10.15.09

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Ellison’s keynote: Linux, Exadata, the Governator and more

  First, Linux. Oracle has been in the Linux business for a while now but Ellison said the company was surprised by the interest in Linux. He noted that the Oracle’s virtual machine will run any OS, such as Windows or Solaris and, of course, Oracle Enterprise Linux. What was surprising, he said, were the results of an HP survey which asked customers running Linux under an Oracle database which Linux they were using. About 65 percent said they were using Oracle Enterprise Linux.

• Desktop

  • Five tips to help ease the migration from Mac to Linux

    Of course you might be thinking “OS X is supposed to be the most user-friendly OS available, so wouldn’t migrating to Linux be even more difficults?” Not exactly. There are certain elements of OS X that inherently make the process of migrating to Linux easier than when migrating from Windows. Take, for instance, the mounting of images and drives. This task is completely obfuscated from the Windows user, but the OS X user actually knows to unmount a drive before removal. But what about simple, every day usage? How do you make that more understandable for one moving from OS X to Linux? Let’s find out.

  • Dell C.E.O. Promises PC Love Affair but Has a Backup Plan

    Dell released a laptop last month that uses Linux and a minimotherboard to give customers near instant access to things like their e-mail and the Web. That is to say, people can ignore Windows altogether by just using this instant-on system to do their daily tasks. In Dell’s own studies, people spent 70 percent of their time in this instant-on world rather than booting up Windows when they were at home.

• Applications

  • UMTS software for Ubuntu

    The launch2net beta for Ubuntu Linux is available in a 32-bit and a 64-bit variant; a list of compatible devices can be found on the vendor’s device page. While Nova Media hasn’t determined the prices for the final version, the Linux version is reportedly going to cost considerably less than the Mac OS version, which is currently available for just under 50 euros.

  • Web Browsers

    • Want That Early Chrome OS Build? You Got It.

      Frederickson has placed the files he downloaded a few days ago on a Rapidshare account for anyone to access. You can find them here.

      Will Google be pleased about this? Probably not, considering they removed the files from the Chromium folder shortly after our post. But whatever, it’s open source, yo.

    • Opera Unite to be Integrated with Opera Beta Builds

      Originally intended as a separate download — or at least released that way in beta form — Opera Unite now comes bundled with the release of Opera 10.10 beta as a standard feature.

    • Opera Unite Puts a Web Server in Your Web Browser

      Opera Software announced a new beta of its flagship Opera 10 browser Wednesday that comes with Opera Unite built in. Opera Unite is essentially a web server that runs inside the browser — instead of just passively browsing the web, Opera Unite lets you share photos, chat and host a simple website directly on your own computer.

    • New Opera browser turns any PC into a server

• GNOME

  • Boston GNOME Summit 2009

    I spent this weekend in Boston for the annual GNOME summit. I really enjoyed it this year, although there were fewer attendees than previously it felt very focussed and productive. There’s some cool stuff going on, and it’s always great to catch up with all of the usual free software suspects in Boston.

  • Telepathy Q&A from the Boston GNOME Summit

    The first Telepathy session session on Saturday evening at the Boston GNOME Summit was very much of a Q&A where myself and Will answered various technical and roadmap issues from a handful of developers and downstream distributors. It showed me that there’s a fair amount of roadmap information we should do better at communicating outside of the Telepathy project, so in the hope its useful to others, read on…

• Distributions

  • Foresight, rPath, LiveCD, and Unity Linux

    Most, if not all, top distributions of Linux ship a live CD that allows an end user to preview the operating system without installing it.

    Foresight Linux is the exception.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat virtual conference announced

      Open source specialist Red Hat has announced an online virtual conference, the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009, to take place on the 9th of December, 2009. The conference will focus on the Linux ecosystem and the companies enterprise portfolio, including virtualisation and cloud computing. Various Red Hat executives, including Navin Thadani, will be presenting and planned content tracks include business, government, technical and vertical solutions.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Dell’s Android phone confirmed

    Dell has confirmed that its Android phone will launch in the U.S. next year, says eWEEK. In other Android news, Samsung is prepping a “Galaxy Lite i5700″ for Europe, a music-oriented phone is coming from INQ, Spotify, and Telia, and Verizon is spinning a MiFi-enabled phone, say various reports.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • Hands on with Acer’s dual-OS netbook

      At an Acer product launch in central London earlier today, Register Hardware got up close and personal with the firm’s first netbook to ship with two operating systems.

    • Acer’s Dual-Boot Netbook, Liquid Phone: More Open Doors for Android?

      Each week is starting to open up new horizons for Android (GigaoM Pro subscription required), and it’s easy to forget that the operating system didn’t even gain its first users until last year. Google’s Chrome OS won’t arrive until next year, and one has to wonder how many milestones Android will hit by then.

    • Netbooks running Moblin 2.0 Linux coming soon… real soon

      Intel Open Source Technology Centre Imad Sousou says that vendors will begin announcing netbooks running Moblin 2.0 within the next week or two. The news came out of an interview with ZDNet UK, where Sousou discussed the current state of Moblin Linux. The operating system is optimized for use on netbooks, particularly those with low power processors like the Intel Atom, and small screens with resolutions of 1024 x 600 pixels or lower.

Free Software/Open Source

• [MySQL in Emerging Markets]

  The survey of more than 400 developers also showed that the open source database MySQL is closing the lead that SQL has in emerging markets. According to the survey, more than 50 percent of developers in the emerging market countries said they are using Microsoft’s SQL Server, but 46 percent said they are using MySQL. MySQL is slightly stronger in India and Latin America, but Microsoft’s SQL Server leads in China and Latin America, Evans Data officials said.

• BE: OpenOffice boom in Belgium

  The number of public administrations in Belgium that use the open source office productivity suite OpenOffice is rising steadily. And with it the use of the open document format ODF.

  OVAM, Flanders’ Public Waste Agency, already adapted its back office to support ODF a couple of years ago. They are now awaiting the decision of the Flemish Minister of Environment to move the four hundred desktops to OpenOffice.

• 5 of the Best Free Human Resource Management Software

  Now, let’s explore the 5 HRM applications at hand. For each title we have compiled its own portal page, providing a screenshot of the software in action, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources and reviews.

• EnterpriseDB cites enterprise capabilities in open source database

  EnterpriseDB is touting enterprise-level capabilities of its Postgres Plus Standard Server 8.4 open source database, which was released this week. The company says the database, which is based on PostgreSQL database technology, offers enterprises cost benefits of open source, performance benefits of a community-developed product, and the reassurance of vendor support.

• Why Would You Pay for Free Software?

  Conversely, a good product may also elicit a need to purchase support, but for very different reasons. Aside from insurance or an SLA, we may feel a certain obligation to support the developers. First, they wrote a wonderful piece of software that we depend on and that saves us untold amounts of time. Second, we need to ensure that the project will continue. Finally, we may wish to “sponsor” certain features, rather than code them ourselves.

• The math education revolution

  Or consider SageMath. This is a GPL program that aims to replicate pricey programs like Mathematica and Matlab, using an interface derived from open source Python.

  What this delivers is transparency. Teachers and even kids can make additions to SageMath, learning Python in the process, and these improvements too go into a commons.

• Game Editor becomes Open Source

  In development since 2002, the game creation tool Game Editor finally becomes Open Source.

• Identi.ca: Microblogging meets Open Source

  Not a week goes by without news about Twitter, the popular microblogging and social networking site. Things like how companies use Twitter for marketing, how consumers use it to flex their muscles, and how celebrities… well, use it to be celebrities.

• Government

  • NO: Open source resource centre awards Kongsberg municipality

    Norway’s Kongsberg municipality is the recipient of the country’s first Open Source Software Municipality award, in a ceremony that took place last Monday in the capital Oslo.

    The new annual award is an initiative by Friprog, Norway’s resource centre on open source and open standards, Norway’s Unix User Group and the University of Oslo.

• Openness

  • Harvard to digitize Chinese rare book collection

    One of the most extensive collections of rare Chinese books outside of China will be digitized and made freely available to scholars worldwide as part of a six-year cooperative project between Harvard College Library (HCL) and the National Library of China (NLC). …

  • OpenFlights data released under Open Database License (ODbL)

    OpenFlights is a site for “flight logging, mapping, stats and sharing”.

  • Stitching science together

    Google Wave is the kind of open-source online collaboration tool that should drive scientists to wire their research and publications into an interactive data web, says Cameron Neylon.

  • ABC chief champions ‘free’ online content

    ABC managing director and tweeting Web 2.0 aficionado Mark Scott will maintain the public broadcasters’ policy of free online content, and says traditional publishers like Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited and Fairfax plan to charge fees for content is unrealistic.

• Programming

  • Beta days for Qt developers

    The Qt development team is using the Qt Developer Days conference currently taking place in Munich, to release a number of products developed under the Qt brand.

Leftovers

• Five Web Operating Systems You Can Take for a Spin

  The computers we use to access Web OSs really only have to have a Web browser. Since most of the computing power is performed by the cloud server, the end-user computers can be more basic systems, saving us money. Plus, administrators can easily control the applications and settings of the virtual desktops. This can greatly simplify an organization’s network setup, especially for smaller businesses that might not be familiar with traditional virtualization or thin client architecture.

• Blu-ray players are incompatible

  BLU-RAY DISCS of 100GB or 200GB are incompatible with available players, according to The Blu-ray Disc Association.

• Barack Obama’s poisoned shirt

  The Nobel peace prize is intended to encourage the United States president to consolidate the great intentions of his first year in office. But it may do him more harm than good, says Godfrey Hodgson.

• “Terrorism could mean a lot of things”

  …protesting peacefully about climate change for example. Yep – more anti-terror idiocy, this time courtesy of the UK border police, who stopped climate campaigner Chris Kitchen from travelling to Copenhagen and interviewed him along with afellow climate activist under Section 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Paul Lewis has the full story in the Guardian.

• Censorship/Web Abuse

  • Amendment 138: The Parliament betrayed by its negotiators

    Negotiations on the Telecoms Package took a worrying turn for citizens rights and freedoms. The European Parliament Delegation was betrayed by its negotiators, led by Catherine Trautmann (S&D) and Alejo Vidal-Quadras (EPP). In total contradiction with the mandate given by their colleagues representing the Parliament, the negotiators unilaterally accepted to work on a proposal by the Council of the EU that negates citizens’ rights1. This dangerous proposition is set to replace “amendment 138″, voted twice by 88% of the Parliament.

  • Copyright holders lose IPRED case

    A landmark Swedish file sharing ruling that forced ISP ePhone to reveal a net user’s identity to five publishers has been overturned.

  • 19th Century Net Neutrality (and what it means for the 21st Century)

    In researching an article for a book I’ve discovered an interesting parallel between the two in regard to the issue of Net Neutrality. What is Net Neutrality? It is the idea that when you use the Internet, you do so free of restrictions. That any information you download gets treated the same as any other piece of information. This means that your Internet service provider (say Rogers, Shaw or Bell) can’t choose to provide you with certain content faster than other content (or worse, simply block you from accessing certain content altogether).

    Normally the issue of Net Neutrality gets cast in precisely those terms – do bits of data flowing through fibre optic and copper cables get treated the same, regardless of whose computer they are coming from and whose computer they are going to. We often like to think these types of challenges are new, and unique, but one thing I love about being a student of history, is that there are almost always interesting earlier examples to any problem.

  • Finland becomes the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right.

    Finland, a country I was fortunate to visit just last month (my thoughts), has just become the first country in the world to make broadband a legal right.

  • Trafigura gag attempt unites house in protest

    MPs from all parties protested at Westminster this afternoon at attempts by lawyers acting for the oil trader Trafigura to stop reports of parliamentary proceedings.

    The Labour MP Paul Farrelly told the speaker, John Bercow, attempts by lawyers Carter-Ruck to gag the media could be a “potential contempt of parliament”.

  • Gag on Guardian reporting MP’s Trafigura question lifted

  • The Carter-Ruck school of viral marketing

    Marketing experts were stunned today at the success of media law firm Carter-Ruck’s high profile ‘gagging order’ campaign, designed to generate buzz around their client Trafigura’s latest toxic waste product.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Anti-File Sharing Propaganda Back To Focusing On That Horrible Malware You’ll Get

    Then, we have the story of the MPAA apparently sending a bunch of anti-piracy comic books to New Zealand, home of one of many different fights on how to change copyright law. The comic book, like the BSA report, involves plenty of ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about how file sharing will unleash nasty malware and viruses all over your computers — but drawn in nice comic book form. Can we send those kids who got the MPAA comic book a copy of the Tales from The Public Domain comic books as well? There are free digital downloads for anyone who wants to hand them out in exchange for the bogus MPAA ones….

  • Negotiating Through Lawsuit Continues: EMI Drops Lawsuit, Signs Deal With Grooveshark

    We’ve noticed a troubling trend in how legitimate online music services are being pressured into deals with the major record labels. The labels begin the negotiations on licenses… and then sue the company.