• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Africa: Promising Land

The big obstacle to IT in Africa is that networks and electrical power are concentrated in cities and large numbers of people live in rural areas with no network and no power. Solar power, ARMed smart thingies and wireless meshes seem to meet the requirements. Solar power may be very important in the locations off the grid. Schools need good GNU/Linux terminal servers and thin clients. Africa needs Internet access, wikis and the like so that Africa can unleash its talent to develop and support IT systems. Fortunately, there’s no time like the present to bridge the digital divide. IT has never been more easy and quick to implement thanks to ARMed devices and GNU/Linux and Android/Linux.

TLWIR 24: HP’s Redstone Servers, Open Source Textbooks, Netflix on GNU/Linux and More

Desktop

• Where desktop sanity prevails

  While the knock-down drag-out debate over the great leap in desktop environment “developments” has raged over the last several months, Clement Lefebvre and the team over at Linux Mint have been taking a more sane and sound approach — mostly under the radar — to the whole desktop interface hubbub.

Server

• Is Rackspace Ready to Support Private Clouds?

  This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how Intel Xeon processors and VMware deliver unprecedented reliability in the face of RAM errors.

• When There’s a Choice to be Made, Choose a Winner

  * Web servers – 65% of the million busiest sites (out of 525 million active web sites) use Apache on GNU/Linux
  * Android/Linux helps Samsung replace Apple as the most popular seller of smart phones
  * GNU/Linux runs an awful lot of embedded smart devices
  * 91% of the top 500 supercomputers run GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: Linux 3.2 main development phase complete

  Linux 3.2 includes support for Hexagon CPUs, enhancements to the TCP stack, an upbeat SHA1 implementation and dozens of new and revised drivers. And Linux now has a Google+ page.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • man make: a Primer on the Make Utility

  • Google Web Toolkit and Web Services: The JSON/JSONP Way

  • Getting Started With Embedded Programming in Linux, the Cheap and Easy Way

  • The other side of Intrusion detection on Linux: Snort

  • Installing And Using OpenVZ On CentOS 5.7

  • Weekend Project: Ensure a Hassle-Free Linux Upgrade

  • The Perfect Server – Ubuntu 11.10 With Nginx [ISPConfig 3]

  • Creating Firewall Rules for Freshclam

  • Virtual Users And Domains With Postfix, Courier, MySQL And SquirrelMail (Ubuntu 11.10)

Desktop Environments

• GNOME vs. KDE vs. Unity: Performing Seven Basic Tasks

  When users talk about the latest generations of Linux desktops, almost always they report general impressions. They say that GNOME 3 seems needlessly complex, or that Unity seems too basic, but they’re vague on the specifics. In the past, I’ve been guilty of dealing with impressions myself.

  But what, I wonder, is the real story? In the hopes of providing some substance, I’ve to compare GNOME 2 and 3, KDE, and Ubuntu’s Unity, using seven basic tasks that anyone using a desktop is likely to do. The comparison is not just a matter of mouse-clicks — although that metric is sometimes revealing — but, in some cases, a matter of design as well.

• What’s The Difference Between Linux Desktop Environments? [Technology Explained]

  f you’ve been introduced to the world of Linux, it probably didn’t take too long to notice that it doesn’t have a single “face”. Linux can sport all kinds of desktop environments, or none at all. That alone is one of the great benefits of Linux among many more.

  But while that’s impressive, it leaves a very important question for you to decide: What desktop environment should you choose? In this article, we’re going to break down what makes up each desktop environment so you will know what’s best for you and your system.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Trinity Project keeping 3.5 alive

    For people who prefer the KDE 3.5-style desktop, a new version of the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) has been released. Trinity is a continuation of the KDE 3.5 Desktop Environment with ongoing updates and new features. Trinity Desktop Environment 3.5.13 source code is available and the project also provides packages for Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora. Read on for an overview of what is new in Trinity 3.5.13!

  • Takeoff with the K Desktop Environment’s best menu style

    The K Desktop Environment (KDE) has more menu styles than any other desktop environment available. There is the Classical type, the Kickoff style (which most users dislike), Lancelot (better than Kickoff, but with a few shortcomings), the ROSA Launcher (for Mandriva Desktop 2011), and the Takeoff Launcher.

    I have already written about the Lancelot menu and the ROSA Launcher. In this article, you will get to see screenshots of Takeoff Launcher. Now that I have used all five menu styles, I can say with confidence that the Takeoff Launcher is best of breed. I think it is what Mandriva developers had in mind when they started working on ROSA Launcher.

Distributions

• ArchBang Brings Arch Linux’s Greatest Features To Your PC Without The Stress

  If you’re in love with Arch Linux but are tired of the painstaking installation process, ArchBang is the perfect distribution for you. It has everything you love about Arch, but installs in just a few minutes with everything you need.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • November 2011 Issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the November 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

• Red Hat Family

  • First JUDCon in APAC to be held in Bangalore

    Red Hat, Inc. the world’s leading open source solutions provider, today announced that the JBoss User and Developers’ Conference (JUDCon) will be held for the first time in the APAC region, at the NIMHANS Convention Center in Bengaluru, India on January 24-25, 2012.

  • On the Record with Red Hat

    Channelline CEO Robert Cohen talks with Jason Johns, a distribution channel sales exec at Red Hat, about what the company has to offer the channel.

  • Red Hat – Traders Looking for a Bottom

    Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) ended the trading session lower by $0.01 or -0.02% from its previous close. Red Hat’s price action in today’s session formed what is considered to be a Hammer, where bears drove prices lower intraday. However, the strong finish indicates that bulls regained control forming a trend reversal.

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) develops and provides open source software and services, including the Red Hat Linux operating system.

  • US Department of Defence fuelled by Red Hat

    The open source leaders do a deal with SAIC to provide cloud computing for the federal government.

    Red Hat today announced a deal with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to provide cloud computing technologies to the US Department of Defence.

  • Red Hat finds its feet in cloud gold rush

    Cloud computing may be the future, but it appears to be one fraught with unpredictable downtime and security breaches. In other words, it’s very much like the bad ol’ days of corporate data centres, except that this time Amazon, Salesforce and other cloud providers get the blame when things go wrong – rather than one’s local IT folks.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Combines Sophisticated Cloud and Virtualization Features with Usability

    • Fedora 16

    • F16 release announcement

    • Red Hat Releases Fedora 16 “Verne”

    • Q&A with Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith on Fedora 16 and Beyond

      Today’s the big day for the Fedora Project. After six months of hard work (give or take a few days for schedule slips) the Fedora 16 release is out the door. To get the “behind the scenes” look at this release, we touched base with Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith.

    • Greg DeKoenigsberg Joins Eucalyptus as Vice President of Community

    • Fedora 16, Red Hat’s new community Linux distribution, arrives

      If you want to see the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you need only no farther than Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, Fedora. In its brand new release, Fedora 16, Verne, Fedora comes with multiple cloud and virtualization improvements.

      Of course, what most Fedora users, as opposed to RHEL system administrators, will be interested in is that Fedora now supports GNOME 3.2 as its default desktop. Good luck with that. For me, GNOME 3.2, like GNOME 3.0 before it, is a failed interface. I’m not the only one who doesn’t care for the GNOME 3.x line. Linus Torvalds, Linux’s founder, finds GNOME 3.x unusable as well.

    • Fedora 16 Has Been Released, Download Now

    • Fedora 16 Screenshot Tour

• Debian Family

  • Get Back to Your Roots, Ubuntu Users

    When you have installed Debian GNU/Linux to your hard drive or SSD drive, simply use apt-get to add the rest. You can use the list of packages I obtained with dpkg –get-selections or make up your own. For mine, use cat package.list_.mp3|dpkg –set-selections. (Note that this is a text file, not an .mp3 file. WP objected to text/something.) Also, note that I installed only the video driver for Cirrus which was used in my virtual machine. You could change “xserver-xorg-video-cirrus” to what you need (lspci can show that) or you could install them all by changing to “xserver-xorg-video-all”. apt-cache search xserver-xorg-video will show you what’s available. My list is 833 packages some of which are already installed in the basic system. Still, it’s 4.1gB, a lot of good stuff. The software not on the CD or USB drive will be downloaded from the web as usual so you should have a local repository or a fast Internet connection.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 is here

        Ubuntu 11.10, code named Oneiric Ocelot, is now available. It has loads of new functions, which puts other operating systems to shame! Here are a few cool features of this new release.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 to outgrow CD-ROMs

        The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is where decisions on what features will and will not make it into the next release of Ubuntu, in this case, version 12.04, code-named “Precise Pangolin”. Although many things were discussed, some issues are left open for further research.

      • System 76 – Ubuntu Linux desktops made to order

        For a lot of us, the process is pretty straightforward — take a Microsoft Windows-powered system, do some research, download a Linux distribution and install it. If all goes well, you’ll have a new OS that is configured well and ready to roll. There are times, of course, when all does not go smoothly, leaving the operator to figure out how to configure hardware, why graphical glitches are present, etc. Bear in mind that communities spring up around Linux distros and those are full of people willing to help folks struggling with various problems. Those groups are a wealth of information and anyone dealing with Linux should get acquainted with a forum or two.

      • 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.10

      • The final word on Ubuntu and Unity

      • 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.10

        AFTER tweaking my new Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) desktop system, I’ve finally got it to a point where it is almost perfect. I’m a little obsessive, which explains why I’ve been at this for a week (and I’m still going), but I do like putting things where I expect them, and the newest release of Ubuntu moved things around quite a bit.

        Ramesh Jha on the SUDOBits blog offered some good advice on 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 11.10. This is my take on the same topic. Unless otherwise stated, most of the extra software can be installed using Ubuntu Software Center.

      • Ubuntu republic riven by damaging civil wars

        There’s a popular misconception about open source: that it’s democratic, that all users have a vote over its direction and development or even the running of the community around it.

        The users of Ubuntu, arguably the world’s most popular Linux distro these days, are currently discovering that this is not how it works. The result is making a lot of people very angry, but it might result in some interesting new developments for Linux – as well as maybe pointing the way towards the UIs of the next generation of PC.

      • Mark Shuttleworth Interview for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

        It appears that Mark Shuttleworth, father of the Ubuntu project, gave an interview to Amber Graner, an Ubuntu contributor involved in the community since February 2009.

        In the interview, Mark Shuttleworth talks about the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS codename and how he came up with the idea for Precise Pangolin.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Hooray for Linux Mint 12

          Regular readers already know I’m not really happy with the direction Gnome and Ubuntu have taken with Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell) and Unity respectively. I think both of these are mobile interfaces poorly scaled to the desktop. I understand that mobile is the future, and that’s fine, but it’s really premature to be pushing half-baked interfaces clearly intended for the tablets and phones of the future onto the desktops of today. I still have work to do and I would like to be able to keep doing it without the interface getting in the way. And I’m not alone. Even Linus Torvalds feels the same way, and when the Big Guy of Linux himself calls your new interface “an unholy mess,” something’s wrong. Torvalds called for someone to fork Gnome 2, and once that happened, I knew sooner or later someone might actually do it.

        • A cautious cheer for Pinguy 11.10 Alpha

          I don’t like reviewing alpha versions of distros. I try to pretend they don’t exist. They frustrate me. They’re not finished, and I tend to get hung up on the problems. I blame them for not being ready, when of course that’s the point of an alpha release. The issue is not with the alpha, it’s with me for irrationally expecting it to be smooth and polished. So I’ve pretty much sworn off even downloading alpha versions – and beta versions too, mostly. I try to avoid everything earlier than the release candidate.

        • Linux Mint Shakes Ubuntu, Replaces As The Top Distro

          Yesterday we published about Linux Mint’s secret project for Gnome users and Clem’s claims that soon they will overtake Ubuntu. Seems like he spoke too late. Today Linux Mint has broken the 6 year old record and replaced Ubuntu as the most popular Linux-based distribution on Distro Watch. Linux Mint sits on top with 2199 and Ubuntu slides to the second spot with 2011 rating.

        • Bodhi Linux ARM Repository Online

          Five months ago I did a post announcing that we are working to bring Bodhi to ARM devices. I’ve been rather quiet about this part of our project since then. We are still finalizing the direction this part of our project is headed in, but for now we have landed on the choice of Debian Stable as our core. Our repository is currently online and you can easily install our Enlightenment packages on top of your Debian Stable ARM install by following these steps:

        • How to install Bodhi Linux [snapshots toor]

        • Linux Mint moves to Gnome 3, keeps Gnome 2 MATEy

          The forthcoming release of Linux Mint will see it shift to the Gnome 3 desktop for the first time, but it will continue to support Gnome 2 users with a separate root, and has a shell to ease the transition between the platforms.

          The Linux Mint team does see Gnome 3 as the way forward, it explained in a blog post, but recognizes it’s a big shift to make. Gnome 3 has received heavy criticism, not least from Uncle Linus, mainly because it changes the traditional way of doing things. In particular, Linux Mint members cite poor multitasking and a shift from an application-centric to a task-centric model.

        • Linux Mint Pulls Ahead of Ubuntu

          Distrowatch.com displays a popularity list of all Linux distributions by measuring the number of hits per page on their site. This ranking system is considered to be one of the most reliable around. Even if it is only a measurement of one website’s traffic. Lately Linux Mint has been making a run at first place.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google’s Eric Schmidt to visit Taiwan to promote Android

      Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt is set to visit Taiwan on November 9 to have a conference with Taiwan-based PC vendors and promote its Android operating system, according to sources from PC players.

    • Motorola ‘doesn’t even have Ice Cream Sandwich source’

      It will be four to six months before Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) is widely available on handsets, a Motorola Mobility executive has warned. Motorola does not even have the operating system’s source code yet, Ruth Hennigar, the company’s vice president of software product management, reportedly added.

    • HTC promises more tablets, Ice Cream Sandwich upgrades

      HTC announced that at least seven of its smartphones will receive upgrades to Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”). They’re the internationally available Evo 3D Sensation, Sensation XL, and Sensation XE, as well as the U.S.-only Rezound, Design 4G, and Amaze 4G, according to the company — whose CEO also told Reuters it will release one or more additional tablets next year.

    • HTC leaks Edge smartphone with quad-core chip

      The HTC Edge is set for a launch in the first half of next year and will have an Nvidia Tegra 3 Kal-el quad-core processor, according to Pocketnow. The handset looks similar to the Titan but will run Android instead of Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.

    • Motorola Razr goes on sale today

      The iconic mobile phone brand has come back to life today as the latest incarnation of the Motorola Razr. Consumers can get their hands on the super-thin smartphone for £454 SIM-free after a delay of just over a week.

    • Google will continue to offer Android for free

      SMARTPHONE SOFTWARE DEVELOPER Google will continue to offer its Android operating system for free, according to the firm’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

      Schmidt said at a press conference today, “We will run (Motorola) sufficiently independently so it will not violate the openness of Android.”

      According to the Wall Street Journal, during his tour of South Korea, Schmidt said that Google’s upcoming acquisition of Motorola will not have an impact on its other Android partners.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Fight! Fight! and M$ is not Even Invited

    Barnes and Noble’s Nook eReaders and Amazon’s Kindles are scrapping in the schoolyard and the bully, M$, is not involved.

  • HTC confirms Ice Cream Sandwich tablet for 2012

    HTC has confirmed it plans to take another stab at the tablet market in 2012 after officially announcing a new fondleslab with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich early next year.

  • HTC to release first Ice Cream Sandwich updates ‘early 2012′

    HTC will be bringing Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich to four of its handsets early next year in what it described today as “the first wave of HTC phones that will receive upgrades”.

  • Rough and tough Honeycomb tablet offers extra security

    Panasonic unveiled a rugged, 10.1-inch Android 3.2 tablet for the enterprise market with extended temperature, drop, and ingress resistance. The Toughpad FZ-A1 is equipped with a dual-core 1.2GHz Marvell processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a full range of wireless features, a security co-processor, and an anti-glare, 500-nit display with 1024 x 768 pixels and an active digitizing pen.

  • Nook Tablet is $249, and other Nooks get price cuts

    Barnes & Noble announced a $249 Android tablet featuring a seven-inch IPS (in-plane switching) display, a dual-core, 1GHz processor from Texas Instruments, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of internal storage. The new “Nook Tablet” was joined by enhancements and a $50 price drop for the existing Nook Color, plus a new $99 price for the monochrome Simple Touch.

Events

• FUDCon India 2011 Coverage From Pune

Web Browsers

• Which of the big five Web Browsers is the Best? (Review)

  Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, or Apple Safari: Which of the most popular Web browsers is really the best?

  With Firefox 8’s early arrival, and new major updates to three of the other major Web browsers, Chrome 15; Opera 11.5, and Safari 5.1.1 it’s high time to take another look at our current generation of Internet Web browsers and see what’s what. Only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 9 hasn’t seen a significant improvement in the last few months.

  Why did I choose these browsers? The answer is simple. These are the most popular Web browsers out there. While Internet Explorer has dropped below 50% of the total Web browser market, it’s still the most popular Web browser. In most of the world, IE is followed by Mozilla Firefox, although in some places, such as much of Latin America, number three, Google’s Chrome, has already moved up to second place. After that Apple’s Safari, which owns the mobile Web browser market, comes in number four, and Opera hangs out to the fifth spot.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Version 8 Available Ahead of Official Release

    While many Firefox users are still working with version 7, Mozilla has now made version 8 available, and this version is definitely the next major iteration of the browser. Although Mozilla’s official release date is November 8, you can get Windows, Mac and Linux versions here. Version 8, is, of course, yet another iteration in Mozilla’s new rapid release cycle for its browser, but it also has a lot of new features. Here are some of the additions worth noting.

  • Mozilla Developers Testing Mobile OS

    Mozilla has been experimenting with an interesting idea called Boot 2 Gecko. Essentially, B2G (as it’s called) is a mobile operating system based on the Web, as opposed to what the project’s wiki calls “proprietary, single-vendor stacks”. Mozilla has something there–open Web technologies indeed increasingly provide an intriguing platform for lots of things, mobile and otherwise.

  • Firefox 8 Officially Released

    In late September Mozilla released version 7 of its Firefox browser, and as part of the company’s new fast release cycle we noted a few days after the release that a beta of Firefox 8 had already been seeded to developers. In the article, we noted Mozilla promised Firefox 8 would deliver better tab management, deeper Twitter integration, and new features for web developers.

    Uploaded to the company’s FTP servers a few days ago, Firefox 8 has been officially released today, with a blog post from Mozilla outlining the differences from the previous version. As with the Firefox 8 beta, Firefox 8 final comes with an option in the Preferences to load existing tabs (the pages you left open the last time you quit the browser) only when they’re selected. This should improve the browser’s startup times, as it’s no longer forced to reload all tabs upon launch.

  • Firefox 8 cracks down on add-ons

SaaS

• Ignition, Accel, Greylock Put $40M In Apache Hadoop Distribution Platform Cloudera

  Cloudera, the startup that commercially distributes and services Apache Hadoop based data management software and services, has raised $40 million in new funding led by Ignition Partners, Greylock, Accel, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel. Cloudera previously raised $36 million from Accel Partners, Diane Greene, Qi Lu, Jeff Weiner, Marten Mickos, Gideon Yu, Caterina Fake, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, and In-Q-Tel. The startup actually just raised $25 million last Fall.

Databases

• MongoDB: Real, FUD or Hoax controversy spreads online

  Is it FUD, a hoax or a real complaint about MongoDB? That is the question being asked by many after an anonymous posting on Pastebin called “Don’t use MongoDB” created a flurry of controversy around the open source NoSQL database. The posting, alledgedly by an ex-user of the database, claimed that MongoDB loses data in various situations, including deleting the entire dataset, and that 10gen, the company behind MongoDB, was not prioritising reliability and instead chasing benchmarks. The eight part list also included complaints about performance on busy servers, recovery from database corruption and issues with replication stopping.

Education

• Experiences Teaching Free and Open Source GIS at the Community College Level

  What’s it like to teach using free and open source GIS? Kurt Menke runs his own GIS consulting business in Albuquerque, New Mexico and also teaches at Central New Mexico Community College. He has developed a course called “Introduction to Open Source GIS and Web Mapping.” In this article, he describes the impetus behind the course development, details the course content and offers some of the lessons he’s learned in the process.

BSD

• Why aren’t you using FreeBSD?

  Here I sit, watching a freshly installed FreeBSD box run through cvsup on all ports, to be closely followed by a new kernel compilation. As the output flies by in the xterm, I find myself wondering why I don’t run into more FreeBSD in the world.

  The truth is that I’ve been using some form of BSD since 1993 or so (the days of BSD/386). A foundational server that I’ve run since 1995 used BSDi initially, transitioning to FreeBSD back in the 3.0 release days. I can’t contemplate using any other OS for this box and the myriad tasks it performs. We’re not talking about a system that sits idle most of the time; this box generally deals with 250,000 to 300,000 emails a day (mostly spam, which produces a heavier load than actual mail delivery), and it serves up DNS, Web, and SMTP/POP/IMAP services for dozens of domains. It generally hovers at a load of 0.50 with the occasional spike.

Project Releases

• Apache Tika reaches 1.0

  Version 1.0 of the Apache Tika metadata and structured text content detector and extractor has been released. The project began as a sub-project of Apache Lucene in 2007 and became a top level project in May last year.

• VirtualBox 4.1.6 fixes 3D support on Fedora 15

  Version 4.1.6 of VirtualBox has been released. The third maintenance update to the 4.1.x branch of the open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware improves its overall stability and addresses several issues found in previous builds.

• New Milestone For Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal

Programming

• 10 years of Eclipse: Consolidating the Java IDE market

  Ten years ago, IBM first presented the Eclipse development environment to a global audience as open source software. Wherever such figures may originate from: the estimated $40 million that the donated code including marketing efforts was said to be worth at the time in 2001 have turned into more than $800 million today, estimates Eclipse Foundation Executive Director Mike Milinkovich; the Eclipse Foundation was founded in 2004.

• The H Speed Guide to Node.js

  Node.js, or Node for short, has become rather popular with web developers in the last year as a platform for their web applications. No one is talking about replacing the entire world of web servers with Node.js based systems, but Node is flexible enough to be able to take on a wide range of tasks. So what makes Node different to preceding web frameworks and platforms? Two words, event-based JavaScript.

• Popcorn.js 1.0: Mozilla’s new HTML5 media toolkit

  Mozilla has announced the launch of version 1.0 of Popcorn, a new HTML5 media toolkit from the non-profit organisation. The Popcorn.js library is a event framework for HTML5 media that combines HTML and JavaScript; “Think jQuery for video” says the project’s site.

  Using Popcorn.js, developers can create interactive time-based media content using video and audio assets, combined with web content including real-time social media, news and visualisations. “Popcorn allows web filmmakers to amp up interactivity around their movies, harnessing the web to expand their creations in new ways,” said Mozilla Executive Director Mark Surman.

Killer Apps: the Defining Applications of Each Computing Wave

Why Google Plus Pages (Will) Beat Facebook. And Twitter

Router problem disrupts Level 3 network in North America and Europe

On Monday, several US and UK ISPs, including Time Warner Cable, Research in Motion, Eclipse Internet, Easynet and Merula, reported a range of errors and problems on the Level 3 backbone. Level 3 has now confirmed the reports. The cause of the problems appears to have been a bug in Juniper’s Junos router operating system affecting the border gateway protocol (BGP).

Health/Nutrition

• Guns, Farms and Stealth: Armed Raids and Surveillance of Farms and Food Clubs

Security

• Demystifying the Chinese Hacking Industry: Earning 6 Million a Night

Finance

• EU-China High Level Political Parties & Groups Forum

  The EU-China High Level Political Parties & Groups Forum, initiated in May 2010 in Beijing, gathers politicians from the European political families, together with Chinese representatives from the International department Central Committee of CPC and other institutions. It provides a tool for dialogue between politicians from China and from the EU.

• Goldman Sachs–Where Are Your Cojones?

  Well, Goldman Sachs, since “deferred prosecution” is the vogue nowadays and really means that no one in your bank, whether CEO, COO or CFO, no one will be prosecuted for their responsibility for the financial meltdown or, if by some miracle or two someone is found responsible, the bank will just pay a fine and carry on.

  That act is the remarkable indictment of the US justice system: Goldman Sachs commits accounting control fraud that makes it billions and billions of fraudulent dollars and then, when it is found out, it just pays a few millions and carries on.

• CMD Requests IRS Investigate Charity Accused of Fronting Private Jets for Presidential Campaign

  Madison — Today, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a letter requesting that the Internal Revenue Service investigate a charity operated by Wisconsin political veteran Mark Block that spent over $40,000 of tax-exempt donations to pay for private jets, travel, and computers for Herman Cain’s presidential bid. CMD also requested an examination of other Mark Block-related groups sharing the same address or other commonalities. Mr. Cain, who has denied knowing who paid for his various travels, is not the target of these requests to the IRS.

  These requests follow an October 30 story by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Dan Bice revealing that “Prosperity USA,” which was created by Mr. Block, had footed the bill for expenses related to Mr. Cain’s bid for the White House. Prosperity USA’s financial records show the charity expected to get reimbursed. Tax-exempt charities are prohibited from intervening in the political campaign for any candidate for public office, no matter the post.

• US IT sector gains jobs

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• New Investigative Report Highlights Koch Brothers’ Reach in Influencing Democracy

  Charles and David Koch, each worth about $25 billion, could be the most influential duo in the United States. These brothers have accumulated their fortune through Koch industries — an oil refining, chemical, paper products and financial services company with revenues of some $100 billion per year. A new documentary by Bob Abeshouse on the Kochs illustrates how these brothers use their billions to manipulate some in the public into voting for their right-wing agenda and to push policies that strip protections for people’s health.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• What’s Behind the Recent Spike in Rate of Adoption of GNU/Linux?

  In short, I cannot find any single event in the news that would correlate with this move in adoption. Is it a shift in the way Net Applications counts? Is it the collective will of the world to use FLOSS? I don’t know, but it seems real.

Server

• 7 Open and Free Network Servers

  Here, we’ll discover some free and open router projects, covering those suitable for small businesses, medium-sized, and even enterprise-level comparable to Cisco and Juniper.

Kernel Space

• Linux, Open-Source Affected In AMD Cutbacks?

  By now many of you have likely heard that AMD is laying off around 10% of its workforce by next year in a restructuring attempt to lower its operating costs, but will their open-source and Linux efforts be hampered by this move?

  Initial indications are that AMD’s Linux and open-source efforts will not be severely hit as AMD lets go of around 1400 employees worldwide.

• Btrfs Brings “Pretty Beefy” Changes In Linux 3.2

  The pull request for the Btrfs file-system in the Linux 3.2 kernel has finally come in this Sunday. It brings some fairly significant changes for this up-and-coming Linux file-system.

  Chris Mason, the Oracle engineer and lead Btrfs developer, began his Btrfs pull request for the Linux 3.2 kernel by saying, “This pull request is pretty beefy, it ended up merging a number of long running projects and cleanup queues.”

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Server 1.11.2 Released

    While all major development work is now happening on X.Org Server 1.12, the 1.11 series is still being maintained with bug-fixes and other minor work. This is important since the X.Org Server 1.11 series is likely what will end up being used by Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Among the distributions shipping with X.Org Server 1.11, which was originally released in August, is the soon-to-be-released Fedora 16.

  • Samsung Keeps Working On Its Linux DRM

    While Samsung has its Exynos 4210 DRM merged into the Linux 3.2 kernel as the first DRM driver for ARM in the mainline kernel, they haven’t stopped there. More patches have been floating around from Samsung in the past few days.

Applications

• Yes, Vim Turned Twenty but Vi Turned Thirty-five Too!

  Recently, all Vim lovers wished it on its twentieth year. Twenty years is a long time, but it is not long enough. Let us talk about something bigger. Vi, the predecessor to Vim, grew even older with this. Very few people use vi anymore, and using it will be CUI overkill. However, it is worth a mention. Vim is ‘Vi improved’. Bram Moolenaar did a great job by ‘improving’ Vi, but the credit goes to Bill Joy, for creating this wonderful piece of software.

• gEdit, an easy to use text editor with many advanced features

• Let’s Play: P-UAE

  Welcome everybody again to a new Let’s Play! This time, i want to talk about P-UAE. What’s P-UAE? P-UAE is a Commodore Amiga emulator for Linux. It’s easy to use, free, and highly customizable. Well… Let’s go!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Git trouble shooting: none-bare repository

  • Linux fstab: mount a path containing spaces

  • Loop mount iso files without being root

  • Fun with the Unix/Linux find command!

  • Using The Haraka Mail Server

  • GNU Binutils: A Collection of Binary Tools

  • How to Install an HP Officejet 4500 G510 on Sabayon Linux

  • Installing And Using OpenVZ On CentOS 5.7

  • The Linux Command Line Shell Roundup

  • NCDU – The Answer to a Question

  • Serving CGI Scripts With Nginx On Fedora 15

  • How To Mount Partitions Automatically On Startup In Linux

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.32 Has Been Released | What’s New | Download

• Games

  • Blue Libra and Thunder Fleets released for Linux

    Martin Lotecki sent word that Blue Libra and Thunder Fleets have been released for Linux on Desura!

  • Digitanks released + source code released under the BSD license

Desktop Environments

• * Simplicity vs. Customizability in Desktop Design

  Another way to characterize desktop environments (or DEs) that are striving for simplicity is this: get out the way and let the user do their thing.

  It’s a pretty compelling argument, really. Why should the user spend time interacting with the OS at all? Why should they have to customize things? Just make it as minimal and intuitive as possible, then let the user actually USE the programs they want.

  We have a perfect example of this view taken to its logical conclusion in the form of Chromium OS. For all intents and purposes there IS no desktop, since the desktop consists of a single, full screen program. There’s a few other goodies tacked on, but for the most part that is what you get. You can’t change your desktop background because there is none. You can’t add a panel widget because there is no panel. It’s just … the Chromium browser. Nothing else.

  Other DEs have gone in this direction, but not nearly so far as Google did. Gnome released Gnome 3 to mixed reviews, largely because they tried to reinvent the desktop. And by reinvent I mean get rid of most of the desktop. Customization is at a minimum because EVERYTHING is at a minimum. No widgets or applets or any kind of -ets. When 3.0 came out there wasn’t even a plugin framework (still isn’t really, though it is in the pipeline) because, well, there was very little to plug in to. Ubuntu’s Unity struck a very similar chord, trying to keep the OS to a minimum. Reviews for Unity were about as enthusiastic.

  The big question is: is this desirable? Is it OK for a certain group to make design decisions that influence a huge number of users? Luckily in Linux, if you don’t like it you don’t have to stick with it, which leads us to the other side of the coin.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Help KDE e.V. secure funding for a sprint with just a few clicks

  • Status on Plasmoids and PyCon ’11

    It has been a while since I posted here. The last few months have been very busy and frantic. I have managed to fix up my Plasma Widgets for the OBS, and am busy packaging it, and testing it. They are running well on my laptop, but I have not been able to test it so far on another machine. Styling of the content displayed on the plasmoids remain on the TODO list. Packaging it is also proving to be a headache, even with the OBS (ironically…). I need to spend more time on IRC with packagers.

  • Let’s convince Nokia that funding Nepomuk makes sense

  • How To Use KDE’s Netbook-Optimized Interface [Linux]

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 30th October 2011

  • What is the KDE Program?

    Executives find valuable to become part of a common network that allow them to open their organizations to new markets, more opportunities in current markets, new products, services and talent. KDE can offer them such a worldwide network formed by many organizations.

• GNOME Desktop

  • New GNOME-FR board

    Early last month, we had a GNOME-FR annual general meeting. It was a while since the last GNOME-FR meeting, and it felt good to get things moving forward again! For those who don’t know, GNOME-FR is the french-speaking non-profit organization (association loi de 1901, to be exact), and while it’s not the most active organization, it’s quite useful to help organize the GNOME presence at events — usually french-speaking events, but also international events (like FOSDEM, for which GNOME-FR handles the t-shirts and more, since a bootstrapping fund given by the GNOME Foundation a few years ago)

  • GNOME and the Semantic Desktop

    The Unity interface’s ‘Files and Folders’ option relies on Zeitgeist—(zeit in German is time, and geist is ghost). My first experience of using Unity was very disturbing—it found nothing! Zeitgeist keeps track of various activities on files—provided the application you are using informs it. ‘Files and Folders’ searches for files within your activities. Obviously, there are no activities after a fresh install, and so nothing is shown as ‘found’—even though the home directory may be full of files from the previous version of Ubuntu. Its utility increases over time.

    In the GNOME environment, you will need to install gnome-activity-journal, which will also install Zeitgeist. After installation, you will find ‘Activity Journal’ in the Accessories menu on Fedora 15. The application aborts at start-up. Fedora’s Bugzilla had numerous entries for this problem—most likely via abrt—but no solution. You need to comment a few lines of code that cause the crash; this is to ensure that you have a recent version of Zeitgeist!

  • GNOME Shell Works Without GPU Driver Support

    As reported on Thursday, GNOME Shell / Mutter no longer requires OpenGL-accelerated hardware drivers. It’s possible to run this GNOME3 desktop with a software back-end via Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe.

    Reaching this milestone can be attributed to Red Hat, Google’s Chrome/Chromium OS developers, and others working on the Mesa / Gallium3D software stack. Just recently LLVMpipe gained support for GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap, the GLX extension that’s required by many Linux compositing window managers. These improvements allow the desktop effects to all be done on the CPU without any dependence on any GPU hardware driver. GNOME Shell on the VESA driver or within a KVM/QEMU guest is fair game.

Distributions

• ArchLinux, not just for the elite

  I had several colleagues, friends and people asking me whether they should run Arch Linux on their desktops or laptops. I even read someone’s blog today on his impression on Arch Linux and Ubuntu. It’s time for me to jump in and clarify what you should expect with Arch Linux as a desktop on a daily basis.

  Arch Linux is a rolling release system. What this means is that you do not get releases at specific intervals in time, like you do with Ubuntu, OpenSuse or Fedora. Instead there is a constant stream of updates that are uploaded on the distribution servers and that you can pull almost everyday. These updates are uploaded after a testing period by the Arch Linux testing community (you can switch to the testing mirrors if you wish) and it is up to you to choose if you want to install them or not.

• AgiliaLinux 8 GNOME review

  AgiliaLinux is a fork of MOPSLinux, a defunct Linux distribution that was based on Slackware. Now, AgiliaLinux is an independent, multi-purpose distribution with development roots in the Russia Federation (MOPSLinux was also a Russian distribution).

  AgiliaLinux 8, the latest release, was made available for public download on October 3 2011. With this release, AgiliaLinux’s development model was changed to a rolling release model, that is, AgiliaLinux is a rolling release distribution, with stable snapshot releases every three months.

• Linux: Now 400 Distributions Strong

  According to the GLDT project, the Linux environment has grown by 10 new distributions over the past two months and more than 50 over the past six months. Among the new entries between September and October are candidates such as AtheOS, DreamStudio, Garuda or Syllable. Debian remains the most populated Linux branch with 114 different choices – among them flavors such Knoppix and Ubuntu. Redhat is the next largest branch, followed by Slackware and smaller branches such as Arch, Enoch, or Sorcerer.

• Linux, Open Source & Ubuntu: 10 Linux Distros Every IT Manager Should Know

  The ability to customize Linux to run on various types of hardware and to suit specific user needs means there are more flavors of Linux-based operating systems available than Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. While administrators generally stick with the well-known ones, such as Canonical’s Ubuntu, Attachmate’s Novell SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their servers and desktops, they are beginning to see other flavors sneaking into the enterprise. A recent Dell KACE study found that IT departments are supporting more operating systems than the company standard because employees are increasingly using personal laptops and devices to access enterprise applications and resources. “No single device is used dramatically more than others, meaning that IT must be aware of a wide range of operating systems and devices that connect to their systems,” Dell KACE researchers wrote in the report. Approximately 14 percent of personal laptops being used in the enterprise run a Linux distribution. In addition, 23 percent of personal tablets and over half of the personal smartphones in the enterprise run Android, according to the report. In this slide show, eWEEK lists some of the Linux-based operating systems and distributions that every IT manager should be familiar with.

• New Releases

  • Elastix 2.2

  • Chakra 2011.11

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 172

    · Announced Distro: ArchBang Linux 2011.11
    · Announced Distro: SystemRescueCd 2.4.0
    · Announced Distro: openSUSE 12.1 RC2

• Gentoo Family

  • Reviews: First impressions of Sabayon Linux 7

    Sabayon’s slogan, which appears when the distribution is booting, is “open your source, open your mind”. It’s catchy, it’s simple and maybe even inspiring. However, were I to choose an alternative slogan it would probably be “There’s an edition for that.” A quick look at the project’s download area reveals six different editions (GNOME, Xfce, KDE, Server Base, Spin Base and Core), each of them available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds. And, indeed, the project lists its number one feature as “variety”. Judging by the editions which eventually appeared for Sabayon 6 we’ll probably see future editions of Sabayon 7 featuring LXDE and Enlightenment.

    For now though let’s focus on the Xfce edition, which is what I decided to download. There wasn’t any particular motivation for the choice, except when in doubt Xfce is usually a safe option. Speaking of options, booting off the 1.2 GB DVD brings up a menu which allows us to try the distribution in live mode, perform a graphical install, perform a text install or boot into a console. I decided to go for the graphical install. Sabayon uses the tried-and-true Anaconda installer, which Fedora and Red Hat users will recognize.

• Debian Family

  • College near Mangalore hosts three-day Debian meet

    A technical college in Dakshina Kannada is the venue for an ongoing meet on Debian, a Linux-based operating system. The college has no “direct contributor” or developers in Debian. That precisely is the reason why one alumnus thought the locale for a three-day meet on the subject, titled Mini DebConf Mangalore, should be the NMAM Institute of Technology (NMAMIT) in Nitte, Karkala, about 60 km from Mangalore.

    Vasudev Kamath, an alumnus of the college, who now works on the Debian platform in a company in Bangalore, said he helped organise the event in his alma mater as he wanted developers to come together and spread awareness on Debian among students who had not had any exposure to it.

  • My DebConf11 summary and its after effects

  • Debian Beckons Ubuntu Refugees to Come Home

    Dissatisfaction continues over Ubuntu’s choice of the Unity Interface as default and, in the most recent release, no obvious way to return to the old Gnome desktop.

    Long time Ubuntu users have been complaining loudly about Unity’s lack of stability, limited options and an overall unfinished feel. Distros that have watched Ubuntu gobbling up the Linux mind-share are suddenly getting a second look by unhappy Ubuntu users seeking alternatives to Unity.

    Ubuntu started life as a simplified Debian with an emphasis on desktop usability. Recent Ubuntu releases seem focused on blazing their own trail toward a touchscreen, cloud enabled, widget driven environment. This may prove to be a very forward thinking plan, but it leaves traditional Gnome users hungering for their familiar desktop environment.

  • Debian Project News – November 4th, 2011

    * Updated Debian: 6.0.3 and 5.0.9 released
    * DebConf12 official dates
    * Debian Installer localisation
    * Feedback after DebConf11
    * Uses of Emdebian
    * Bits from the DPL
    * New Member process
    * Further interviews
    * Other news
    * New Debian Contributors
    * Important Debian Security Advisories
    * New and noteworthy packages
    * Work-needing packages
    * Want to continue reading DPN?

  • Derivatives

    • CrunchBang 10 Statler review – Crunch, bang

      CrunchBang Linux is a power-user oriented, minimalistic distribution focused on clear, simple elegance of the Openbox desktop, with a low memory footprint, a robust behavior, and a spartan set of programs. Not one to fawn over you, it’s the other way around, although, based on the facts and figures, it should not be too difficult to setup.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Expected Changes In Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin (UDS-P In Brief)

      • Ubuntu Acknowledges Boot Speed Problem

        Developers at the Ubuntu Developer Summit have acknowledged the boot speed problem in Ubuntu 11.10 and are looking to improve the time it takes to boot Ubuntu Linux for the 12.04 release.

        One of the issues in Ubuntu 11.10 that I have made widely known is that it’s booting slower. Since the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release each succeeding release has largely been regressing when it comes to the boot performance, among other areas. I have found the boot performance to be an issue on a wide-range of hardware and an obvious regression from the ten second boot time focus in Lucid Lynx.

      • Ubuntu Must Love The Fedora 17 Beefy Miracle

        For those that were concerned about Fedora 17 being codenamed the Beefy Miracle, fear not as Ubuntu has your back… At least Canonical’s community manager, Jono Bacon, is in support of this next-generation Fedora codename.

        Jono is in support of Fedora 17′s Beefy Miracle so much that he decided to dress up as the friendly competitor’s mascot for the Halloween party during the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

      • Canonical Hiring Chromium Browser Engineers

        Canonical is now hiring a web browser engineers. Not just one but three positions have opened. The first of these is specifically targeted at improving Webkit and V8 features. WebKit and V8 are key parts of the Chrome/Chromium web browser. This alone doesn’t indicate a shift to chromium as Webkit has be used in other applications to render content. The second position is a interesting in that it focuses on developing both Chrome/Chromium and Firefox plugins. But the last position is rather telling: a specific Webkit/Chromium Engineer. According to the posting this position is responsible for both developing WebKit and Chromium features.

      • Why Ubuntu Should Just Focus on the Desktop Market

        Recently, at UDS, it was announced that Ubuntu would soon be coming to tablets, and smartphones, and other devices. Come 2014, Ubuntu, the most mainstream Linux distribution around, will be battling major players like Android, iOS, and Windows for the mobile OS market share.

        As exciting as it may sound to any Linux fan, it seems that this is simply one of the worst decisions Canonical has taken recently. Even though Ubuntu is struggling to cross the 1% desktop market share, Canonical is running around in multiple directions when they should focus on their core product, that is the desktop.

      • Ubuntu and I – Beauty Isn’t Enough

        I’m not a new Linux user. Actually, I’m about as far away from being a new Linux user as you can get. I’m perfectly comfortable getting down as low as you want to go, rolling in the grease, re-routing the pipes and wiring, or smashing about in the subatomic.

        So you Arch Linux cutie dilettantes, you go have your fun running your scripts and googling for what someone else did to fix something, and feel all big about yourselves. That’s wonderful. It’s good to learn. Maybe you’ll be solving some problems some day too, that other people will benefit from. But don’t think I need to hear anything about how wonderful Arch Linux is.

      • Ubuntu’s Maverick Mobile Move

        If there was ever any doubt as to Canonical’s true intentions with its touch-enabled Unity interface, those doubts were laid to rest last week.

        Unity has often been described as a “mobile-inspired” interface, and voila! Canonical has finally admitted that it plans to bring Ubuntu onto mobile devices. At last, it all makes sense!

        While few have questioned the reasons behind Canonical’s move in this so-called “post-PC” era, the timing is another matter. Plans call for Ubuntu to arrive on mobile shores no sooner than 2014, causing more than a few furrowed brows last week in the Linux blogosphere.

      • Things that I do after installing Ubuntu (with Unity)

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin unveiled

        With the Ubuntu developers summit wrapping up last Friday, there is some news of what to expect for the upcoming release of version 12.04, Precise Pangolin (a scaly anteater). Keep in mind that this is a LTS (long term support) release, so there isn’t going to be anything Earth shattering in the announcements due to the fact that Canonical and the Ubuntu development team will spend five years supporting Precise Pangolin in an effort to clean up as many bugs and functionality issues as possible. That being said, there was still some interesting news and features discussed during the week long event that will interest devotees of the open platform.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit Summary

        The Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” release has now ended in Orlando, Florida. Here is a brief summary of some of the interesting news and discussions that took place for this leading Linux desktop distribution.

      • The Official Ubuntu Book 6th Edition Review

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 12 Will Come With Gnome 3 And MGSE

          Extraordinary changes will be included to the upcoming release Lisa the code name of Linux Mint 12. Clement Lefebvre Linux Mint project leader just revealed Linux Mint 12 preview features Gnome 3 along with Mint Gnome Shell Extensions “MGSE” and many improvements.

        • Linux Mint 12 ‘Lisa’ to Come with a Customized Gnome 3 Desktop

          Linux Mint 12 ‘Lisa’ will come with its own customized desktop and it will be based on Gnome 3. The core desktop will be based on a series of Gnome Shell extensions called “MGSE” (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) that will provide a layer on top of Gnome 3.

        • Xubuntu, so close, but not quite there

          Let me set the stage for my recent migration to Xubuntu. On one of my machines — my main machine actually — I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10 only to find the desktop starting to randomly lock up. So I did what any one would do: I migrated my other test machine to Bodhi Linux, installed Dropbox to sync all of my work, and then began the process of re-installing Ubuntu 11.10 onto the new machine. Thing is, although I think Ubuntu Unity has come a long way, it’s just not the desktop for me. So, with that in mind, I installed GNOME 3 (aka Gnome Shell). What did that do? Brought my little machine to a screeching halt. This behavior was partially expected, but not welcome.

          My next step in the test was to try a different distribution sporting GNOME 3 — Fedora. Throwing caution to the wind (as I am wont to do) I downloaded the 64 bit beta ISO and installed. It looked as if everything was going to work out just perfectly. Oh, how looks can be so deceiving. When the installation completed, I attempted to log in — only to find that the Nouveau drivers are still, well, bad.

        • Linux Mint 12 To Use GNOME Shell By Default, MATE Might Be Included On The DVD Too

          According to a new LinuxMint blog post, Linux Mint 12 will use GNOME 3 with GNOME Shell by default. For those who prefer the classic GNOME 2.3x desktop, MATE (a GNOME 2.3x fork) will probably be included on the DVD edition.

        • Linux Mint Reveals The Top Secret Project, To Overtake Ubuntu Soon

          We just learned that Linux Mint is doing something which was expected from a project like this, yet we never thought of it – a way to embrace newer technologies without having the user to relearn everything or to lose some features or functionality.

        • Linux Mint Is The New Ubuntu

          Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, proudly announced on his blog that the upcoming Linux Mint 12 operating system will feature a new desktop interface built on top of the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

Devices/Embedded

• Questions remain over $25 Raspberry Pi

  The Raspberry Pi, a $25 working computer the size of a credit card, is almost ready for public consumption. But questions remain.

  The device was first revealed in May, with the brainchild behind it, former games developer David Braben, revealing the specs as a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128Mb of RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, USB 2.0, HDMI and Composite outputs, an SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot, and open source software including Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, and Python. In August we saw a demo of the Raspberry Pi working, with it impressively managing to run Quake III.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Powers 45% of U.S. Smartphones: ComScore

      New comScore data on mobile usage shows the number of smart phones continues to grow rapidly, increasing 12% from June of 2011 to 87.4 million in Sept. of 2011, and that the Android platforms continues to grain market share, hitting 44.8%.

    • Barnes & Noble unveils Nook Tablet at $249 as Kindle Fire rival

      The Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet was announced on Monday as the bookseller’s answer to the coming Amazon Kindle Fire and Kobo Vox tablets.
      The Nook Tablet is now on pre-order and will ship to Barnes & Noble stores and other retailers (Target, Staples, Wal-Mart, Office Max and many others) late next week at a price of $249 — about $50 more than the Kindle Fire.
      But for the extra $50, the Nook Tablet offers beefier specs than the Kindle Fire that, Chief Executive William Lynch argued in unveiling the new Barnes & Noble device will add up to a faster, smoother experience when reading books, playing games or watching movies.

    • Ubuntu: Power Consumption, KVM, Mozilla, Etc

The Time Weaver – Where FOSS Meets Fantasy

Thomas is a busy guy. A father of two, he and his wife live in a small town in Ontario Canada. He holds his college degree in Network Engineering and currently works as a software developer for one of the leading vinyl siding manufacturers in the world.

Sounds like a fairly well grounded guy huh?

Don’t bet on it.

While Thomas goes about his business in this world, acting all normal and everything, he also dwells in a world where Evil Warlord Wizards cast mayhem and misery on the land. But all things in balance, Good battles evil, sometimes with ambiguous results.

Events

• Zentrifuge: Future Day

  AJ and me today went to Zentrifuge again where we had the openSUSE Conference 2011 a couple of weeks ago. We were invited for a coffee and had a feedback session about the conference event. It was a success for both openSUSE and the Zentrifuge.

Web Browsers

• The Holy Grail Of Chrome-To-Firefox User Conversion?

  A Firefox developer just posted some revealing information about a process of how Chrome users could be converted into Firefox users. The good news may be that there is now a reasonable hint why Mozilla may not be able to gain users once they have become Chrome users. The bad news is that Firefox, in its current form, is not equipped with a critical feature to lure influential Chrome users.

• Mozilla Dev on How to Convert Chrome User to Firefox

  To survive the battle with IE and Chrome, Mozilla will have to find more compelling reasons for people to use Firefox – or reasons to draw people back to Firefox. Nicholas Nethercote, who works on memory improvements in Firefox, described why getting users back from Chrome may nearly be impossible, and the reason why casual users may steer clear of Firefox.

• Mozilla

  • How To Restore Firefox Bookmarks

  • Download Firefox 8 Final for Linux

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• My talk at the LibreOffice Conference in Paris

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Free As In Freedom: But Whose Freedom?

  It would be hard to overstate the contribution of Richard Stallman to the digital world. The founding of the GNU project and the creation of the GNU General Public License laid the foundations for a wide range of free software that permeates computing from smartphones to supercomputers. Free software has also directly inspired like-minded movements based around sharing, such as open access and open content (Wikipedia, notably).

  At the heart of everything Stallman does lies a desire to promote freedom, specifically the freedom of the software user, by constraining the freedom of the developer in the way the code is distributed. That’s in contrast to BSD-style licenses, say, where the developer is free to place additional restrictions on the code, thus reducing the freedom of the user.

  [...]

  As with software licenses, the question once more comes down to: whose freedom are we talking about here? The freedom for creators to decide how their creations are to be used, or the freedom of users to do with those creations as they wish? The fact that Stallman straddles this divide shows there are no easy answers.

Project Releases

• mdds 0.5.4 released

  I’m happy to announce that version 0.5.4 of Multi-Dimensional Data Structure (mdds) is available for download from the link below.

Openness/Sharing

• 4 strange places to find open source

  Years ago I hung out with a friend who had a prosthetic hand. It was a stiff plastic hand, like a store mannequin hand, that could open and close in a simple grip. It didn’t have much functionality, but it had a bit of fun factor — my friend liked to remove it to scratch his back. In public, of course, with a freaked-out audience. Americans seem to have a hard time looking at these sorts of things.

Programming

• Eclipse Xtends Java

  The Eclipse Foundation has quietly launched a new language, Xtend, which it says is designed to address shortcomings of Java without replacing it.

  The aim of Xtend is to create more readable code, to add features that Java needs but doesn’t have, and to offer “a convenient alternative in situations where Java doesn’t shine”.

• GCC 4.6, LLVM/Clang 3.0, AMD Open64 Compiler Benchmarks

Why can’t Apple get iPhone’s design right?

For a company praised for such great design, Apple sure seems troubled getting out an iPhone that works right. Death Grip — and its signal stifling capability — marred iPhone 4 from Day One. Consumer Reports still won’t recommend the handset, even after giving it a high rating. Successor 4S comes along and, uh-oh, suffers from heap, big battery-life problems. The story is everywhere — even Apple apologist blogs report it. Perhaps the company should invest more resources in functional design than appearance.

Funny How Microsoft’s Views On Responsibility To Competitors Differ Based On Who’s In The Antitrust Hot Seat

We recently mentioned the latest round of Microsoft’s antitrust fight, dating back to some of its actions around Windows 95. To be clear, I think the action against Microsoft is pretty silly. It’s pretty clear that the market is quite capable of dealing with any perceived Microsoft “monopoly” and routing around it. That said, one thing that is quite stunning in all of this is the sheer hypocrisy from Microsoft in discussing this case, as compared to Microsoft’s own efforts to drag Google into an antitrust battle as well. Now, some will shrug and say that this is basic self-interest on Microsoft’s part. It’s always going to favor things that help Microsoft. But it certainly seems to weaken the validity and credibility of Microsoft’s arguments.

Back in March, we noted just how ridiculous this was, when Microsoft complained about Google to the European Union, whining that Google made it difficult for Microsoft’s platforms (mainly the Bing search engine and Microsoft’s mobile platform) to access YouTube video data. At the time Microsoft’s General Counsel sure seemed to insist that Google had a duty to engineer its platform to make life easier for its competitors.

Idaho National Laboratory to move to Google Apps

On Tuesday, Unisys plans to announce that it has won a contract to move the employees to Google Apps for Government, a suite of services that includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.

Windows Update Never Stops Sucking

Ok, you’ve heard this rant before, so I’ll keep it short… I picked up a new netbook yesterday (more on that in the next day or two, when I have had a chance to try it out and load a few Linux distributions on it). It is VERY new, pretty much fresh off the production line, evidenced by the latsest AMD C-60 CPU for example. So, first I fire up Windows 7 Stupor Edition, and let it go through 30 minutes or so of “Initial Setup and Configuration”. Then I go to Windows Update, which says there are 25 “Important” updates, of which 24 have been selected for installation. No hint as to why that last lonely update didn’t get selected, nothing in the pitiful descriptions of the updates which indicates incompatibility of that one with any of the others. Never mind, let it install those 24, reboot, go back to Windows Update and select that last lonely one for installation, run that… SURPRISE! When that one has finished, a new one has now appeared. Grrr. Ok, select that one, install it (of course, each of these select/install updates causes a “Windows Recovery Point” to be created). Hmmm. Installing just that one new update is taking 15 minutes or so, thrashing around on the disk, not giving any status information other than “Update 1 of 1 is being installed…”. Ok, that one is done, now it wants to reboot, so let it do that. Finally, updates are done… or not…. GRRRR! Now there is one “Optional Update” that has suddenly materialized in the list… Ok, select that one, and install it – creating yet another “Recovery Point” in the process. Gee, this at least provides ample proof for my description of Windows as “The world’s only automatically self-destroying operating system”. When that “optional update” has finally installed, reboot one more time just to be sure, and check Windows Update again. Oh my God. OH MY GOD!!!! Suddenly there are EIGHT MORE *IMPORTANT” UPDATES to be installed! Where the HELL did those come from?!?!?!

Security

• Hard drive encryption has never been easier

• Demystifying the Chinese Hacking Industry: Earning 6 Million a Night

• Ex-U.S. general urges frank talk on cyber weapons

  The United States should be more open about its development of offensive cyber weapons and spell out when it will use them as it grapples with an increasing barrage of attacks by foreign hackers, the former No. 2 uniformed officer in the U.S. military said.

Finance

• Occupy protesters declare Goldman Sachs guilty, get arrested

  In the latest round of demonstrations calling for corporate accountability, 16 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested in front of the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

  A New York Police Department spokesperson confirmed that nine men and seven women were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

• Corzine steps down at collapsed firm, hires lawyer

  He set out to create a mini-Goldman Sachs. In the end, he built a mini-Lehman Brothers.

  Former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s resignation Friday from the securities firm he led capped a week of high drama and swift failure.

  MF Global collapsed into bankruptcy Monday, and Corzine has since hired a criminal defense attorney amid an FBI investigation into the disappearance of hundreds of millions of dollars in client money.

• No Change After All

  President Barack Obama told us Jon Corzine was looking out for the little guy.

  Never mind Mr. Corzine’s 1% pedigree as a former Goldman Sachs chairman. Never mind how Mr. Corzine essentially bought himself a U.S. Senate seat, spending his personal Goldman Sachs loot in one of the most expensive senatorial races ever. Never mind the dough Mr. Corzine stuffed in Mr. Obama’s pocket.

  Here’s what Mr. Obama said in October 2009 while stumping for Mr. Corzine’s re-election bid as the Democratic governor of New Jersey: