• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 307, 15 June 2009

The delayed Fedora 11 was finally released last week. Does the new version of the popular distribution live up its standards? Did the delay help to squash all the bugs? And how does it fare in comparison with other desktop Linux products? Read our first-look review to find out. This week also sees the release of a new project to create more up-to-date installation media for FreeBSD. Currently shipping a 32-bit Xfce desktop, the project hopes to expand to many other areas, as needed. Meanwhile Fedora’s Leonidas release is in full swing, but some users are encountering an issue when installing via the live CD as the system cannot yet boot from the default ext4 file system. Read on to discover the simple fix! Also, Debian derivative distribution sidux has copped some heat over its decision to remove non-free firmware from its 2.6.30 kernel, while Novell gets its users to help advertise their products with an online “Custom Geeko” creation tool. Finally, don’t miss the freshly posted development roadmaps for Mandriva Linux 2010 and Fedora 12. Happy reading!

The Bizarre Cathedral – 45

Run your Linux like a Mac

LINUX users who want to run their computers so that they look like Macs can pick up this Mac4Lin distribution here.

Mac4Lin 1.0 is out!

Mac4Lin Gives Linux Desktops the Complete Mac Look

Linux: Mac4Lin, a package of skins, wallpapers, icons, and interface refinements that brings a completist Mac look to Linux with an automated installation, has reached the 1.0 stage with an impressive array of features.

Unbundle IE in Europe? Why stop there?

My interest here isn’t in what Microsoft and the EU agree to as an appropriate remedy for Microsoft’s market dominance in web browsers or past legal transgressions. My interest is in ensuring an increase in the global competition in operating system platforms. In short, unbundle IE in Europe? Why stop there? Why not unbundle the whole of Windows from all OEM PCs shipped in Europe?

CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 8.0

CodeWeavers has announced the release this morning of CrossOver 8.0. This software, which is based upon Wine and allows users to run their favorite Windows applications on Mac OS X or Linux, features several prominent improvements in this major update. CrossOver 8.0 has been in beta for a few months now and among the newly supported programs are Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 and Intuit’s Quicken 2009. Adobe Photoshop CS2 is now also officially supported by CodeWeavers.

Linux Foundation Takes Training Online

In March, the ever-innovating Linux Foundation announced a new program aimed at bringing the brains behind Linux together with developers-to-be in order to supply the increasing need for Linux talent. Now the program is going online, with the first two courses set to call roll by mid-month.

I’ll be calling it GNU/Linux for now on.

I’m currently organizing the New Mexico GNU/LinuxFest. At first we had it listed as New Mexico LinuxFest. The LinuxFest name was copied from many other festivals and I thought all was just fine. However, after a friend pointed out to me that he uses the term GNU/Linux I decided to look into the name. After all I of course had heard of GNU but like many others I had no idea what GNU was all about. A darn good place to start is this wiki article, you get both sides of the argument and plenty of reference matrial.

Linux versus Windows: the eternal discussion

Now, many of these arguments are bogus. Looks don’t matter much in discussions like these, both operating systems run software the other one doesn’t (I don’t care about the Sims, but I do want Openbox), and I’m not a nerd.

The one thing that did struck me was how they felt about price. Linux is free, and almost all it’s software too? Well, so is Windows, and applications can be cracked.

Desktop

• NoMachine NX Advanced Server Enables University to Redesign Computing Infrastructure

  NoMachine, creator and global provider of remote access NX software, announced that the University of Salford, one of UK’s most enterprising universities with a first-class reputation for real-world teaching and ground-breaking research, located in Manchester, is providing students with virtual around-the-clock access from any location to Linux desktops and applications via NX.

  Students in the School of Computing or Science and Engineering require access to the Linux environment along with students from other areas like the School of Business. They need access to a wide variety of applications like Epiphany and Konqueror for Internet access, Freemind and Planner for system documentation, Weka for data mining, and programming languages such as Java and Perl.

• I Clicked A Button

  The more steps that any Linux developer takes that make the overall Linux user’s experience easier are steps in the right direction. Take the technical mastery requirements from Linux and you’ll see the user base increase even faster.

• Seven Reasons Why Beef Is Not Ready For The Dinner Table

  While I’ve been blogging less and reading more, I notice the Linux-on-the-desktop troll-war heating up again. So this was my latest take on it – because I’ve said everything else it is possible to say about it already. It demonstrates that you could go on and on with “why X isn’t ready for Y”, using the same pattern of half-truths, absolutes, hand-waves, and logical fallacies.

  Try it yourself! How about “Why Fords aren’t ready for the highway”, “Why Obama isn’t ready for the presidency”, or “Why the letter Q isn’t ready for the alphabet”?

• Why I Use Linux: Ken’s Story

  Linux opens a hole new world of freedom that Microsoft does not want you to see or even know about. But the tide is turning! Tom-Tom and Linux won the suit over Microsoft. The Linux community was more than ready and MS knew it!

• Indian Government takes a lead in getting FOSS in Education

  Open Source is getting bigger by the day in India. Success stories such as Tamil Nadu going completely open source, NRCFOSS and CDAC launching Debian based BOSS Linux distribution tailored for India in many Indian languages and the recent steps by Gujarat State Education Board(GSEB) to give 50% weightage to Open Source and Linux in Computer subject across all streams (Science, Commerce and Arts).

Backup

• Arkeia Software Announces Arkeia Network Backup Version 8.1

  Managed Service Providers (MSPs) that deliver cloud computing typically leverage both Linux and server virtualization, areas where Arkeia has demonstrated leadership and innovation. Linux provides a robust, cost-effective and flexible platform to deliver hosted services and virtualization improves the efficiencies of server deployment and management. With Arkeia Network Backup version 8.1, MSPs now have the ability to deliver even more customized backup capabilities to their customers with a system that is secure, scalable and granular.

• Druvaa inSync Enterprise Laptop Backup Released on Linux Platform

  Druvaa announced the long awaited general availability of Druvaa inSync v3 on Linux platform.

  Druvaa inSync is fully automated laptop backup software which protects corporate data for office and remote users. It features simple backup, point-in-time restores, and patent-pending data deduplication technology to make backups up to 10 times faster.

Applications

• GnoMenu: Eye Candy Applications Menu for your Gnome Desktop

  Wallpaper switchers, new themes, GDMs and GnoMenu all have one purpose – they bring fresh and new looks to our Gnome Desktops.

  GnoMenu is a highly customizable, theme-driven Applications Menu for your Gnome desktop. The XML theme engine supports very attractive themes with transparency, even on non composited desktops.

• Amarok 2.1 is out & Installing Amarok 2.1 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

  Another nice feature introduced is “bookmarking” – any track with a length greater than 10minutes and Amarok will save the last listened position, so when you return to playing the track, it resumes from the last bookmarked place. You can also manually bookmark any track btw.

• Amarok 2.1 Quick(-ish) Review

  So I’ve just installed Amarok 2.1. Configured my collection location easy enough, downloaded the alarm script from the scripts library (haven’t tried it yet) and now I set about making it look how I want. I know exactly how I want Amarok 2 to look: Exactly like Amarok 1.4.

• Great themes for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty jackalope

• The Killer App keeping her on Windows is… Open Source?

  Linux used to have a fantastic client – KDE-SVN for KDE 3.5. It was better than Tortoise in many ways (it not only showed what you had modified locally, but not committed, but also showed what was newer on the server than the version you had), but not as good in others. The move to KDE4 broke it, and now it has “more bugs than a bait store”, and crashes on routine operations. It was also integrated with Konqueror, the old KDE file manager, and no one has (to my knowledge) taken the time to port it to Dolphin, so now it is just another, separate SVN client.

• Tribal Trouble 2

  Oddlabs sent in the following news:

  After months of tweaking and expanding, Tribal Trouble 2 is ready to throw away its beta tag, but it will keep growing. Since the last release, two new connected quests have been added. Your urge to loot your rich neighbors ends up in an unexpected alliance that will bring you far away from home in search for great riches. The Hall has been updated further so it is now possible to see who is playing, and a new quick stat islands has been added, which pits you against an equal opponent on a random 1 vs. 1 island.

• Almanah — a Diary App for You

  Ever wanted to note down some things that happened to you in a day? Diaries are ever useful for logging things that you might need to refer to in the future and to keep them in a calendar form would be easy for some. Others need to be able to refer to the calendar to make sure that the entries are consistent. Almanah seems to be an application made solely for that purpose.

• Chrome/Fiefox/Web Browsers

  • Who should use alpha-status Chromium on Linux?

    We all owe a debt of gratitude to Mozilla and Firefox. Firefox effectively paved the way for competition in the browser monopoly scenario we had a few years back. Without it, I doubt web applications development would have advanced the way it did.

    But I seriously abhor using Firefox right now. On my Kubuntu Jaunty laptop, my CPU utilization bottom-lines at 5-10% on average before firing up Firefox and shoots up to 30-40% after. Its memory issues are well-documented. Typing a URL in the address bar the first time after starting up causes the entire browser to freeze while it pulls up the address history. There have been experiments that show the Windows version of Firefox running faster on Wine than the native Linux versions.

  • Testing Google Chrome Alpha: Test #1 – Linux

    Editor’s note: We have a special installment for MakeUseOf readers who happen to be Chrome fans. We are reviewing the alpha build of Chrome for both Linux and Mac today. Watch out for the Mac edition later on.

    For those Linux users who have been waiting hard and long for the release of Google Chrome Linux Alpha, there are both a good and bad news for you. The bad news is, Google Chrome for Linux is still not available yet. The good news however, the alpha build is now available for testing, which could be a joy for some Linux geeks.

  • Using sidux with Midori

    I now rate Midori as one of the fastest browsers. I found a few rendering issues, but they are minor, and I’d rate it better than Konqueror at accurately rendering most pages, including this blog. It is without question faster and more accurate than Konqueror, and sidux includes Konqueror as their default browser in the KDE edition, so I am lobbying to make Midori the new default Web browser in the next sidux XFCE edition; it deserves it.

  • Firefox 3.6 To Have Self-Profiling Extension

    Firefox 3.6, otherwise known as Firefox.next, is about to be released pretty soon. And one of its most interesting feature would be a self-profiling web tool that will allow user to see their browsing habits profile. The new Firefox feature which is tentatively known as about:me, will give relevant user information such as most visited sites, time of the day and days users navigate the web most, as well as how users access the site.

  • Invigorate your Firefox with Personas

    Personas is a Firefox extension that add lightweight theming to the browser. It won’t improve security or solve financial crises, but it can infuse some color to your browser, bringing a touch of fun into the routine of Web life.

  • Firefox.next peek: profiling yourself

    One of the features planned for the next version of Firefox (tentatively named Firefox 3.6, but most accurately referred as Firefox.next) is about:me, a specially crafted web page that will let you see your browsing habits profile including most visited sites, time of the day and days you navigate most, how you access sites.

  • Firefox nearly overtakes Internet Explorer in Germany

    Firefox, the open-source web browser, is close to overtaking the rival Microsoft product, Internet Explorer, in Germany, but Firefox still lags well behind in the rest of the world, according to market data Monday. The disclosure comes just days after Microsoft said it would respond to an EU desire to open up competition among browsers by offering its forthcoming operating system, Windows 7, in the European Union without a browser pre-installed.

• Desktop Environments

  • Turn Gnome into a productivity blaster

    If you rely on computers to help you get things done in your personal or professional life, then you’re probably on the lookout for useful applications that will help you stay on top of things. Recently, we took a look at productivity tools for the KDE desktop, but there are plenty of options out there for the GNOME desktop, too. Here are a batch of tools designed with GNOME users in mind.

Distributions

• Review : Cherry Picks of the Month: Foresight Linux

  I just cannot believe that it has been a month to the day that I proudly signed off on the Cherry Pick of the Month for the second issue of GeekDeck! A whole lot has happened since then and I literally did not have a chance to get a lot of writing done. As if keeping up and committing translations for the GNOME, Xfce and LXDE projects wasn’t enough, I embarked on a 2-week-long roller coaster of a ride at work that just ended this afternoon! Have I mentioned that I am also running for the GNOME Board of Directors? My last adventures took me to a very familiar road, this time in my own backyard so to speak, as I was elected into the Foresight Linux Council and became their Community Manager.

• Red Hat

  • Quintiles, SAS, Red Hat among ‘100 Best Places to Work in IT”

    Three Triangle-based companies – Quintiles Transnational, SAS Institute and Red Hat – have won a place on Computerworld magazine’s latest annual list of the “‘100 Best Places to Work in IT.”

  • JBoss and rPath demonstrate choice and customization leading in Linux

    Sometimes writing or reading tech stories about entirely different products can uncover new trends and ideas. I was intrigued with the JBoss Open Choice Java Application story last week because Red Hat officials said its new framework would enable customers to add specific functionality like clustering, caching, messaging and security in “microcontainers” or do without it, according to their needs.

  • Fedora 11 mini-review

    All in all, Fedora 11 is a great upgrade. There are lots of changes “under the hood” for those (like me) who are interested in such things. General users will notice a few cosmetic changes going from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11, especially when booting. For example: Under Fedora 10, graphical boot had just been re-written and didn’t work everywhere, so most systems booted in a sort of text-mode interface. But with Fedora 11, graphical boot now supports almost all video cards, so looks much better.

  • The Three Faces of Fedora 11, Part 1: GNOME

    But having said this, I can now safely proclaim that this latest release is nothing short of remarkable.

  • Two hours (and counting) with an upgrade to Fedora 11

    All in all, I must admit that I am happy I took the leap to upgrade. It has been almost a week now since I did the upgrade and everything is working great with minimal fuss beyond the first two hours from the upgrade until I had X configured properly. If you are using Fedora 10, Fedora 11 is a welcome upgrade, and I look forward to spending more time over the next few weeks figuring out what else is new and interesting. If you have not given Fedora a serious look in a while, I would encourage at least downloading the Live CD and giving it a try — you may find it a pleasant surprise.

  • Fedora 11 Leonidas bleeds

    So who should use Fedora? As a bleeding edge and short life cycle distribution, it is hardy the ideal server environment. It offers a very nice desktop environment, but requires a bit more manual tuning than some of the competition. Performance wise it is very typical, with similar system resource consumption that Ubuntu and others. FOSS purists will enjoy the fact that no proprietary code is included. Overall I would recommend Fedora to someone who has already learned the basics of Linux and can do a bit of work on the command line. The relation to RedHad is a terrific asset for anyone interested in learning Linux for a professional career, as RedHat / CentOS has a lot of commercial and corporate users. If you are looking for the quick jump from Windows to Linux, you should probably look elsewhere.

  • Increase the booting speed of Fedora

    Initng is a full replacement of the old and in many ways deprecated sysvinit tool. It is designed with speed in mind, doing as much as possible asynchronously. In other words: It will boot your unix-system much faster, and give you more control and statistics over your system.

  • int@j hosts Red Hat

    The ICT Association in Jordan (int@j) in corporation with Redhat and Savvytek ‘Red Hat Premier Business Partner in the Region’ and with support from the USAID-funded SABEQ Program conducted an Open Source Software Workshop titled ‘Achieving faster growth and success while reducing spending’ on Monday June 15th, 2009 at the Landmark hotel in Amman.

• Ubuntu

  • IBM’s Cloud Will Feature Ubuntu

    News of IBM’s cloud effort broke in The New York Times on June 15. The Times story didn’t mention Ubuntu, but the blogosphere is talking up IBM’s growing interest in Canonical’s operating system.

    According to the Cloudonomics blog, IBM will extend its on-premise virtual desktop offering into the cloud. The solution allegedly will include Verde’s Virtual Bridges, Ubuntu Linux and IBM’s Open Collaboration Client Solution Software (OCCS), based on IBM Lotus Symphony, IBM Lotus Notes, and Lotus applications. We’ll know for sure on June 16, but I believe the early reports about Ubuntu leaping into IBM’s cloud are accurate.

  • First encounter with Ubuntu 9.04 and conclusion

    In short, there may be some problem which you may face, but thats how we learn something new, isn’t it. So fellas, I definitely recommend you to install Ubuntu 9.04 and give it a shot. Ofcourse Ubuntu is going better and better, in terms of driver support, features and visual looks. So my conclusion is that, you should definitely try the all new Jaunty Jackalope and this was my first look at it. Go ahead, install this.

  • Taking Gloria out for a spin: A review of Linux Mint 7.0

    There is a soft spot in my heart for Linux Mint: Mint 3.0 was the first Linux distribution that I really used rather than experimented with. Since then I have moved on to Ubuntu (on which Mint is based), but the release of the new Linux Mint 7.0 codenamed Gloria made me want to install and review Linux Mint again. I brought my old Dell latitude D400, a 5 year old subnotebook, out of storage and started the Mint live CD.

  • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 146

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 146 for the week June 8th – June 14th, 2009. In this issue we cover SanDisk collaborates to improve Ubuntu netbook SSD performance, MOTU Council Results, Ubuntu Stats, Calling all LoCo Teams!, In the Press & Blogosphere, Upcoming Meetings & Events, Updates & Security, and much, much more!

  • Notes on Post-Its: Ubuntu

    So, though I’ve had a few problems with Ubuntu, the great thing is that everything can be fixed or close to being fixed. So, since I’m going to be using Ubuntu for at least the next couple of days, you will see a couple of posts centering around Ubuntu (yes, really). I’ve got to say though, using this computer with the speed of a new computer is very awesome. It’s going to make this whole sans-laptop period a whole lot easier.

  • First look: Ubuntu 9.10 alpha 2 brings Ext4, GRUB 2

    There are several major changes under the hood that users can look forward to in Karmic. Ext4, a new version of the standard Linux filesystem, is used by default for new installations. This is a step forward from Ubuntu 9.04, which only made Ext4 available as an option.

  • Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2 “Karmic Koala” on The Dell Mini 9

  • click2try(TM) Helps Users Run Ubuntu Directly from Open Source Catalog

    click2try (http://www.click2try.com) today announced the availability of Ubuntu 8.04 (http://www.ubuntu.com) in its online catalog of virtualized Open Source applications. A Community site, click2try enables users to try applications for free and use by subscription.

  • Ictivity Training becomes Ubuntu Training Partner for the Netherlands

    The Ubuntu Certified Professional (UCP) is a training certification based on the LPI level 1 certification. To earn the UCP, candidates are required to pass the LPI 101, LPI 102 and the Ubuntu 199 exams. Exams can be taken in any order.

  • Ubuntu Satanic Edition 666.6 (Jesus’ Jugular) Review

    We’ve looked at a couple of religious based distributions such as Ubuntu: Christian Edition and Ubuntu: Muslim Edition. But there’s another version of Ubuntu…a dark and evil one. A version so hideous and so terrible that it’s name is only spoken in whispers among Linux users…

• Mandriva

  • Noteworthy Mandriva Cooker changes (18 May – 14 June 2009)

  • Good-Bye Ubuntu, Hello PCLinuxOS

    I’ve been spending the past few days migrating some of my home computers to PCLinuxOS. Not my studio computer which is going to run Fedora with the Planet CCRMA packages. I keep a current Ubuntu on my laptop just to stay up-to-date, and Debian powers the home server. Nobody is pushing Debian out of that spot; it’s too important.

• New Releases

  • Elive 1.9.29-compiz development (compiz) released

    The Elive Team is proud to announce the development release of Elive-Compiz version 1.9.29

  • Enlightenment E17 Snapshot Released

    Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri, a member of the E17 development team, has written in to share that a new development snapshot of this lightweight desktop environment is now available. Gustavo also shares that they hope to have E17 released by the end of this year. Available from the Enlightenment blog is a 2009-06-14 snapshot of E17 along with a new (stable) Eet library.

  • Source Mage 0.10.0

  • Clonezilla 1.2.2-20

  • Greenie 5j

  • FreeNAS 0.69.2

  • Berry 0.97

  • Linux-EduCD 1.0 “Valis” wydany!

  • SystemRescueCd 1.2.1

  • BlankOn 5.0

  • Announcing A New Linux Distro: BaitNSwitch Linux

    Today, I’m announcing my new Linux company, HookLineNSinker, Inc. (HLNS) which will produce a new commercial Linux distribution: Pricey Linux. HLNS products include Pricey Linux Enterprise, Pricey Linux Small Business Server and The Pricey Linux Desktop. There are also Pricey Linux Support options for those of you who need 24×7 support for your Pricey Systems. And to comply with Linux licensing, we’ll also offer a free, community edition of our Pricey Linux known as BaitNSwitch Linux.

Devices/Embedded

• Chip vendor spins multi-core networking security stack

  Freescale Semiconductor announced the availability of Linux-ready embedded software that provides security and networking functionality tailored for its multi-core, PowerPC-based QorIQ and PowerQUICC system-on-chips (SoCs). The “production-ready, application-level” Vortiqa software provides a base platform for developing firewall, IPSec-VPN, IPS, anti-virus, and anti-spam software, says the company.

• Linux-based Autonomous RoboCar from Pino Creator

  MP, the Japanese company that created the open hardware Pino humanoid robot, has announced a Linux and AMD-Geode based RoboCar (PDF format). The 6 lbs, 17 inch long RoboCar is 1/10 the size of a real car. It’s intended for use as a test platform for autonomous car technologies. While it looks like it’s made from RC car parts, the company claims the maneuvering accuracy is much higher than possible with toy cars. The hardward includes an AMD Geode LX800 processor running a soft real-time GNU/Linux system.

• Linux robot car targets autonomous navigation

  Tokyo-based ZMP Inc. is readying a Linux-based car robotics platform designed to test automotive robots and autonomous navigation algorithms. The RoboCar is built on a 500MHz AMD Geode LX800, and offers a stereo camera, multiple sensors, and an optional image recognition module, says the company.

• Wind River brings a hypervisor to embedded systems

  We most associate hypervisors and virtualization with servers from their beginnings as tools for development and testing, through their widespread adoption as a means to reduce the number of physical servers needed, to their current stage as a foundation for dynamic IT architectures. Virtualization on the client side has been more of a niche although application virtualization continues to grow in importance and some specific uses, such as running Windows applications on Macs, have proven quite popular.

• Hypervisor targets embedded multi-core

  Wind River announced the availability of its long-awaited virtualization technology for networking and industrial embedded systems. Wind River Hypervisor supports Intel and PowerPC multi-core processors running Wind River Linux and VxWorks, and will eventually support other chip architectures and operating systems (OSes), says the company.

• Android to replace Garmin-Asus’ current Linux platform

  At CommunicAsia today, Garmin-Asus showed off its nuvifone G60 and M20 devices. The former was first developed independently by Garmin and later rebadged with the new brand name after the two companies decided to collaborate on a line of navigation-focused smartphones.

• Lab gear spotlight: Synology DS509+ NAS

  It can do all that because it’s basically an embedded Linux system with a gigabit NIC. I can SSH into it, assume root, install packages manually, and configure it pretty much like any other Linux box. However, it runs cooler, houses more storage, and uses less power than a regular server. I’ve been very happy with it.

• Homer Simpson speaks out on satnavs

  Evergreen Terrace’s most famous resident – no, not Ned Flanders – has finally officially found his way onto a satnav.

• Phones

  • Pre gets NES emulation in Linux; our thumbs are in for a world of hurt

    All it requires is a quick trip to root on the device a compile of the FCEUltra NES emulator for Linux and bam, it’s good to go. Hit up the read link for instructions (we’re sure we’re simplifying things just a tad) — and no, the incredible appropriateness of using a Contra ROM to kick things off hasn’t escaped us.

• Mobile Computing

  • Chinese Chip Project Licenses MIPS Architecture

    Whether Godson-based devices become available with Android is up to business partners who put the chips into products, Hu said. A handful of Godson-based netbooks running Linux are currently available, though some Godson-based embedded products use other operating systems.

  • CrunchPad Prototype Peeks Out Again

    Though the CrunchPad promises low end hardware and a Linux-based kernel, the touchscreen display, the Wi-Fi chips and solid state hard drive should all add up to a much higher price point that what Arrington is willing to let on.

  • KDE Linux Netbook Desktop

    The developers of the KDE desktop environment for Linux are working on a netbook optimized KDE 4 Plasma user interface. Applications & widgets can be displayed on low resolution displays & the graphical effects don’t use too much resources.

  • Switched On: When netbooks suffer from ‘Droid rage

    Even these manufacturers have more to gain by going with their own twist on Linux. HP, for example, has created a unique and differentiated experience with its Linux environment for netbooks. It will take some time before various Android implementations are so unique. It’s unclear why an Android-based netbook would fare much better than Linux-based netbooks have.

  • 2.2million children to own laptops by 2012

    Rwanda has targeted to provide all the 2.2 million of its primary school children with laptops by 2012.
    This was revealed last week (June 9) during the launch of regional Global Center for Excellence in Laptops and Learning by the One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organisation.

How Open Source Can Beat the Status Quo

Open source cannot change the status quo on its own, and of itself. This has become entirely clear now, after 10 years of hype leading to effectively the exact same situation as when we started. No, open source needs to be combined with something else, and that’s usually a technology. That technology can be the Web, in the case of Mozilla, or a hardware platform, in the case of the recent netbook revolution.

Below I look at some of the biggest challenges to the current computing status quo. In each and every case, open source is playing a part. It’s only now, around ten years after the open source revolution was supposed to have begun, that we’re actually seeing things really begin to happen.

IFRA using Drupal

IFRA, the world’s leading association for newspaper and media publishing, knows how to set an example: they are switching their websites to Drupal.

Sphinx: Search Outside the Box

For many years, the only easy way to add decent search capability to a MySQL-backed web site was to use its full-text index support. It was fast, efficient, and reasonably configurable. But as more and more sites began to deal with larger datasets and moved from MyISAM to InnoDB, they found that it was harder to support their search needs. InnoDB does not provide full-text indexing, so that often meant keeping around a set of slaves that still ran MyISAM for the sole purpose of handling full-text search requests.

Drizzle: Rethinking the MySQL Database Kernel

Much like Linux is a fast kernel that can be extended with loadable modules (notably filesystems and device drivers, among others), Drizzle explicitly says “no” to building in some features, instead pushing them out of the core and into plug-ins. This separation allows Drizzle to focus on only the most essential features of a modern database kernel. In fact, it’s almost a become a joke on the Drizzle mailing list that someone will say “Make it a plugin!” when anyone questions removing functionality from the server.

Will Google Wave revolutionise free software collaboration?

If you haven’t heard yet, Google have released a developer preview of their new social networking and collaboration tool – Wave. What impact might this have on free software users and developers?

Wave is what Google call a “a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web”. Think of it as a cross between e-mail, social networking, IM, IRC and Twitter. It not only gives (or to be fair will give) ways to communicate but gives instant feedback to other participants. Using the basis of a wave as a conversation, it allows others in your conversation to see what you are writing in real-time, as you write it. No more having to wait while your IM buddy finishes her message. Wave also allows — in the same tool — bulletin board-style messaging for participants to follow when they log back in. It has nice features which permit you to respond to different parts of a message in-line and in-context. New participants can be brought in at any time and not only get the full history of the “wave” but can “playback” the wave as it happened, seeing who wrote what when and in chronological order.

I am in Love with Flowplayer!

I don’t think I’ve ever been giddy over a video player until I meant my new crush, Flow. On top of being awesome (which I’ll get into in just a sec) it is an open source project with a GPL 3 license. They also offer a few flavors of a commercial license that let you fully brand the player, and of course, support them with some cash.

BSD

• Exploring Freebsd 7.2 – Part 2 – Security and Setup

  Welcome to part 2 of our series. In this part we’ll explore first time setup and security for a machine running Freebsd 7.2 release, as well as upgrading to 7.2 stable, the newer, more secure version of the OS.

• Chinese Green Dam pilfers open source too

  After claims that China’s “Green Dam” filtering app includes code pirated from an American software maker, it should come as no surprise that the People’s Republic censorshipware is also using open-source code without displaying the proper license.

  According to multiple coders at Sourceforge, the Green Dam Youth Escort package – which the Chinese government wants loaded onto all PCs sold within the People’s Republic – includes code from the OpenCV computer vision library. But its developer – Jinhui Computer System Engineering – seems to have deleted the BSD license document that should be included when OpenCV code is reused.

Business

• Why Tech Needs to Keep an Eye on Free

  He said that the free economy was made possible by the industrial revolution and dates back to Jello. Anderson pitched his latest book, called “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” at Wired magazine’s Disruptive by Design conference. Anderson is best known for his Long Tail marketing thesis. “Free” details the changes Anderson expects to see in the business models of the future.

  He said that when the Genesee Pure Food Company was preparing to launch its new gelatin product, it needed to find a way to get customers to ask for it by name at the general store. One idea was to sell it door-to-door but that required licenses. Free products, however, did not require licenses so the Genesee Pure Food Company made a Jello recipe book, printed 5 million copies, hired the best artists, and gave it away for free.

• EnterpriseDB Smooths Way for Oracle App Migration

  EnterpriseDB, which has commercialized the PostgreSQL open source database, announced on Tuesday the fifth version of its Postgres Plus Advanced Server. This latest version of EnterpriseDB’s relational database management system is designed to let users easily migrate more Oracle applications in order to cut costs. It also provides massive scalability using commodity hardware through its Infinite Cache feature. While several open source databases are available, demand for PostgreSQL is strong because enterprises are emphasizing analytics in database management systems.

• World’s Biggest Open-Source Event Announced

  Open World Forum and Open Source Think Tank to bring together key players from the world of Free, Libre and Open Source Software in Paris, September 28th-2nd October 2009.

  Developer communities, business and policy-makers to attend event to ensure open software plays an active role in the digital recovery.

Lord of the Universe’ loses Wikiland grip

Back in February 2008, we told you the epic Wikitale of Jossi Fresco, who had worked his way into the site’s inner circle to guard the Wikimage of his guru and apparent employer, Prem Rawat. Formerly known as Guru Maharaj Ji, Rawat once fostered a worldwide religious movement styling himself as the “Perfect Master” and encouraging followers to call him “Lord of the Universe.”

[...]

And now he’s gone again. Site admins have instituted a kind of forced retirement, banning “Pergamino” for sockpuppeting.

DRM licensing group presses on with plan to plug analog hole

The AACS-LA plans to phase out analog output of Blu-ray and other AACS-protected content over the next few years. The move is ostensibly to prevent pirating, but it seems more likely to just cause headaches for legitimate consumers.

Copyrights

• Price Increase: Sirius XM to pass Music Royalty Fees to consumers

  Satellite radio subscribers will be seeing their subscription price grow by nearly $2 a month thanks to increased music royalty rates, according to leaked internal company document.

• America’s radio lobby ‘fighting dirty’

  Hollywood? That’s not a daft guess. The MPAA is a lobby that wines and dines. The RIAA, you say? Get out of here! This once fierce attack dog is now a toothless old hound, its bark worse than its bite. It’s only bloggers and law professors with a peculiar psychological quirk – (they love to feel victimised) – who have morphed the RIAA into the Beast with Many Heads. So that’s not the right answer

• Stern letters from ISPs not enough to stop P2P use after all

  A new UK survey finds that only one-third of P2P file-sharers would change their behavior after receiving a warning letter alone. If ISP disconnection remains on the table, that number jumps to 80 percent.

• Who’s afraid of a digital world? The World Copyright Summit

  The world’s rightsholders gathered in Washington this week to discuss copyright in all its variegated glory, but the event was essentially about one topic: how do we survive in a digital world?

• Jammie Thomas suffers pretrial setback in copyright case

  A federal judge dealt a serious blow to Jammie Thomas’ defense on Thursday.

  U.S. District Court Judge Michael Davis will allow evidence gathered by MediaSentry, a security firm that once investigated illegal file sharing on behalf of the music industry, to be heard by a jury in Thomas’ retrial, scheduled for Monday. Thomas is the first person sued by the recording industry for copyright violations to have her case argued before a jury. She was found guilty in October 2007 of illegally sharing 24 digital-music files. The judge in the case declared a mistrial after acknowledging he erred in giving jury instructions.

• How The Recording Industry Changes Its Own Story

  We’ve already discussed how silly the Performance Rights Act is — and how it’s basically an attempt by the record labels to get their own bailout courtesy of radio stations. There are all sorts of problems with it, and Jess Walker does an amazing job explaining just how ridiculous the Performance Rights Act is. In doing so, he highlights one point that is quite a common trick in the RIAA’s bag of tricks, but which doesn’t get enough attention: how it changes the story to flip things around to its advantage over and over and over again.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Tim O’Reilly: Open source purists trying to answer the wrong question

And yet, as O’Reilly points out, the open-source world continues to fixate on the wrong battles:

The whole context of free and open-source software is not about Linux taking over the world and replacing Windows. That might even happen, just as the PC replaced the mainframe. And it probably will happen. But it doesn’t change the dynamic….

I.B.M. to Help Clients Fight Cost and Complexity

In 2000, the Linux operating system was a hot technology, but it had not spread much beyond scientists, researchers and computer programmers. Then I.B.M. declared that it would back Linux with investment, research and marketing, and the technology moved swiftly into the corporate mainstream.

Trolls and Astroturfers and Shills, Oh My!

The question of Linux vs. Windows suckiness riled the blogosphere this week, with fans questioning the drivers behind the perception that Linux isn’t ready for the desktop and is only suitable for the technologically superior few. Is it a question of user skill levels or marketing talents?

Desktop

• Leading Chinese PC Company and NComputing Partner to Bring Sub-$150 Computing to Governments and Educational Institutions

  The Macedonian government chose Ubuntu Linux for its “one-computer-per-child” program. By combining NComputing virtual desktops with Haier’s scale and price advantage on monitor and host PCs, the joint solution can be offered for 60-75 percent less than traditional desktop PCs or thin clients.

• Thinking Mobile, Summer Style

  Earlier this year, I bought an old-issue netbook, a refurbished Asus EEE PC 900A with a 9-inch screen, built-in wireless, no CD-ROM drive and 4-gigabyte drive that barely has enough room to hold the Linux operating system and generic bare-essentials software. It cost $175, or $50 less than my iPod Touch. This is carefree computing: If it’s lost, stolen or damaged this summer, I’ll survive.

• Product Spotlight: System 76 Meerkat NetTop PC

  Desktop systems are following the trend set by netbooks by getting smaller and smaller. And it makes perfect sense. Not only do you save space, but in most cases you save on energy costs. System 76, a company producing Linux-based hardware, is offering up an outstanding smaller form-factor PC – the Meerkat NetTop PC.

• ZaReason Ion Breeze 3770

  While this is the first NVIDIA ION nettop that we have tested under Linux (along with being the first ZaReason system we have reviewed), we were left being quite pleased with the Ion Breeze 3770. When using the proprietary Linux driver from NVIDIA, the GeForce 9400M GPU works great with an Intel Atom processor and delivers excellent video playback capabilities and is able to even run some games. Aside from faster graphics, when factoring out the other hardware differences with today’s tests, the NVIDIA MCP79 performs about the same as the Intel 945 with ICH7 Southbridge.

• Ubuntu Sucks Like a Shopvac and Other Linux Rants

  Almost 100 articles and blogs on the topic of “ubuntu sucks” were published in the past month alone, and about as many were published that unequivocally state Windows is better than Ubuntu.

  But upon closer examination, I found that a substantial portion of these negative reactions to Ubuntu stem from unrealistic comparisons.

  Almost all of the hurdles people seem to have when switching from Windows to Ubuntu appear to be errors in judgment and assessment, rather than actual problems with the OS.

• Linux in Libraries an Overdue Concept?

  Both institutions deal with free materials, yet Linux and libraries haven’t always turned out to be an ideal match, according to Tom Curl, a consultant and entrepreneur with a couple of library implementations to his own credit.

  Linux-enabled back-end systems are in very widespread use for cataloging books and other library content, acknowledged Curl, who heads up Medfield, MA-based Enertex Systems. But when it comes to end user terminals, the PCs accessed by patrons in actual physical library settings, Curl considers only a handful of deployments in the US to be real success stories.

Server

• Aussie SkyMapper Telescope to “open new windows of exploration”

  Data hosting will be done on a data storage cloud hosted next to the supercomputer to allow for easy access for data processing. This cloud is based on a hybrid of software and hardware including: SAN QFS software from Sun to help manage the storage domain; virtualization software from VMware; Linux as a core operating system; Solaris ; and databases from MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Kernel Space

• A Visual Expedition Inside the Linux File Systems

  This is an attempt to visualize the relationships among the Linux File Systems through the lens of the external symbols their kernel modules use. We took an initial look a few months back but this time the scope is much broader. This analysis was done on 1377 kernel modules from 2.6.0 to 2.6.29, but there is also a small dip into the BSD world.

• Linux 2.6.30′s best five features

  1. Fast boot. Older versions of Linux spend a lot of time scanning for hard drives and other storage devices and then partitions on each of them. This eats up a lot of milliseconds because it looks for them one at a time. With the 2.6.30 boot-up, however, instead of waiting for this to get done the rest of the kernel continues to boot-up. At the same time, the storage devices are being checked in parallel, two or more at a time, to further improve the system’s boot speed.

  There are other efforts afoot to speed up Linux’s boot times. The upshot of all this work will be to keep Linux the fastest booting operating system well into the future.

• TTM, Radeon KMS Pull Request Goes In

  David Airlie has asked Linus Torvalds to pull in the TTM memory manager and Radeon kernel mode-setting code into the Linux 2.6.31 kernel.

Applications

• Develop Websites with Bluefish

  Linux is at the forefront of web development, and Ubuntu is a great distribution to use to build and design a website for the first time. Recently, I’ve been developing web applications using frameworks, and Linux in general makes these things quite a bit easier. Therefore, I figured I should present some of the basic tools you can use to create, develop, and host a website. This may abstract a bit away from the idea of “applications” in and of themselves, but I thought you may all be interested anyway.

• Dropbox vs Ubuntu-One

  My request for using Ubuntu-One Beta was approved by Canonical, so I immediately made a small (& un-scientific) test. I put 13 files, totaling 23,4MB, first in Ubuntu-One and then in Dropbox.

• Upbeat about Updates

  Once again I hope you’ve enjoyed this report. I know that I promised a build HOWTO, and it is under construction so stay tuned.

  By the way, I’m happy to see that OSC is becoming more popular (developer Nick Copeland may add OSC support to his Bristol synth, mentioned in my previous article) and I hope that more audio software developers utilize it in their work.

  This article is dedicated to the memory of my friend Fred Kwis who passed away recently after a lengthy battle with the effects of Parkinson’s disease. Fredy was only a year older than me, and we had been friends since childhood. He was a life-long musician and like an older brother to me. RIP, my friend, I know your spirit is still rockin’ the heavenly house.

• 7 of the Best Free Linux Revision Control Tools

  Version control systems play an essential role for developers. First up, they allow developers to safely store successive versions of source code. Besides providing a secure backup of the source code, this type of software lets developers revert back to a stable release if subsequent code changes have unforeseen consequences.

Desktop Environments

• Introducing KDE 4 plasmoids

  Plasma, the desktop shell of KDE 4, improves the desktop experience with its simple Plasma applets, plasmoids

• Gnome – The Curtain Is About To Go Up

  I was told once by a third party that the reason Nautilus did not include these simple features was because they did not want to be perceived as copying the KDE guys. I honestly hope that isn’t true. If it is, that means the development of the première environment for file management is being fueled by ego.

  So given the fact that Gnome via Ubuntu is going to be the face of Linux, what changes do you see as an evolution of the system? Post them here and we’ll cull the best and send them forward. No they probably won’t listen, but you can’t give up until you try at least once. You people are pretty smart…we’d like to know what your ideas are.

• Screenshots with Xfce

  The Xfce Screenshooter for the Xfce desktop with the current Version 1.6.0 has no cause to fear the competition.

  With Version 1.6.0 of Xfce4 Screenshooter, Xfce has gained considerable ground against Gnome and KDE when dealing with screenshot capabilities. The option to choose using the mouse pointer to hide or to display aspects over the graphic user interface is a new one.

Distributions

• Fedora

  • Fedora 11′s Biggest Improvements Are in Virtualization, eWEEK Labs Finds

    Fedora 11 provides a sneak peak at what’s coming in the more staid and stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux. During tests, eWEEK Labs found that the biggest improvements in Fedora 11 come in the area of virtualization, although Fedora still lags systems from VMware in functionality and polish. Fedora will also serve well in desktop roles, but will need more care and feeding than other desktop Linux distros.

  • Linux & Open Source: Labs Gallery: Fedora 11 Shows Significant Virtualization Gains

    Fedora 11, the latest release of Red Hat’s community-oriented Linux OS, can serve in a full gamut of Linux roles on the server and desktop. And, as usual, Fedora 11 gives users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux an early look at what’s to come in their operating system of choice. In my review of Fedora 11, I took note of the distribution’s improvements around virtualization, where Fedora boasts improved facilities for creating, accessing and managing virtual machines across multiple hosts.

• Ubuntu

  • Canonical to boost Ubuntu usability by tackling “papercuts”

    Canonical aims to improve the Ubuntu user experience by fixing a multitude of minor usability glitches. The project, which is called One Hundred Paper Cuts, will entail a collaborative effort by Canonical’s new design team and the Ubuntu community to fix one hundred usability bugs before the release of Ubuntu 9.10.

  • Taking Gloria out for a spin: A review of Linux Mint 7.0

    The main point of the review is that I personally consider Linux Mint as the easiest distribution for new Linux users. Everything has been thought out to make the transition easy for those users without sacrificing what makes Linux unique. Nice touches like the screenshots in the software manager show a level of polish and user friendliness rarely seen in a Linux distribution. Linux Mint is also interesting for more advanced users that want a distribution that install quickly and include all the multimedia components without the need of adding codecs and flash from the repositories. If Linux Mint continues to provide such high quality releases I may well switch back from Ubuntu by the time of the next Long Term Support release.

Devices/Embedded

• Silicon Turnkey Express Selects Timesys’ LinuxLink as Default Linux Environment for ADS512102 Platform

  Timesys Corporation (http://www.timesys.com), a premier provider of embedded Linux software solutions, today announced it has been selected by Silicon Turnkey Express (STx) as their Linux partner in enabling and supporting open source Linux for their ADS512102 board.

• Chip vendor spins multi-core networking security stack

  Freescale Semiconductor announced the availability of Linux-ready embedded software that provides security and networking functionality tailored for its multi-core, PowerPC-based QorIQ and PowerQUICC system-on-chips (SoCs). The “production-ready, application-level” Vortiqa software provides a base platform for developing firewall, IPSec-VPN, IPS, anti-virus, and anti-spam software, says the company.

• Palm

  • More Pre Hacks and Inner Details Revealed

    PIC: This means use of the Pre as a full-fledged Linux computer is/will be quite doable – and it won’t interfere with the built-in Palm stuff?

    RW: Correct. Exactly that.

  • Native Linux Nintendo Emulation for Palm Pre

    It seems that some more details on the capabilities of the newly launched Palm Pre and on its webOS platform have made it into the wild, and among them the fact that the handset can easily run unsigned firmware, a piece of information coming from the iPhone developer Steven Troughton-Smith. A wide range of other things that the handset is capable of have made it into the wild as well, though it seems that some hacking skills are required to be able to access some of them.

  • Palm Pre is shipping GPL incompliant

    As it has been reported at many places online, the Palm Pre has started to ship as a CDMA model in the United States. However, as it seems, at this time it is not GPL compliant and thus a copyright infringement!

    The Pre undoubtedly contains Linux and other GPL licensed software. So it ships with the GPL license text as well as a written offer indicating to obtain the source code. So far so good.

  • Dell Ready to Deal for Palm?

    Michael Dell has a few bucks burning a hole in his pocket. But is a company hanging on by one product the best place for his money?

  • A New Hope For Smartphones

    The Pre’s system software, based on the open-source Linux operating system, stayed responsive most of the time, although music playback stuttered once as I launched its camera program. Once the Pre’s working memory fills up, it won’t let you run any more programs but will advise, “Dismiss unused cards to free memory.”

• Android

  • eReader on Android Soon, Planned for Palm Pre Later

    Google Android handset owners can expect eReader availability in “mid- to late summer,” according to TeleRead. They spoke to Scott Pendergrast of Fictionwise, which is owned by Barnes & Noble.

  • Android Headlines: The Hits Just Keep Comin’

    There are approximately 30 new Android handsets coming from top manufacturers this year, several companies are putting Android on netbooks (a hot hardware category), and there are even new strains of Android appearing. Here are just a few of the notable Android developments from the past few days.

  • Google Maps for Android: Speak and Ye Shall Find

    It’s about to get a whole lot noisier in the real “land of the lost.” Google just outed a Maps update for Android handset owners, and one of the new features is voice search. Unlike prior updates, this one won’t be pushed out over-the-air. Instead, you’ll need to hit up the Android Marketplace and download it. Once you do, you’ll have not only the voice search, but some other digital cartography goodies as well.

• Sub-notebooks

  • ARM Android netbooks more “snappy” than Windows 7 on Atom say analysts

    Of course, there’s a big leap from snappy performance to an appealing platform, and that’s something that Linux still needs to address for mainstream users. Sales figures of Windows and non-Android Linux netbooks suggest that buyers are willing to put up with slower performance in return for the familiarity and app-flexibility of Microsoft-based devices. Internet browsing, while perhaps the netbook’s primary purpose, is not all the budget ultraportables are used for; similarly, the absence of Flash support for ARM processors could prove a major stumbling block for an audience used to streaming video content.

Cloud computing and open source face-off

And Linux will make IBM money when used in cloud-based products which are metered to customers, often by the hour. One big reason that open source will help fuel the rise of cloud computing, while often becoming second fiddle to platforms in the cloud, is that software is only a component of a computing environment, albeit an expensive one and cloud economics almost always favor the incorporation of open source products. However, something that open source has only been partially successful at incorporating as a value creator (essentially, only the cost of development) is what IBM’s Sutor clearly stated: economies of scale.

OpenBSD Enters “I’m a Mac/PC” Ad Campaign War

Calgary, Alberta – Theo De Raadt, founder of the security-minded OpenBSD operating system, has announced plans to launch a series of television commercials to battle software giants Microsoft and Apple.

From the beginning of the first “I’m a Mac…” ad, OpenBSD has seen a sharp decline in users from the hip 18-35 demographic. As Microsoft and Apple have slugged it out on the television set, OpenBSD has seen fewer and fewer installations from sorority girls, coffee shop denizens, and young entrepreneurs.

Open source vs Microsoft: further progress in Switzerland

The Swiss Open Systems User Group and the canton of Berne treasurer’s office have reached a rapprochement. The open source advocacy group had criticised the fact that a contract for revamping the canton’s 14,000 workstations was awarded to Microsoft without a tendering process. Although the canton is insisting that the contract should stand, the Swiss Open Systems User Group has decided not to pursue the case in the courts.

Firefox.next peek: profiling yourself

One of the features planned for the next version of Firefox (tentatively named Firefox 3.6, but most accurately referred as Firefox.next) is about:me, a specially crafted web page that will let you see your browsing habits profile including most visited sites, time of the day and days you navigate most, how you access sites.

Something very special happened – The birth of the first official FLOSS nonprofit organization in Romania?

Something very special happened after eLiberatica 2009 ended; I’m talking here about the initiative to organize a nonprofit organization that would support and help Free Software and Open Source spread in Romania.

Google Wave Extensions: An Inside Look

It’s undeniable: Google Wave has captured the imagination of techies, social media enthusiasts, and web users everywhere. Its combination of email, real-time chat, wiki tools, and social networking have generated an incredible amount of buzz.

Hemlock: An Open-Source Real-Time Web Platform

Hemlock, a new open-source framework for building real time web apps in Flash with an XMPP back-end has been released by MintDigital, a development shop in London and New York. Real time apps that use efficient methods of communicating information between the browser and the server are all the rage these days. Now Flash developers will have an easy way to get in the game.

Commercial and Open Source Options: A Strategic College-Wide Initiative

In hindsight, Wellesley’s comprehensive approach and methodical process enabled them to make a truly educated choice. Their diligent requirements gathering efforts gave them the confidence to choose a solution that would address not only their immediate needs but also serve the institution well into the future. Their willingness to consider a variety of commercial, open source and commercial open source options enabled them to find a solution that not only met their functional requirements, but was extremely cost-effective as well.

Cos switch to open source technologies to cut costs

Indian enterprises, private and public, are opening up to saving costs by using free for use technologies. Governments, institutions and companies are increasingly turning to open source technologies to turn frugal as these softwares, hardwares and applications are often free but also to avoid falling into the trap of a proprietary IT environment.

[...]

“We invested only about Rs 8 lakh (Rs 4 lakh for a Dell server). We will incur a saving of Rs 50 lakh, because of a migration from a proprietary software to an open ERP solution running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Dell X86 servers,” says Mankotia.

How to Sponsor an Open Source Sprint

Your company’s IT department probably depends on at least one open source application. The software does the job, is budget-friendly, and it has an active open source community which is constantly upgrading the application. But few applications are perfect, whether proprietary or open source. While the software may do most of what your business needs, you may consider having a few in-house developers add customizations. That’s a perfectly reasonable idea. But there may be a better way that benefits the community, is dirt cheap, and oh yeah – is also fun.

Indiana District Funds Classroom Makeovers with Open Source Savings

Indiana’s Michigan City Area Schools is in the midst of renovating hundreds of classrooms at fourteen school sites. Through a new technology initiative, called HiTEC (“High Technology Educational Classroom”), the district is outfitting its classrooms with a wide range of interactive A/V technologies and control systems and funding the whole thing through savings realized through an open source initiative.

NSC stresses importance of open source software

A sophisticated electric walking cane for the blind is ready for mass production by this summer, the National Science Council (NSC) said yesterday, stressing the need for increased development and training for open source software (OSS) technologies.

Events

• Event: FOSS Fans to Gather at Open World Forum in Paris

  Forget Paris in the spring. Do it in the Fall this year, particularly if you are involved, interested or even vaguely curious about open source software.

  That’s because in October, the second Open World Forum with the Open Source Think Tank will take place in Paris and bring together the key global players in the Free, Libre and Open Software (FLOSS) community.

• Open Web Vancouver 2009: Open Source Business

  Liza Kindred of Lullabot (news, site) began her talk at the Open Web Vancouver conference on open source business with a video of Dr. Vandana Shiva discussing saving seeds to preserve the right of farmers to grow their crops the way they have for thousands of years. Dr. Shiva referred to this practice of preserving traditional knowledge as open seeds, and compared it to open source.

• LinuxFest to highlight open-source software

  Twenty of the biggest brains in open-source software will descend on Clemson University Saturday for the SouthEast LinuxFest. Open-source programs differ from commercial software in that the former can be tweaked by virtually anyone. And they’re free.

  The open-source alternative for Windows, for instance, is Linux. A popular open-source alternative for Internet Explorer is Firefox. Several cell phones run on open-source platforms.

Business

• Ingres “code sprint” yields new features

  Among the new features created at the event were a compressed backup option to save space when archiving databases, an enforced logging system for databases and the ability to suspend logging when copying a database, a command line history for the Ingres SQL utility and improved Soundex routines for better matching. Emma McGratten of Ingres, who organised the sprint said “It’s a testament to the open source community when we can get together and make improvements on features and programs that are being used every day, by the people who depend on them”.

• Over 10 Ways to Find Paying Work in the Open Source Arena

  Despite some encouraging upticks, the economy is still suffering, and many people are out of work. This is also the time of year when new graduates from college get set to find jobs, many of them looking for tech opportunities. The good news is that there are jobs available all over the open source community, and open source skills can be very valuable in a career.

  [...]

  Red Hat always has many jobs available, but you can even find many open source-focused positions at big Internet companies such as Yahoo. Yahoo makes extensive use of open source technologies such as Hadoop (which underlies its search technology), and usually has positions available for serving these efforts.

• SRI LANKA OPEN SOURCE FIRM STARTS FREE ‘SUMMER SCHOOL’

  WSO2, a Sri Lankan software firm, is starting a free ‘summer school’ this month on open source software and service oriented architecture (SOA), the company said.

  The eight week program will help at enterprise IT architects and developers to become more familiar with SOA concepts, technologies and best practices, the company said.

• KnowledgeTree Updates Open Source ECM, Adds Key Enterprise Features

  Open Source solutions seem to be in high demand in this down economy. So what do open source enterprise content management providers do to meet this demand? They add new features and functionality of course. At least that is what KnowledgeTree (news, site) has done.

• KnowledgeTree Makes Upgrades to its Open Source Document Manager

  KnowledgeTree, the open source document management system for the enterprise, has a new release featuring some small but significant updates to their software.

  In the 3.6.1 version announced yesterday, KnowledgeTree has ramped up their alerts feature with specification by document type, and added configurable electronic signatures, easing the burden of regulatory compliance.

• Yahoo releases parallel software

  Web search pioneer Yahoo officially released its source code for Hadoop, a parallel programming framework many see as the key ingredient for cloud computing services. The software could fuel a broad class of future Web-based applications, said an IBM executive at the second-annual Hadoop Summit.

• Yahoo Releases Hadoop Source Code

Government

• BE: Government publishes source code for election software

  The Belgian government this week has made available to the public the source code of the applications used for the regional and European elections held on 7 June, Digivote and Jites.

  The same software will be used in upcoming elections.

• NHS tech agency touts use of open source

  NHS Connecting for Health is using open source to collaborate with other countries’ health services in building specialist informatics software.

  Ken Lunn, CfH’s director of data standards and products, said the organisation is agnostic towards open-source software, and uses it where it makes sense to do so.

Openness

• The Size of the Public Domain

  Having already obtained estimates of the number of items (publications) produced each year based on library catalogue data our next step is to convert this into an estimate of the “size” of the public domain. (NB: as already discussed, “size” could mean several different things. Here, at least to start with, we’re going to take the simplest and crudest approach and equate size with number of publications/items.)

• Riversimple to Unveil Open Source Car in London This Month

  The idea to build an open source car isn’t a new one, but you’ve got to give vehicle design company Riversimple credit for originality. The company plans to unveil its first car in London later this month, a small two-seater that weighs roughly 700 pounds. If you agree to lease one for 20 years (yes, 20), Riversimple will throw in the cost of fuel for the lifetime of the lease.

• Hyrban: The Open-Source Hydrogen Car

• The world’s first Open Access Mandate?

  In the process of writing something about the current state of Open Access (OA) mandates I became intrigued by the mandate introduced at Geneva-based particle physics laboratory CERN.

• United Nation launches world’s first free online university

  For hundreds of millions of people around the world higher education is no more than a dream. The United Nations hope to make this dream a reality with their global tuition-free online University.

• Wikipedia begins content licence migration

  The free internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia is beginning its licence migration today. In the future, the content of Wikipedia will be dual licensed, under the current GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL) and under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA). The update is beginning with the English Wikipedia projects, as a reference implementation of the licence change, and will expand to Wikipedia in other languages in the near future. From this point on, GFDL-only licensed content will no longer be accepted.

• Open Source Embroidery: Technology Embraces Its Craft Side

  A legitimate artistic movement known as Open Source Embroidery has sprung up to explore the relationship between, no joke, software engineering and needlework. It’s pretty awesome.

• Geek Art: Needlework Brings Together Programmers, Crafters

• Open Source Robotics Venture Shows the Way Forward

  First, look at the team behind it. Willow Garage founded by Scott Hassan (one of the designers of the original Google search engine) has set out to develop both the hardware and software for personal robots unlike any previous venture. By promoting an open source and open platform approach they are pulling in ideas and assistance from specialists in North America and Europe.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Virgin Territory, Perhaps, but Still not a Universal Solution

  The really problematic part is at the end: “No customers will be permanently disconnected and the process will not depend on network monitoring or interception of customer traffic by Virgin Media.” Well, yes, but intermittent disconnection is just as bad: if you don’t know when your connection is available it becomes pretty useless. Similarly, you have to wonder how Virgin Media will know who to disconnect in this way, if they are not monitoring or intercepting traffic. The worst case would be if they just took Universal’s word for it, pretty much along the lines of the increasingly-discredited “three strikes and you’re out” in France.

  So, although there is much to welcome in this announcement, it represents just the first baby steps towards a full and fair solution.

• Into the DTV era, with no broadcast flag mandate

  Just a few years ago, some broadcasters and movie studios argued that this transition couldn’t happen without a DRM mandate — a legal requirement for devices to obey the broadcast flag and apply DRM restrictions to free, over-the-air broadcasts. And they said they would hold up and obstruct this transition unless they got their way.

• BT Throttling Online Video For Competitive, Not Congestion, Reasons

  Case in point? BT. The British telco is starting to heavily throttle all video — especially the BBC’s online video player. This is the same BT, by the way, that just two years ago was saying there was no need to traffic shape or break net neutrality, and that it could handle all traffic issues with basic upgrades. So what happened? Well, it appears BT didn’t like the competition from online video providers, so it decided to pretend it needed to do this for congestion purposes.

• Bell Canada Shuts Down Crappy Video Store That No One Used… But It’s Still Throttling

  Apparently, it took all of a year for Bell Canada to realize that it wasn’t getting any use whatsoever, and Joe McEnaney points out that Bell Canada has quietly shut down the site… though, it’s still throttling traffic from resellers. Maybe, next time, instead of trying to limit competitors and offer something crappy, Bell could spend its resources investing in bandwidth. That would have made everyone a lot happier.

Copyrights

• Court Orders P2P News Site To Dishonor Convicted Pirates

  Following a request from the entertainment industries, a French court has ordered the P2P news site Numerama to cover the cases of 27 convicted file-sharers. For their efforts the site receives 10,000 euros which they promise to spend wisely by supporting a pro file-sharing cause.

• Media Analyst Calls Hulu ‘Anti-American’ For Providing Free Content

  We see all sorts of confused analysis when it comes to how “free” works in economics — which goes back to our assertion that the human brain tends to run into a mental block when it encounters a zero and rather than recognize the rest of the economic equation, it just pops out an error message. That’s the only explanation I can find for the so-called analysis by Media Metrics’ Laura Martin of how Hulu is “anti-consumer, anti-media employees, and even anti-America” and supposedly putting $300 billion worth of market value “at risk” (thanks Ben for sending this in).

• Obama Administration Reiterates Its Support Of Secretive, Industry Written ACTA

  We’ve been bothered by the incredibly secretive (except if you happen to be in the entertainment industry) ACTA Treaty negotiations for quite some time now. This is the industry-led effort to get a bunch of nations to agree to draconian and damaging new copyright laws by sneaking them through as a secretive “international treaty,” such that countries are then compelled to change their copyright laws to “be in compliance with international agreements.” It’s a really sneaky trick that Hollywood has used for years.