• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Getting Connected to Illinois State University ISUNET from Linux

Me: “I need the manual configuration instructions for ISUNet.”

Him: “Are you sure? Are you running Windows or Mac?”

Me: “Linux.”

I was slightly surprised at this point, normally saying that “L” word to customer support for tech trips them up a whole lot, this guy seemed to know his stuff though.

Him: “Oh, well the setup will vary with your system – but what you are looking for is WPA2 Protected EAP (PEAP) in your security settings. Once there just use your ISU login for the user name and password.”

A Windows user’s guide to Linux

This is your first step. Linux is not homogeneous like Windows or OS X. Linux comes in a range of different versions, called “distributions”. The majority of the underlying code in each of these distributions is the same with most of the differences being in the interface and some of the management tools. Choosing the right distribution can be tricky, especially as there are literally hundreds of versions of Linux available. Fortunately most of those you can forget about, for now. What you need is an easy to use version of Linux, which leaves you with a short-list of Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Mandriva and Linux Mint. Picking one of these will make you life easier as they are all easy to install and pretty simple to maintain.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Link Tech Show Episode 417

Kernel Space

• As Linux Turns 20, Hopes and Wishes for Its Next 20 Years

• What We Know For Sure on Linux’s 20th Anniversary

  Today, the Linux kernel is the most pervasive piece of software in all of computing. It runs the world’s stock exchanges, transportation systems, consumer devices, smart grid technologies, 90 percent of the world’s supercomputers and much, much more.

• March of the Penguin: Ars looks back at 20 years of Linux

• The history of Linux

  When Linus Torvalds released Linux 0.01 on the internet 20 years ago, his idea of a free Unix clone to which anyone could contribute touched a creativenerve in people. Today, it would be impossible to imagine an IT world without Linux.

  It has been twenty years since Linus Torvalds programmed the first few lines of what would become the Linux kernel. An IT student at the time, Torvalds wasn’t yet thinking of an operating system, he just wanted to explore the capabilities of his PC’s 386 processor. Eventually, his memory management, process switching and I/O experiments developed into something that resembled a rudimentary operating system kernel.

• Twenty years of Linux

• Twenty Years of Linux according to Linus Torvalds

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, started the celebration of Linux’s 20th anniversary at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, but when is Linux’s real birthday? Is it August 25th, when Linus announced the project? October 5th 1991, when 0.02, the first public release was made? I decided to go straight to the source and asked Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds.

• At 20, Linux is invisible, ubiquitous

• As Steve Jobs Steps Down, Linux Turns 20: Which Changed the World More?

• Linux Turns 20 Today—And Shut Up, Yes, It Still Matters

  Your TiVo? Linux. Along with a lot of the other cable and set top media boxes you might have stuffed under your TV.

  The New York Stock Exchange? The whole shebang runs on a cluster of HP Linux boxes. Those boxes are more important than the ones under your TV.

  Google something. Go ahead! That search? Executed on servers running customized Linux.

  That ATM you withdrew cash from last night? An increasing number are using a Linux variant.

  And of course, there is the tremendous number of servers powered by Linux that run the websites you frequent daily.

• Graphics Stack

  • The Sad State Of GPU Drivers For BSD, Solaris

    Developers on the mailing list and end-users (in the forums) have been largely positive about this move to drop the aging and not actively maintained Mesa code. The only developer actively objecting to stripping out the old code is Luc Verhaegen. Michel Dänzer raises a (minor) interesting point though, “DRI1 is basically the only reason for the r300 and r600 drivers to still live in the light of r300g and r600g, but I believe they (along with radeon and r200) are still pretty far from dead on non-Linux OSs.”

Applications

• Music Player Tomahawk 0.2 Tweaks Appearance, Adds New Features

  Yeah folks, we know it often feels like that there are too many music players available for Linux, but when they’re as innovative as Tomahawk we’re more than happy to take them for a spin…

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Data Deduplication with Linux

  • Burning UDF Video DVD in Linux

  • Encrypting data on USB flash drives with LUKS

  • Red Hat 5 STIG: Kernel Modules

  • How to Speed Up Package Downloads and updates with Apt-fast

  • Generating a random MAC address

  • Using PyGame in a PyGtk App

  • How-To: Create ISO Images from Command-Line

  • Download all the shortlisted ubuntu 11.10 oneiric wallpapers in zip file

• Games

  • Interview: OpenXcom developer Daniel

  • Server Monitoring With Icinga On Debian Squeeze

  • My Favorite Little Games

    “Little games” is a term I use to describe those that are quick to start, easy to play, and quick to exit. These are the ones that usually come installed by default with most Linux distributions. Some have GNOME and KDE counterparts, but all are fun. Here are a few of my favorites.

  • Best In Show Solitaire Coming To GNU/Linux !

    Graduate Games are soon going to release their unique dog solitaire game Best in Show Solitaire, you can preorder the game at lower price and play the beta now !

Desktop Environments

• Five Things the Enlightenment Desktop Does Best

  I am a huge fan of the Enlightenment desktop. The following items in this post are things I believe the Enlightenment desktop (and it’s developers) are doing better than some of the other open source desktops.

• Linus Ditches KDE and Gnome (so what?)

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KMail – A Different Kind Of Email Client For KDE

  • Aaron Seigo talks about the KDE SC 5.0 – and more

    Applications and workspaces will follow the frameworks – Plasma Active’s influence and why the traditional desktop won’t be killed by the mobile space

    After years of focusing on further improving KDE4 two weeks ago the developers of the free desktop announced the next big step for their project: KDE Frameworks 5.0. But as long-time developer – and Plasma team leader – Aaron Seigo points out in an interview with derStandard.at/web, the source-incompatible changes shall be held to a minimum, making it easy for developers to port their applications. He goes on to explain that Frameworks 5.0 is only the first step and new Applications and Workspace releases are to follow later, talks about Plasma active and further areas of collaboration with the other big free desktop: GNOME.

  • Testing out Amarok 2.4.3′s Dynamic Playlists

    I’ve spoken about Amarok’s Dynamic Playlists before. Despite my best attempts, I couldn’t quite get it to work correctly. However, Amarok 2.4.3 has revamped the dynamic playlists engine and interface, so I wanted to check it out and see if it worked better as well as testing out some of the new features. For one thing, they changed the interface to more closely match the interface for static playlists. See:

  • Flash 11: It contains a kcmodule for KDE !

Distributions

• New Releases

  • IPFire open source firewall improves network throughput

    The IPFire project has announced the release of an update, Core Update 51, to version 2.9 of its IPFire open source firewall. According to Project Leader and developer Michael Tremer, the latest update addresses several security issues in the Linux kernel – Core Update 51 is based on the 2.6.32.45 longterm Linux kernel – and improves the distribution’s overall stability and performance.

  • Arch Linux moves up to Linux 3.0

    The Arch Linux team has released the first new all-in-one update for its minimalist, rolling-release distribution in 15 months. The Arch Linux 2011.08.19 installation media features support for Linux 3.0 and the syslinux bootloader, and offers experimental Btrfs and NILFS2 file-systems, and more flexible source-file selection.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Getting to Gold

    Today, in celebration of 20th birthday of Linux, we totally freezed Mandriva 2011 repository. No more additions, no more fixes, no more anything. We started the final countdown till “copying to gold”.

• Gentoo Family

  • Digging deeper with Gentoo Linux

    Gentoo is not like other Linux distribution. The Gentoo swims faster than other penguins, and dives deeper. Where more fashionable distributions worry about fast installation and ease of use, Gentoo worries about efficient compilation and degrees of customisation. Richard Hillesley explains its history.

    Gentoo is not about ease of use or making installation easier for the new user. Computers are what you do with them, and most users have little or no knowledge of how their systems are put together, and care even less. Gentoo is for the users who want to reach under the hood, get their hands dirty, and learn.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat and Telstra Partner to Bring Enterprise Solutions to the Cloud

  • Finnish City of Kankaanpää Cuts Project Hardware Costs by 50 Percent with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

  • Red Hat will move to downtown Raleigh

    The two biggest corporate and real estate stories in the Triangle converged Thursday as software maker Red Hat agreed to occupy one of Progress Energy’s two downtown Raleigh office towers.

    The deal will bring hundreds of high-paid technology workers downtown and help offset the job losses that are expected to occur as a result of Progress’ merger with Charlotte-based Duke Energy.

  • Fedora

    • Free as in sake: The story of Koji

      Koji is an open source build system. While many are familiar with Koji because of the Fedora Project’s use of it, Koji is a generic system that is used by different groups around the world.

    • Who uses Fedora as a server?

      Is Fedora really not a good choice for a server? I think it all depends on the situation. But first, let’s try to figure out what are the requirements for a distribution to be called server-worthy.

      Some things that servers require are: stability, security updates, mature software, long-term deployment, support, no incompatible changes, point-in-time release, etc. But what do these attributes really mean? Stability means that the server performs well, without unexpected and unknown issues causing downtime. Timely security updates must be provided in forms of package updates, etc. Mature software is one which has been pounded upon by many, many users in different environments and has performed well. Long-term deployment means that if you plan to deploy your server for many years, it should be able to handle the length of time without needing constant attention. Support includes software and knowledge support: can you find people to help you if something does go wrong? No incompatible changes refers to package updates, where no major functionality changes are made. Point-in-time release means fixing the design of your server, from hardware to OS to applications; if a package is at major version 1.2.3 then it should remain at 1.2.3 (it could be 1.2.3.1 or 1.2.3.10 but always 1.2.3) and not become 1.2.5 or something newer when an update is applied.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10 (So Far) Screenshot Tour

        So here we are in the thick of the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot development cycle, and I am really excited about the progress that is being made. I thought it could be interesting to show off some of the work that is going on with a quick screenshot tour.

        This cycle has been very much focused on integrating GNOME3 into Ubuntu and focusing on fit and finish both at a software and design level on Unity and it’s components. The goal with Ubuntu 11.10 is to build on the accomplishments in Ubuntu 11.04 and to continue refining the experience.

      • Ten things to do after installing Ubuntu (humor)

        There’s nothing you need TO DO after installing a new Linux distribution. Ubuntu, as well as many of its counterparts, offer a complete common experience, with a very decent set of programs, tools, drivers, and aesthetics. In recent Ubuntu versions, you get to install codecs and updates while installing, so there’s even less fuss. A handful of useful applications has been removed from the default installation, like GIMP, but then, it’s not meant for everyone out there. Regressions must never happen, but then again, this applies to every distro out there.

      • Ubuntu Development Update

      • Minimized Window Thumbnails in the Switcher

      • Running Wayland On Ubuntu 11.10

        It’s approaching the one-year anniversary of when Mark Shuttleworth announced Ubuntu is going to deploy Wayland with Unity, eventually. As those know that pay attention to the continual flow of information from Phoronix regarding the next-generation Wayland Display Server and Linux graphics drivers in general, it’s being developed at a brisk pace and with several key open-source projects now betting big on its adoption, but how’s it playing in the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 11.10?

      • Distro Breakdown in the Netflix/Linux Petition

        Ubuntu 11433 69.2%
        Fedora/RH/CentOS 1600 9.7%
        Mint 1092 6.6%
        Arch 891 5.4%
        Debian 856 5.2%
        SuSE 596 3.6%
        Other 50 0.3%

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot frozen

        Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” has been frozen: now that the beta and user interface (UI) freezes have been announced, any further changes to the range of new features or user interface will require explicit approval by the release team. However, bug fixes will continue to be accepted so that they can be integrated into the forthcoming Beta 1 of Ubuntu 11.10, which is now being finalised. The first beta is scheduled for release next Thursday (1 September).

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Quick Look at Bodhi Linux 1.1.0

          A lot has been written about Bodhi Linux in its short existence. Bodhi appeared out of nowhere not even a year ago it seems and quickly gained followers aplenty. Usually there’s a good reason for something like this. So much has been written in such little amount of time, I’m not going to go into all the aspects of this little distro, for example that Bodhi means Enlightenment, a nice word play on the default desktop environment of choice E17, just a quick look.

          Actually, mentioning or for that matter running Bodhi without this desktop would make little sense as it is its sole purpose to bring us a nicely customized and integrated Enlightenment desktop that the lead developer and founder Jeff Hoogland evidently is so fond of. This is tightly wrapped around a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS core with an updated 2.6.39 kernel in 1.1.0, a good choice that guarantees utmost stability, at least in Ubuntu terms, and steers clear of potential pitfalls later versions might have introduced with all the upheaval moving from Gnome to Unity. Thus, after almost all earlier releases were test releases, this latest one promises a degree of maturity, which is probably underscored by the fact that it hasn’t been updated for nearly three months, which for the Bodhi project is a long time.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • SKorea building new Open-Source OS for smartphones: report

  • Android

    • Android is on fire

      Because Linux is free software and belongs to no-one, it is often assumed that Linux is “surrounded by legal uncertainties,” but Linux is no more or less prone to legal uncertainties than any other software. Richard Hillesley looks at the latest attempt to cast fear, uncertainty and doubt around the GPL and the Linux kernel…

      The Linux kernel is released under the GPLv2. The GPL was devised as a means of enhancing and protecting the freedoms of the user, the coder, and the code.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • $200 Android tablet features 1.2GHz Cortex-A8 processor

    X10 has begun selling a seven-inch Android 2.3 tablet for $200. The X10 AirPad has a 1.2GHz, Cortex-A8-based Rockchip 2918 processor, 4GB of flash storage, a seven-inch, 800 x 480 pixel capacitive display, a two-megapixel camera, plus an HDMI output delivering 1080p, says the company.

New Options Available for Mobile Open Source Apps on USB Drives

Are you using a pocket USB drive to store applications and backup data? If not, the time is ripe to do so. You can get entire sets of useful open source applications in one download for free on a USB Flash drive, and the drives themselves offer a lot of capacity now for very little money. Here are just a few good, free resources you can take advantage of with a pocket USB drive and a few minutes to do a download.

TransferSummit: Evolving open innovation in software

In the first of a short series of articles introducing the upcoming TransferSummit in Oxford, Ross Gardler and Sander van der Waal explain the principle of open innovation and how this applies to free and open source software.

HP Should Put WebOS into the Open Source Pot

Modders offer bounty for HP TouchPad Android port – Update

Following the recent fire sale of HP’s TouchPad tablet, members of the Hack N Mod hacker and modder community have setup a cash bounty for the first functional port of Google’s Android OS to replace the default Linux-based webOS mobile operating system. The Hack N Mod prize is intended to “speed up the porting process” and is currently valued at a total of $1,500.

HP’s webOS Decision Sends Shock Waves Through Developer Community

Events

• Desktop Summit: Claire Rowland on service design

  When thinking about user interface design, many will focus on the application itself, but Claire Rowland, an interaction designer and researcher, looks at things a bit differently. She came to the Desktop Summit in Berlin to describe “service design”, which encompasses more than just the interface for a particular application. Looking at the service that is being provided, and focusing on the “touchpoints” for that service, makes for a more holistic view of interface design. That will become increasingly important as we move into a world where more and more “ordinary” devices become connected to the internet.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Rapid Release Process

    Recently Mozilla implemented a rapid release process, where we release a version of Firefox every 6 weeks. This has involved changing a number of our processes. It’s also raised some new issues. For example, some enterprises find the idea of rapid browser change to be disconcerting at best and potentially unmanageable at worst. Add-on compatibility is another. I acknowledge these issues are complex and difficult. There is work to be done to make the rapid release process smoother and hopefully more useful to more of our userbase. I’d like to describe why I believe the rapid release process is important enough to pursue despite these difficulties.

  • On Second Thought Firefox Will Keep Its Version Numbers

  • reactions, thoughts, comments, etc.

  • That UK.gov Firefox cookie leakage snafu explained

    If you’ve used the latest version of Firefox to visit a UK government website in the last few weeks, you may have noticed something unusual in the browser address bar.

Databases

• Can PostgreSQL pickup where MySQL left off?

  EnterpriseDB, a provider of enterprise-class products and services based on PostgreSQL, today announced Postgres Plus Cloud Server, which the company has billed as “a full-featured, Oracle-compatible, enterprise-class PostgreSQL database-as-a-service for public and private clouds with support for Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, and GoGrid.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle Does Some Open-Source Good With TTM

  While Oracle is most often criticized since their acquisition of Sun Microsystems for shafting the open-source community, in particular for OpenOffice, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and other projects, not everything they do is bad for open-source and Linux. They have VirtualBox, various kernel developers, Chris Mason works for them on Btrfs, etc. They also still employ some graphics developers. One of these developers for some time now has been working on improving the GPU memory management situation in virtualized environments.

Healthcare

• Open source continues to thrive in health care

  As the Linux kernel celebrates its 20th anniversary today, the impact of open source and free software in broad areas of technology continues to be felt. A new report from Black Duck Software reveals that in the health care sector, the number of open source software projects has risen by 31 percent since last year.

  According to Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, open source software projects are accelerating the pace of software development in the health care industry, which is typically a slower-moving sector than other technologies, such as mobile.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • New interface for Nagios fork, Icinga 1.5

    The developers behind Nagios fork, Icinga, have released version 1.5 of the open source monitoring package. Icinga 1.5 has a new user interface which includes a pre-installed integrated reporting tool, a guide to which can be found on the Icinga wiki. It is based on Jasper Reports and includes 20 frequently used templates, such as a list of available services and the top 10 problematic hosts or services.

Open Hardware

• Exclusive: How Facebook is open-sourcing its data centers and servers

Quitting With No Notice

Apple may or may not change without Steve. Assuming he was OK with suing the world instead of innovating, I won’t miss him. If I were his employer, I would not mind him quitting with no notice. I would say, “Good riddance!” Perhaps his replacement will realize that having half the world hate the company is not good for business. Think of all the people loving Android who see their “fix” in terms of importations from the Far East jeopardized by groundless legal suits. Are they ever going to feel the same about Apple? Nope. Cross Apple off their shopping list forever. How about the suppliers of Android/Linux hardware components? Are they going to want to support Apple when Apple is trying to take away their livelihood? Nope. What about the many distributors of Android/Linux? One even asked the US president to block the ITC on this. What about Google? Is Google ever going to want to cooperate with Apple on anything after 2011? Nope. Apple is sawing off the limb on which it rests, people being comfortable with Apple’s existence.

Apple’s Jobsless Future

As a FOSS supporter, I’ve often found myself POd by actions taken by Steve Jobs, especially in recent months as he’s pulled out his patent portfolio and declared war on Android. However, I’ve never viewed his actions through the same lens I’ve used to see the anti-FOSS moves made by the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer or Larry Ellison. Indeed, I’ve always viewed Jobs as something of a kindred spirit and have understood that his commitment to protecting Apple has been brought about because he knows what it’s like to be ripped off by the likes of Microsoft. It’s happened to him in the past and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let it happen to him again. I like Jobs. I admire him. But he still pisses me off sometimes.

Mac Lion blindly accepts any LDAP password

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Secrecy, leaks, and the real criminals

  Shane notes that the government’s censorship effort “amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath,” particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez — who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ — that touts the benefits of the CIA’s “tough” actions, propagandistically entitled: “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.”

• Why IP Addresses Alone Don’t Identify Criminals

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks: US links Australia’s Afghan partner to drugs

• WikiLeaks cables reveal fears over China’s nuclear safety

  China has “vastly increased” the risk of a nuclear accident by opting for cheap technology that will be 100 years old by the time dozens of its reactors reach the end of their lifespans, according to diplomatic cables from the US embassy in Beijing.

  The warning comes just weeks after the government in Beijing resumed its ambitious nuclear expansion programme, that was temporarily halted for safety inspections in the wake of the meltdown of three reactors in Fukushima, Japan.

• WikiLeaks uses Twitter to crowdsource latest releases

  What to do when you have been given a plethora of official communiqués and you need to read each one of them to uncover a potential story?

  The answer: crowdsource.

• WikiLeaks Cables Deal Fresh Blow to Yudhoyono, Indonesian Government

  Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been heavily criticized in a new batch of US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks on Wednesday.

Finance

• Rothschild Is Now In TBTF Plunge Protection Business

  Following the already failed attempt by captured pan-European regulators to stop the local bank Friend-o treatment by instituting a short-selling ban, whose effectiveness as we pointed out lasted, oh, about 7 days, we find just what Plan B is. And, yes, Rothschild is involved. From the WSJ: “Societe Generale SA, whose shares have come under severe pressure in recent weeks, said Tuesday that it had signed a liquidity contract with Rothschild & Cie. to prevent excessive volatility in its stock price.” That’s right: Rothschild is now in the Plunge Protection business. And they all have the ECB to thank for it: after years of not learning from the New York Fed-Citadel Joint Venture, which “never” steps in at precisely the right time (wink wink), they have opened the market for third party PPT incursions. It only seems fitting that the bank that started it all, would step in and fill the void. Because after all if SocGen falls, Rothschild will sooner or later follow. That said, the official explanation is worth its weight in laughter: “The idea is not to keep the stock price high, but rather to keep it steady” a representative for Societe Generale said. After hearing such… brilliance… what really is there to say?

• What’s Really Bugging Goldman Sachs Investors: The Ticker

  Late Monday afternoon, after word broke on Reuters that Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., had hired Reid Weingarten, the criminal defense attorney with an especially scary list of white-collar clients, Goldman’s stock plunged and the firm went into damage control mode.

• Goldman Sachs VP Moonlighting as Issa Staffer, Working Hard to Make Elizabeth Warren Look Bad

  Think Progress had a fun story last week about Peter Haller, a former Goldman Sachs VP now working for Darrell Issa on the House Oversight Committee and advocating for the interests of the banks. Haller changed his name shortly before moving to work for the Oversight Committee.

  Now we learn that Haller was involved in the weak attempt by Patrick McHenry to embarrass Elizabeth Warren. Back in May, McHenry chaired a hearing with Warren and rescheduled the date several times, leading to Warren having to leave the hearing early. McHenry accused Warren of lying about the scheduling of the meeting.

• USDA Signs MOU with Rockefeller’s Council on Foundations to Exploit Rural America

• Inquiry over prisoners who painted home of ex-minister

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• More Windows 7 corruption and repair woes

  In comparison, GNU/Linux has similar repair software that is used by booting the repair DVD for the distribution. It scans the installed packages and repairs as necessary. Since the Linux boot sequence is far less complex than Windows, the kernel can at least boot and get the user to a command prompt (in case X11 can’t start), allowing for further troubleshooting of log files. Fortunately, I haven’t needed to run a repair like this for GNU/Linux in a long long time. Corruption and repairs just aren’t needed like they are in Windows. But, I’m guessing the latest GNU/Linux repair DVDs are very efficient at fixing issues, if any do come up.

Kernel Space

• he 20th Anniversary of Linux

• Linux @ 20: The Swiss Army knife of operating systems

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Migrate Joomla Content (Articles) Using phpMyAdmin

  • Changing Desktop Appearance On Linux Mint 11

• Games

  • Feature: Finding Success Through Open Source Game Development

    In a new Gamasutra feature, contributor Michael Thomsen looks at the sometimes surprising direction game development can take once its opened up to a group of excited enthusiasts and modders.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • [Clonezilla 1.2.10-7
    released]

  • [Tiny Core Linux 3.8.3 released]

• Red Hat Family

  • Finnish City of Kankaanpaa Cuts Project Hardware Costs by 50 Percent with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

    In 2008, the city’s information and communications technology (ICT) department faced several IT-related challenges. The management and configuration of individual desktops at several locations in and around the city, including diverse places such as public libraries and schools became very difficult to manage. In addition, there were numerous mission-critical solutions running on physical servers in its datacenter that presented a constant risk of downtime, which could directly impact business continuity. Lastly, the effect of running IT services on a limited number of physical servers increased complexity when deploying new applications, services or during hardware migration projects, which the city found to be both time consuming and expensive.

  • Telstra cloud certified Red Hat Enterprise Linux ready

    elstra has received Red Hat Enterprise Linux certification providing certainty to Australian organisations moving into Telstra’s cloud computing environment.

Devices/Embedded

• SilverStone DC01: An Entry Into The Linux NAS Market

• $25 PC alpha board successfully runs Linux

  Late last month we reported that the $25 PC had gone into alpha production. That meant the spec of the board had been finalized by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and they wanted hardware to start testing. Now they have an alpha board to play with.

  The alpha board is significantly larger than the final product will be, but as testament to just how small this thing is even scaled up, the alpha version is about the size of 3 credit cards. The final version will be credit-card sized.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Bringing an Unloaded Knife to a Gunfight

      The court in the Netherlands has thrown out Apple’s charges of infringement of a design patent againts Samsung only asking Samsung to change a swipe-scroll feature to clear them for importation. Apple lost huge points for fudging pictures and claiming the shape of a tablet was their idea.

    • Samsung v Apple in NL: Happy selling, Samsung!

    • HTC Bliss Handled in The Wild

    • Millennial Media: Android Leads All Mobile Platforms with 61% Share

      The latest Millennial Media ‘Mobile Mix’ has landed today and it shows Android continuing its dominance over all other mobile platforms. According to their ad network metrics, Android has grown 15% month-over-month and now has a 61% share of overall smartphone impressions. Apple comes in at a distant second place with 21% of the market, down six points from the month before. For whatever reason, the dip was considerably bigger than the previous few months which only saw slight 1% declines. Coming in third, RIM and their BlackBerry platform also dipped a point to 14% of the pie.

Infoblox and Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) Team to Help Optimize Development of Critical Open Source Internet Infrastructure Software

Taiwan should not overlook Korea moving to develop open-source smartphones

Events

• NoSQL Now! Conference to Open This Week in San Jose

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Fantastic Chrome Extensions for Linux Users

• Mozilla

  • How To Make Firefox Look And Feel More Like Chrome

  • Mozilla WebAPI wants to replace native apps with HTML5

    Mozilla has launched an ambitious new project aimed at breaking down the proprietary app systems on today’s mobile devices. The project, dubbed WebAPI, is Mozilla’s effort to provide a consistent, cross-platform, web-based API for mobile app developers. Using WebAPI, developers would write HTML5 applications rather than native apps for iOS, Android, and other mobile platforms.

SaaS

• Eucalyptus Open Source Cloud Gets High-Availability Injection

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – Damages Report – Try Again, Oracle

  The court heard the oral arguments on the Daubert motion last Thursday and rendered its decision [PDF] on the same – back to the drawing boards, Oracle. But we shouldn’t be too quick to draw a blanket conclusion in favor of Google from Judge Alsup’s order. Rather, we need to parse it and consider what the order says.

Healthcare

• OpenEMR achieves full ONC certification

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Fellowship interview with Richard Shipman

  Richard Shipman, Teaching Fellow at the Computer Science department of Aberystwyth University, has extensive experience of working with Free Software and discussing its strengths and weaknesses with others.

Licensing

• Why the GPL sky isn’t falling

  With all of the talk about the license for the Linux kernel being violated by Google and downstream vendors of the Android operation system, I wanted to find out what would happen in a worst-case scenario.

  Specifically, if someone wanted to sue a vendor for GPL non-compliance on behalf of the Linux kernel, who could do it, and what might happen next?

  To understand this, let’s back up and talk about how “ownership” of the Linux kernel works. Throughout this discussion, I will be talking about the Linux kernel proper, not any form of the broader Linux operating system (aka GNU/Linux, if you’re so inclined). Ownership of the operating system is a little easier: Red Hat owns Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE owns SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and so on.

Standards/Consortia

• Bart Hanssens:

  next #odfplugfest interop event will be in Gouda, The Netherlands, November 17/18 plugtest.opendocsociety.org/doku.php #fedict #noiv #odf

Hardware

• Compact 1.8GHz Atom PC is just $200

Security

• Twitter adds SSL security

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• General Electric’s Jim Cramer Heads to Midwest to Cheerlead for Fracking

  Today, CNBC’s Mad Money with Jim Cramer’s “Invest in America” series will take the show to a seemingly unlikely locale. The crew will head to a place many would consider the middle of nowhere — the state of North Dakota.

• Plain Talk: Gore deplores BS skewing climate debate

  It has been nearly two years now since Wendell Potter, the former public relations expert for two of the nation’s largest health insurers, wrote the book “Deadly Spin,” exposing the misleading advertising campaigns and dirty tricks that insurance companies have used to try to scuttle meaningful health care reform.

  In the book Potter, who is now a senior fellow at the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, revealed that the health insurance industry has been using many of the same tactics and, indeed, some of the same people who successfully fought off tobacco regulation for decades. Tobacco interests used doctors and other medical “experts” to discredit the research that found tobacco causes cancer and numerous other diseases in not just smokers, but people around them.

Finance

• Cameron and Osborne did the Swiss tax deal to support tax evasion – there’s no other explanation

  The UK – Swiss tax deal does not meet with my approval, as some will have noticed. The deal is outlined here. My objections are littered through the blogs preceding this one.
  But let’s stand back for a moment and consider why the UK have done this deal – uniquely (because it seems unlikely that the supposedly similar German one will get parliamentary approval and so will not happen).

• Under Fire, Goldman Sachs CEO Hires Top-Notch Attorney

  Goldman Sachs’ shares nosedived nearly 5% after it confirmed that its chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, has hired Reid Weingarten, a high-profile Washington, D.C., defense attorney to defend the embattled executive in connection with the Department of Justice’s inquiry into Blankfein and other firm officials.

  The Justice probe is looking into findings in a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which alleges Goldman Sachs (GS) executives misled Congress and investors about its mortgage-backed securities deals.

• Could Blankfein Face Prison?

  The Goldman Sachs CEO didn’t get a big-time criminal-defense lawyer because he’s worried about an SEC wrist slap—there’s a real possibility of doing time, says former Goldman managing director Nomi Prins.

• Job Creation and America’s Future

  Right at the beginning the report hits us in the face with a few statistics highlighted in big text that succinctly capture the job picture in 2011: US jobs have declined by 7 million since December 2007; 20% of men are not working today, up from 7% in 1970; there has been a 23% drop in new business creation since 2007; the jobless recovery is projected to last 60 months; 10% of Americans move annually, down from 20% in 1985.

• Revealed: Former Goldman Sachs VP Turned Issa Staffer Supervised Scheduling Of Elizabeth Warren Incident (Think Progress)

  Last week, ThinkProgress revealed that Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) hired Peter Haller, a former Goldman Sachs vice president, as one of his top aides. Haller, who adopted his mother’s maiden name in 2008 and had escaped public scrutiny until now, coordinated an Oversight Committee letter to regulators demanding that they justify new Dodd-Frank rules impacting investment banks like his old employer, Goldman Sachs. After publication of our story, the Project on Government Oversight discovered more of Haller’s Oversight Committee letters, again on issues directly related to Goldman Sachs.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Plastic Bag Manufacturers Edit California Textbooks

  The American Chemistry Council (ACC), a lobbying group representing plastic bag manufacturers, successfully convinced the California Department of Education to rewrite its environmental textbooks and teachers’ guides to include positive statements about plastic grocery bags.

• Profit Motive Underlies Outbreak of Immigration Bills

  July 29 marked the one-year anniversary of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, a year that has seen similar anti-immigrant bills emerge across the country. Thanks to the release of over 800 pieces of “model legislation” by the Center for Media and Democracy, we can now pinpoint the source of the outbreak to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a bill factory for legislation that benefits the bottom line of its corporate members. While it has been reported that more immigrants behind bars means more income for ALEC member Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), less discussed has been how immigrant detention benefits commercial bail-bond agencies, an industry represented in ALEC through the American Bail Coalition.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Excellent Ways of Watching TV on Your Linux Desktop

Television, the little box that sits in the living room is something many people can’t do without. If you have hooked up your TV to your computer then you might want to check out the list of free and open-source television software we published earlier. However, if you want to watch your favorite programs according to your own schedule, you won’t have to rely on the idiot box anymore.

Thanks to the Internet, a lot of native as well as web applications have come up that make sure that you watch your favorite shows at the time and place you want. Here’s a list of ways in which you could get the best television experience on your very own Linux desktop:

Linux Hardware Support Better Than Windows 7

The concept of better is a subjective idea. What is better to me is possibly, even probably, not better to someone else. In my case, and in the case of some of my clients, Linux hardware support is “better”. I do not buy cutting edge hardware and tend to keep systems and peripherals until they stop working and can no longer be repaired at a reasonable cost. When a new release of my favorite Linux distribution comes out I can be 100% certain that my hardware that works with my current release will still work with the new release. That is something I just take for granted. This is not so in the Microsoft camp.

Zorin PC

After waiting like Job for the pre-installed Linux machines we deserved, we’ve arrived at a literal Garden of Eden full of worthy choices. A compelling new offering is the Zorin PC, a new mini-laptop that runs its own Linux distro, Zorin OS.

Audiocasts/Shows

• LOSS Weekly 179: The Apache Traffic Server

Kernel Space

• Linux is 20 years old today

  ONE MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT, a student at the University of Helsinki posted a query to the newsgroup comp.os.minix asking, “What would you like to see most in minix?” The student’s name was Linus Torvalds, and that Usenet post was the beginning of the Linux operating system (OS). The date was 25 August 1991, exactly 20 years ago today.

• It was twenty years ago today…

  Linus Torvalds didn’t use words half as lyrical as those of the immortal Beatles when he first announced the arrival of Linux 20 years ago (for those who don’t know, the headline for this article is taken from the famous album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released by the band in 1967).

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Server 1.11 Set For Release On Friday

    X.Org Server 1.11 was originally planned for release on the 19th of August, but following a one-week delay, it should be officially released this Friday. This is another significant update to the X.Org Server.

    X.Org Server 1.11 was originally planned for release last Friday, but last week was met by the unexpected passing of Keith Packard’s mother. With Keith serving as the release manager and being out of the game last week, the xorg-server release was obviously postponed.

  • Legacy Mesa Drivers Receive Their Death Sentence

    Last year at XDS 2010 Toulouse there was a discussion about killing old X.Org / Mesa drivers with fire. In particular, dropping all the old drivers that go un-maintained and have little in the way of users and modern functionality. Last year they decided to not really do much about it since these drivers cause little maintenance burden, but the topic has been brought up again and it sounds like these crusty old Linux drivers will finally receive their death sentence.

Applications

• Buy ‘Illumination Software Creator’ for Whatever You Want

• Pybackup Makes Saving and Restoring Easy as Pie

• Zero Install- Run software without the need to install it in your system

• Udev Discover – Tool for udev testers, coders, hackers and consumers

• Some console Utilities for Linux

• Shotwell 0.11.0 Released

  Shotwell photo manager 0.11.0 has been released bringing in new features and improvements.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing and configuring vsftpd for local unix users

  • Using ls

  • HOWTO : Pure-ftpd and atftpd on Back|Track 5

  • Enable automatic security update in Debian/Ubuntu

  • An Introduction to Find

  • Linux: Vim Freezing

  • Enable automatic security update in Debian/Ubuntu

  • Manage notification settings in KDE 4.x

  • KMail for both, those who want and those who dont want to view/reply to/forward HTML mails.

  • How to enable gzip compression in Apache 2.x

  • Sed Explained—Part 2: Data Structures and Operators

  • Installing / Using Classic GNOME Desktop In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

  • Broadcom wireless on Arch linux

  • How To Sync Subtitles, Audio and Video In VLC Player

  • Keep your disk clean with BleachBit

• Wine

  • Becoming a real Wine developer

    Today’s Wine consists of two equally important parts: a series of implementations pretending to be parts of Windows, and an ever-growing suite of unit tests. The implementations are straightforward once you know the right thing to do: if the waiter function in Windows’ restaurant.dll asks for a tip, then ours needs to as well. Similarly, the tests prove what the right thing actually is, on both Wine and Windows. They help us answer weird questions, like if the Windows waiter still demands a tip with a negative bill. Somewhere out there, there’s a Windows program that depends on this behavior, and it will be broken in Wine if we make the mistake of assuming Windows acts reasonably.

• Games

  • ‘In The Dark’ Kickstarter Drive Update, Plus Gameplay Footage

  • Building With Someone Else’s Blocks: Going Open Source With Games

    [While commercial products are rarely open source, many different projects have explored the possibilities of opening up the code to the community -- and in this feature, Gamasutra looks at some examples and speaks to the minds behind them.]

    The relationship between creator and audience in video games is more complicated than any other creative form. Developers can be artists, teachers, entertainers, scientists, or collaborators — and often they must fill several of those roles simultaneously.

  • Marball Odyssey Needs GNU/Linux Testers

    Ozzy from “Sunday Coders” told LGN that they are porting their game Marball Odyssey to GNU/Linux and need testers to make sure it would work on as many distros as possible.

  • BZFlag Tournament hosted by Ohava Open Computers

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Current Status of Plasma Media Center

    Happy to tell that Plasma Media Center has been improved a lot and have basic functionalities which is required in a mediacenter i.e Picture, Music and Video.

    First of all when user open MediaCenter then welcome screen gets opened in full-screen (required) modes i.e picture, Music and Video. User can enter into any of these mode by clicking on the icons.

  • Self Reproducing Machines at the Berlin Desktop Summit

    I look forward to software conferences because you can never tell which ideas will excite you most. In 2011 I would expect to be wowed by the latest in tablets or 3D rendering stuff, but actually it turned out that 3D printers and a bad attempt to build a toaster from first principles were what left me with the deepest impression at the Summit. Michael Meeks gave a Lightning Talk on his 3D printer RepRap project. It was really funny, about how he built five iterations of his printer, with each generation printing the next printer. Sadly it seemed his wife’s nylons suffered in the cause of science, but holy crap I’d personally happily donate my socks to further such an awsome project. I don’t know how Michael does it, I am a big fan of his blogs where he describes his thoughts on software such as Libre Office, massive child rearing efforts, attempts to fix his plumbling, lots of stuff on learning Christianity and of course those 3D printers. I couldn’t actually write a blog like that because I personally manage to do bugger all apart from mainly writing software, listening to music and drinking a lot of beer, and if I wrote about my life, by comparison sadly it would be a bit of a dull read. Oh well. I can only think about one thing for years on end it seems, and I wish I was more of a generalist like Michael. But if I wanted to think about one thing, there couldn’t be many better topics than self replicating machines.

  • KDE in France – the View from RMLL

    Geoffray found quite a few differences in attitudes towards the free desktop options on Linux compared to the previous year. The situation with Gnome 3 and Unity in Ubuntu has affected the view that people have of KDE. Some traditional free software users have given Unity a bad reception and are considering other options. The response to GNOME 3 seems to be more mixed. Some traditional Gnome users appreciate the new look and feel, while others do not really like it. Some think that the new desktop is not finished, likening it to the KDE 4.0 release. This creates some new interest in KDE, although of course some KDE people are excited to try out alternatives such as GNOME 3 and Unity.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.0 Live image release 1.5.0 available

    I just push a new GNOME 3.0 live image labelled as 1.5.0 (yes, I forgot to push 1.4.0 after I built it, so we are at 1.5.0 now

Distributions

• SalixOS: older brother of SLAX

  My first acquittance with Salix OS left very good impression on me.

• Use parted for large partitions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 almost ready for total freeze!

  • Some beautiful news from Mandriva team

    In latest ISO We fixed bug, that prevented loading drivers for USB webcams. Now you can use such programs like Skype without any problems. Try it!

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Gets an Installer

    Almost as though they heard my suggestions, Gentoo now has an installer. It’s not included on an official Live DVD just yet, but it just might next release.

    Wiktor W Brodlo has ported the Red Hat Anaconda installer from Sabayon to work with Gentoo. You can either install it in the live Gentoo environment or you can roll it up in a new Gentoo ISO.

• Red Hat Family

  • RHEL 6 uses Upstart!

    With the advent of RHEL 6 — the newest release of RedHats Enterprise operating system — RedHat have chosen to replace the old SystemV init system with… Upstart!

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 KDE and GNOME 3 Alpha screenshots

      From the test installations I carried out, I observed that GPT is the default if Fedora is installed in standalone mode. If, however, there is an existing distribution or another operating system on the drive, and you attempt to dual-boot, it defaults to the MBR partition table.

    • Trying out Fedora 16 Alpha.

      Sadly, I don’t have quite as much time to do deep testing of Fedora as I used to. So the above is basically a minimal report from about 3 minutes of usage I was able to fit in a couple nights ago. But I can say I’m looking forward to doing more! Remember that if you’re testing and finding problems, we need bugs! Without them it’s really hard to make a better product. So do your part for free software, and report them.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Top 10 Ubuntu 11.10 Features

        Beta of the Ubuntu 11.10 operating system is knocking on our doors, as it will be released next Thursday, and we though this will be a good moment to list some of the most important features that will be added in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) release.

      • Ubuntu Oneiric gets makeover

      • Ubuntu 11.04 Installer Fail

        So I decided to take a go at Ubuntu 11.04 in a virtual machine before taking the leap and installing it for real. As I understand it, the new Unity desktop is a pretty major departure from the Gnome 2.x desktop that I’m used to, and I want to see if it’s as bad as it looks in the screenshots.

      • Interview with Ubudog

      • Full Circle Podcast 24: OGGCamp Part Two

      • The New Ubuntu Friendly Program Needs User Feedback

        Is your computer Ubuntu Friendly? How do you find out? Do you know about the System Testing Application/Client on Ubuntu? Let’s talk, shall we?

      • A Photobomb Sale!

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 11 Gnome Review

          Well not much was left unmentioned, apart from the vast amount of application and package upgrades. The sleek and stylish Mint 11 Gnome interface is an almost flawless working environment, while remaining quite minimalistic and uncluttered. I encountered no problems at all when running this distribution, thus I highly recommend it for everyone.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Galaxy line gains four new Android 2.3 phones, new naming scheme

      Samsung announced four new Android 2.3 Galaxy smartphones, as well as a new naming scheme for the Galaxy product line. The new phones include the Galaxy W (3.7-inch, 1.4GHz), the QWERTY-enabled Galaxy M Pro (2.66-inch, 1GHz), the Galaxy Y (three-inch, 832MHz), and the keyboard-ready Galaxy Y Pro, according to the company.

    • Android car receiver offers hands-free telephony, web access

      Parrot is readying what it claims is the world’s first Android-based car receiver for an October release. The Parrot Asteroid offers a 3.2-inch display, GPS-based location services, Bluetooth, optional 3G access to web services, a 4 x 55 Watt MOSFET amplifier, plus support for music sources including Internet radio and a built-in FM/AM tuner.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • 35% of Tablet Owners Use Them in the Bathroom [STUDY]

  • First NFC-ready Android tablets debut

    NFC is coming to Android tablets this fall, in two seven-inch, Android 2.3 models announced by Sharp and TazTag respectively. The Sharp RW-T107 is an enterprise-focused tablet that supports the Sony Felica flavor of NFC in Japan, while TazTag’s TazTab combines NFC with a biometric fingerprint scanner, plus ZigBee, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and optional 3G.

Three Worthwhile Open Source Project Management Apps

Alfresco- An opensource alternative to Microsoft sharepoint

Korea to Develop Own Web-Based OS

The government has decided to develop an operating system capable of rivaling Google’s Chrome OS in collaboration with Korean companies such as Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, a move to gain ground in the emerging cloud computing service industry.

Events

• Interesting Talks For Linux Plumbers Conference 2011

  Besides XDC Chicago 2011 for Linux graphics developers, coming up in just two weeks in Santa Rosa, California is the Linux Plumbers Conference. Here’s some of the interesting talks expected at this event that’s largely targeted for Linux kernel developers.

  Here’s the talks I find to be most interesting based upon the LPC2011 schedule. (My list is in no particular order.)

  Coreboot – The Coreboot software project will be talked about and their efforts to replace proprietary BIOS/UEFI/firmware with this fast open-source code that’s designed to initialize the hardware and boot the system in a lightning fast manner. The talk abstract mentions that Coreboot currently supports around 230 kinds of motherboards and can get to booting the kernel in as little as a half second. The Coreboot project has been around for a while known — previously it was called LinuxBIOS — and is supported well by AMD, especially with the promise of supporting Coreboot on all future hardware.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Says Firefox Mobile Memory Usage Is “Pretty Bad”

    Mozilla’s JavaScript engine man-in-charge David Mandelin believes that there is plenty of room for the Firefox Mobile team to improve the browser’s performances on ARM/Android devices. He highlighted Firefox Mobile’s memory usage as a key problem area and suggests that the mobile browser might have to revert back from a multi-process to a single-process architecture.

  • 5 awesome Mozilla Firefox secrets

SaaS

• Gluster Goes After Hadoop Big Data

  Big data requires big file systems. That’s where the open source GlusterFS file system is aiming to fit in with the upcoming GlusterFS 3.3 release.

  The Gluster project is out this week with the second beta release of GlusterFS 3.3, the final release is expected before the end of the year. The new release provides an integration point for Apache Hadoop enabling Hadoop users to use Gluster for storage. According to Gluster, their filesystem is also comptable with Hadoop’s own HDFS (Hadoop File System), though Gluster provides some additional benefits including scalability and performance improvements.

• Thoughts From Eucalyptus System’s CTO As it Rolls Out its Version 3.0

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Extension-Repository is growing

  I had a short look at the new Extension repository, that I created for LibreOffice, and I saw the number of projects is growing. There are currently fourteen projects on the site and I expect more of them in the next weeks, because we had not going into the wider public with this new sub-project.

• LibreOffice Draw and Impress Guides Published

• Election Announcement for The Document Foundation Board of Directors

  Having been asked by the Steering Committee and Membership Committee to act as the Elections Officer for The Document Foundation, it is my pleasure to announce that we will now conduct the election of a Board of Directors. This election is following the Bylaws [1] of our Foundation. The term is one year commencing from the date the Foundation is legally established.

CMS

• Acquia Releases New Drupal Monitoring Tools

Project Releases

• NetworkManager 0.9 Release Brings Networking Fun

  NetworkManager 0.8 was released at the beginning of the year and then NetworkManager 0.9 was planned for release in March, but its release didn’t finally take place until yesterday. NetworkManager 0.9 is a huge release that breaks both the API and ABI compared to the previous NetworkManager release.

Programming

• No Policy Can Save Wrong Code

• Git – Revision Control Perfected

  In 2005, after just two weeks, Linus Torvalds completed the first version of Git, an open-source version control system. Unlike typical centralized systems, Git is based on a distributed model. It is extremely flexible and guarantees data integrity while being powerful, fast and efficient. With widespread and growing rates of adoption, and the increasing popularity of services like GitHub, many consider Git to be the best version control tool ever created.

• Serving a Local Directory with Plack

• Tweaks To Extend The Battery Life Of Intel Linux Notebooks

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks Hit With DOS Attack as It Releases Tens of Thousands of Cable

  Hours after announcing it would be releasing tens of thousands of cables from various countries including Libya, China, Israel and Afghanistan, WikiLeaks announced that it was sustaining denial of service (DOS) attacks and had “regressed” to its backup servers.

  Not surprisingly, WikiLeaks suggested on Twitter that the attacks were from a state-sponsored entity. The organization asked, “Are state directed Denial of Service attacks, legally, a war crime against civilian infrastructure?” And, “Should we, legally, declare war on state aggressors that commit infrastructure war crimes against us?”

  These messages came early in the morning on August 24. Releases had already been posted. Followers were helping WikiLeaks “crowd source” the cables by tweeting out their findings with the hashtag #wlfind.

• WikiHistory: Did the Leaks Inspire the Arab Spring?

  Almost two weeks before the desperate young fruit-seller Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire on a street in Tunis and a full month before the uprising that ensued, touching off the “Arab Spring” that is still unfolding, the rationale for revolution appeared on the Internet, where it was devoured by millions of Tunisians. It was a WikiLeaks document pertaining to the unexampled greed and massive corruption of Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and all his money-hungry family.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

DELL D620 power usage (Win 7 vs Mint 11)

I recently bought a JOEL Wattforbrugsmåler.

My laptop, a Dell D620, has both Windows and Linux (Dualboot).
I was curious to see whether there was any difference in power consumption during idle, so I decided to put my new device to use!

I removed the battery from the laptop and plugged the charger into my power measuring device before I made sure Windows 7 was running up-to-date drivers, while Linux ran the default drivers.
I then disabled all non-default services and removed any third-party programs from the startup. I booted into each os, let it run for some time (to make sure it was indeed idle) before turning on the clock.

Why have you switched to GNU/Linux?

A long time ago when I was using Windows I realized that many applications were trying to constrain me from doing certain tasks. I was unable to play a certain format or had to install applications that I did not want on my system. I started to think critically as to why I am using Windows and if there is some kind of alternative that I could use instead. Prior to this, I used Mac OS but I knew that both operating systems are proprietary and want to limit the end user. I got tired of being manipulated to use a particular application and having bloatware already pre-installed on my computer. After searching the Internet for alternatives to Mac OS and Windows I found this really cool operating system that is called GNU/Linux.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Thoughts about Network Trancparency

Applications

• New GIMP Release Has Working Single-Window Mode

• Gimp 2.7.3 Has Been Released | Key Features | Install On Ubuntu Using PPA

• Single Window Gimp!

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Setting Up Network RAID1 With DRBD On Debian Squeeze

  • An Introduction to Find

  • How to setup Postfix with spampd on Debian Squeeze

  • Checking Password Complexity with John the Ripper

  • Using scponly To Allow SCP/SFTP Logins And Disable SSH Logins On Debian Squeeze

  • Gnome 3 shell and fglrx fixed in next driver!

Desktop Environments

• What GNOME Can Learn from KDE’s Recovery

  When users complain about GNOME 3, inevitably they compare its release to KDE 4.0′s. One KDE developer has told me that he dislikes the comparison, but, in the absence of other parallels, it continues to be made.

  However, one part of the analogy that hasn’t been explored is KDE’s recovery from its user revolt, and whether GNOME is in any position to emulate that as well.

  KDE’s recovery has not received much notice. It hasn’t been covered by the free software media. Often, too, it is overshadowed by those still loyal to the KDE 3 series, who continue to express their dissatisfaction at every opportunity.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Say No to Big Oil

    A 1,700-mile pipeline called the Keystone XL would carry crude oil from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. Calling it “a bad deal for America,” Sen. Bernie Sanders urged the Obama administration to reject the proposal. “Why in the world would we ever consider approving a new Big Oil pipeline to carry dirty fuel and keep America addicted to oil, when we could save money, create jobs, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil by moving to stronger fuel economy standards?” Sanders asked. He made the case against the pipeline in a video for Tar Sands Action, an organization headed by Vermont environmentalist Bill McKibben. “The State Department will decide whether to approve or reject the pipeline by the end of the year,” The New York Times said in an editorial published on Monday. “It should acknowledge the environmental risk of the pipeline and the larger damage caused by tar sands production and block the Keystone XL.”

Distributions

• First Look at Poseidon Linux, the Linux For Scientists

  Poseidon Linux is designed for the international scientific community, bundling a big batch of science-oriented software into a single live DVD, plus a batch of desktop productivity and multimedia applications. Poseidon 4.0 was just released with significant changes, so let’s take it for a test drive.

• New Releases

  • SystemRescueCd 2.3.1

  • BackTrack 5R1

  • LinuxTLE 10.0 Final

  • VYATTA CORE 6.3 – VC6.3-2011.07.21

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat considering NoSQL/Hadoop acquisition

    The article adds that Whitehurst would not specifically state whether Red Hat will or will not actually acquire anyone, as is to be expected, but the comments are the clearest indication yet that Red Hat sees value in a potential NoSQL acquisition.

    This is something that we have seen for some time, pointing out in May 2010 that “We have consistently noted that the database remains a missing layer in Red Hat’s software stack… and would see advantages in adding an open source NoSQL database to its portfolio to target MySQL users.”

  • Is Red Hat Interested in the Database Market?

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is perhaps best known as the leading enterprise Linux vendor. While Linux is the core of Red Hat’s business, their JBoss middleware business is also a critical component of Red Hat’s overall platform play. As Red Hat gears up for its next era of growth, the most often asked question is: Where does Red Hat needs to go next? One potential area of expansion for Red Hat could be the database market.

    “If you think about what makes up a platform, what you’re seeing is that more and more components of functionality are getting sucked in,” Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst told InternetNews.com. “We basically have our data services layer. which tries to do some degree of data federation. Will there be more stuff around that? Certainly there will be.”

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Alpha released

    • Alpha version of Fedora 16 “Verne” released

      The feature freeze is already in place, so that the alpha should contain all major changes in a testable form. These include the switch to the GRUB2 boot loader, which, though officially still under development, has long been used by other distributions.

    • Fedora 16 Alpha Has Been Released

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 11 LXDE review

          Linux Mint is a desktop-centric distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop, and Linux Mint LXDE is the edition that uses the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE). The latest release, Linux Mint 11 LXDE, was released August 16, 2011. This article presents a review, the first for an LXDE-based Linux Mint edition on this website.

        • Zorin OS 3.1, the First Update for the LTS Distro, Is Here

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android (Finally) Taking Steps Towards WebKit And Chromium

      Why isn’t Chrome a part of Android? It’s a question as old as time itself. Or at least a few years old. But given that the same company, Google, makes both products, it never made much sense. Now they’re finally taking steps to resolve this. A bit. Maybe.

    • Google move hints at Chrome for Android

    • Sony brings Walkman brand into the Android age

      Sony Ericsson announced a music-oriented Android 2.3 smartphone with a dedicated Walkman music button and “deep” Facebook integration. Due to ship in the fourth quarter, the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman offers a 1GHz processor, a 3.2-inch inch display with 480 x 320 pixels, a five-megapixel camera, a front-facing VGA webcam, plus Sony Qriocity music and video content services.

    • Android devs gain tools to begin Google TV 2.0 ports

      Google announced a preview release of the Google TV add-on for the Android SDK, supported on Linux with KVM emulation. The add-on lets Android app developers start preparing their software for porting to Google TV, in anticipation of the Android 3.x “Honeycomb” IPTV platform that’s expected to ship later this year.

    • Add-on for Android SDK makes Google TV 2.0 ports possible

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Top Business-Minded Tablet? The Toshiba Thrive or the Apple iPad 2?

    However, the recently released Toshiba Thrive Tablet PC line is slowly beginning to make inroads into the business tablet application niche. With a “strictly business” approach to most of its features, and a huge focus on business apps, more businesses are turning to the Thrive as opposed to the iPad 2 or any other tablet for their business plans. The Thrive offers five separate home screens, one of which is loaded with Google contacts, LogMeIn remote access, the Google calendar, QuickOffice for business file access and Toshiba’s PrinterShare and FileManager apps. This is a perfect business suite of apps all in one place.

    The native file management Toshiba provides in the Toshiba Thrive tablet is also another business advantage. And though Toshiba’s App Place (apps store) does provide entertainment and gaming apps, it is definitely heavily slanted towards business-oriented apps and software, from enterprise-oriented apps developers such as Central Desktop.

  • Why The iPad 3 Is Irrelevant

    Apple’s success with the iPad 1 and 2 doesn’t guarantee success for the third. But this shouldn’t deter long term investors. Apple’s greatest capability is its unstoppable innovation force – the release of new product lines that overshadow the previous.

  • The Asus Transformer Is Now Available For $349 At Walmart

    Remember when the Asus Eee Pad Transformer was the hottest thing since Laserdisc? Remember when it was hailed as an iPad killer with its fancy IPS screen, low price and sweet name. Autobots, unite! Well, Walmart is currently selling it for $350, which puts it at the low-end of the Honeycomb tab price scale. Jokes aside, it’s actually a great deal for an Android tablet.

Open source publishing helping to realise Digital Agenda aims

One positive aspect of the Internet’s innovative capacity for rapid change has been the dawn of open access publishing that has came to prominence over the last decade. Leading the way is the non-profit organisation Creative Commons, which has just launched a new book showcasing how copyright, content sharing and collaboration can lead innovation in the digital age.

IU Makes New Software Investment

Bloomington, Indiana. Indiana University has replaced the software that provides its information services to mobile devices, moving to open source Kuali software created by a consortium of universities.

New Open Source Smartphone OS Planned For South Korea

Well now it appears that the home turf of the worlds second largest smartphone maker Samsung has plans to develop a new open source smartphone operating system just for South Korea, a new OS that will challenge rival platforms iOS and Android in the country.

South Korean government to come up with their own smartphone platform

Exploring Cyber Security – The Open Source Way!

On the client desktop, running the open source Firefox Web browser is a significant win for security. Firefox alone isn’t sufficient, but it comes with a giant ecosystem of plug-ins which add to security. Adblock-plus is a plug-in which stops advertisements dead in their tracks. Scriptblock disables JavaScript and lets users enable it on a site-by-site basis. Some of the known flash plug-ins have been a source of security bugs; they are generally bad residents on your PC because they simply hog resources and make systems slow. Using flashblock will let you run flash site-by-site, and restrict them elsewhere.

Why is Open Source Software Beneficial?

With sense of crisis, Korea braces for software war

60 Open Source Tools for Protecting Your Privacy

With the growth of social networking, blogging and the Web in general, personal privacy is becoming harder and harder to find.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that privacy is no longer “a social norm.” And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once famously opined, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Under the Hood in Apache Lucene 4.0

Events

• FOSS4G 2011 in Denver Gathers Momentum

  – The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software, is fast approaching. The event, which will take place in Denver from Sept. 12-16, has gathered a great deal of momentum, with more than 600 attendees from 31 countries and 43 states signed up so far. It’s not too late to take advantage of this unique learning opportunity that presents a world-class program at great value to attendees, and in a beautiful setting.

• 5 Top News Items From LinuxCon

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google patches another wave of Chrome browser holes

• Mozilla

  • From Mozilla: WebAPI for HTML5 experience on phones

    Robert Nyman, a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, has announced the introduction of WebAPI, a project intended to “to provide a basic HTML5 phone experience within 3 to 6 months”. The goal is to provide a set of APIs consistent across browsers, operating systems and devices, that enable common methods of access to phone functionality. The list of functions given in the announcement includes the dialer, address book, SMS, clock, camera, calculator and maps.

SaaS

• VMware’s open source doppelganger gets cloudy

• Gluster Announces Apache Hadoop Storage Compatibility in Latest GlusterFS Release

• So, want to manage a cloud with open-source software?

• NextGen MapReduce Hits Apache Hadoop Mainline

• Gluster Announces Apache Hadoop Storage Compatibility in Latest GlusterFS Release

Databases

• EnterpriseDB Sets Sights on Oracle’s MySQL

  It’s no secret that EnterpriseDB, the company that sells and supports commercial versions of the open source PostgreSQL database, is going after MySQL. The company, which says revenues are growing at a 2X annual pace, senses that Oracle is ostracizing its MySQL customers and partners–something that IBM i customers can relate to. But while PostgreSQL makes inroads in the X64 and Itanium markets, it’s not clear if the database will find a similar reception in Power Systems.

• Oracle debuts JDK 7, MySQL 5.6 at OSCON, pledges better OS support

• Oracle Takes on VMware with Oracle VM 3.0

  Oracle is advancing its virtualization strategy with the release of Oracle VM 3. The new virtualization technology is designed to expand on Oracle’s previous efforts with a clear focus on server virtualization.

  “We care about running big server VMs,” Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle said during a launch event for Oracle VM 3.0. “We want to enable customers to virtualize everything.”

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Netbook+Cheap Software+Handheld Recorder

Project Releases

• Version 0.9.8 of the free open-source 3D engine PixelLight released

• Bootstrap from Twitter

Programming

• Engine Yard Joins Forces with Orchestra

Lenovo Reinforces Strong Market Growth in Light of HP Woes

Lenovo isn’t kicking HP while it’s down, but the company is taking this opportunity to let everyone know it’s doing just awesome, thanks very much. Lenovo released a statement regarding its status amid the uncertainty in the PC and tablet world. Here’s a brief highlight on the PC manufacturer’s status …

Cablegate

• Audio: rare interview with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange

  In the interview, he spoke at length about information’s role in democracy, and how government censorship is sometimes an opportunity. “Censorship is a signal that an organization or a government is fearful about reform effects of information release,” he said.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

In love with Linux again

It’s been a while since I got to play with Linux. My Toshiba laptop is Linux-proof for some reason and the Asus EEE 701 4G has been in active duty. Now I have another netbook and it came with Windows 7 which was great. I became dependent on a lot of Windows only programs, the Rockmelt browser for example.

Then after a couple of months Windows 7 took forever to not only boot…

GNU/Linux Rules in Brazil

I visited Dell’s Brazilian site. Hard to find anything Linux-like there…

Good Luck Lincs LUG

Over the last few days, there’s been a bit of activity of the .lug.org.uk mailing lists, regarding the rebirth/re-vamp/re-whatever of Lincs LUG.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Aug 22: #148 Linux Antivirus-Advanced

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Developers’ Conference 2011 Approaches

    Three weeks from today, the X.Org Developers’ Conference, the annual meet-up of Linux graphics driver developers, will be taking place in Chicago. Here’s the latest developments for this conference.

    As most Phoronix readers are already aware, I am the organizer of the XDC2011 conference that is taking place in Chicago on the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology. The X.Org conference is running from the 12th to 14th of September where the future of open-source Linux graphics drivers, the X.Org Server, and possibly Wayland will be discussed.

Applications

• GIMP Needs a Better Name

• GIMP 2.7.3 Released

  We are pleased to announce availability of a new development version that brings us closer to GIMP 2.8. This version is packed with important new features and improvements.

• GIMP 2.7.3 released

  A new development version of GIMP has been released; version 2.7.3. GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition & image authoring.

• Remote access, share desktop and transfer files with TeamViewer

• GIMP 2.7.3 arrives with single-window mode

• Instructionals/Technical

  • CreBS – Create Background Slideshow (wallpaper changer) for Gnome Desktop

  • Become an ImageMagick Ninja: Resizing And Converting Images

  • Red Hat 5 STIG: Network Settings

  • Unexpected Bottle Neck: vector(bool)

  • Setting Up Network RAID1 With DRBD On Debian Squeeze

• Games

  • It’s a Roll of the Dice for Linux Game Makers

    The big problem with Linux users is their aversion to paying for anything, said tech analyst Rob Enderle — so for Humble Bumble’s developers to get customers to voluntarily pay for Linux games is in itself pretty amazing. … The Linux derivative OS, Android, might well be the platform for change when it comes to Linux gamers parting with their cash.

  • Zatikon: Legions Is Now Available For GNU/Linux !

    Chronic logic the developers of Gish and other GNU/Linux games, released the second add-on to their freeware strategy and tactics game Zatikon.
    Despite the simple graphics the game is very deep and addictive, you can play the game and if you like it and want more units, you can buy the add-ons which add many new strategies and tactics.

  • 3 Puzzle game on Linux

    Today we’ll take a quick look at some puzzle game for Linux.

Distributions

• Its now time to look at Argentinian Tuqito, Indonesian Blankon Linux and visit Parsix for Linux3.7

• Red Hat Family

  • Could Big Data Be the Next Big Move for Red Hat?

    Is Red Hat interested in joining the Big Data trend? One of the biggest trends in computing at enterprises and even small- and medium-sized businesses is Big Data crunching, using tools such as the open source Hadoop. Businesses want to slice and dice their analytics and databases in new ways, surfacing views of everything from customer behavior to support trends in new ways. According to Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, the explosion of data and new ways to sift it is squarely on his radar.

• Debian Family

  • Newer X for Debian Squeeze now in Backports

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu joins VMware Cloud Foundry

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 229

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-ready camera gets dual-core AMD G-Series processor

  Ximea GmbH announced new “smart cameras” that include AMD G-Series processors and monochrome or color image sensors ranging from WVGA (752 x 480 pixels) to five megapixels. The Currera-G devices include flash storage, microSD slots, VGA and Ethernet ports, and isolated digital I/O, the company says.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • What do you plan for your $99.99 HP TouchPad?

How open source is transforming the publishing industry

Many of you already know I am not only a writer of a technical nature, but a writer of fiction. In fact, the second in my I Zombie trilogy will hit the shelves next month. I have been working hard to produce a catalog of ebooks and paperbacks for the last three years. During that time I have discovered something that seems to be slipping through the cracks of the majority of computer-type pundits — open source is one of the major players in the new world publishing order.

How open source is transforming the publishing industry

With the growth of social networking, blogging and the Web in general, personal privacy is becoming harder and harder to find.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has argued that privacy is no longer “a social norm.” And former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once famously opined, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Events

• Three Linux wireless summit videos

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Community-Wide Discussion of Mozilla in the New Era

CMS

• Drupal Open App Standard Initiative Launched

  Two leading players have announced the Drupal Open App Standard Initiative in an effort to help create an improved user experience within the Drupal content management system and to help spur the development of the Drupal economy.

  Phase2 Technology, based in Alexandria, VA, and SubHub, based in Cardiff, United Kingdom, have been collaborating on the initiative to achieve interoperability for Drupal apps and thus make it possible for any developer to write an app that would then be deployable across multiple app market implementations.

Licensing

• New GPL licence touted as saviour of Linux, Android

  The Free Software Foundation reckons its new version of the General Public Licence removes the problems bedevilling version two, but not everyone is convinced the problem even exists.

  The FSF reckons that Linux developers need to move quickly to GPLv3 if they’re to avoid Android (and similar Linux-based platforms) getting tied up in legal battles, despite the fact that many are claiming such battles are no more than figments in the eyes of publicity-hungry bloggers.

  At issue is the clause in version two of the GPL which states that anyone breaching the restrictions irrevocably surrenders their rights under the licence. As just about every Android licensee has, at some point, failed to provide source code (or written notice of source code provision), then (the argument goes) they are all in breach of the GPLv2 and thus open to copyright suits from every Linux developer.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Open hardware, or open source hardware?

    Bruce Perens (co-founder of the Open Source Initiative) has been opining about the difference between open source hardware and open hardware. People have compared the debate to the difference between open source software and free software, and are concerned that it might become as divisive. I’m not so sure. I think they are two different things, and they can co-exist peacefully.

Programming

• Really GUI (more on Buttons, images and handlers)

Rare Strong Earthquake Hits Colorado

The largest natural earthquake in Colorado in more than a century struck Monday night in the state’s southeast corner, but there had been no reports of damage or injuries.

The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 5.3 and centered about nine miles from the city of Trinidad, hit at 11:46 p.m. local time. It was felt as far away as Greeley, about 350 miles north, and into Kansas and New Mexico, said Julie Dutton, a geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.

Earthquake rocks Washington area

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was 3.7 miles deep. Shaking was felt at the White House and all over the East Coast, as far south as Chapel Hill, N.C. Parts of the Pentagon, White House and Capitol were evacuated. The quake was in Mineral, Va., in Louisa County.

Justice Prosser Back in the Spotlight

Embattled Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser is in the spotlight once again, this time for a conflict-of-interest in a pending case involving Koch-funded Tea Party groups.

Science

• Top scientists advise recent graduates to seek work abroad

  Science graduates should scale back their hopes of finding work in the UK and cast their net wider, according to two of the UK’s most influential scientists.

  Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Prof Keith Campbell said decreasing levels of funding for British research meant would-be scientists should think globally when hunting for employment.

  The pair made their comments on Sunday at an Edinburgh International Book Festival debate on the future of science.

Security

• Slip-Up in Chinese Military TV Show Reveals More Than Intended

  EXPOSED: A picture of the hacking software shown during the Chinese military program. The large writing at the top says “Select Attack Target.” Next, the user choose an IP address to attack from (it belongs to an American university).

Finance

• Can the Middle Class Be Saved?

  IN OCTOBER 2005, three Citigroup analysts released a report describing the pattern of growth in the U.S. economy. To really understand the future of the economy and the stock market, they wrote, you first needed to recognize that there was “no such animal as the U.S. consumer,” and that concepts such as “average” consumer debt and “average” consumer spending were highly misleading.

• Insurers Deliberately Confuse Policyholders and Dump the Sick

  A couple of years ago, when Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia asked me to testify about little-known health insurance industry practices at a hearing of his Senate Commerce Committee, I initially was reluctant. I knew that if I was completely honest, my life would change forever.

  What he was asking me to do was to disclose practices that have contributed to the growing number of Americans without insurance, the even faster growing number of us who are underinsured, and the phenomenal increase in insurance industry profits over the years, even as the ranks of those without coverage swelled.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Andy Coulson ‘paid by Murdoch while working for PM’

• Publicopoly: ALEC and the Bid to Make Private All That is Public

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Non-Windows Operating Systems for the Beginner

Windows is by far the most commonly used operating system, with over 95% market share. Most computer users have used Windows operating systems exclusively throughout their lives, and may know very little about alternatives.
The next biggest operating system is Apple’s OS X. One of the main differences between Windows and Apple is that Windows can be put and run on just about any computer, while the Apple operating system can only be run on Apple hardware. This means if you want to switch to the Apple OS, you have to buy an Apple computer.
The second most popular alternative to Windows is Linux. Linux is a free, open source operating system which can run on any system. It is redistributed in a number of different forms, the most common being the Ubuntu distribution. Linux has a comparatively small user base, and it has traditionally been considered difficult to use, however it has gotten better over time, and is fairly easy to install. Linux is supported by a large developer community, and it isn’t hard to find help when you need it.

Using Linux to Improve Energy Efficiency and Productivity

There’s been a long-standing belief that office automation is just too expensive to bother with. From possible higher hardware costs, all the way down to software licenses that are targeting large enterprise customers at high rates. The barrier to entry feels too high, thanks in part to costly price points within the automation industry.

On the do it yourself (DIY) front, going with a Linux-based solution is not only affordable, it’s downright practical. Because there’s no stipulation stating that one must hire an outside firm to set up office space automation, the choice of installing in-house or outsourcing the task is left to the decision makers.

This allows for near complete freedom to carry out a self-installation via an existing IT team, thus keeping control of the entire situation under one roof. And one place that I think is a no-brainer place to start is wasted energy usage.

Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 161

Linux Desktop Flamewars: Is the News Media Too Negative?

Is the tech press too focused on negativity, to the detriment of the FOSS community? I don’t know how he does it, but Bruce Byfield writes calm, thoughtful, lengthy articles that somehow ignite mad passions and flamefests. In his latest piece he discusses some of KDE4 developer Aaron Seigo’s thoughts that the tech press presents an unbalanced, negative perspective, and sparks yet another round of heated discussions. So what’s going on here?

Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards

Desktop

• The sad state of the Linux Desktop

  Some days ago it was reported that Microsoft declared it considers Linux on the desktop no longer a threat for its business. Now I usually wouldn’t care that much what Microsoft is saying, but in this case, I think, they’re very right – and thererfore I wonder why this hasn’t raised any discussions in the free software community (at least I haven’t seen one – if it has and I missed it, please provide links in the comments). So I’d like to make a start.

Server

• Linux and the financial crisis

  The financial industry is out-innovating regulators, experts and common investors. For years, the financial industry hired the best hackers it could find. They have a sizable share of the most creative and smart engineers on the planet. And Linux is one of their favorite tools. It is not difficult to understand: you can literally rewrite, or help rewrite, the Linux kernel. Today, Wall Street runs on Linux and it thrives thanks to its elite programmers.

• Microsoft, CS2C take joint aim at Chinese cloud market

  We’ve all heard of Microsoft; China Standard Software Co (CS2C), not so much. The Shanghai-based company focuses on Linux and related software under the NeoShine, NeoKylin and NeoLite brands.

  An agreement between the two companies is aimed at the joint development and marketing of mixed-source software for China’s cloud market, using Hyper-V Open Cloud and NeoKylin Linux Server.

Kernel Space

• LinuxCon: Open Source is an Ecosystem, not a Zero Sum Game

  Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from everyone here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone.

• Intel Thunderbolt Support Under Linux

  Earlier this year Apple introduced Thunderbolt ports on their new systems while more hardware vendors will be offering these next-generation high-speed connections on their systems going forward, particularly when the Ivy Bridge hardware is rolled out. Thunderbolt, which was developed under the Light Peak codename, can transfer data at 20 Gbit/s and offers much potential, but how’s the Linux support?

• The dawn of Linux: “it’s just a hobby, it won’t be big and professional”

  As we are celebrating 20 years of Linux this week, it seems only fitting to highlight a few milestones in the life of what has come to be (for many people) a very important piece of software development.

  This link will take you to some collected notes, which dig right back to the dawn of Linux history on the 31st of July 1992 when Linus Torvalds was discussing his ideas on an open newsgroup.

• Linux 3.1 Kernel Draws More Power With Another Regression

  If you were hoping that the Linux 3.1 kernel would fix the big power regression problem that’s caused by PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) being disabled on more systems since the release of the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, you’re not in luck. There has not been any active work in this area. Making things worse though for mobile Linux users interested in a long lasting battery is another new regression in the Linux 3.1 kernel. Affected systems can easily see a 30% increase in power consumption simply when comparing the Linux 3.0 kernel to the current code being assembled for Linux 3.1. For an Intel Sandy Bridge notebook, the power consumption is up by 76% just over the course of this year from Linux kernel regressions.

• Announcement: RapidDisk (rxdsk) 1.1b Stable release

• Linux 3.1-rc3

Applications

• Wholesome Threesome on Tux4Kids

  The Tux4Kids consists of three quality applications for mastering maths, with TuxMath, make an artist out of your little one with the TuxPaint and the third, TuxTyping. In fact, TuxPaint leads the march for the Tux distro with an independent website for itself, while TuxMath and TuxTyping are offered as twin applications on the Tux4Kids site itself.

• Useful Basic Terminal Commands On Linux Mint 11

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Show Unity Launcher Using Top Left Corner Instead Of The Whole Left Edge

  • Setting up a PPTP VPN in Linux

  • Use Giver to share files in a local network environment

  • Keep Your Data In Sync With DropBox For Linux

  • How To Speed Up Drupal 7.7 With Boost And nginx (Debian Squeeze)

  • Remote Bandwidth Stats

  • How-To: Release Stuck NFS Mounts without a Reboot

  • How-To: Release Stuck NFS Mounts without a Reboot

• Games

  • Interview with Jonathan Prior of Gameolith.com

  • My four favorite graphical Chess clients for Linux

    Last week I presented the Linux versions of a few games and pastimes from the pre-computer era. They are the applications that I always end up installing on the computers of all senior citizens who ask me, “How could I use this PC for games?”, but they still are great fun for everybody. I deliberately left chess clients out of that post, because I didn’t want to make it too long and chess deserves (at least) one whole post anyway.

Desktop Environments

• I’ve got some good news and some bad news

  Recently, I wrote an article about the lack of acceptance of GNOME 3. I received a private email from Aaron Seigo of KDE in which he took me to task, politely, thoughtfully, and with his usual thoroughness, for focusing on negative news. Since I often debate this issue with myself, with Seigo’s permission, I’m summarizing the discussion here.

  Seigo begins by asking, “Is it useful to spend time concentrating on the negatives in FOSS when we have not only a tremendous number of positive events occurring but many detractors who are willing to do the negativity thing for us? Why do we reward failure and negative reactions with press coverage when thriving and positive efforts struggle for valuable attention?”

  According to Seigo, the major stories of the past year include such items as users being disappointed in Unity and GNOME 3, the danger in Project Harmony’s copyright assignment templates, the need for anti-harassment policies at conferences, and Android’s patent issues.

• Desktop Summit 2011

  I realize nearly ten days after the end of a conference is a bit late to blog about it. However, I needed some time to recover my usual workflow, having attended two conferences almost back-to-back, OSCON 2011 and Desktop Summit. (The strain of the back-to-back conferences, BTW, made it impossible for me to attend Linux Con North America 2011, although I’ll be at Linux Con Europe. I hope next year’s summer conference schedule is not so tight.)

  This was my first Desktop Summit, as I was unable to attend the first one in Grand Canaria two years ago. I must admit, while it might be a bit controversial to say so, that I felt the conference was still like two co-located conferences rather than one conference. I got a chance to speak to my KDE colleagues about various things, but I ended up mostly attending GNOME talks and therefore felt more like I was at GUADEC than at a Desktop Summit for most of the time.

• My quest for a tiling window manager

  I’ve never used a tiling window manager before, but lately I’ve been doing more and more with the command line, and I’ve been using vim-only for almost a year now, so it seems like a natural next step.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Join KDE Italia at CoNAsSL 2011

    KDE Italia, the Italian community backing the KDE Italia website and the KDE Italia forum, is pleased to invite you to CoNAsSL 2011, an end-of-summer event aimed at gathering all the Italian associations involved in Free Software. The event will take place on 9, 10 and 11 of September, in a beautiful location: the Tuscan seaside! People attending will be hosted at the same place where the talks and workshops will be held: the “Baia dei Gabbiani” campsite in Scarlino, a town near Follonica (Grosseto).

• GNOME Desktop

  • String freeze for GNOME 3.2 in 2 weeks

    This is a reminder to developers that we’ll enter string freeze in about 2 weeks. Note that although the development release version 3.1.90 is postponed by a week, that should not affect the dates of the string freeze. There are many bugs with the “string” keyword that will benefit from attention. Another interesting keyword is “i18n”. Please review these for your modules. Let’s do the best we can for GNOME 3.2!

  • Why I joined GNOME – fixing the clocks

  • GNOME3 and AMD – in a nearby future…

    A long time has gone since I posted the (in)famous bug regarding graphical corruption on GNOME3 seen only by ATI users who use the proprietary case. After long hours of frustration I’ve decided to jump into Intel chipsets which work very nicelly out of the box and leave ATI behind, but new developments suggest that ATI/AMD has fixed the bug and it’s under internal testing, so it seems that within one or two releases this bug will be fixed.

  • Gnome users are revolting II

    I currently have Debian Squeeze installed on my computer, and Fedora 15 on a Live USB, and I’m booting into both from time to time. This gives me a good idea of how Gnome 3 in Fedora compares to Gnome 2 in Debian in terms of ease and pleasure of use as a desktop environment.

Distributions

• FirstImpressions of Puppy Linux Lucid 5.2.8

  I really enjoy using Linux a lot. My adventures with Linux started over ten years ago. I am far from being a Linux expert, but I am getting to the point now where I am pretty comfortable tackling challenges, experimenting with configurations, and using the command line. My Linux journey started with Ubuntu. But quickly I started to feel like Ubuntu was becoming the Microsoft of Linux. It’s very commercialized and extremely popular. Using Ubuntu no longer gave me that “I am unique and cool feeling because I use Linux and most everyone else doesn’t.”

• Best Linux Distributions for Kids and Young at Heart

  Linux has been a versatile operating system catering the needs of people from all walks of life. Unlike Windows and Mac, which only target the general consumers, Linux offer various specialized distributions for engineers, doctors, religious people, and even kids. Yes, kids. Linux, thanks to its openness, has allowed many developers to create distributions made especially for kids of different age groups. These distributions aren’t made to teach C++ programming for kids. Instead, they are normal, easy to use distros with user interfaces specially designed for the young ones. Many of them come with games and educational software preinstalled, so that children can learn as well as have fun.

• BackTrack 5 – A Linux Distribution Engineered for Penetration Testing

  Linux, which is a very versatile operating environment, caters for an array of different needs of different users. One such specific usage of Linux is in the area of computer security and penetration testing. Among the digital forensic tools available for Linux, BackTrack is well known as an all-in-one platform that offers security professionals all the tools that they may need to carry out various security related tasks.

• BackTrack 5.0 updated with new tools

• New Releases

  • Zorin 3.1

  • IPCop 1.9.20

  • Swift Linux version 0.1.2

  • News: 2011.08.19 installation media

    Hi,
    time for a much needed update to the Arch installation media, as the last release (2010.05) is not only quite outdated, but now yields broken installations if you do a netinstall (because the old installer is not aware of the changed kernel/initramfs filename in our new Linux 3.0 packages).

    What has changed in this period of more than a year?

• Red Hat Family

  • Big Blue Tweaks Red Hat Deal for Power Systems

    IBM has updated a special Linux promotion it announced last year for Red Hat and SUSE Linux variants running on Power Systems machines.

  • Amavisd and SELinux

    A friend of mine recently ran into an issue with a Centos 6 box when trying to start amavisd. He knew it was SELinux related because the log had the following message in it

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.7 review

    RHEL 5.7 is a release that hasn’t a lot to be excited about, which, to be fair, is normal for an update of an enterprise Linux distribution. Koen Vervloesem sees what’s under the hood…

  • Scientific Linux 6.1 Carbon review – Almost there

    Scientific Linux deserves a lot of praise and credit. I think it was the first desktop-oriented RHEL spin that truly offered what normal people need without too much extra fuss. The 5.4 release was truly phenomenal in a time when neither RHEL nor CentOS would mound NTFS partitions without tweaks. Since, version 6.0 has been released, bringing new goods to the table, alongside some early-rushed glitches, which persist into the service pack.

    Overall, Scientific Linux works well – it’s fast and stable and modern and can easily be turned into a beautiful and fully functional desktop with everything you need. But it does all of this with a fairly high margin of risk. Users can so very easily make mistakes and ruin their systems. The repository management must not be given to users. It must be centralized. Printing and a weak default collection of programs in the live CD version, that’s another pair of faults. Nothing major, but perfection is won by tiny, tiny details.

  • First look at Scientific Linux 6.1

    The big thing that sells me on Scientific Linux (and other Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones) is the collection of administration tools. Both the text and GUI programs for managing system services, user accounts and the firewall are top notch. And Scientific Linux will be supported for several years (probably another five or six), making this a good distribution for home users who just want to install the operating system and forget about it. Despite a few problems early on, I came to enjoy Scientific Linux with its clean desktop and snappy performance. It’s a good desktop distro for people who want to avoid the cutting edge and rapid upgrade cycles.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.0 Beta Unleashed

    One of the top-most open source solution providers in the world Red Hat Inc. has unveiled the beta version of the Red Hat Virtualisation 3.0, the company announced.

    With this new offering, the company has finally stepped into the process of delivering what it claims to be the “next generation version of the company’s end to end virtualisation solution.

  • Red Hat Looks Good Approaching Value Levels

  • Fedora

    • MP3 in Fedora 15

      I’ve been using a Fedora 15 Live USB to test Gnome 3, and also looking at how easy Fedora 15 is to do everyday task. Probably one of my most common everyday tasks on Linux is listening to MP3s and watching rips of TV shows and films. I was able to do this on Fedora 15 without much trouble, by following a series of notifications and advice links. Today I came across a review of Fedora 15 where the author (a person with lot more IT experience than me) has gone down the same road as me but somehow failed to reach the end.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Linux Mint Debian Edition Updates Released

      Well, it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought that it would. Hot on the heels of my post about Mint Debian and updates, new base release ISO images for both the Gnome and Xfce desktops were made available at the end of last week. I find the fact that they were released together to be particularly encouraging, because it appears that the Xfce distribution is being treated as an equal to the Gnome distribution, rather than as a poor step-child, the way some other distributions do it. As I suspect Xfce will be getting more interest in the near future because of the uncertainty and unhappiness about Gnome 3, this is good news.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 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.

      • Ubuntu Software Center Overhaul in Full Swing

        Ubuntu Software Center is seeing its second round of upgrades, this time changes are even more dramatic. Good to see Canonical putting so much thrust on Software Center which has the potential to become Ubuntu’s major money spinner in the near future.

      • Ubuntu App Developer Week 2011: 5th – 9th September

      • Ubuntu Linux bets on the ARM server

        In today’s data center, millions of instructions per second (MIPS) and gigabyte per second (GBPS) throughput are well and good, but being green (having a low power consumption) is becoming just as important. That’s why Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is betting that in the long run, ARM processors will play an important role in tomorrow’s servers and datacenters.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • First Impressions of Linux Mint 11 Katya

          All in all, this is a very elegant, classy, and distinguished operating system. It’s very stable, very functional, and has all of the Ubuntu structure and backbone that you have come to expect and depend on with Ubuntu. Only difference is that everything is enhanced and restructured in a way that I feel very comfortable with instantly. As I mentioned before, if you have been enjoy Ubuntu but would like a change, Linux Mint 11 is definitely the way to go.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River’s fully integrated graphics software stack on Linux platform for processors

• Embedded Linux test software focuses on high-risk segments

  Wind River announced a new version of its Linux-ready, embedded device test automation software. Wind River Test Management 4.0 can now identify high-risk segments in production code, as well as focus testing solely on changes made between builds, among other new features, says the company.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Canalys: Android shipments balloon 379% in Q2, iOS now No. 2 smartphone platform

      While Apple owns the largest share of handset shipments and profits among the world’s top smartphone vendors, Android is still the No. 1 smartphone operating system on the planet by a wide margin. Market research firm Canalys on Monday released its second-quarter smartphone figures, reaffirming impressive growth across the global smartphone industry. The firm says the worldwide smartphone market grew 73% year-over-year to more than 107.7 million units shipped last quarter, and Android lead the market in 35 of the 56 countries Canalys tracks. According to the firm’s estimates, Android shipments in the second quarter ballooned 379% over the same quarter last year to 51.9 million units. This impressive growth helped Android gain 48% of global smartphone shipments in the quarter. With 20.3 million iOS smartphones shipped in the June quarter, Apple’s mobile OS topped Symbian to steal the No. 2 spot with a 19% share of the global market. BlackBerry shipments grew 11% in Q2 though RIM’s global share slid, and Microsoft, still waiting for Nokia to launch its first batch of Windows Phones, shipped fewer than 1.5 million devices last quarter to take just 1% of the market — down 52% year-over-year. Canalys also notes that Apple was the top smartphone vendor in the second quarter, while Samsung grew 421% year-over-year to take the No. 2 spot with 17 million smartphones shipped. Canalys’ full press release follows below.

    • CyanogenMod development slows, but will continue

      Following the news that Steve Kondik, the founder of CyanogenMod, had been hired by Samsung, there had been some uncertainty regarding the future of the popular custom ROM for Android smartphones. To clarify matters, a blog posting has appeared on the CyanogenMod web site stating that rumours that “CyanogenMod’s core philosophy is changing, that we’ve been sold, or that we’ve given up” are all completely untrue. It states that Kondik, aka “Cyanogen”, is not leaving the project, which will continue.

    • The Plight of the Android App Wallflowers

      With just a handful of popular Android apps dominating users’ attention, what’s a developer to do? It’s all about discovery, says Nielsen’s Don Kellogg. “How can you make it easy for people to find your app? How can you ignite positive word of mouth? How can app stores and other aggregators improve the consumer experience to make it easier for consumers to discover a broader range of quality apps?”

• HP/Tablets

  • HP drops webOS: What lies ahead?

  • HP TouchPads sell out across the US

    HP’s TouchPad tablet has enjoyed a weekend of bumper sales, with stock proving scarce at retailers across the US – thanks, it must be said, to a discount which has seen the device drop to under $100.

    The TouchPad was HP’s flagship tablet device, based on the webOS platform it acquired when it took over PDA pioneer Palm back in 2002. Designed to compete head-on with the likes of the iPad, it represented a similar approach to Research in Motion’s PlayBook, in that it was designed as a companion device to HP’s webOS-based smartphones.

  • 5 things you can do with your new HP TouchPad

    You’ve just bought an HP TouchPad for $99. You have successfully clicked on the Buy Now button faster than the frenzied, fire sale horde, and you slept soundly last night in the knowledge that a juicy piece of high-technology was winging its way to your door.

    In all honesty, though, you’re probably not even sure why you bought the HP TouchPad — it was simply a matter of behavioral economics. The TouchPad was $500, and now it’s $99 — how can that not be a good deal? Heck, this was the tablet that was heralded as the best non-Apple tablet — $99 must be a good deal.

  • Ubuntu Linux and Android Could Give HP’s TouchPad New Life

    HP’s ill-fated TouchPad may be a hot commodity now that it’s being offered at fire-sale prices, but those lucky enough to get their hands on one could soon find themselves with more choices than they ever imagined.

  • How to install Ubuntu Linux on an HP TouchPad

  • ‘It’s Alive!’ Says HP Exec of WebOS

    HP may be out of the tablet hardware business but, it’s holding on to its software presence in the market. “The WebOS is not dead,” declares Stephen Dewitt, senior vice president of Palm, which is owned by HP.

  • A Big Round of Face-Palms For HP

    The Linux-oriented blogosphere reacted swiftly to HP’s news that it’s cutting webOS devices and mulling the sale of its PC division. A brief sound-bite sampler: “No competent management left,” “HP blinked,” “What were they thinking?” “Now it’s simply too late,” and “It’ll be sad to see them go.” Suffice it to say, then, this was not a popular decision among Linux lovers.

  • HP’s WebOS licensing ship has sailed, blogs say

    While HP’s official company line continues to be that WebOS will live on, industry watchers say the OS will quickly fade away as a tech history footnote. Find out more

  • $99 TouchPad a hit, as Ubuntu and Android ports emerge

    Sales of the “discontinued” HP TouchPad have been brisk after its price was cut to as little as $99, and hackers are working overtime to port Ubuntu and Android to the WebOS-based tablet. Meanwhile, analysts speculate on who might acquire HP’s WebOS operations, which include a 2,000-plus patent portfolio that one analyst says could recoup the cost of HP’s Palm acquisition.

  • Practically Giving Away the HP TouchPad, Still Too Expensive

    Those of you who may have paid more needn’t worry. HP has offered to give full refunds if you choose, or just return the balance of what you paid minus the current retail price. This is a classy move on HP’s part, removing the bitter taste many of their customers likely had after hearing the devices were being discontinued.

Events

• You Make a Difference

  *

  In a town known for excess, we were impressed by the goodwill shown to EFF and beyond. Cheers to everyone who got chopped by Mohawk-Con to benefit charity (we hope you chose us!), thanks to the DEF CON Scavenger Hunt for including EFF, and much respect to those who joined the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry.

• Clay Shirky Says Good Collaboration is Structured Fighting

  Companies and projects focusing on large-scale collaboration might want to start thinking about collaboration in a new way. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody closed out the second day of LinuxCon North America 2011 with a contrarian look at collaboration. While many treat collaboration as a “love fest” or harmonious interaction, Shirky put forward the idea that productive methods of fighting are the most successful, particularly in open source.

  Shirky, who also teaches at New York University, started talking about his “favorite bug report ever.” The bug report, for Firefox (#330884), was a corner case where Firefox would show any user what sites that should never save passwords even if selected by another user.

• A Look at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab

  One of the key themes at LinuxCon North America 2011 is the ubiquity of Linux. Many people use Linux in many ways, often totally unaware that they’re depending on Linux. Likewise, those of us in the open source community depend heavily on Oregon State University’s Open Source Labs (OSUOSL), but may not even realize just how much. Thanks to one of the final talks at LinuxCon by Lance Albertson, it’s much clearer now just how important OSUOSL is.

• Lessons from LinuxCon North America 2011

  Every conference, at least the good ones, has a theme to tease out and lessons to learn. LinuxCon North America 2011 was one of the best, and having the good fortune to be in Vancouver, BC last week for LinuxCon, I learned quite a bit.

Web Browsers

• Chrome

  • Google Stabilizes Chrome For Mac OS X Lion, Adds PulseAudio For Linux

• Mozilla

  • Resistance to the Resistance to Version-less Firefox

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• 25,000 Danish hospital staff to move to LibreOffice

CMS

• Limpag: WordPress rides the open source juggernaut

  EIGHT years after it was started by a 19-year-old college freshman as a blogging software, WordPress now powers 14.7 percent of the world’s top one million websites.

  It is used in 55 million websites.

• WordPress powers 14.7 per cent of the top million web sites

  According to WordPress founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg, 14.7 per cent of the top million web sites in the world are now powered by the open source blogging and publishing platform, up from just 8.5 per cent a year ago. The project’s latest data also shows that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the United States are running WordPress.

Public Services/Government

• Cabinet Office shuns open-source in IT-tracking deal

  The Cabinet Office and its IT underlings have exhaustively championed the need for more OSS across government since the ConDem Coalition was cobbled together in May 2010. Nonetheless Francis Maude’s department has just snubbed open source players by awarding a contract to a proprietary software provider to help establish how much money the government spends on technology.

  Readers need only cast their minds back to a damning report published by the public administration select committee (PASC) last month that lambasted over-reliance on big IT firms in Whitehall over many years.

Programming

• JetBrains releases Meta Programming System 2.0

  JetBrains’ Meta Programming System (MPS) offers a development environment that implements the Language-Oriented Programming (LOP) paradigm. Instead of using a given programming language to solve a problem, developers initially design a custom, domain-specific language that ideally allows them to implement the required functionality in a better way.

Spending Money: VMWare

Spending Money: EAGLE CAD

Some time back I reported on one of my peculiar needs: electronic circuit design. There are a few open-source packages available, such as KiCad, which I have experimented with. But unfortunately, it’s not (yet) what I would call “industrial grade.”

Enter EAGLE. This was recommended to me a few years ago, but until recently I didn’t have occasion to try it out. EAGLE has four things going for it.

First, it’s available for Linux. I don’t need to run it in Windows emulation mode.

That Other OS as a Legacy App

All this talk of the “PC” being obsolete is a bit off-base. A PC is a computer that is suitable for use by an individual. That cuts out main-frames but includes just about every other type of computer in mass production: desktops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, smart phones and various smart thingies embedded in various gadgets and appliances. Ordinary folks can even use main-frames remotely if they are running some web application. The PC is here to stay but it won’t be staying in the legacy formats.

The “desktop” intended to cover a good portion of a desk or to hold up a monitor is dead for consumers although some foolishly locked-in businesses may still feel that’s what a PC looks like. The rest of us will use thin clients that bolt on to the back of a monitor or reside inside it. We don’t generally need “drives” or expansion slots in our PCs so why pay for them and have them take up space? We don’t need to use 100W gadgets near where we work when 10W or less can do the job. PCs will be like light-bulbs. Smaller and cheaper to own and operate is better.

A Decade of Haiku

Security

• Why isn’t SSL turned on by default for all websites?

• PHP users warned not to upgrade to 5.3.7

Finance

• Goldman CEO hires prominent defense lawyer

  Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein has hired high-profile Washington defense attorney Reid Weingarten, according to a government source, as the Justice Department continues to investigate the bank.

• Video: The Bankers as the Enemy of Humanity

  This video is stunning, in that it is an articulate and well done rant that will resonate with many readers. The fact that it appeared on Karl Denninger’s site (hat tip reader Scott, Denninger’s been very critical of the TBTF banks) is an indication that the level of frustration with the major banks’ refusal to take responsibility for wrecking the global economy and their efforts to preserve their ability to loot is moving to a new level.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Mixed Messages at the ALEC Annual Meeting

  In the midst of corporations voting with with state politicians on corporate wishlists to rewrite the law, some messages at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Annual Meeting in New Orleans got a little mixed up. Here are two examples.

• Morello Returns to Union Town

  Op-ed. Throughout the winter protests against Governor Scott Walker’s labor-bashing agenda, the halls of the Wisconsin Capitol were alive with the sounds of steel drums, cowbells, and daily sing-a-longs. Eventually, a muse would emerge to channel Madison’s musical energy into a powerful new protest song.

  With lyrics like, “When they put the governor on trial, I will be in the front row” and “…the kids locked in the capital are fighting till the end,” Tom Morello’s “Union Town” became the de facto anthem for the thousands of protesters fighting the Walker agenda, who heard it almost every morning on local radio stations. On September 5th, the Rage Against the Machine frontman and labor rights advocate, will return to Madison with Tim Mcilrath of Rise Against and Wayne Kramer of Detroit’s MC5 as part of their recurring Justice Tour, with all profits from their show benefitting nonprofit media center The Nation Institute.

• Brownskins and Greenbacks: ALEC, the For-Profit Prison Industry and Arizona’s SB 1070

  “Beside my brothers and my sisters, I’ll proudly take a stand. When liberty’s in jeopardy, I’ll always do what’s right. I’m out here on the frontline, sleep in peace tonight. American soldier, I’m an American soldier…”

  So goes the ringtone on Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce’s phone—as performed by Toby “’cause we put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way” Keith. Seconds into any conversation with Pearce on the issue of illegal immigration, you’ll find the song fits. Pearce is—in his mind—the “American soldier.” What’s more, just as he sees himself a soldier, Pearce envisions his home to be none less than the front in a war which threatens the very fiber of the nation.

• “Legislative Laundry”–Investigative Report on the Mechanics of the ALEC Scholarship Fund

  “You and a guest are cordially invited to join Arizona Lobbyists for dinners while in Washington, DC for ALEC. We have 3 dinners planned for your enjoyment and hope you will be able to join us… We will be gathering in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt, ½ hour before our reservations to organize and accompany you to the venues by taxis…”

  “Wednesday December 1, 2010: Old Ebbit Grill – reservation for 6:30pm…Thurs. December 2, 2010: The Source by Wolfgang Puck – reservation for 7:30pm (you will be able to enjoy the holiday gala at the Hyatt scheduled for 6:00pm before we meet in the lobby for dinner)… Fri. December 3, 2010: Smith & Wollensky – reservation for 6:30pm.”

  – Invite sent to Arizona ALEC member lawmakers for the annual ALEC States and Nation Policy Summit, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Washington, D.C., December 1-3, 2010.

Privacy

• Critics label cybercrime bill ‘invasion of privacy’

  A CONTROVERSIAL bill that extends the powers of Australia’s police and security agencies to retain emails, text messages and other data used in alleged cyber crimes has encountered a roadblock, with a committee recommending significant changes.

Copyrights

• ACTA

  • European Parliament ACTA study

    Act on ACTA refers to a European Parliament Trade Committee commissioned study on ACTA (pdf). The study highlights problematic aspects of ACTA and makes recommendations (see below). 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. It recommends asking the European Court of Justice an opinion on ACTA.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Crossword Puzzle of Some Linux Distros…

Desktop

• Installing Linux on old PC’s Part 2

  In part one I showed you that you could install a linux distro on a new computer and transplant it into a 386 computer in a short amount of time and with little effort. Now it is time to move on to bigger and beefier machines like 486′s, Pentiums and better.

  I am going to break this quick tutorial down into sections based on installed RAM. While this won’t be a “how to” for all old PCs in the world I hope to at least send you in the right direction. I will mention a few distributions mainly for the super low ram machines. Its not my intent to start a distrubution war, and I have not personally sat down with every single one to make a educated assessment. However, you’re more than welcome to chime in.

• Students! Don’t get scammed for back to school computer shopping.

  There are only a few more weeks left before students go back to school and technology companies are gearing up for one of the most busiest seasons of the year.

  Even though having a laptop is not mandatory for college or university studies, students often justify the purchase by saying that they need it desperately for school. I have worked in several large computer stores that have back to school specials for students and let me tell you that its all about revenue and scamming the customers. These large computer stores want to extract as much money as possible from customers and are willing to go the distance in confusing students and their parents in order to make that extra profit. For example, I was told shamelessly straight to my face when buying a netbook that the company does not make a lot of money from the sale of a laptop and that I should purchase something else on top.

• Why are we still waiting for affordable laptops / netbooks / tablets for schools?

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast 91 Interview with JD Horelick

• Linux Outlaws 224 – OggCamp 11 Live

Kernel Space

• ARM’ing Linux

  The ARM chip architecture is emerging to become an extremely popular one for embedded and mobile devices. It’s also an architecture that has had some issues when it comes to Linux.

  Speaking at the LinuxCon conference this week, Linux creator Linus Torvalds detailed his frustrations with ARM. Coincidentally this week, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu Linux, announced ARM support as part of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 release.

  “I think that ARM is very promising,” Torvalds said. “The problem is that ARM doesn’t have a standard platform.”

  In Torvalds’ view, ARM is a ‘hodgepodge’ of companies making random pieces of hardware. He noted that on the kernel side, Linux has tried to support alot of ARM.

• Graphics Stack

  • An Open-Source Mobile Linux Graphics Stack?

    The mobile device landscape, particularly for those devices running Linux, is quickly evolving. Just in the past few days, Google bought Motorola, Qualcomm open-sourced the remainder of their Gobi API for controlling modems, and HP ended off all their webOS devices, among other changes. But will the future mobile Linux device landscape deal with more open-source drivers, particularly when it comes to graphics?

Applications

• guiminer – An Extensive Tool For Bitcoin Mining [Windows & Linux]

  As of late there’s been a been a great buzz going around about Bitcoin, the latest P2P digital currency. One of the main activities of getting Bitcoins is through a process called mining.

• 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.

• Wallbase – All your wallpaper are belong to us

  Wallpapers, such an innocent affair. Apparently not so. For most people, finding high-quality wallpapers or backgrounds for their desktop usually takes them down the image lane of Google’s highway, where they sift through tons of garbage, looking for decent high-resolution imagery of their favorite topics and avatars.

  A colleague of mine told me about wallbase.cc several weeks ago, a site that has a virtually infinite pool of great images plus superb navigation. My initial reaction was one of slight contempt. But then, after going through the website, I realized there’s quite a bit of useful art there, worth enough for a complete article. So here we go.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • A Cheat Sheet That Teaches Linux Commands To Beginners

  • Command Line | Change The Owner Of Files And Folders | chown

  • 10 Good Inkscape Tutorials for Vector Graphic Designers

  • How to undelete files from ext3/ext4

  • Rebuild Spice-Gtk-0.7 via Debian Unstable with gobject-introspection enabled

  • Updating glibc to 2.14 with some libtirpc fun

  • Pruning WordPress Theme and Plugin Directories

  • Introducing Find Many Strings – A chrome extension

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

  • Command Line | Change The Owner Of Files And Folders | chown

  • How to make USB modem work on Arch Linux

  • Anaconda Runtime for Clickteams Multimedia Fusion (MMF2)

  • Fix your icons package

• Wine

  • PlayOnLinux 4.0 Is Released

    PlayOnLinux is a piece of software which allows you to easily install and use numerous games and apps designed to run with Microsoft Windows.

  • The Friendly Black Screen that Talks (Espeak)

    Today, I had great fun with my little nephew thanks to Espeak, which I had installed from the Mandriva repositories long ago in an attempt to make my computer talk again. In Mandriva 2009, the task was performed by KTTS. However, as Mandriva 2010 kept KTTS despite KDE renamed the text-to-speech service (now it’s called Jovie), my computer became voiceless. Or so I thought.

• Games

  • Interview with Michael Bok developer of The Zod Engine

    So today I had the pleasure of chatting with Michael Bok of The Zod Engine via google talk. This is the most fun I’ve had chatting to developer so far (mainly because it was live and not via email, not to say the others haven’t been awesome).

  • Indie Game ‘No Time To Explain’ Released for Linux

    No Time To Explain is a platformer game about Time Travel, Big Jetpack Guns, Giant Enemy Crabs and Ribs in People’s Eyes. You are taken on a wild adventure of time paradoxes, things that make no sense and more things that make less sense. The game went through a Kickstarter funding project which raised more than $ 26K for the developers though the actual target was only $ 7K. So there was already a huge interest in the game even before its release.

  • [Gaming]: TeeWorlds Multiplayer Shooting Game Running On Linux | 0.6.1

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Disable Akonadi in KDE SC 4.7

    How to avoid the Akonadi PIM framework of KDE is a very frequently asked question. Akonadi is started when logging into a default KDE session – and includes a mysql server – this is a bit of a waste of system resources since (in my personal estimation) the majority of KDE users won’t use Akonadi for anything at all.

  • KDE:Active:Devel introduced

    The past week, when working on the Mesa packages for Plasma Active, I might have caused some headache since I broke the compositor in Plasma Active with a few packages I uploaded for easier deployment on test devices. It was not more than an annoyance, because kwin gracefully falls back to non-composited mode in case of graphics problems. In order to get a bit more stability into our deployment process, I’ve now set up a subproject called KDE:Active:Devel under the KDE:Active project on the Open Build Service (OBS) which we use to build the Balsam packages. As we’re moving, development-wise into the stabilization phase for Plasma Active One, this makes testing new things a lot easier, just by switching to the same package from the :Devel branch. Conversely, this means that if you install packages from the :Devel subproject, you should really know what you’re doing. On the bright side, it’ll be easier to keep regressions out of the packages that are deployed on most users’ machines.

  • Plasma Active on OpenGL ES

  • For A Superior Music Player Try Amarok

    Amarok is a full featured music player that works on most popular operating systems. And now Amarok comes in over 45 different languages and counting. With Amarok you can listen to the music you love or find new music easier than ever. Amarok now has better performance, stability and speed. Automatically integrate with MusicBrainz music library and update your library information with no hassle at all. And you can discover music files on your network just as easily. Find Amarok in your Ubuntu software center or type these commands into your terminal.

  • Twinkle – KDE Soft-phone using the SIP protocol

  • Fedora 15 KDE – How to upgrade to KDE 4.7

• GNOME Desktop

  • Gnome shell starting to become my favourite

    I have several different computers, running Gnome 2, Gnome 3, Unity and Mac OSX. New interfaces always take a while to get used to, so after the initial launch of Gnome 3 and Unity the “classic” Gnome 2 interface was still my favourite to get my work done.

  • Why I won’t be using gnome shell or gnome 3

    When KDE4.0 was released I knew the KDE world would lose some users. I also assumed the other desktop devs would take note, but I guess my assumptions were wrong.. Gnome3 includes the exact same mistakes.

Distributions

• Geek Software of the Week: Clonezilla!

  This is AWESOME! Open Source, FREE, and it handles nearly everything that you need for disk imaging! Also, there is a FREE Server Version as well as the regular PC Client Version!

• A Xubuntu Fanboi Looks at Salix OS

  But if Salix performs as well installed as I think it will, I may have little reason to fall back on Xubuntu.

• New Releases

  • BackTrack 5 R1 released

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • EVO 3D Added to HTC’s List of Unlockable Bootloaders

    • Navy Federal Credit Union Releases Android App

    • Smartphone wars: Android topples iPhone in Australia

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Fusion Garage follows JooJoo with Grid10 tablet, Grid4 smartphone

    Remember the JooJoo? It started out its life as the CrunchPad by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and via all sorts of legal hullabaloo, it ended up being sold only under the Fusion Garage banner when the Linux-based tablet launched in 2009. It didn’t do so well, but Fusion Garage is back with a couple of other offerings.

    What you see here are the Grid10 tablet and the Grid4 smartphone. While they may appear to be just your run of of the mill Android devices, they’re not. Instead, Fusion Garage has taken the Android kernel and built around it to create a custom operating system called GridOS. As if we didn’t already have enough platforms already, right? Maybe they should have just done the skin thing like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • GNU IceCat 6.0 released

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v Google

  When Oracle sued Google over Android/Linux, Oracle’s shares were around $31 and had a little uptick. Now it’s down to $25, off 20%. At that time Google was around $480, had a build to $620 and is now back where it started, even, more or less. If that’s any indication, Oracle’s claims are not worrying investors much.

  It’s a different story on the blogosphere. Detractors are claiming Google is an evil thief of ideas and worse. The facts are that Android/Linux contains little or nothing from Java and so copyright claims are weak and 88% of the patent claims of Oracle re-examined by USPTO so far have been rejected.

• Seven Free LibreOffice Extensions You Should Know About

  When the Document Foundation released LibreOffice 3.4.2 earlier this month, the big news wasn’t so much that a new version was out. Rather, the big news was that LibreOffice had officially become enterprise-ready, according to its developers.

CMS

• Alkacon Software Launches OpenCms 8.0.2

Healthcare

• OpenEMR achieves full ONC certification

  It’s official! OpenEMR has passed all ONC certification tests as a fully qualified emr that can be used to attest for incentive moneys. The official posting: http://onc-chpl.force.com/ehrcert/EHRProductDetail?id=a0X30000003mNwTEAU&retURL= appeared on the website 2011/08/19.

Programming

• The Kotlin Programming Language

  Kotlin is a new JVM language under development by JetBrains. That’s the company that makes IntelliJ IDEA, the well-regarded Java IDE. According to JetBrains, the main design goals behind this project are: to make Kotlin compile as fast as Java, make it safer than Java, i.e. statically check for common pitfalls such as null pointer dereference, make it more concise than Java by supporting local type-inference, first-class functions (closures), extension functions, mixins and first-class delegation, etc; and, keeping the useful level of expressiveness; and make it way simpler than the most mature competitor—Scala.

• Lightning: Automating An Eclipse RCP Build

• LinuxCon: Are Application Developers ‘Weanies’?

  During Linus Torvalds talk at LinuxCon he took the time to call application developers ‘weanies’ and said that they weren’t ‘real men’ like kernel developers.

  It’s a description that Marten Mickos, the CEO of Eucalyptus (and former CEO of MySQL) does not agree with. During a keynote presentation at LinuxCon, Mickos explained his vision of the new world order in which the cloud and virtualization dominates.

Standards/Consortia

• Amazon and the future of the web

  Amazon’s HTML5 strategy shows the way forward for web publishing

Losing the HP Way

The news of course is that HP plans to buy for $10 billion Autonomy, the UK business analytics company, while dropping the WebOS product line acquired only a year ago and eventually dumping the entire HP PC business. What this is intended to accomplish is to move HP firmly into the enterprise market, away from consumers, while shifting the company’s center of gravity in the direction of Europe. It’s the end of HP in all but name.

Cablegate

• Julian Assange in conversation with John Pilger

Finance

• The Real Reason the SEC Has Been Shredding Documents For Decades

  What should we make of the new revelations by Securities and Exchange Commission attorney Darcy Flynn (background here, here and here) that the SEC has been shredding documents for decades?

  As many commentators have noted, the SEC did this to cover up fraud on Wall Street.

Privacy

• A Cheat Sheet That Teaches Linux Commands To Beginners

  A group of South Korean users of Apple Inc.’s iPhone sued the company in a local court, claiming it invaded their privacy by allowing the smartphone to collect location data without their consent.

• 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.