10.02.11

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Kernel Space

  • Samsung Exynos4 DRM Driver To Be Merged Soon

• Applications

  • Deja Dup, the backup simple and fast is served

    Today we talk about Deja Dup, the tool I used to make a backup of files before the upgrade of my Lubuntu at release 11.04 (most probably this arrive a little late, but the program is worth a blog post) . It is indeed a great software to create backups (so that it’s part of the standard packages in Fedora 13 and if everything goes in the right way it will also be added to Ubuntu 11.10), but the reason for the post is not just that, a large plus of Deja DUP is its extreme ease of use, it takes a couple of clicks to configure it and save our precious documents, even “in the cloud”.

  • Transmission 2.33 Review

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to use Jupiter with Ubuntu 11.10 to control netbook power features

    • The Best Text Expansion App for Linux

  • Games

    • ZOD Engine – Game Review

      Today we’ll take a look at a remake of the classic game Z. Z was a real strategy pc game by Bitmap Brothers launched in 1996. It is about two armies of robots (red and blue) battling to conquer different planets.

      The remake it’s Zod Engine is an open source remake written in C++ using the SDL library and available for Linux/ e Windows.

      The Zod Engine is a multiplayer oriented game where as Z is a single player oriented game. Here you will be able to for the first time do things such as play games against multiple bot players, or play the original levels with friends helping you on the same team.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • DoudouLinux Gondwana update 1

      For the peopel that don’t know what’s doudoulinux, this it is not a new distribution, but a Debian tailor-made for children, the designer Jean-Michael says that is usable by children two years old.

      And in fact by starting this live meta-distro you get a rich and colorful menu from which childrens can choose what to play or learn.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Analysts’ Weekly Ratings Changes for Red Hat (RHT)

  • Debian Family

    • Linux Mint Debian Update Pack 3 Released

      I noticed yesterday evening that one of my systems running Linux Mint 201109 Gnome was offering to install Update Pack 3. This morning I see the release announcement for it. This is going to be particularly good news for some users with very new hardware, because it upgrades to Linux kernel 3.0. On my HP dm1-3105ez, for example, this means that it now includes the driver for the Ralink 5390 WiFi adapter. Of course, there are a lot more changes and improvements in this update. If you have been running the normal distribution with Update Pack 2 installed, it will probably install something like 480 updates.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Oneiric Ocelot (Ubuntu 11.10) Launching October 13th In A Shroud Of Mystery

          Lion and Windows 8 may be stealing their share (and then some) of the spotlight, but that’s not to say that other operating systems are just sitting on their laurels. Ubuntu, perhaps the most popular flavor of Linux for the consumer world, is about to release their newest version. Oneiric Ocelot is on the edge of launch, with Ubuntu 11.10 arriving October 13th.

        • Ice Cream Sandwich, Jaunty Jackalope, and other bizarre code names

        • Award-winning Airtime releases new packages for Ubuntu & Debian

          Airtime 1.9.4 has been released with new DEB packages for Ubuntu and Debian that keep installations automatically updated with the latest version. Airtime is Sourcefabric’s open source radio software for scheduling, automation and remote station management via any web browser. It can be downloaded free from www.airtime.sourcefabric.org

        • Ubuntu eyes speedier releases

          The pace of technology change has always been fast, but now even technology companies are feeling the pinch.

          There was a time when new software updates were released years after one another. Then that changed to releases that were released months apart. Today more and more software companies are putting their foot down and accelerating releases to an almost weekly basis.

          Google releases new Chrome versions faster than most people can keep up. Version 14 of the increasingly popular browser was released this week as a stable release. Already version 15 and 16 are well into development. By the end of the year both of those may have been released formally and version 18 will be in sight.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Teach your router new tricks with DD-WRT

    With each passing year, hardware devices grow less dependent on proprietary components and more reliant on open source technologies. Network routers are among the main beneficiaries of this trend, especially those that can support a variety of third-party open source firmware projects. One variant, DD-WRT has become a common out-of-the-box option for many routers, but also exists in stand-alone implementations that can be placed on routers that support it. Hundreds of routers can run DD-WRT firmware, including nearly 100 Linksys models alone.

  • Phones

    • Nokia creates yet another mobile Linux OS

      Like London buses, mobile Linux operating systems travel in threes. Hard on the heels of plans to open source Samsung bada, and the merger of MeeGo and LiMO to form Tizen, Nokia is reported to be developing its own platform, Meltemi. However, this will not be another challenger to Android, but will be focused on the featurephone market which has recently been Nokia’s main source of growth.

    • Meltemi tipped as Nokia’s new open-source OS ambition

    • Android

      • Samsung to show off Nexus Prime at Oct. 11 event?

      • Android: Ice Cream Sandwich briefly previewed

        A video alleged to show the next major update to Android, code-named “Ice Cream Sandwich”, has surfaced on the internet. The video shows a Nexus S phone running an updated and unreleased build (IRK48) of Android with a newer kernel version (3.0.1). While current Nexus S smartphones show the version number under the “Android version” heading (e.g. 2.3.x) under Settings > About phone, the phone in the video specifically says “IceCreamSandwich” without a number.

      • LG Optimus Slider, HTC Wildfire S join Virgin Mobile’s Android family

        Today, Virgin Mobile announced the upcoming availability of its latest Android smartphones, the LG Optimus Slider and HTC Wildfire S.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • ThinkPad Tablet holds its own against iPad in enterprise, says review

      Lenovo’s 10.1-inch ThinkPad Tablet is a reasonable alternative to the iPad 2 for enterprise users, says this eWEEK Labs review. This capable Android “Honeycomb” tablet offers business-focused extras like built-in enterprise software, full-size ports, and an effective digitizing pen.

    • India Gets a $35 Tablet: Is the U.S. Next?

      The Amazon Kindle Fire promises a lot of great features, including free cloud storage, an innovative Web browser and access to all of Amazon’s multimedia services, but the most eye-catching part of Wednesday’s announcement was the price point: The device will cost just $200, far less than the $500 base price of the iPad 2.

      That’s hardly the cheapest tablets can get, though. The Indian government has announced that a long-awaited $35 tablet intended for students will be coming out next month.

    • Sony Tablet S review

      It has taken two years for Sony to enter the tablet market, and in that time every manufacturer and their budget Taiwanese spin-off have colluded to fill the tablet market with dross.

    • 12 best Android tablets in the world

      Some have ten-inch screens, others seven, and there are big differences in battery life, processing power and on-board RAM. So while we wait for the likes of the Asus Eee Pad Slider, Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 and Amazon Kindle Fire, let’s see what the current best tablets are…

Free Software/Open Source

• Google open sources JavaScript testing tools

  Google is open sourcing one of its key JavaScript testing tools in an effort to get developers to speed up web applications.

  Google JS Test is used internally on the V8 JavaScript engine using in Chrome. Google has attributed much of the speed increases it claims for the browser to the performance of the V8 engine, and the company is clearly hoping this will improve matters further.

• Google open sources JavaScript unit testing framework

  On the Open Source at Google blog, Google has announced the release of JS Test – the JavaScript unit testing framework that it uses in-house – as an open source project. The tests run on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, the same open source JavaScript engine used in Google’s Chrome web browser. In developing JS Test, the creators of the framework were inspired by googletest, an open source framework for writing C++ unit tests.

• X2Contacts Emerges From Stealth With Open Source Beta Release

• A Few Sparks of Open-Source Virtualization

  VMware dominates the virtualization market and is likely to do so for some time. Why, then, does an intrepid band of tech firms continue to put stock in open-source technology?

• Twitter Storm: Open Source Real-time Hadoop

• The Apache Software Foundation Announces 10th Anniversary of Apache Lucene

• Events

  • Looking to JavaOne 2011 with Apache expert Rob Davies

    JavaOne 2011 will be a novel experience for some, but Rob Davies is an old hand at the event. Last year was the first time in ten years that Davies, now CTO with FuseSource, missed the conference. He’s often been a speaker or presenter on Apache projects, especially Apache Camel, and other open source development issues. Still this year promises to be a new experience even for him, because last year was also the first year that Oracle had taken the reins of JavaOne.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 8 Beta arrives with Twitter search

      As expected following the arrival of the stable version of Firefox 7, Mozilla has announced the release of version 8.0 of Firefox into the web browser’s Beta Channel. Available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, Firefox 8 Beta is based on the Gecko 8 engine. According to the Releases wiki, it is scheduled to arrive in a stable production-ready form on 8 November.

    • Firefox Aurora for Android likes big buttons and cannot lie

      While some solid changes to JavaScript rendering and other under-the-hood code have landed in the latest Firefox developer’s build, the bulk of what’s new focuses on the second version of the recently introduced Android version of Aurora. Aurora 9 for Android includes some big interface changes designed to improve its usability on tablets, support for native camera apps, faster start-up times, and broader language support.

• SaaS

  • Experimentation, Open Source and Big Data

    More than ever, today intelligent businesses are trying to make sense of millions of tweets, blog posts, comments, reviews, and other form for unstructured data. The obvious question becomes, “How?”

  • Revolution speeds stats on Hadoop clusters

    Revolution Analytics, the company that is extending R, the open source statistical programming language, with proprietary extensions, is making available a free set of extensions that allow its R engine to run atop Hadoop clusters.

• Databases

  • Google VP backs open database processing tools

    Basho CEO Don Rippert suggests that Riak’s openness means that developers have been able to, “More easily build and maintain powerful business applications on top of our platform.” He also says that, “Riak has already proven its stability, ability to scale and provide absolute fault-tolerance in a highly distributed deployment.”

• Education

  • On the University migration to Free Software

    Megatotoro described here how the recently announced migration to free software in the University where we work made a big splash in national newspapers and even on TV news.

• Healthcare

  • Open Source and EHRs: A proven reality and invaluable opportunity

    The marriage between open source technology and electronic health records is at first blush, greeted by many with skepticism regarding robustness and efficacy. In truth, persistent myths obscure an intriguing reality: Open source EHR systems are not only possible but already in place.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Jaspersoft claims world first open source mobile BI package

    Business intelligence (BI) software specialist Jaspersoft has made its move on the mobility space with the latest (4.2) version of its BI Suite, released under open source in what the company claims is an industry first

  • Implementing Business Intelligence, the Open Source Way

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Looking for Free Software? A New Directory Can Help

    There are free and open source alternatives to just about every proprietary software package available today–the trick is just finding the right ones for your business.

  • Free Software Directory gets overhaul

• Public Services/Government

  • NASA’s open source space applications challenge

    NASA, the US space agency, is organising an international open source application competition next year which it hopes will deliver a new generation of software to address global issues. The agency plans to liaise with other space agencies to create the International Space Apps Challenge that will encourage “scientists and concerned citizens” to create new solutions using open technology, open data and open source.

• Openness/Sharing

  • WMMNA: Open Source Biological Art

    Hackteria is a collection of Open Source Biological Art Projects started in 2009 by Andy Gracie, Marc Dusseiller and Yashas Shetty. They have since been joined by Anthony Hall, Urs Gaudenz, and a growing community of people keen on making experiments and developing their own projects in the field of biological art and science.

  • The New World of Open-Source Mentoring

    Kathleen Lim wanted to move up the learning curve. At 24, she had just been promoted to billing operations manager at Box.net, a $10.7 million cloud-computing company in Palo Alto, California. It would be her first management job at her first postcollege employer. Box.net also wanted her to strengthen its collections department, not previously a focus. “I was looking for guidance, from best practices to how to structure my team,” says Lim. “And there was this curiosity about what else is out there. How do other organizations do it?”

  • Open-source R&D advocates prep $150M cancer drug project

    After watching the cost of drug research escalate year after year with only a small annual crop of new drug approvals to point to, a number of the Big Pharma companies have begun to question all the fundamentals of the grossly inefficient game. And one of the biggest assumptions–that you have to keep your drug IP carefully sequestered behind a legal firewall of patents–will be put to the test by a new project being hatched by some of the leaders of the open-source research movement in biopharma.

• Programming

  • Engine Yard’s PaaS adds support for JRuby

    Engine Yard, a San Francisco-based company that provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution for Rails applications, has announced that developers can now use JRuby, the Java implementation of the Ruby scripting language, in the Engine Yard cloud. Other supported Ruby implementations include CRuby (Ruby MRI), which was written by Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto, and Rubinius. It is no surprise that support for JRuby has been added, as three of the four main JRuby developers are employed by Engine Yard.

  • A Look at Phabricator: Facebook’s Web-Based Open Source Code Collaboration Tool

• Standards/Consortia

  • Spreadsheets Come to ODF as Version 1.2 Wins Approval

Leftovers

• Finance

  • Hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested

    More than 700 people from the Occupy Wall Street protest movement have been arrested on New York’s City’s Brooklyn Bridge, police say.

  • Occupy Wall Street protests grow amid Radiohead rumour

    An estimated 2,000 people have gathered in Lower Manhattan, New York, for the largest protest yet under the banner Occupy Wall Street.

    Demonstrators marched on New York’s police headquarters to protest against arrests and police behaviour.

  • SEC finds ‘apparent failures’ at credit rating agencies

    The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has discovered “apparent failures” at 10 credit rating agencies.

    It said it was concerned that the agencies – including Standard & Poor’s (S&P) and Moody’s – were not making timely and accurate disclosures or managing conflicts of interest.

  • Wall Street’s unwelcome warriors hang on to protest

    All are anti-Wall Street protesters, but with barricades and swarms of police officers in front of the New York Stock Exchange the closest they can get to their target is Liberty Street, a good three streets away.

    An online activist group called Adbusters organised the gathering and the word spread through social media.

  • In pictures: New York mass arrests