hope that this time it will not fail

  • Survivors of Ragnarök, New Linux Game Inspired by Dwarf Fortress

    Survivors of Ragnarök, a city building game by French Rice Games Studio is coming soon to Linux. The game is inspired by legendary Dwarf Fortress game. Still under development, Alpha 8 of the game was released recently.

    Unfortunately, only Windows installer is available for Alpha 8. Both Linux and Mac installers are in the works and hopefully they will be available in upcoming Alpha builds.

  • No Time to Explain Soon

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • The GNOME 3 Meltdown

    Suddenly, many are saying loudly what they have been whispering for several months: GNOME 3 is a desktop that (to put it mildly), they don’t want. For instance, for others in the same thread in which Torvalds held forth, GNOME 3 is “completely unusable,” “a mess” a piece of “brokenness” that “finally pushed me over the edge” and “a killer of GNOME.” You can find similar views wherever Torvalds’ comments are mentioned, and no more than perhaps one comment in four that protests that GNOME 3 is not that bad when you learn it, or can be tweaked until it is tolerable. Only isolated comments show any enthusiasm for it.

  • Brasero The Easy CD Creation Tool For Gnome

    Brasero is an easy to use CD or DVD burning tool created for the Gnome desktop environment. Brasero supports many different CD or DVD formats, as well as disk images. Brasero is excellent for burning data CD’s or music, you can even erase disks that are rewritable. There are a number of unique features that make Brasero one of the best choices for your burning needs. This short guide should help explain the common uses for brasero, how to burn your projects, all about the menu structure, and how to erase your discs.. This is how you can install Brasero on your Linux system from the command line.

  • GNOME-Designer Jon McCann about the future of GNOME3

    William Jon McCann: Yeah, I’m definitely proud of what we accomplished. There’s always things when you look back that you wish you would have had a little more time to finish or polish. But with GNOME 3.2 we have the opportunity to get to some more stuff that we wanted and six months after that as well.

Distributions

• PartedMagic: A Swiss Army Knife for Hard Drive Resuscitation

  PartedMagic does so much more than just partition hard drives. It is a specially crafted Linux distro designed to diagnose and repair broken stuff short of replacing hardware. With PartedMagic as a complete solution to work with GParted, I have a relatively safe and reliable tool to partition a fresh disk or repair a broken partition table on a working computer.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat beta revs KVM hypervisor to 3.0

    Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is kicking out the first beta of its Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 hypervisors for servers and desktops. This brings the free-standing hypervisor up to par with the KVM hypervisor that was embedded in the company’s Enterprise Linux 6.1 distro for servers , which came out in May.

    KVM is an open source alternative to the Xen hypervisor for x64-based machines, which Red Hat took control of when it bought Qumranet in September 2008 for $107m. Qumranet took the QEMU hardware emulator and paired it with a Linux kernel module to virtualize x86 and x64 machines (with the intent originally being to create virtual desktops) and paired it up with a .NET-based management console that ran on a Windows server called Solid ICE. Since acquiring Qumranet, Red Hat’s customers had to use a Windows-based machine to manage their free-standing RHEV hypervisors, somewhat embarrassingly.

  • Red Hat RHEV Freed From Windows Fetters

    With the next release of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, Red Hat has finally rid itself of one of its most notorious dependencies, namely the use of Microsoft’s Windows Server and SQL Server.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Now Available

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • The future of Ubuntu

      THE TechCentral Web site recently ran a Q&A with Mark Shuttleworth, head honcho at Canonical and the man behind Ubuntu Linux. The interview was insightful, because Shuttleworth talked, not only about the future of Ubuntu, but also tackled the state of tablet computing as well as the dangers of software patents.

      Amid the backdrop of a flurry of patent lawsuits involving mobile phone software from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung and HTC, Shuttleworth argues that the legal tool originally designed to encourage technology transfer isn’t working the way it should.

      “The patent system is… sold as a way of giving the little guy an opportunity to create something big … when in fact patents don’t really work that way at all,” he says.

    • Dash takes shape for 11.10 Unity

      We’ve moved from the idea of “Places” to a richer set of “Scopes and Lenses”. Scopes are data sources, and can tap into any online or offline data set as long as they can generate categorised results for a search, describe a set of filters and support some standard interfaces. Lenses are various ways to present the data that come from Scopes.

    • Unity Contributor Report: So long Feature Freeze!

    • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot Alpha 3 Quick Review

      Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot Alpha 3 was released few weeks ago. I decided to properly install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric in my netbook along with Ping-Eee OS this time around instead of just experimenting it with a USB install. I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 as my primary OS for almost 2 weeks now and this is how I feel about it. Read on.

    • Interview: Kate Stewart, Ubuntu Release Manager at Canonical

      Kate Stewart: I’m the Release Manager for Ubuntu. I am very fortunate to get to work with the inspiring members of the Ubuntu Release Team, along with all the very talented Ubuntu and upstream project developers, and the testing teams to get images of Ubuntu and the various flavors published and available on timely basis.

    • Why Intel & Canonical Should Make A Deal for Ubuntu MeeGo

      A lot of people have made the assertion that MeeGo could thrive without Nokia’s presence in the collaboration. And, there’s some potential for traction there as Android lawsuits and patent claims mount. However, as they mount, Google has shown their willingness to acquire as many patents as possible to thwart those lawsuits.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Bodhi Linux Is Beautiful & Works On Very Old Computers

        Try a lightweight, beautiful Linux distro that works on very old hardware. Bodhi Linux can run on processors with only 300 mhz so imagine how well it will work on your machine. With the Enlightenment desktop environment, Bodhi looks great and runs light. With the Ubuntu repositories, Bodhi has access to a plethora of quality free software. With a little work, it can become your perfect desktop.

        You’ll need to install your favorite software of course, and you might want to spend some time tweaking things. In many ways Bodhi reminds me of time spent tweaking early versions of Ubuntu to make everything work just right. We’ve shown you visually pleasing Linux distributions that use Enlightenment, and those are worth checking out. Bodhi Linux is different because it’s up to date, completely free to use and compatible with the Ubuntu repositories.

Devices/Embedded

• MeeGo IVI becomes fifth Linux distro to achieve Genivi compliance

  The Genivi Alliance says the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) project is the fifth Linux distro that has been confirmed as Genivi compliant. Earlier this month, the open source automotive consortium announced a Genivi Compliance Program, listing Canonical’s Ubuntu IVI Remix and Mentor Graphics’ Embedded IVI Base Platform as compliant along with the more established MontaVista and Wind River IVI distributions.

• Phones

  • Android

    • $80 Android Phone Sells Like Hotcakes in Kenya, the World Next?

      It seems like just yesterday when only the slickest kid on the block had a smartphone, but now, this revolutionary gadget is selling like hotcakes in the developing world. Earlier this year, the Chinese firm Huawei unveiled IDEOS through Kenya’s telecom titan, Safaricom. So far, this $80 smartphone has found its way into the hands of 350,000+ Kenyans, an impressive sales number in a country where 40% of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. The IDEOS’s success in this market firmly establishes the open source Android as the smartphone of the people and demonstrates how unrelenting upswings in price-performance can jumpstart the spread of liberating technologies. Thanks to low-cost Androids, the geographically-untethered smartphone is here to stay, and it simply cannot be stopped.

67 Open Source Replacements for Really Expensive Applications

Why spend thousands or even hundreds or thousands of dollars on a closed source application when you can get a comparable open source app for free? Even if you need commercial support, many open source programs now offer paid support that costs much less than the alternatives.

For this list, we looked for quality, open source alternatives to software that has a reputation for being expensive. Whenever possible, we included MSRPs for the expensive software, though in some cases, the pricing scheme is so complicated that it’s nearly impossible to pin down.

We published a similar list last year, and we’ve updated and expanded the list for 2011. If you have suggestions for next year’s list, feel free to note them in the comments section below.

10 Great Free Open-Source Software Advancements In The Past Year

With the leap ahead this year of tablets, as well as cloud computing and virtualization, it may be easier to overlook important contributions by the open-source communities of real, production-quality technology and innovations for IT. But developers for platforms ranging from Ubuntu to Libre Office to Android have made broad leaps that will have significant impact moving forward.

Research identifies benefits of the open source software market

A forthcoming paper in Marketing Scienceby Columbia Business School Class of 1967 Associate Professor of Business, Brett Gordon, in collaboration with Vineet Kumar, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and Kannan Srinivasan, Heinz College Professor of Management, Marketing and Information Systems at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, finds that commercial open source software (COSS) results in high-quality products, and that despite the free-riding that is inherent in the industry due to information-sharing, the market creates spillover benefits for both consumers and producers. The study features a two-sided model of competition between commercial open source software (COSS) firms, which allows the research to determine the benefits of COSS.

In a tough job market, your open source experience may be an asset in more ways than one

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Thunderbird 6.0 has been released! PPA Ubuntu

  • Mozilla launches Firefox 6 with tasty treats for developers

    There aren’t any major interface tweaks in Firefox 6; you’ll pretty much be seeing the same browser you’re used to already. Some of the user-facing changes include a highlighted URL in the address bar, easier access to Firefox Sync and some performance enhancements. The new release also gives users a new permissions tool that lets them set permissions for saved passwords, pop-ups and cookies on a site-by-site basis.

  • Firefox releases get smaller, as do Internet Explorer cakes

  • Deactivate Multiple Firefox Add-Ons

  • Firefox 6: Is it really faster?

  • Mozilla wants to hide Firefox version numbers from users

  • Mozilla Releases Firefox 6, for Real

    Though many tech sites, including PCMag, published news of its release over the weekend, Mozilla had only made code available from its FTP servers, a standard practice leading up to a release. But in accordance with Mozilla’s recently adopted rapid release schedule, version 6 debuts only 8 weeks after its predecessor and only includes whatever updates are ready for that schedule. Whereas in the past, a new full-number Firefox version meant almost a completely new browser, Mozilla’s new approach means there’s a lot less in the way of new features with each increase in version.

  • After Early Post, Firefox 6.0 Launch Goes Official Today

    It’s been a little while since we checked in with web browser Mozilla, but a lot has happened in a short time. Faced with a surging Chrome browser from Google Inc. (GOOG), Mozilla has altered its strategy somewhat. Perhaps taking note of Chrome’s psychological advantage of a faster release schedule (Chrome 13 sounds very advanced), Mozilla has pushed Firefox towards a shorter release cycle as well adopting a new “Rapid Release” calendar.

  • Network admins stunned and reeling from repeated Firefox upgrades

SaaS

• AppFog Expands Beyond PHP Servers in the Cloud

  Portfland, Oregon based startup AppFog is among those that are trying to grab PaaS share. Until this month, AppFog was known as PHP Fog and focused exclusively on providing a PaaS solution for PHP developers and servers. The company is now expanding beyond just PHP with a PaaS platform for multiple languages including Ruby, and Java. The expansion is being fueled by $8 million in Series B investment led by Ignition Partners. In total, AppFog has raised $9.8 million in funding to date.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice liberation

  Have you made the switch to LibreOffice yet? You really should! The project is going from strength to strength, with versions available for all Linux, Mac and Microsoft users. Most big name Linux distributions have alreeady made the switch from OpenOffice.org, and organisations such as Red Hat, Google, SUSE and the Free Software Foundation are throwing their weight behind the project too.

• LibreOffice 3.3.4 is Ready for Download

  The Document Foundation announces the availability of LibreOffice 3.3.4, a new release of the free office suite’s 3.3 branch. The new version is available for download at http://www.libreoffice.org/download

Healthcare

• omeopathy multinational sues blogger over statements that its mythological curative had “no active ingredient”

  Samuele Riva, an Italian blogger, is being sued by Boiron, a France-based homeopathic “remedy” multinational. Riva dared to mock the company’s claim that its Ooscillococcinum has no “active ingredient.” The company claims that the product has been made by diluting “oscillococcinum” (a mythological substance said to be present in duck liver, though no evidence supports this claim) at 1:100 dilution 200 times, which “is the equivalent of diluting 1ml of original ingredient into a volume of water that is the size of the known universe.”

Project Releases

• Blender 2.59 has been released! PPA Ubuntu and LinuxMint

Openness/Sharing

• Non-profit Group Releases Open Source Mesh WiFi Network Software

  The non-profit group Geeks Without Frontiers today released open source software based on an upcoming WiFi standard. It lets Linux machines be their own WiFi network, no hardware required.

  The software is based on the not-yet-ratified IEEE 802.11s, an extension to the 802.11 WiFi standard. 11s creates wireless “mesh” networks. Ratification is expected to happen by Q4 2011. 11s allows multiple wireless devices to connect with each other without having a hardware access point between them and to “multi-hop” to reach nodes that would otherwise be out of range.

Standards/Consortia

• W3C Launches Agile Track to Speed Web Innovation

  With the launch of Community Groups, W3C now offers a smooth path from innovation to open standardization to recognition as an ISO/IEC International Standard. W3C’s goals differ at each of these complementary stages, but they all contribute to the organization’s mission of developing interoperable standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.

Security

• Wi-Fi Security: Cracking WPA With CPUs, GPUs, And The Cloud

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Police Try To Bring Wiretapping Charges Against Woman Who Filmed Them Beating A Man

• MI5 called in to find organisers of riots

  The agencies, the bulk of whose work normally involves catching terrorists inspired by al-Qaeda, are helping the effort to catch people who used social messaging, especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), to mobilise looters.

• Global financial looting and the London riots

  I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities — window smashing in Athens, or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.
  But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion — a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

• 8 Trillion on Our Military Addiction? Why the Price Tag of the National Security Complex Should Scare the Hell Out of You

  As with all addictions, once you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.

• Fighting China’s Golden Shield: Cisco sued over jailing and torture of dissidents

  Cisco, one of the world’s largest technology companies, is being sued by Chinese political prisoners for allegedly providing the technology and expertise used by the Chinese Communist Party to monitor, censor and suppress the Chinese people.

• China cracks down in Xinjiang following ethnic violence

  Chinese security forces have launched a two-month “strike hard” crackdown against violence, terrorism and radical Islam following renewed ethnic violence in the restive western region of Xinjiang, the regional government has announced.

• Met officers cleared over hacking misconduct claims

  The former Metropolitan Police commissioner has been cleared of misconduct in his handling of the phone hacking inquiry by the police watchdog.

  The Independent Police Complaints Commission said Sir Paul Stephenson had not committed any criminal acts.

  An independent inquiry will examine claims former assistant commissioner John Yates secured a job for a News of the World executive’s daughter.

Finance

• We’ve been warned: the system is ready to blow

  Only a new way of managing the global economy can prevent more mayhem in the markets and on the streets

• Inequality is bad for business

  The cautions are getting more numerous and blunt. Since January, heavyweights who have spoken out include Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, Chrystia Freeland, editor of Thomson Reuters Digital and former managing editor of the Financial Times, and even America’s staunchest defender of laissez-faire economics, the five-term former chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Here in Canada, the Conference Board of Canada has recently released two studies on inequality, funded by 24 influential corporations. The studies warn, “High inequality can diminish economic growth if it means that the country is not fully using the skills and capabilities of all its citizens or if it undermines social cohesion, leading to increased social tensions. Second, high inequality raises a moral question about fairness and social justice.”

• Ending the Moral Rot on Wall Street, Part 2: William D. Cohan

  Can it be true that the trillions of dollars we spent bailing out Wall Street only restored the deeply flawed status quo, instead of bringing about the fundamental system overhaul we needed?

• Allstate Sues Goldman Sachs Over Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) was sued by Allstate Insurance Co. over the sale of more than $100 million worth of residential mortgage-backed securities that the insurer claims the bank itself called “junk” and “lemons.”

  Allstate asked for damages including the lost market value of the securities, plus principal and interest payments in the complaint filed today in New York state Supreme Court in Manhattan.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Damning 2007 letter asserts that phone hacking was an open practice at News of the World

  Clive Goodman, the News of the World royals reporter who resigned in disgrace, wrote a letter to News International’s HR department four years ago asserting that the editorial staff of the NoTW knew about the phone hacking, that it was discussed at editorial meetings, and that Andy Coulson — UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s ex-media advisor — was active in these discussions. It also calls into question Rupert and James Murdochs’s testimony to Parliament that they hadn’t been aware of the practice.

Censorship

• Cutting Off Cell Phone Service To Squash Protest Is The Foreign Policy Of Dictators! Right???

DRM

• Seven Points About Ereaders You Should Know Before Buying

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Waffle House Shoots Down Rapper’s ‘Waffle House’ Hip-Hop Song

    J.R. Bricks recently signed with Block Starz Music LLC, a German-American digital imprint that was reportedly bought by Jay-Z’s Roc Nation in April.

    This single, previously titled “Waffle House,” drew the unwanted attention of the legal counsel for WH Capital, LLC and Waffle House Inc., the owners and licensee of the Waffle House trademarks.

    The lawyers sent off a cease and desist letter, claiming J.R. Bricks was improperly using the restaurant chain’s image without proper permission.

• Copyrights

  • Righthaven CEO Explains Losses: ‘We’ve Blazed Some Trails; There Are Differences Of Opinion’

    With Righthaven being told to pay attorneys fees yet again, we were curious if Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson would stand behind his earlier claims that judges mostly supported Righthaven, but were just providing “guidance” to less careful competitors. While he isn’t going that far, in an interview with Joe Mullin at PaidContent, Gibson continues to pretend that Righthaven hasn’t been beaten up nearly as badly as it has.

    First, Gibson claims, as Righthaven has been arguing in court lately, that if a court rules (as they have been) that Righthaven didn’t have the copyrights in question when it sued, then it’s “just” a “jurisdiction issue” and, therefore, the court cannot then rule on the further merits of the case and should not award attorneys’ fees. That’s a rather interesting way to avoid acknowledging what appears to be a form of fraud. It seems pretty damn clear from multiple rulings that the courts do not consider this merely a “jurisdiction” issue, but rather an attempt to deceive the court system and use it to force people and organizations to pay up. Either way, Righthaven seems to be gearing up for an appeals court challenge on this issue.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Ryan MacDonald, New Director of Technology at A Small Orange

MacDonald was previously the lead system and network administrator at a small hosting company based in Michigan. However, he is best known for his contributions to the Linux open source community. MacDonald has written and continues to maintain a number of popular software applications used by web hosts including Linux Malware Detect (LMD), Advanced Policy Firewall (APF), Brute Force Detection (BFD), System Integrity Monitor (SIM), and a half dozen other applications through his website, R-fx Networks (rfxn.com).

Desktop

• Has Microsoft defeated Linux?

  I’m not saying that Linux will be number one next year or anything. However, I am saying that Linux is just as capable of taking on Microsoft as it has ever been. Probably fifty times more capable, and I don’t see it weakening one bit.

Server

• Toshiba Expands Its New IPedge Line

  IPedge accommodates multiple unified communications EP via a single Linux server. The new EP version is designed for SMBs, supporting 40 users per server.

Kernel Space

• Future of the -longterm kernel releases.

• Lots of stable kernel updates

  The 2.6.32.45, 2.6.33.18, and 3.0.2 stable updates are now available. They contain the usual pile of fixes. All three updates also include a change how TCP sequence numbers are generated; a (relatively) insecure 24-bit MD4 algorithm has been replaced by 32-bit MD5.

Applications

• Top 5 MPlayer Skins for your Ubuntu Desktop

  We have recently started bringing out more eyecandy stuff as we really think that Linux has to shed its “old command only interface for geeks” image to make it appealing to more people and as you know there is strength in numbers. Yeah we know Ubuntu has changed that a lot!! but hey allow us to speed up the process. Here is our take on some of the most appealing themes to juice up your Mplayer experience.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.0

  • Graphviz+Jessyink as a Latex-Style Potential Alternative to Prezi and Mindmap Presentations (How to Beat MS PowerPoint)

  • Moving Databases

  • Experiment with ‘Native Linux KVM Tool’

  • Update Virtualbox on Ubuntu

  • Install LAMP in Gentoo/Sabayon

  • Preparing Ubuntu Linux desktop for web development

  • How to read Kindle books on Linux

  • 16 Cool Ass Random Linux Stuff

  • Installing Cherokee With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.04

  • Getting Your Desktop Back – The (Almost) Definitive Guide

    Whether you have a black screen, a flashing screen, just can’t get past the login screen or you’re stuck in the command-line, you’re about to learn a few tricks that will help you get your desktop back to full working order. You will even learn how to open multiple virtual desktops.

• Games

  • Quickly booting C64 games in Linux

    It’s lunch time, and you have 5 minutes to chill out and forget about those reports due by the end of the week. You could play some solitaire, but why limit yourself to the same old dull card games? Some of my favorite games were made for the Commodare 64, and to this day still provide a quick and enjoyable distraction for those otherwise dull desk based lunch breaks.

  • Dead Cyborg Ep 1 Linux download!

  • Ultimate Edition 3.0 “Gamers” Released

    On one of the slowest news days of the year came the welcomed announcement of Ultimate Edition 3.0 “Gamers.” The Ultimate Edition, once dubbed Ubuntu Ultimate, is based or derived from Lubuntu, but the “Gamers” Edition takes it to another level by offering an environment suitable for gaming as well as dozens of pre-installed games and emulators.

Desktop Environments

• North Sea suffers worst oil spill for 10 years – video

  Shell says there have been two leaks at the Gannet Alpha platform, just over 100 miles east of Aberdeen. The first was discovered on 10 August, and has already spilled about 1,300 barrels of oil into the sea – more than the amount spilled across the whole of 2009. It claims that the first leak is ‘pretty much dead’ and the second is minor

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Release Team Changes

    During the Desktop Summit in Berlin, we had a session in which we had a good look at how KDE’s release team performs, which points we can improve on, how, and who will implement these changes.

  • Wireless sharing with Plasma NM 0.9

  • Back from Berlin

    One of the highlights of the conference was the panel discussion about copyright assignment. It’s a complex topic, but the panelists brought up good arguments and lot of food for thought. Mark spoiled his argumentation a bit at the end by introducing his generosity concept. This certainly has its place when talking about motivation in a community, but in the context of legal agreements with companies it’s very questionable, if generosity should be a dominant concept. My takeaway from the panel and some other discussions I had at the summit is that KDE e.V. is in a very good position here with the Fiduciary License Agreement, we optionally provide for KDE contributors. This provides a good balance of the different interests and adds safety for contributors and community.

  • Installing Plasma Active on the ExoPC (“WeTab”)

    If you own an ExoPC, and you’re eager to know how to get Plasma Active, our new workspace and set of applications for consumer devices to run on it, this blog article will help you get going.

Distributions

• PCManFM-Mod To Be In Parted Magic 6.7

• Installing Linux on a 386 laptop

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/Linux Still Growing Strongly

  • Derivatives

    • One time around the Bodhi Tree

      So bodhi is a Pali/Sanskrit work that loosely translates to “enlightenment”. They seem to make heavy reference to this lineage in their artwork and as well as their naming. For example, they have two recommended software sets:
      Nikhila (meaning entire/all in Hindi) – their full featured software collection Pratibha (meaning light in Hindi) – their lightweight software collection

      Bodhi Linux itself is very new (first release, 1.0.0, was out March 2011). Version 1.0.0 was based off of Ubuntu 10.04LTS as was their update 1.1.0, which was released in May, but with the 2.6.39 kernel and Midori 0.3.6. According to their website, they are targeting only the LTS (long term support) Ubuntu versions, which come out every 2 years. They will have quarterly updates to keep their software fresh in between. I don’t have much interest in bleeding edge, but 2 year release cycles are a bit much. I haven’t even gotten anywhere yet and I’m already questioning my decision.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • LXDE edition of Linux Mint 11 arrives

          Linux Mint 11 LXDE has been released, offering a number of improvements in the UI, a faster update manager, better overlay scrollbars and more. The release comes just under three months after the release of the main version of Linux Mint 11. In the LXDE version, Mint 11′s Software Manager has been made more visually attractive with larger icons and a better layout and the Mint-X theme works better with more applications. What’s New in Linux Mint 11 has screenshots and details of these and other changes in the Ubuntu-based distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• GENIVI Alliance Announces Fifth Compliant Offering

  The GENIVI Alliance, an automotive and consumer electronics industry association driving the development and adoption of an open In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) reference platform, today announced that the Linux Foundation’s MeeGo IVI Project has been approved as GENIVI compliant.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Motorola and Samsung unleash ruggedized Android phones

      Hot on the heels of news that it will be acquired by Google, Motorola Mobility announced a 1GHz, Android 2.3-ready “plus” version of a rugged phone it first released last year. The 3.7-inch Defy+ will go head to head with a 3.6-inch Samsung Xcover announced last week in Germany, since both handsets are said to offer IP67-rated resistance to water, dust, and scratches.

    • 5 Android Apps for Remotely Controlling Banshee, Amarok, VLC, XBMC, Boxee in Linux

    • Tablet and smartphone run on Android-based Grid OS

      Fusion Garage announced a 10.1-inch tablet and four-inch smartphone, both running an “Grid OS” operating system that’s based on Android — and said to run its apps — but adds predictive features and a grid-like UI. Available for purchase now, the Grid-10 tablet features an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor and 1366 x 768-pixel screen resolution, while the Grid-4 smartphone due later this year offers a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor.

    • Will Google Build an Uber Android?

      One thing that’s clear is that Google will obtain an impressive patent arsenal if its acquisition of Motorola goes through. Among the many things that aren’t so clear, though, is what the deal could mean for the development of the Android platform. Will Google maintain a distance from Motorola operations? Or will it use the company’s assets to closely supervise the design of an uber Android handset?

    • Android is still safe under the GPL

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Readies Its New Public License

    Not only is Firefox 6.0 complete, but Mozilla’s new public license may also be ready. Mozilla has made available its release candidate of the Mozilla Public License 2.0.

  • Firefox 6 Soon, Firefox-Next PPA, & Mozilla Labs Test Pilot!

  • Mozilla Public Licence 2.0 gets a release candidate

    Mozilla has made a “release candidate” of the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) 2.0 available and, if no significant problems are found with this version, it plans to make it the released version of the MPL 2.0.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Peter Brown and Stormy Peters Appointed as Directors of Software Freedom Conservancy

  Today, the Software Freedom Conservancy announces the appointment of two new members on its Board of Directors. The new directors, Peter Brown and Stormy Peters, bring even more excellent expertise to Conservancy’s Directorship, which includes many substantially experienced non-profit and Open Source and Free Software project leaders.

Openness/Sharing

• The future of management: Is it deja vu all over again?

  The likes of Linux, Mozilla, Google, Amazon, Netflix and eBay all grew up in an online world, and with a majority of Gen Y employees. As a result, they are managed in much more enlightened way than their traditional competitors. And this provides inspiration to others.

Programming

• The Freelance

  Friend: Free software doesn’t cost anything, so they call it “free”
  Programmer: You’re wrong, young padawan…
  Programmer: Free as in freedom, not as in “Free beer”… But most people usually misunderstand…
  Programmer: For example, I did a freelance job in January, but I think they thought that was a “free”lance like “free beer”, because they haven’t paid me yet…

England riots: pair jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder

Two men have been jailed for four years for using Facebook to incite disorder.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, from Marston near Northwich, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, from Warrington, appeared at Chester crown court on Tuesday. They were arrested last week following incidents of violent disorder in London and other cities across the UK.

Neither of their Facebook posts resulted in a riot-related event.

During the sentencing, the recorder of Chester, Elgin Edwards, praised the swift actions of Cheshire police and said he hoped the sentences would act as a deterrent to others.

Security

• Encrypt Early, Encrypt Often!

• Attack on open-source web app keeps growing

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Rights helped lead to U.K. riots, Cameron says

  In a sweeping speech Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron said mending England’s “broken society” was his priority and he called the four days of riots “a wake-up call.”

Finance

• 147 Superentities dominate the network of global corporate control

• Bitcoin and Anonymous Transactions

  One of the much touted advantages of Bitcoin is its anonymity. The full record of all transactions is by the very nature of Bitcoin completely public. However, transactions move coins between a set of incoming addresses and a set of outgoing addresses, and the addresses are not tied to any particular entity; an address may belong to anyone and Bitcoin includes no way to tell.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• FCC Finds That ISPs Don’t Deliver Advertised Speeds

  Does your Internet Service Provider (ISP) give you the kind of performance that it advertises? The FCC has just completed a year-long study that found that many ISPs don’t do so. The study involved tests performed on both download and upload speeds from many top providers. According to the Hot Hardware blog: “Most of the ISPs hit 90 percent of their advertised upload speeds, which is good, except that the reason that the upload speeds of broadband providers are always significantly lower than their download speeds is because most people are much more concerned with how long it takes for something to download than it does to upload.”

DRM

• How to read Kindle books on Linux

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • The Daily Mail knowingly and commercially used my photos despite my denying them permission.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Sunny Days of GNU/Linux

We are fortunate enough to live at a time when many (if not most) phones run Linux and the overwhelming majority of Web servers do too. Those who say that GNU/Linux is “not ready for the desktop” hardly exist anymore. So for those who insist on running it on their desktop/s, there is rarely a major barrier. Videos work just fine (increasingly with HTML5 and free codecs, not Flash), a lot of applications are Web based, and some of the world’s best Web browsers are available for GNU/Linux, so how can one complain? Among developers and producers, there is no real pitfall associated with GNU/Linux (those that are brought up can easily be defended against, e.g. “fragmentation”).

Desktop

• Trying to switch to Linux

• Are Linux Users Smarter or is Everyone Else Just Lazy?

  Access to the Linux desktop is incredibly simple to run with modern distributions. Yet many naysayers have grasped at a difficult to dispel excuse for not switching. They say that their workplaces require them to use Windows along with a number of other specific-to-Windows programs.

• Is the Linux Desktop “On Par” With Mac and Windows? No Way!

  Where is the Linux desktop going, and where should it go? This is a hot topic, and an important one. Unfortunately the discussion usually starts from the wrong premise, that the Linux desktop has only recently achieved parity with its Mac OS X and Windows cousins. Not so! The Linux desktop has been superior since its early days, and would have to go backwards to achieve parity.

Server

• How Linux mastered Wall Street

  When it comes to the fast-moving business of trading stocks, bonds and derivatives, the world’s financial exchanges are finding an ally in Linux, at least according to one Linux kernel developer working in that industry.

  This week, at the annual LinuxCon conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Linux kernel contributor Christoph Lameter will discuss how Linux became widely adopted by financial exchanges, those high-speed computerized trading posts for stocks, bonds, derivatives and other financial instruments.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Alternatives to Microsoft Windows Part 1

• Alternatives to Microsoft Windows Part 2

Kernel Space

• Jim Zemlin on 20 Years of Linux

  Jim Zemlin, executive director of the non-profit Linux Foundation, has been using Linux for about as long as I have, which is roughly half the time that Linux has been around. I recently spoke with Jim about the Linux Foundation’s upcoming LinuxCon, the history of Linux, and what might be in store for the next twenty years.

  If you look at the history of computing, we see big established players dominating in their respective spaces, and then slowly wither and in some cases die altogether. 40 years ago computing was all mainframes and UNIX. Then the personal computer era began and desktop operating systems like Microsoft Windows ruled the roost — UNIX and mainframes were still around, but failed to adapt to the sea change in the primary nature of computing. In the last decase, we’ve seen an absolute explosion in mobile computing — Microsoft is still a contender but there’s no denying that they’ve been slow to react to the change in how people use computing devices.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Ubuntu 11.04 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

  • Measure tomcat Performance with ab

• Games

  • Five traditional games and pastimes, Linux style

    The final common requirements in situation like these come from me: only games that run on Linux natively and are easily installable via binary packages are acceptable; when I visit these people, I never have the time to compile source code (assuming that their computer is powerful enough to compile anything in the first place), or deal with Wine.

  • Quickly booting C64 games in Linux

Desktop Environments

• Desktop Summit all done

  Like a large number of Desktop Summit attendees, I made my way back home shortly after the end of the conference. I will spare you the details of my schedule, and will share a few things of note.

Distributions

• King Kongoni

  Overall I was disappointed with Kongoni. Granted, the project has its good points.

• 10 Linux Server Distros That Could Save You a Bundle

  Businesses require reliability, stability and compatibility. It’s no wonder business owners prefer to stick with the status quo: It’s what works for them. Those entrepreneurs who take the time to research the possibilities outside that status quo find a treasure trove of free and low-cost alternatives. When it comes to software, Linux is at the top of that list. With more than 100 complete distributions from which to choose, Linux is far from a single entity.

  Linux powers the majority of the world’s websites, data centers, and development efforts. Consider this list of 10 business-oriented Linux distributions an all-in-one-place collection of information on those possibilities. The list is in no particular order.

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core 3.8.1

  • Brand New wattOS R4 – Out NOW!

  • Zorin 5 (Educational)

  • Parsix 3.7

  • Announcement and release notes for Wary Puppy 5.1.3

    Wary Puppy is built from a “Puppy builder” system named Woof (http://bkhome.org/woof), which can build a Puppy Linux distribution from the binary packages of any other distro. There are many “puppies” built with Woof, and this image gives an appreciation of some of them and how they fit into the Woof time-line:

  • Frugalware 1.5 (Mores) released

    The Frugalware Developer Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Frugalware 1.5, our fifteenth stable release.
    No new features have been added since 1.5rc2, but 86 changes have been made to fix minor bugs. If you didn’t follow the changes during the pre/rc releases, here are the most important changes since 1.4 in no particular order:

  • Open Xange 2011.08
    

• Red Hat Family

  • How to pimp your CentOS into a perfect desktop

    When it comes to being used as a desktop operating system, CentOS has several major advantages: it is super-stable and offers a very long-term support, which are a blessing for people seeking serious work. On the other hand, the rock-solidness comes with one possible flaw; you don’t always get the latest and greatest software.

    [...]

    There you go. Your perfect desktop just got perfecter.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 15 Live USB

      I’ve been trying Fedora 15 (and Gnome 3) from a Live USB. I’ve had a Live CD since the beta but my CD is failing and read errors mean programs fail to launch even if the OS does load. I’d tried a USB installation a year or so ago when I was distro hopping, but without luck. This time the USB boot worked, with only a minor hitch.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Project News – August 15th, 2011

    * Debian named “Best Linux Distribution of 2011″ and “Top Production Server Distro”
    * Bits from the Release Team
    * Recent improvements with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
    * FreedomBox activities at DebConf11
    * New website for mentors.debian.net
    * Debian s390x port
    * Integrating Emdebian Grip into Debian
    * Further interviews
    * Other news
    * New Debian Contributors
    * Important Debian Security Advisories
    * New and noteworthy packages
    * Work-needing packages
    * Want to continue reading DPN?

  • Debian Community celebrates its 18th birthday

    The Debian Project is pleased to mark the 18th anniversary of Ian Murdoch’s founding announcement. Quoting from the official project history: The Debian Project was officially founded by Ian Murdock on August 16th, 1993. At that time, the whole concept of a ‘distribution’ of Linux was new. Ian intended Debian to be a distribution which would be made openly, in the spirit of Linux and GNU

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Spending the day with an Ocelot

        After reading a few articles about the Alpha 3 version of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and finding that it was available (though it’s a little hard to find — perhaps by design — on the Ubuntu site), I thought I’d give Oneiric Alpha 3 a try since I had a day to spare — actually a unusually slow day at work — and not much else to do with it. Such is my life on a Saturday.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 228

      • Corporate desktops and Ubuntu

        A migration from Windows to Ubuntu is still a project that requires a lot of planning, analysis and hard work. But for most institutions, it’s realistic to be confident that 10-25% of the desktops can migrate smoothly if a professional team has that as their mission over a year or two. For large organisations, that might be 5,000-50,000 seats, and the resulting savings are tremendous given the increase in Windows licensing costs driven by Win 7.

      • Why Buy An Ubuntu Certified System?

        What do Chianti wines, Organic foods, and Spanish Ham have in common with Ubuntu Certified? The simple answer is that they all stand for quality.

        Chianti is an Italian standard (DOCG) for Tuscany wines that requires using defined methods, satisfying set quality standards.

      • Video: Recent Changes In Ubuntu 11.10

        Since I was gone for two weeks and there were quite a few changes in Ubuntu 11.10 during this period, I’ve made a video with all the new features / improvements:

      • ubuntu 11.10 — a little look

        ubuntu 11.10 oneiric ocelot (come on people…you could have come up with better that that…) alpha 3 has been released so i thought i’d give it a whirl. been using fedora 15 64 bit since its alpha stage and kind of miss a debian based distro. so i fired up vir­tu­al­box to give it a try. here’s a brief look with some screen­shots (click any of them for a larger view).

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Ultralight laptops coming

    Lately I’ve been playing around with my little Asus netbook, a 10-inch screen model that came with Windows loaded but now runs Ubuntu Linux and delivers all the computing I need in portable situations at a cost below $400. When netbooks were a true phenomenon – this was before the “tablet revolution” that has rewritten the tech roadmap thanks to the iPad – they took the market by storm not because the big manufacturers figured out how to create a niche for them. Rather, it was the consumer who demanded them, and the consumer whose taste had PC companies scrambling to come up with the wide variety of models that defined this category.

Never underestimate the amount of open source software available

Since starting the DIY IT Guy column here on Techrepublic I have found that so many people have severely under-estimated the amount of open source software available. In fact, I would lay claim that the amount of quality open source software far outweighs the amount of quality proprietary software.

That’s a bold claim, I know … but it’s one I firmly believe in.

When I was tasked with DIY, I knew how it was going to wind up. Think about it; a blog focused on the DIY crowed with a “cut costs” take on all things IT. Where would you think that would lead? Microsoft? Apple? Proprietary software? Nah … it lead straight to open source and all it has to offer.

Debunking popular open source myths

The open source industry will soon reach another milestone when Linux celebrates its 20th anniversary on Aug. 25. Advocates identify five misconceptions surrounding the technology and discuss how these have since been proven false with the emergence of a viable business model.

Traditionally, open source software (OSS) such as Linux was created and refined by a community of software enthusiasts working on it as a hobby or fueled by their personal passion. Linux founder Linus Torvalds, for example, was a computer science student at the University of Helsinki when he created the operating system (OS).

This has resulted in several commonly-held perceptions regarding OSS such as the lack of capabilities and support for deployment in the enterprise space, and an insufficient security foundation.

Events

• OSCON round-up: Open source isn’t declining. It’s maturing.

  Reading some stories recently, it would be easy to conclude that there was some sort of a decline in open source. I’ll not pretend to have new and objective data on the subject, but having just returned from OSCON in the USA I have to say rumours of the death of open source are premature.

• A Tale of Two Conferences

  I spent the week in humid, rainy Berlin for the Desktop Summit. I particularly enjoyed Sunday’s keynotes by Claire Rowland and Nick Richards, not to mention the many great talks and discussions. It’s always fun to catch up with old friends (not to mention my coworkers at Collabora, very few of whom I see regularly), and to meet some new (to me, at least) faces, including João Paulo, whose Summer of Code project—implementing OTR in Telepathy—I have the pleasure of mentoring. I gave a talk of my very own, which apparently is one of the few videos available so far. I haven’t dared watch it yet. I hope to make the promised new release of Bustle this coming week.

• Open Science Summit 2011 this Fall!

  After a (fairly) successful event last year, the Open Science Summit will again happen this year, taking place in Mountain View, CA on October 22-23. Featuring multiple speakers from many different disciplines, the Open Science Summit focuses on how to adapt current scientific practices to ever changing technology, as well as how to open source scientific work and research.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Does Chrome Burn Through More Power Than Firefox?

SaaS

• Joyent Open Sources SmartOS for the Cloud

  Having open-sourced Node.js and seen the positive reception to Facebook’s Open Compute platform, Joyent is continuing in the open source tradition and releasing the source code of SmartOS, the operating system behind its cloud computing offerings.

• SmartOS (based on IllumOS) released – with KVM

  SmartOS is a new Solaris/IllumOS-based distribution released by Joyent. “SmartOS incorporates the four most revolutionary OS technologies of the past decade – Zones, ZFS, DTrace and KVM – into a single operating system, providing an arbitrarily observable, highly multi-tenant environment built on a reliable, enterprise-grade storage stack.” Yes, they have ported the KVM virtualization facility from Linux to Solaris.

CMS

• Why and how I migrated from Drupal to Jekyll

  I started blogging about Linux, in 2007, it all started because I was writing almost daily in some Linux distribution lists, so I thought it could have made sense to put all my writings on line in a single place, so others can use them.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Open Surface vs Open Core

    Changing sides again, if my system is open but anything I write in my word processor can’t be opened on another computer without spending lots of $$$ for another license, I won’t be too happy. An if the open core of my system has to meet the demands of the commercial software companies, it might not feel very open or work very well.

    It’s all about control. Is the user in control or the software provider? Or in the cloud, the company who uses and maintains the cloud or the company that designed it.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• What’s Coming Up For GCC 4.7

  GCC 4.6 was released back in March with various Intel hardware optimizations, initial AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) support, Google Go programming support, new optimization paths, and a number of other new features. While not yet ready for release, version 4.7 of the GNU Compiler Collection is also collecting a number of highlights. This is also good news seeing yesterday’s news about C++0x.

• Photos from Richard Stallman’s talk in London, March 2011

• GNU dbm – News: Version 1.9.1

Project Releases

• GIMP Single-Window Mode Almost Ready, Hardware Acceleration Planned

  ingle-window mode has been a feature requested and planned for GIMP for quite a while. The work has been continuing for so long that many almost forgot its coming. But for those still hoping for this feature, their wait may soon be over. Martin Nordholts, Android engineer and Open Source developer, recently posted that the long awaited option is feature complete and on track for GIMP 2.8.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Building a personal data locker

    Personal data being information associated with you: your contacts, your photos, the web pages you’ve visited, the places you’ve been, the messages you’ve sent and received, and so on. In short, your stuff.

Programming

• Approved: C++0x Will Be An International Standard

  The ISO has unanimously approved C++0x, the next version of C++, to become an international standard. The International Organization for Standardization will now prepare the standards document for C++0x and release it in the coming months.

Standards/Consortia

• An Invitation to the Apache ODF Toolkit

  Perhaps overlooked in all the excitement generated by the move of OpenOffice.org to Apache was the fact that a parallel move is occurring with the ODF Toolkit. A few weeks ago we submitted a proposal to Apache to start a new project based on the Java components that were until then hosted by the ODF Toolkit Union. This was done after consulting with ODF Toolkit community and getting approval from the ODF Toolkit Union’s Steering Committee. This proposal was recently reviewed, voted on and approved by Apache. So now we have the Apache ODF Toolkit project in the Apache Incubator.

Lawyers in Hell – Book Review – Updated – July 25, 2011 – Republished as One Piece

Security

• False Alarm: XSS Vulnerability in WordPress 3.2.1

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Riots Are Over, Problems Are Not

  Burial of one’s problems is not the solution to these problems. Burial of a state’s problem is not the mass arrest of the symptom of this problem.

  [...]

  Those who write more objectively or at least attempt to assess the arguments of both sides are not apologists for looters. They are apologists for truth.

• Essex police charge man over water fight planned on BlackBerry Messenger

  A man will appear before magistrates next month for allegedly trying to organise a mass water fight via his mobile phone.

Cablegate

• Top German Hacker Slams OpenLeaks Founder

  Former WikiLeaks deputy Daniel Domscheit-Berg has been expelled from Germany’s top hacker group, the Chaos Computer Club. In an interview, the group’s spokesman Andy Müller-Maguhn told SPIEGEL how he lost faith in Domscheit-Berg and his new whistleblowing project OpenLeaks.

• Obama Crafts New Anti-WikiLeaks Law

  As far as anybody can tell, the release of the classified material by Wikileaks, despite the hyperbolic haranguing about Assange being a terrorist and about leaked documents harming our national security, has done no measurable harm to any individuals in the U.S. government. Nor is any damage to the safety and security of Americans as a whole at all perceivable. What the leaks have done is to give Americans a better idea of what their government does in their name. It’s possible even, as some have argued, that they’ve done much more good than just that. But sticking to the dangerous national security threat these leaks were promised to present by the apologists for shadow government, not even the government itself has pointed to any specific occurrences of danger or threats to safety or national security. Not even the Obama administration has made that charge.

• OpenLeaks doing strange things with SSL

  What is wrong here is that an intermediate certificate is missing – we have a so-called transvalid certificate (the term “transvalid” has been used for it by the EFF SSL Observatory project). Firefox includes the root certificate from Go Daddy, but the certificate is signed by another certificate which itself is signed by the root certificate. To make this work, one has to ship the so-called intermediate certificate when opening an SSL connection.

• Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s criminal history and her hypocrisy with WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

  ulia Gillard had criminal allegations made against her in 1995 when she was accused of helping her boyfriend steal over $1,000,000 from the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and helping him spend the money on such things as her personal home renovations and dresses.

Finance

• Quelle Surprise! New York Fed Director Shills for Bank of New York, Argues Against Rule of Law

  Given the Federal Reserve’s abysmal regulatory record in the runup to the crisis (even the uber bank friendly Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was more aggressive in going after subprime abuses, for instance), it should be no surprise that some of its directors are utterly lacking in propriety and common sense when it comes to defending the rights of banks to profit at the expense of customers and society at large.

  The only good news about the latest example is that it was so ineptly done that it appears to be backfiring.

• Quelle Surprise! New York Fed Director Shills for Bank of New York, Argues Against Rule of Law

  Over the past ten years investors have been battered by the dotcom bubble(off over 50%), 9/11 (off over 25%), the credit crisis bubble(off 50%), the crash of commodities(down 25%) and now the government debt downgrade together with a dire European sovereign debt crisis(down 20-25%). Nor have we ever gotten back to the all-time peak of the Dow Jones industrial average of 1410, set in October, 2007. It’s no surprise that investors are fleeing equity mutual funds and shoved $50 billion of their savings in money market funds yielding zero laast week. Zero is once again again preferable to losing money.

• Goldman Sachs Downgrades Bank Of America, Cites Market Rumors As The Reason

  That’s because the market is buzzing with rumors about Bank of America, and Goldman’s negative view might signal that the firm believes that Brian Moynihan is unable or limited in his ability to quash the concerns, now and in the future.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC: Facilitating Corporate Influence Behind Closed Doors

  Through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), corporations pay to bring state legislators to one place, sit them down for a sales pitch on policies that benefit the corporate bottom line, then push “model bills” for legislators to make law in their states. Corporations also vote behind closed doors alongside politicians on this wish-list legislation through ALEC task forces. Notably absent were the real people who would actually be affected by many of those bills and policies.

Civil Rights

• Corporations are People, My Friend, and So are States, Say GOPers

  On the campaign trail in Iowa last week, former corporate executive and Republican governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney shot back at hecklers who were challenging his stance that it would be unfair and unwise to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations to reduce the deficit.

  “Corporations are people, my friend,” Romney said. “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend.”

• Distributions

Open Source: Multitasking with X and Linux

Another restriction is with multi-user on Microsoft. With my Linux desktop PC I have a user for work related tasks and a user for relaxation and gaming tasks. I can keep the work user logged in, switch to a Linux console using Ctrl Alt (F1-F6), login the game user, start a second X GUI session with startx startxfce4 — :1 and play a short game while “stuff” keeps running under the work user in the first X session. If I am playing a buggy 3D game that may crash X, I have no worries about my tasks in the other X session as they would be unaffected if a poorly designed 3D game took down the second session. I can do this “out of the box” on a typical Linux distribution installation. If you are from the limited Microsoft universe you have no concept to compare to this on a standard, out of the box, Microsoft desktop PC. Yes, you can switch users. But if you switch users as I do to play a game that crashes the Microsoft GUI called “Windows” it all crashes. Not just the session where the faulty program broke the GUI. It is also truly simple to switch between or among multiple sessions of X on a Linux PC. Just use Ctrl Alt F# to switch back and forth, where # is the virtual terminal number for an X session. For example, my first session is on virtual terminal 8 and my second session is on virtual terminal 9. To switch between them I use Ctrl Alt F9 and Ctrl Alt F8.

The Age of the Icon Is Full Upon Us

It is pretty clear that whether you use Apple, Linux, or Windows (to be scrupulously alphabetical about it) you are going to be at least offered – and more likely stuck with – a highly iconified desktop in any current or future offering of an operating system. It doesn’t seem to matter whether you’re using a phone, a tablet, or a Real Computer.

Why I Support Free Software

At a Linuxworld trade show I heard three people arguing about the proper way to decompose applications to work on a high-performance Linux-based supercomputer. The three people were two engineers from Hewlett Packard and an eleven year-old programmer. The interesting part was that the two engineers from HP were wrong and the young programmer was right.

Choosing a Desktop (#noapple)

When it comes to operating systems, the most “free” distro out there is Debian. I run Debian on more than half of my servers. Unfortunately, native Debian is a poor choice for a desktop, especially on proprietary hardware like my iMac. While I have no doubt that I could get things to a useable state with Debian, one of my stated goals is easy of use, and from the desktop standpoint Debian ain’t it.

The broken dreams of a Linux system administrator

After some studies, or perhaps a specialist course or presentation you’d like to start to implement in your company the best practice you have learnt, and perhaps start a new and better era for your IT department.

But it seem that something always go in the wrong way or there are unexpected difficulties that make all your plans, and dreams, fails; and after some fight you usually end saying “ok that WAS the best practice and we are sure to don’t follow it”.

This is my list of things I’ve found impossible to realize in some years of work.

[...]

To make the things easy the best solution would be: to have 1 distribution at the same level on all servers, use only 1 application stack to deliver services (java, ruby, php).
I can understand this can become too strict, over time new release of the distribution come out and it’s not so easy to upgrade all server, or different group can use different software.

Dear Windows,

You were good to me at first, we had plenty of laughs you and I. You introduced me to a lot of people. We were good together. But then you started ditching me all the time. Only co-operating when it suited your mood, getting angry at me a lot, telling me what I was and wasn’t allowed to do. Cutting me off when I was in the middle of something, or getting rid of my stuff without permission. That’s not cool. But, I stayed with you. I felt comfortable being with you, everything was familiar, and simple. Until you wouldn’t let me in, you said I was doing something illegal when I wasn’t. You know me, we’ve been together since I bought you in the store, I’d never do something like that. But I gave up on you today, I’ve finally had it.

Top secret productivity recipe

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman on 20 years of Linux @ LinuxCon Japan 2011

• Linux 3.1-rc2 Is A Fairly Calm Release

  Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.1-rc2 kernel on Sunday afternoon. There isn’t too much to see and Linus notes that this is a fairly calm release for coming just one week after the close of the Linux 3.1 kernel merge window.

Applications

• Three Quake like drop-down terminals for Linux

  If you use Linux, chances are you use the terminal. Desktop environments like Gnome and KDE have done a good job of hiding the complexities of the underlying OS, but there are some tasks that you just have to do in a terminal.

  I have become a big fan of drop down terminal windows, modeled after the Quake console, instead of having a terminal window sitting in the background that I have to switch to for every command that I want to run. You just press a keyboard shortcut, run your command, and hide the window again. There is no mucking around with virtual desktops, and you don’t have to try and find a terminal window buried beneath all you other applications.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • HowTo: Microkorg XL Sound Editor on Linux

  • Solving the Sunday Puzzle with coreutils

  • Cnotify, get notifications for console events

  • Easy Ubuntu 64bit DLNA Server Setup + Bonus MKV Converter Script

• Games

  • Help Fund “In The Dark” !

    pement Studios, In The Dark, Platform
    0

    The indie company Escapement Studios are working on a new unique platform game called In The Dark.

Desktop Environments

• E17 Enlightment Rocks

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Which languages are people writing Plasmoids in?

    Python 46%
    C++ 44%
    QML 6%
    Javascript 4%

  • Wireless on Plasma Active MeeGo image

    Since MeeGo uses Connman instead of Networkmanager to handle network connections, that means there is not (yet an user interface to control in right from the KDE workspaces.

    If you happen to have one of the Desktop summit Exopc with the Contour user interface that there has been installed on several devices, here are some easy steps to get the MeeGo tablet Connman ui installed and be able to connect to a wireless network.

  • Dragon Player – KDE Video player focus on simplicity

    Dragon Player is a multimedia player where the focus is on simplicity, instead of features. Dragon Player does one thing, and only one thing, which is playing multimedia files. It’s simple interface is designed not to get in your way and instead empower you to simply play multimedia files.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Did GNOME Shell Miss the Mark?

    Having played with a couple of tablets over the last week it occurred to me that these are the sort of devices the GNOME 3 Shell is said to be intended to run on, a reasonable assumption when looking at the design. However, the current breed of tablets PC’s come with their own interfaces already, and they seem rather streamlined and efficient at what they’re doing. Android tablets, HP webOS, the Blackberry Playbook and of course the iPad all have rather good interfaces in my view that are more than up to the job they’re intended for, and probably superior to the Shell because they have been designed with just that one purpose in mind.

  • Classic Gnome panel vs. Unity

Distributions

• Review of Puppy Linux on an Old Server

  Puppy has become familiar to many as a Live CD option for aging PCs that sit on people’s desktops at home, maybe even at some offices. Puppy recently became more of a derivative of Ubuntu (arguably, depending on the definition of “derivative”), but its legacy and/or its strength was mostly associated with its version that I used. It contains JVM and it can also use other lightweight desktop environments.

• Big distributions, little RAM 3

• New Releases

  • Top Five New Releases of the week you need to watch

    Here are some just released distros that are interesting and great to work with. Monomaxos is a refreshing Greek distro for those who prefer an out-of-box Linux OS. dyne:bolic, Plop Linux, Toorox and Network Security Toolkit have just released over the past week and will make for an enriching experience.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu In The Wild: Have You Seen ‘Ubuntu’ In Public?

        When reader Fabio Bier mailed in a photo of this familiar looking emblem atop a drain/man hole cover (spotted in Seville, Spain, fact fans) it got me thinking: does the ‘Ubuntu’ logo ever crop up in urban landscapes?

      • Flavours and Variants

        • WattOS R4 – An alternative to Lubuntu

          I have always been interested in lighter weight desktops, and having a laptop I also am interested in saving power and maximizing battery life. WattOS promises both of these by offering a Lxde desktop. It’s also based off of Ubuntu 11.04, so it is up to date and has a great amount of packages.

          I do all of my testing in Virtualbox for lack of a spare machine to install to. I dedicated one gigabyte of RAM to Virtualbox for testing out WattOS. Booting from the iso image took two minutes and two seconds, which isn’t too long of a time, but I have certainly seen better. Still, it was soon up and running with the lxde desktop. The desktop has a nice silver colored panel and a wallpaper with some sort of insect clinging to a blade of grass. The icon theme is the ever popular Faenza, and the Openbox theme is the default for Lxde, which goes by the name of Onyx. The GTK theme is Clearlooks, which is simple but looks nice with pretty much any setup. The desktop is fast, and did not slow down noticeably even when I ran nearly every pre-included program, something that can’t be said about many distributions.

Setting up a new project – 4 tools you can’t miss the first time around

Just ask them, I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to tell you about it. Adding wheels to a kitchen table, or jet packs in your blue blazer, everyone is an inventor in their own mind. Sooner or later you every person on the planet will have a desire to strike out on their own and make a go at bringing their idea to life. Whether you’re building a consultancy or rocket ships, there a few key apps that need to be rolled out on Day One. If you don’t have these ironed out from the very beginning, things tend to spiral out of control and make it hard for a project to ever get on track, much less stay there.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • The GPU Acceleration Situation In Firefox 6

    Mozilla Firefox 6.0 is to be officially released on Tuesday (it’s already out if you look on FTP mirrors) with faster performance, better start-up times, improved plug-in management, greater HTML5 support, more permission controls, and several other features. What’s not talked about much, but is huge for the affected Linux users, is that the GPU acceleration situation begins to be sorted out.

  • The New Firefox Permissions Manager

  • Mozilla Firefox 6 Final Now Available For Download

Security

• XSS Injection Vulnerability in WordPress 3.2.1

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Eriks Zelenka’s diary

  Fuh, I spend half of my day today at police station because some paranoid guy called the police. We had a conversation with him and I tried to explain him what I’m doing, with no success.. The area I mapped had quite a few burglaries recently. But still they arrested me with no evidence, after I explained them what and why I’m doing. Three cars, six policeman, six hours enclosed for nothing.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks: Bulgaria, US Mulled New Refinery to Rival Neftochim

  Bulgarian and American officials discussed two years ago the construction of a new, mid-sized oil refinery to compete with Neftochim, controlled by Russia’s giant Lukoil, diplomatic cables, revealed by WikiLeaks, show.
  “The gas cut-off [in the winter of 2009] has reinvigorated Bulgarian efforts to diversify away from Russian energy sources. We are urging Bulgaria to think big,” former Ambassador Nancy McEldowney writes in a diplomatic cable, entitled “Bulgaria – digging out of the energy hole”.

• Wikileaks Makes the World More Civilised

  Earlier on in the day, Wikileaks’ official account echoed my tweet to over a million followers, which is rare (I have posted over 50,000 tweets and never was I mentioned by Wikileaks). For whatever reason, people still associate Wikileaks with crime, even though its only connection to crime is that it helps expose crime. In this world and in this strange age of oppression, exposing crime is criminal if the criminals are very rich. If they are poor people who commit petty crimes, nobody seems to care — neither about them nor those who expose them.

• The Evolving Media Portrait of the Wikileaker

  On May 24th PBS aired a Frontline documentary about alleged Wikileaker Bradley Manning called “WikiSecrets.” Billed as “The inside story of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and the largest intelligence breach in U.S. history” it focused exclusively on Manning’s struggles in the military as a data analyst and closeted homosexual who’d gained access and subsequently released tens of thousands of classified government documents. Omitting Manning’s stated motives or the content of the leaks, it put forth the “angry gay man” narrative that Bradley leaked the information primarily because he was frustrated by bullying and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the military policy in place until September 20, 2011 that prohibited military personnel from disclosing or discussing homosexual relationships. As PBS told it, Manning was angry and wanted to exact vengeance on the establishment before going bonkers.

• IQ2: Is Wikileaks a Force for Good?

  US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a big fan of the concept of open governance, famously opined that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”. Yet even the world’s liberal democracies have claimed that sometimes they require a place in the shade, condemning WikiLeaks for publishing their confidential information.

  Are governments justified in their condemnation of WikiLeaks and merely being responsible in protecting their secrets? Could the world really survive an unbridled commitment to transparency?

  Tackling this thorny topical issue at an IQ2 Debate in Sydney were two teams featuring, on one side, a former foreign minister in Gareth Evans … and, on the other, a Wikileaks insider in the form of Icelandic investigative journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson.

• Review the Charges Facing Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Founder

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• EPA’s Proposed Standards Would Limit Mercury, Arsenic, and Other Air Toxics from Power Plants for First Time

  The Environmental Protection Agency took a critical step toward cleaner air on March 16, 2011, by proposing its air toxics standards for coal-fired power plants. The proposed rule would limit emissions of mercury, arsenic, and other air toxics from power plants for the first trime.

  These protections were called for in the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, but they haven’t been implemented, and they are long overdue. Toxic mercury, arsenic, and other pollutants have been spewing uncontrolled from power plants even though we fully know how bad they are.

• Raw Footage From The Gulf: Beaches In Bay Jimmy “stained Black”; Grand Isle Oyster Beds Choke Under Heavy Sheen

  BP and its boosters say we dodged a bullet. They beat their chests and shout from the treetops that the 200-million-gallon spill off Louisiana’s coast didn’t break the back of the Gulf like all the “doomsdayers” said it would. They talk of safe seafood and booming Gulf tourism. They tell us the oil is gone, that it’s time to move on. In fact, according to BP, the Gulf has made such an unexpectedly fast recovery that “future loss” claims to victims of the spill should be shut down. No more damage so no more damage claims, or so argues BP’s legal team on into the night.

Finance

• Welcome to Chicago, America’s capital of volatility

  This is where America comes to profit from fear.

  One storey above Chicago’s main financial strip, beneath three towering screens of ever-shifting neon green financial data, 60 people gather every day to helm the “fear index.”

• For members of deficit-cutting supercommittee, ‘doomsday’ defense cuts hit close to home

  For the dozen lawmakers given the task of producing a deficit-cutting plan, the threatened “doomsday” defense cuts hit close to home.

  The six Republicans and six Democrats represent states where the biggest military contractors — Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics Corp., Raytheon Co. and Boeing Co. — build missiles, aircraft, jet fighters and tanks while employing tens of thousands of workers.

• What happened in London? Just an adjustment of the Riot Index

Censorship

• David Cameron’s net-censorship proposal earns kudos from Chinese state media

  UK prime minister David Cameron (who is reported to have rioted himself and then fled police while at university) has proposed a regime of state censorship for social media to prevent people from passing on messages that incite violence. This proposal has been warmly received by Chinese state media and bureaucrats, who are glad to see that Western governments are finally coming around to their style of management.

• Riots lead to rethink of Internet freedom [from China]

  One of the anti-riot measures recently suggested by British PM David Cameron is to prevent rioters from using Twitter and other social networking websites. Such a tactic, which was slammed as a trick resorted to only by authoritarian governments in the past, has had a great impact on world media.

Privacy

• Inquisitive UIDAI wants all details about you and I

  The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), Karnataka, which is all set to begin its ambitious “Aadhar” enrolment in Bangalore from August 17, has kicked up a row even before its formal launch by “surreptitiously” widening the scope of the ID card beyond the officially stated position.

  On the second day of the special enrolment for mediapersons and their families in the City — as a precursor to the launch for general public —there were heated arguments between applicants and officials, as the enrolment forms distributed by the officials did not match the forms put out by the UIDAI on its website and seemed to be far wider in its scope, seeking personal details.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • Where In Trademark Law Does It Say It’s Okay To Trademark A Town Name ‘For The Good Of The Community’?

    We had recently written about how a group called the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Inc (SMRi) had received trademarks on the name of the city of Sturgis, where the famed motorcycle rally is held each August. SMRi was then using the trademark to block the sale of souvenirs from any “unauthorized provider.” This seemed absolutely ridiculous. You should not be able to trademark the name of a town under trademark law. We had thought that SMRi ran the event, but after our last story ran, we found out that it was a separate operation set up solely to “manage the intellectual property” of the event.

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • Notes on ACTA and Public Health

      The European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA) commissioned a study on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). The INTA study highlights problematic aspects of ACTA and makes recommendations. According to the study, “unconditional consent would be an inappropriate response”, and “There does not therefore appear to be any immediate benefit from ACTA for EU citizens”. The study confirms ACTA goes beyond current EU legislation.

      With regards to access to medicines, the INTA study concludes that adding some annotations will solve the problems. There is a huge gap between the paper reality of the INTA study and the reality in the streets: people are dying because they do not have access to medicines. The INTA study aims too low, just meeting our international obligations on public health is by far not enough. We leave in place, and reinforce with ACTA, low-volume high-profit strategies. We also note some other health issues (development and availability of medical and diagnostic methods and instruments).