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05.17.11

Links 17/5/2011: More GNOME 3 Mockups, Groklaw Interviews

Posted in News Roundup at 8:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop OS revenue and growth outpace servers

    The fastest real growth in operating sales in 2010 came not from Apple, but from Red Hat.

  • 5 Truly Bizarre But Handy Uses of Linux

    Linux is everywhere. From desktops to laptops, from tablets to mobiles, and from servers to garden sprinklers. Wait! Garden what? Yes, that’s right fellas, Linux-powered garden sprinklers do exist. Being a very customizable and open operating system, Linux has found itself being used in places even Linus Torvalds had never expected. Here are five such bizarre uses of the world’s most trusted operating system.

  • Boot Linux In Your Browser
  • Open-source software, Linux to save Santos $2.5m

    AUSTRALIAN oil and gas exploration company Santos has switched on a critical IT upgrade set to save more than $2.5 million by using open-source software and Linux-based systems.

    A consolidation of hardware and software will see the company reduce its power consumption by 300,000KW hours a year.

  • Desktop

    • My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven

      This week, I finally got my new Lenovo ThinkPad X220, the latest and skinniest in the Lenovo X-series of fast, skinny, rugged, all-black, no-nonsense machines. This – my third X-series ThinkPad – is shaping up to be everything I expected from the line and more: it is slim, 2.5cm (1in), configured with its smallest battery and very light – 1.5kg (3lbs 4oz) or so; size up to the biggest battery and you get eight or nine hours of work at a mere 1.8kg; snap on the “Slice” battery, which snugly fits underneath the machine, fattening it up to 4cm, and the weight goes to 2.5 kg – but the Slice delivers about 24 hours of continuous operation without plugging in.

      I haven’t yet taken the machine on the road, but 24 hours’ worth of battery means that I’ll be able to leave my mains adapter at home for the next all-day conference or travel day, which saves weight overall. It’s got a 64-bit, 2.7GHz Sandy Bridge processor, 8GB of RAM, and I’m about to slap in a 600GB Intel solid-state drive that’ll increase its speed and battery life even more.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • LMDE – the Xfce variety

      LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition. Xfce, at one time, stood for the XForms Common Environment because the early editions of Xfce used XForms to create a common desktop environment.

      The Xfce project originally began around the same time as another desktop environment project, KDE, around 1996. Xfce, in its early implementation, was similar to CDE, the Common Desktop Environment that was prevalent on UNIX workstations in the mid to late nineties. CDE was pretty ugly, and so were the early implementations of Xfce, but arguably Xfce worked better than CDE ever did, and Xfce became portable to a lot more systems.

    • GTK/GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • Reviews: First impressions of Slackware Linux 13.37

      It has been often said that if a person wants to learn about Red Hat they should install Red Hat, but if one wants to learn Linux they should install Slackware. I think there’s some truth to that, partly because Slackware largely avoids distro-specific tools and configurations, but also because it forces the users to educate themselves. One certainly can learn the nuts and bolts of Linux through Ubuntu, Fedora or openSUSE, but where those distributions provide a lot of hand holding, Slackware patiently sits to the side with its arms folded. As a teaching aid Slackware is hard to beat as it’s stable, has a clean implementation and encourages user involvement while offering sane defaults. Slackware will also be appealing to people who want their computer to do what they tell it to, no more, no less. I wouldn’t recommend it to users who aren’t interested in what’s going on “under the hood”; it’s a distro for expert users or for people who wish to become expert users. Whether you like Slackware will depend a lot on what you’re looking for in an operating system, but I’m happy to report 13.37 continues the project’s tradition of stable, clean computing.

    • Puppy Linux: Top Dog of the Lightweight Distros

      How can you run a full range of current applications on older computers, netbooks, thin clients, and mobile devices? One way is to install a lightweight Linux like Puppy, Lubuntu, or Vector Light. Select the distro with the apps that meets your needs while matching your computer’s resources.

      Puppy is worthy of your attention because it’s pushed its way into Distrowatch’s top ten most popular operating systems by merit alone. It doesn’t have a corporate sponsor or advertising budget. This article describes Puppy. Screenshots follow the article.

    • Slackware: Remember your roots

      Jack Wallen revisits a Linux distribution he hadn’t touched in years, only to find himself pleasantly surprised. Do you have what it takes to install and administer a Slackware Linux distribution and get back in touch with your roots?

    • 9 Slackware Based Live Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mageia abroad

        We showed the name “Mageia”. The visitors who came by were informed by our people at the booth and the text of a large poster. Questions were not so much about the technical side but rather in the area of who we are, what we are and (and not least) why we are. This was an initial introduction to the Germans and it was received nicely by those who asked. Something the German Mageia community can build upon during the time and the events to come.

        [...]

        A visitor came to our partner (MandrivaUser.de) with whom we shared the booth. He was presented with the current Beta of Mandriva 2011 and then he asked our helpers about their opinion about the new menu style. They expressed their rather negative opinion, then the visitor presented his business card – he was a representative of RosaLabs, the company who invented this new menu style! :)

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Does Net Mean Inter? Or Not?

          Any differences between Fedora 13 and Fedora 14? To be honest, I have not noticed much from my nodding acquittance.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal – Reactions from Users

            Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is probably *the* most controversial Ubuntu release to date. Tech Drive-in reviewed Ubuntu 11.04 few weeks ago and we felt that, even after accounting its share of bugs and rough edges, Natty Narwhal is not as bad a release as you think it is. But one thing is sure, a lot of genuine hard core Ubuntu users absolutely hate the latest Ubuntu release. Here are some of the responses we received from our readers through our feedback forms and comments on brand new Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

          • Why Unity made me fall out of love with Ubuntu

            I’m falling out of love with Ubuntu, which is strange because it’s as good as it’s ever been. And no, this isn’t one of those blogs. I’m not going to proclaim that it’s now too mainstream, or soulless or any other such tosh. It’s not. In fact, it’s very brilliant in many of the ways that matter, just not the one that matters to me. It’s simply not the Ubuntu I’d hoped it would become.

          • Why I’m a bit disappointed with Canonical (One week later)

            So, I’ve had a couple of days to think about what I’ve said, talk it over with some folks and really work through some of the practical issues with maintaining a high standard in the community.

          • Plans for Oneiric: Playing with Brains

            While I was at LGM I got into an interesting discussion about communities and how much they are like biological organisms. When the organism is doing well and all the parts are working on their own little jobs, the rest of the organism doesn’t have to pay much attention. But if something goes wrong then all sorts of attention is paid to the damage/infection.

          • 6 Important Changes in Next Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

            It’s time for another important Ubuntu release cycle. The upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 codenamed Oneiric Ocelot won’t be bombarded with the kind of sweeping changes that its predecessor had to deal with. But in terms of the importance, Oneiric Ocelot might be an even bigger release. A quick peek into the important changes for upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

          • The Case Of LibreOffice And CD Space Restriction At UDS-O
          • Explaining UDS Sponsorship

            At UDS last week I took an action to write up a quick blog post that explains how UDS sponsorship works. This discussion was born out of the view that some people feel a little bent out of shape when they don’t get approved for UDS sponsorship. This is a common reaction at every UDS, but it really shouldn’t be. Firstly, UDS sponsorship is not an entitlement…there is no rule that says “if you are a great Ubuntu contributor then you get sponsored to UDS“, and likewise there is no rule that says “if you are a bad Ubuntu contributor (if such a thing exists) then you don’t get sponsored to UDS“.

          • Ubuntu Developer Summit Oneiric Roundup

            This year’s Ubuntu Developer Summit was held at Budapest in Hungary. There were a lot of interesting developments regarding Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” which is scheduled for release in October 2011. In this article, we list the most important news from the Ubuntu Developer Summit Oneiric.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Pinguy OS 11.04 Is Based on Ubuntu 11.04, Without Unity
            • The Perfect Desktop – Kubuntu 11.04
            • elementary OS 0.1 Jupiter – Unremarkable

              elementary OS has exactly the same problem like most Ubuntu forks. It aims for unique and special, without taking in regard the more important facets of usability and simplicity. You can be unique in any number of ways, but the computer usage is limited to humans staring at their screen, so you best make the smoothest and most pleasant experience of that.

              Then, minimalism really hampers the overall use. Taking away from a distro that is already fairly optimized for general use creates huge problems in the long run, which cannot be offset by any number of tweaks or even applications. People have their basic, universal needs; icons, colors, wallpapers are secondary. The tradeoff is just not right. And lastly, people do not want to spend time administering their boxes.

            • Bodhi Linux Desktop of the Week Contest

              Many computer users enjoy customizing their desktop to perfection. Personally I have spent hours playing with different icon sets, GTK themes, Enlightenment themes and E17 gadgets. Something most people like to do almost as much as tweaking their desktop is sharing those sexy screen shots with the world!

              Enlightenment is so customizable we like to encourage this tweaking and sharing among Bodhi users. Seeing what other people have done with their desktop often gives new users ideas for their own. With this in mind, we have started running the Bodhi Linux “Desktop of the Week” contest. Each week in the news section of the Bodhi forums there is a thread started to let users vote on their favorite of five different desktops (new voting starts on Tuesdays).

            • How I found Enlightenment

              If you know anything about my past — no, that’s not me on the Post Office walls across the country . . . honest — you’ll know that I was a resident at the San Francisco Zen Center in the early to mid ’90s where, among other things, I was trying to find enlightenment.

              So I’m familiar with the Bodhi tree and with Bodhidharma. Good thing, too, because when trying Bodhi Linux, those leaves from the tree swirling around the screen could be a little disconcerting.

            • Quelitu Linux

              This is based on Lubuntu — Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop environment — so that it can be used on older computers.

            • Ubuntu Studio, Unity and XFCE4

              This seems a reasonable approach to me. XFCE4 has a lot of differences from GNOME but it is pretty simple. It also has the benefits of being well-supported and mature. This is a more sure option than hoping for a fork of GNOME 2.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Now, a technology-laden Robot that does all the household work

      She has her own Linux-based operating system called Luna OS. So anybody, especially the throng of app developers for tablets and smartphones, can easily write an app for her.

    • SmartBoards and GNU/Linux

      I prefer just using a projector with Gromit (permits writing in several colours and erasing using mouse) so this technology would be a change for me. Perhaps I don’t need the “extras”.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android notes

          It was bad idea to change the hostname. sl4a mysteriously stopped working. sl4a is now single most important application on my android, because I use it to launch … shells into debian chroot. So now I’m stuck looking at “localhost”.

        • Vodaphone Loves Android

          Vodaphone is a huge global mobile ISP. They are first or second ranked in market share in revenue or units sold. … Vodaphone has 130 million subscribers in India alone and 341 million globally. … They are going to have a house-brand smartphone running Android/Linux. For 90Euros it will sell well. … That means a huge increase in usage for Android/Linux over the next couple of years

        • Android and Ubuntu –Everything

          What u need?
          1.Android emulator for Linux from their site
          2.Eclipse with java for Linux which is free
          3.U should have jdk(java dev kit) installed in your computer
          and some space for your workspace…..
          Emulator is used in order to emulate the actual android phone. It helps in running programs before we run it in actual phone. In here I only asaid about the emulator. I included the picture so always look at the screen shots…

        • Blake Krikorian’s Next Act Is Live: $99 Home Automation App For Android

          Since he left EchoStar (NSDQ: SATS), Slingbox inventor Blake Krikorian has been working on a home automation app, meshing his experiments with renovations on his own Bay Area home. After seven months in full beta, the first public result is live now in the Android Market. The $99 R2 Control for Crestron—yes, you read that right—literally turns most Android smartphones and tables in a fully-functional touch panel for the automation systems company. With it, residential and commercial users can manage nearly every Crestron system on the scene or remotely.

          During a stay at Krikorian’s home late last year, I had a chance to use the Android app in progress and to watch him manage entertainment, lighting, security systems and more inside and out from smartphones and tablets. It wasn’t exactly as mind boggling as the first time I saw a Slingbox at work—home automation isn’t new and neither are home automation or building control apps—but the potential for a program that was usable, powerful and flexible was intriguing. Crestron already supports versions for iOS, MacOS and Windows; this is the first for Android.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Interview: PJ on the beginning, ending, and future of Groklaw

    I’ll still be working on it, just not doing articles. I want to finish the Comes v. Microsoft exhibit collection and fix some other loose strings, so the work stands the test of time and is truly useful to historians and lawyers.

    I can’t do that and write articles every day. And I have a number of personal and other work projects that I shoved to the back burner in order to do Groklaw, and now that the emergency for Linux is handled, it’s time to prioritize in a more normal way. We won, the emergency is over, and I get to relax a bit now.

    So that is part of it. But the most important consideration was this: I was born to write Groklaw, about SCO and the Linux kernel and copyright litigation. But the battlefield now has shifted to mobiles and patents. I thought seriously about that, and I recognized that I am not the right person to take the lead on that. I always hated patent law, and nothing I’ve seen in the last 8 years has altered my feelings. I hate software patents with a passion, I think they are destroying innovation in the US, and that they particularly threaten FOSS, the open development model being opposed to patents. I think software and patents need to get a divorce.

    I consider that a serious enough matter that I thought modesty needed to inform me to stop, that others could fill the role and would if I did. Then when I announced I would stop, I was flooded with requests to find someone to continue, and I realized the community was right. It was irresponsible if I didn’t try to maintain the community, their skills, in one place. And happily, we found someone. I think Groklaw will end up more important than it’s been, actually, because Mark Webbink is lawyer, a FOSS lawyer, and a law professor. With him taking the lead, and his law students –and we hope eventually others at other law schools–joining the community, it can grow in the direction that is needed now. They can explain the law, and the community at Groklaw can help them understand the tech. It’s what Groklaw is for, what I dreamed it should be–a place where the two communities can teach each other, so they can together hopefully help judges to understand the tech so they can reach better decisions, ones based on technical realities. So this is organic, part of what Groklaw is supposed to be, just the next step.

    Part of Groklaw’s success was realizing that we could contribute just as we are, without trying to be more than we were. But that means also remaining modest and aware of what we were not qualified to do. I always said the only legal advice I ever give is, Ask your lawyer. Well, now Groklaw is going to follow that advice and get a lawyer. It’s a natural progression. And it’s the right time, given Microsoft’s rather obvious strategy of using patents against GNU/Linux.

  • Groklaw – “The blog that made a difference”

    Groklaw began life in 2003 as the personal blog of Pamela Jones, better known as PJ. “At the start, I was just trying to learn how to use blogging software,” she has said. “I was startled to learn anyone was reading what I wrote… I started covering the McDonald’s ‘I’m fat and it’s your fault’ litigation and Martha Stewart and just whatever was in the news, just to have something to write about as I learned how blogging worked.”

    The emergence of Groklaw coincided with The SCO Group’s decision to take legal action against IBM and the Linux community. PJ’s first article on the case, “SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step”, appeared in May 2003.

  • Survey: 56% expect that more than half of all software spend over next 5 years will be open source

    More than half of all software purchases made over the next five years will be open source, according to half of all respondents in a significant survey released today.

    Although 95 percent of the same survey’s 450 respondents believe that the “turbulent “ economy is good for open source software, avoiding vendor lock-in has supplanted lowered software cost as the chief reason for open source adoption.

    These findings, included in the fifth annual Future of Open Source survey, conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners (NBVP) and 451Group, were made public today at the Open Source Business Conference. The venture capital firm invests in many open source firms including Acquia, which is highlighted in the report and at the conference.

    The overall finding: open source has gone mainstream and is in high growth mode.

    Lower software costs are still important (No. 2 on the list) but customers increasingly value open source because it protects them from traditional vendor lock-in (Oracle, for example) as well as emerging proprietary cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 races further ahead of IE9

        Mozilla may still be weeks away from automatically upgrading users of its aging Firefox 3.5 browser, but even without the benefit of those additional users its latest browser version continues to blast past Microsoft’s competing Internet Explorer 9 in usage.

        In fact, early this month Firefox 4′s usage began to show a sharp increase while IE9 continued on a much more gradual climb, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler pointed out on Sunday.

      • Firefox 6 Gets URL Bar Upgrade

        The most recent Nightlies of Firefox 6 are first out of the gate with an update for the UI.

      • Mozilla Plans End to Firefox 3.5 With Firefox 5 Beta on Horizon

        Mozilla is sticking to its new fast-track development cycle, with plans to release a beta version of Firefox 5 on Tuesday, May 17.

        Meanwhile, the company is also working on phasing out Firefox 3.5.

        Firefox 5 is currently in Mozilla’s Aurora channel, but will move to beta tomorrow. Aurora is a recently created channel that now comes between nightly builds and beta in order to “deliver features to users at various levels of quality and polish,” Mozilla said last month.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice clarifies version numbering

      The LibreOffice developers at the Document Foundation have, for the last time, published an announcement on their main mailing list of a new beta version of LibreOffice. In future, beta releases and release candidates will only be announced on developer mailing lists and the announcements mailing list will only carry news of final and stable versions.

  • Licensing

    • What is the Top Open Source License?

      Open source software is defined by the open source licenses under which applications and code are made available. Have you ever wondered what the most popular open source licenses in use today are?

      A new study from enterprise open source service provider OpenLogic, released today at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) reveals that the answer to what is the top open source license depends on how the question is asked.

      When looked at from the perspective of total projects and the code under which they are licensed, 68.9 percent of open source software packages use the GPL. The Apache software license comes in second at 7.6 percent.

      Adjusting the question to look at the top open source projects by download and what licenses they use, present a different view of the data. According to OpenLogic, measured by downloads the top open source license is the Apache License at 32.7 percent. The LGPL came in second at 21.0 percent and GPL is third at 14.4 percent.

    • Is the Affero GPL unfriendly to hobbyists?

      A few days ago I wrote about GNU MediaGoblin, a project that looks to provide a federated media sharing solution so users can take control of their media and still share with friends. But the licensing for GNU MediaGoblin, the Affero GPLv3 (AGPLv3) seemed to irk a few commenters? Is the AGPL’s “one additional feature” too much for hobbyists?

      The difference between the AGPL and traditional GPL is simple: The AGPL seeks to close a “loophole” that allows a company or organization to modify GPL’ed software and use it to provide a service — but without actually distributing changes. So a company can take a package like, say, WordPress and modify the software significantly to sell a service — but hold back changes because it’s not technically “distributing” or “propagating” the software. The AGPL goes a bit further and says that if the program is “intended to interact with users through a computer network” and if the version that you received gives users “the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program’s complete source code,” you have to maintain that functionality and distribute the modified version.

Leftovers

Clip of the Day

Nexuiz, I still play it.


Credit: TinyOgg

05.16.11

Links 16/5/2011: Many New Distro Releases, Netflix Comes to Android

Posted in News Roundup at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Fear Haunts Users of That Other OS

    It won’t go away. That other OS fools its users about the identification of files causing what looks like text or other innocent files to be executable… If ever there was a flaw in the design of an OS this is it. Use Debian GNU/Linux, which actually examines the file to determine its type. The latest malware exploiting this “feature” of that other OS romps through Vista and “7″. Use Debian GNU/Linux, a real OS, working for the end-user and not criminals.

  • Chromebook: the good and the bad

    Chromebook is a brand name for range of hardware from the likes of Acer and Samsung that will run Chrome OS. Both the Samsung and the Acer machines sport a 12-inch screen, a 1.6GHz dual core processor and either 3G or combination 3G-WiFi connections. The selling point for many is that the Chromebooks will be available on a subscription basis at US$28 a month over three years. However, there are pros and cons to the Chromebooks.

  • Is Lack of Marketing Still Linux’s Achilles Heel?

    …Linux and open source purists who cringe at the sheer mention of terms like “marketing” or “public relations”…

  • Desktop

    • Top 20 Countries for Use of Desktop GNU/Linux

      Compare these numbers showing global acceptance at around 1% with Wikipedia Stats that show 2.53%, and that’s only in the English-speaking world.

      Really, StatCounter does not cover the globe in a neutral way. Give us the list of sites covered, please. We know Wikipedia is a neutral site because anyone can post articles and anyone can read them but it is biased towards English, so it will be undercounting most countries of the world. It shows MacOS at 7.73% but we know from Apple’s own numbers that it is less than 4%.

    • A Windows Guy Goes Linux

      In case you are a new TNW reader, I am a card-carrying Windows fanboy.

      [...]

      I accepted shipment of the laptop, a fine, if slightly low-end ThinkPad, and opened to the gate to the land of Linux bristling with uncertainty as to what I was about to experience.

  • Kernel Space

    • Fedora and Ubuntu are getting the Butter on our File systems…

      Phoronix.com, a great site with an even better preformance test suite, has a nice write up about the often talked about BRTFS(commonly pronounced Butter FS). They mention that Fedora seems to be releasing it with GRUB extenstions to allow for file system snapshot roll-backs by the end of the year and Ubuntu by the 12.04 release next April.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE PIM 4.6 RC1

        This version will have regressions compared to KDE PIM 4.4. There was never a goal to create a Kontact2 with zero regressions. The only goal was to create a working release. After that the work on making it perfect can begin. Division of resources between maintaining the 4.4 series and attempts to perfect the Kontact2 release was causing demotivation in the community. Making the release is the act that allows us to cross the starting line towards fixing the smaller issues.

      • JuK facelift

        So, somewhat miraculously, I’ve been doing a little KDE hacking again this week for the first time since, oh, 2006 or so (aside from TagLib, which recently moved to GitHub).

        Being as I’m all a startupy web weenie these days, some of the design sins of my youth have been haunting me. I wanted to give JuK a little bit of a fixer-upper. Almost all of the 20 commits that cia.vc says that I’ve done this week stem from either polishing the interface some or improving the initial experience on startup.

        [...]

        I’d love to someday have time to go all OCD and just spend like a couple weeks fixing things like text alignment and margins all over KDE.

      • Kubuntu Council? What is this?

        Every year the Kubuntu community gets to elect 3 new members for the Kubuntu council.

      • digiKam Tricks 3.5 Released

        Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.

      • Nokia Update On Qt 5 Provides Open Assurances

        Now, it’s clear that Qt is moving toward an open governance model, and Lars Knoll reports that it will be relatively easy for developers to move applications from Qt 4 to Qt 5…

    • GNOME Desktop

      • ISO image for GNOME3 promo DVD available for download

        a quick post for people who want the GNOME 3 promo DVD iso image (it is based on 1.1.0 image, combining both x86 and x86-64 images and some demo video and music).

      • Gnome Outreach Program for a clueless head

        It could happen to anyone to have being using Gnome many years on Ubuntu or SuSE without knowing they are gnome users, and it did to me. I somehow get to know gnome by working on Beijing Gnome User Group community events, because many my other friends joined and asked me to. When I got a dim picture of what gnome is, I had been using it for years. Until now I still not so clear which application belongs to Gnome. I know Inkscape is of gnome, but a few month ago I thought (wrongly) SmartSVN in my toolbox is also of Gnome. I guess with this level of background knowledge I am the most clueless of all. I knows something about web building, graphical works and so like,Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Andreas Nilsson (my mentor) somehow thought I might be of use. “Get on-board”, they say, so here I am. I’ll try to be useful:)

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • SalineOS 1.0 (Personal Server)
      • Zentyal 2.1-1
      • BackTrack 5 – Are you Infected yet?
      • Clonezilla 1.2.8-41
      • Berry 1.09
      • Kanotix Hellfire 2011-05
      • Salix Xfce 13.37

        Salix Xfce 13.37 is finally here, shortly after Slackware 13.37 was released, on which Salix 13.37 is based. Salix Xfce 13.37 includes numerous changes and improvements, both Salix specific and also inherited from Slackware. With Salix being fully backwards compatible with Slackware, the Salix repositories for 13.37, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, are already the largest 3rd party binary package repositories available for Slackware users.

        This release comes with linux kernel 2.6.37.6, the Xfce 4.6.2 desktop environment, Firefox 4.0.1 and Claws-mail 3.7.8. Libreoffice 3.3.2 is included by default in full mode installations, replacing OpenOffice.org and localization packages for it for more than a hundred languages are available through the package management tools.

        [...]

        There is also a full source tree in the Salix 13.37 repositories, for all software packaged by Salix.

      • 2011-05-09: version 0.9.7 of live.linux-gamers.net released!

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Enlightenment Special Edition of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

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

      • The mystery of the missing wi-fi in Mageia/Mandriva

        I’ve been avoiding kernel 2-6.38.4 and 2-6.38.6-1 in Mandriva because last time I found them in an update and installed them, my netbook lost its wi-fi capabilities. Yes, it would not pick any signal or start wireless connections at all. It would tell me that I needed some b43 files from a web site and the installation was beyond my understanding.

        Well, I decided that I wanted to install Mageia 1 in my netbook. I will spare you the story of my mistake of installing beta1 and my consequential sadness because iBus would not work. However, when I corrected my mistake and installed beta2, my happiness upon seeing iBus working flawessly quickly faded away because I discovered that the dreadful kernel 2-6.38.4 was what Mageia uses and, therefore, my wi-fi was gone!

        [...]

        It worked. Now, I’m posting this entry using the wi-fi in Mageia beta2.

      • Considerations on Mondorescue packaging for Mageia

        There has been a recent discussion on the Mageia mailing list on the mondo package which is one of the last having a non-coherent version schema with the one in Mandriva, thus blocking the update.

        [...]

        Note that it just affect the mondo package. All the others are already sane.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Public Service Announcement: crossdev, glib and binary compatibility

        Quick summary, please read as it is important! If you’re running a 64-bit arch such as amd64, then you’re safe and you can read this simply as future reference. The same goes if you have never used sys-devel/crossdev (even better if you have no idea what that is. But if you’re cross-compiling to a 32-bit architecture such as ARM, you probably want to read this as you might have to restart from scratch or you’re using a 32-bit architecture and have sys-devel/crossdev installed you really want to read this post.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)

        Back in 2006, LWN looked at the rather complicated story around the maintainership of the RPM package manager. Given the importance of this tool for any RPM-based distribution, the lack of a clear story on how it was being maintained was somewhat discouraging. Later that year, the Fedora project announced the creation of a new, community-oriented project around RPM. Since then, things have been on the quiet side, but recent events show that the RPM story has not yet run its course.

        The above-mentioned RPM project lives on at rpm.org; the 4.9.0 release was announced at the beginning of March. The code is actively maintained and sees the addition of some small features, but the project does not show any real signs of having big plans for the future. Only a handful of committers show up in the repository; almost all of them work for Red Hat. By all appearances, RPM is at least halfway into maintenance mode.

        [...]

        That has changed, though, in recent months; the Mandriva 2011 plans include a switch to rpm5.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6.0: KDE 4

        Having got Debian 6 “Squeeze” running, the next project was to reconfigure my desktop environment, KDE, the way I like it. I’ve used KDE for years, and really liked KDE 3.5 on Debian 5 “Lenny.” Alas, Debian 6 has moved on to KDE 4, and the developers couldn’t leave well enough alone.

        [...]

        I must say, even before adding Xinerama, the desktop display seemed slower to me. And I see that Xorg is consuming 18% of my available RAM. Oink!

      • DebConf “Newbies”/Non-Regulars Funding Initiative

        This year the Debian Project again invites “newbies” and non-regular attendees to join the annual Debian Conference (DebConf). As a special incentive an extra travel fund has been set up, which is only available to new or non-regular DebConf attendees. Every Debian Developer or Maintainer who has never been to a Debian Conference or who last attended in 2007 (Scotland) or before is invited to participate.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu, Linux, and Eucalyptus

            Last week Eucalyptus participated in the Red Hat Summit in Boston. This week we are at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest. At UDS Canonical formalized the decision to make OpenStack what they call foundation technology in Ubuntu Cloud. What are the likely impacts of this decision?

          • I will not use Unity because…

            Ubuntu 11.04 has been released, and I’m very happy about it. I gave the news to many (Italian) media, I wrote the (Italian) press releases, I did several talks (Ubuntu parties, Universities, simple events) about the Unity allure. I said it’s new and fantastic. What else should a good promoter do?

            Probably use it. But I’m sorry i will not use Unity. For many reason.

          • Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.13: bugs, bugs and bugs

            The door to Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 is never closed, but there’re still a lot of bugs have to fixed. Here’s Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.13.

            After the release of Natty, the desktop environment of Ubuntu has never been so complex before: Unity, GNOME classical, GNOME 3(Through PPA), LXDE, KDE…

          • Ubuntu gnome remix shaping up; now install with a script

            Ubuntu gnome remix or UGR got serious attention partially because of the disappointment on the latest iteration of the Ubuntu desktop and its Unity shell. The Unity although a good idea, falls short of meeting the expectations of many users. Since Ubuntu uses the gnome 2.32 desktop the gnome 3.0 ppa had real issues working well in Natty (11.04). There came UGR with lot of promises to provide a stable ubuntu remix with a vanilla gnome 3.0 and its shell. So, where do they stand now?

          • Canonical switches to OpenStack for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud

            Canonical has announced that Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud will adopt the OpenStack cloud platform over Eucalyptus. In other Ubuntu-related news, an Ubuntu 11.04-based Linux Mint 11 release candidate (RC) was announced that opts for the GNOME 2.32.1 desktop environment over both Canonical’s Unity and GNOME 3.0.

          • Some changes to contacts

            Last month was a big one for Ubuntu and Ubuntu One. For Ubuntu One, in addition to all the improvements we made in Ubuntu 11.04, we also released substantial improvements to contacts on the web, including Facebook import. Our attention now turns to contacts sync for mobile devices.

            We’re working on completely revamping contacts sync for mobile to give you an overall better experience. The new service will work with mobile devices running iOS or Android operating systems. We decided to focus on these two operating systems so we can deliver the best user experience without having to limit functionality to the lowest common denominator. The new service will be free and available later this year. If you are interested in testing the new service, please add your email address to this form and we will provide you with more info once the service is ready for testing.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Pinguy OS 11.04 Released With Classic GNOME 2.32.1 Desktop

              Pinguy OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that comes with a lot of applications installed by default, trying to cover everyones needs. But it’s not the default application selection what makes Pinguy OS so interesting and easy to use (though it’s a plus if you use most of the default applications in Pinguy OS) but Pinguy’s attention to detail: every single aspect of the desktop is carefully customized to provide a great out of the box experience. From drivers (and Compiz enabled by default) to pre-installed Firefox addons, themes and so much more from both the Ubuntu and Linux Mint worlds.

            • Ubuntu Studio says no to Unity, adopts Xfce

              In another sign Canonical’s Unity desktop environment is not resonating well with the wider Ubuntu community, multimedia-centric Ubuntu derivative, Ubuntu Studio, will move from the GNOME to the Xfce desktop for its next release.

            • Find your favorite apps installed by default in PinguyOS 11.04

              PinguyOS 11.04 is released, Based on ubuntu 11.04 natty Narwhal, this new release is an optimise build of Ubuntu 11.04 Minimal CD with added repositories, tweaks and enhancements that can run as a Live DVD or be installed. It has all the added packages needed for video, music and web content e.g. flash and java, plus a few fixes as well. Like fixing the wireless problems, gwibber’s Facebook problem and flash videos in full-screen.

            • Enlightening Your Linux Desktop With Bodhi: Jeff Hoogland

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Linux-based IP and VoIP routers gain embedded database

      McObject announced a design win for its in-memory ExtremeDB database management system, which will be integrated across dozens of Linux-based IPLink IP routers and SmartNode voice-over-IP (VoIP) routers from Patton Electronics. Patton is adopting ExtremeDB as a component of its Linux-based Trinity AE distribution to manage configuration data on the routers, says the company.

    • Linux/Android mini-PC debuts HD-ready Marvell PXA510 SoC

      Globalscale Technologies announced a $249, mini-PC hardware/software development kit based on the Marvell PXA510 — a new ARMv7, 1GHz processor capable of 1080p video. The D2Plug clocks the PXA510 at 800MHz, and offers 1GB DDR3 RAM, 8GB flash, a full set of peripherals including 802.11n and Bluetooth 3.0, plus Ubuntu Linux and Android 2.2 support, says the company.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Android gets a Netflix app!

          Roma De, from Netflix’s product team, has announced that the company has released an Android Netflix app, which he says eventually will support a “large majority” of Android phones. Five devices, four from HTC and one from Samsung, are initially supported.

        • Finally, Netflix Comes To Android

Free Software/Open Source

  • Another High Priority Project done: The Unarchiver provides free RARv3 extraction tools

    This collection of software fills an important gap in free software support for different archives.

    Free software to support the RARv3 archive format has been listed on our High Priority Projects list for some time now. We’ve always had ways to create and extract free archive formats, using tools like GNU tar and Info-ZIP. The RARv3 format is proprietary, so we don’t want it to replace these tools, but it’s not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet. That means the lack of free software to extract RARv3 files has been sorely felt.

  • Why free should not always mean cost-free

    More and more I realize that there is a misconception about free software. Many people tend to believe that free software actually means software that should not cost any money. They somehow find natural and fair the fact that some people may work voluntarily in order to produce software, which the rest can use to make money without having any legal obligation to contribute either money or effort back upstream.

  • Events

    • Notes from : Nagios World Conference Europe – 2011

      Yesterday I’ve attended the Nagios World Conference Europe hosted in Bozen (Italy) by Wurth-Phoenix, so as first thing thanks to Wurst-Phoenix for the organization this meeting, for the free access provided to the event , and for the good meal that we have enjoyed.

    • Presenting NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond at OSBC

      Next Monday, May 16, I will be hosting session at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco focused on NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 4 Pulls Farther Ahead of IE9

        Since activating the Firefox Update system and alerting Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 users to the availability of Firefox 4, the line has really picked up some speed.

  • SaaS

    • EMC Unveils Hadoop Appliance for Big Data Analytics

      EMC (NYSE: EMC) says the company has a new strategy for distributing, integrating and supporting the Apache Hadoop open-source software that is emerging as the preferred solution for Big Data analytics across unstructured data in enterprises.

      Announced at EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas, the EMC Greenplum HD Data Computing Appliance is a purpose-built data co-processing Hadoop appliance that integrates Hadoop with the EMC Greenplum Database.

    • Oracle: Quit messin’ and marry Hadoop!

      Oracle isn’t the biggest enterprise software vendor, but in 2010 it grew faster than its big-enterprise peers, including Microsoft and IBM, to claim third place. Being ever so ambitious, it’s unlikely that Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison will be content to take the bronze. But it’s equally unlikely that relational databases will be enough to power Oracle to the top of the enterprise heap.

  • CMS

    • WordPress 3.2 Drops IE 6 Support

      Word Press team has announced the release of version 3.2 Beta 1 or the popular blogging platform. The team expects that Word Press 3.2 will be released by the end of June, 2011.

  • Education

    • Aristotle University of Thessaloniki joins the FTA

      The Free Technology Academy is pleased to announce the inclusion of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) in the FTA Partner network.

      The Aristotle University will participate through its Programming Language and Software Engineering Lab and will contribute to the FTA curriculum by co-developing new courses in the fields of Mobile Development, Data Analysis, Intelligent Systems, Reuse Methods and others.

  • Business

    • UK OpenERP Partner Community
    • Openbravo ERP Software Downloads Surpass Two Million

      Openbravo, the Agile ERP company, today announced its flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been downloaded over two million times – making it the most popular open source ERP software in the world. Openbravo’s agile ERP solution is modular and extensible so can be ‘right-sized’ for any organization, in any industry, in any country with over 325 modules from which to choose. The download milestone underscores the growing momentum of open source adoption in the ERP software category.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Data

      • New Ways to Exploit Raw Data May Bring Surge of Innovation, a Study Says

        Math majors, rejoice. Businesses are going to need tens of thousands of you in the coming years as companies grapple with a growing mountain of data.

        Data is a vital raw material of the information economy, much as coal and iron ore were in the Industrial Revolution. But the business world is just beginning to learn how to process it all.

        The current data surge is coming from sophisticated computer tracking of shipments, sales, suppliers and customers, as well as e-mail, Web traffic and social network comments. The quantity of business data doubles every 1.2 years, by one estimate.

      • Getting out the Data

        Today I want to to draw your attention to the Open Data Challenge that has started a while ago. I am grateful to the Share PSI initiative and its partners for organising such a competition at the European level. The jury features the World Wide Web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, no less. Here you can really show how creative, innovative and successful you are with getting data out into the open, visualising it in new ways and building apps on top.

    • Open Access/Content

      • How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education

        10 years ago in April 2001, Charles M. Vest, the MIT President at the time, announced that the university would make its materials for all its courses freely available on the Internet. This initiative, found at OpenCourseWare, has enabled other teachers and lifelong learners around the world to listen and read what is being taught at MIT. 5 years later, in April 2006, UC Berkeley announced its plan to put complete academic courses on Apple’s iTunes U, beginning what is now one of the biggest collections of recorded classroom lectures in the world. One year later, in October 2007, the school launched UC Berkeley on YouTube. According to Benjamin Hubbard the Manager of Webcast at UC Berkeley, the school has had well over 120 million downloads since first sharing videos online, which they began doing in 2001.

    • Open Hardware

      • Aldebaran Robotics To Open Source Code of Nao Robot

        Aldebaran Robotics has just announced that it’s going to open the source code of its popular humanoid robot Nao.

        The French firm has been developing Nao over the past five years, turning an initially obscure robot with a quirky name into a widely adopted research and education platform used to study human-robot communication, help treat hospitalized children, and play soccer.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • BT Beats: User freedom and artistic freedom go hand in hand

      Today, the Free Software Foundation Europe’s UK team calls on BT to not forget free software users when launching its upcoming service, and to build the system using web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, rather than proprietary and invasive software such as Flash.

Leftovers

  • How Do We Get To IPv6?

  • Science

    • Chernobyl’s 20,000-30,000 Fatalities

      Since at least the mid-1990s, the standard estimate of the long-term human impact of the Chernobyl catastrophe is that there would be between 20,000 and 30,000 premature deaths from leukemia and other cancers, almost entirely in the greater European region. So how have the New York Times’s editorial writers got the idea that Chernobyl’s impact was minimal?

  • Health/Nutrition

  • Security

    • After Sony Data Breach, Lawsuits Flood The Courts

      In the wake of Sony’s admission that information for millions of accounts was stolen, Reuters has tallied no less than 25 federal lawsuits. That number shows a very active bar of plaintiffs’ lawyers who believe that they’ll be able to turn companies’ privacy snafus and data breaches into serious cash payouts.

    • Is Sony getting a bad rap on its data breach?

      It discovered that a second network, Sony Online Entertainment, had also been hacked, and then had to admit that bank card numbers had indeed been stolen, contrary to its earlier assessment.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Finance

    • The People vs. Goldman Sachs

      They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

    • Here’s How Eliot Spitzer Would Handle The Goldman Sachs Perjury Claims

      What would Eliot Spitzer do if he were handed the Senate Subcomittee’s report on what caused the financial crisis?

      “Once the steam stopped coming out of my ears, I’d be dropping so many subpoenas,” Spitzer told Taibbi in this month’s Rolling Stone.

      “And I would parse every potential inconsistency between the testimony they gave to Congress and the facts as we now understand them.”

    • Simon Johnson: U.S. Banks Need More Capital

      The Vickers report came out in Britain identifying areas where Britain’s banking system needed to alter its regulatory structure. Simon Johnson talked to Bloomberg about this report and banking regulation in general. His view is that first and foremost large globe-spanning banks are too large. Using Goldman Sachs as an example, he notes that Goldman had a $1 trillion balance sheet when the panic hit in 2008, 4 times as many assets as it did just a decade earlier. Meanwhile most studies show no significant economies of scale or scope above the $300 billion range.

    • An Updated List of Goldman Sachs Ties to the Obama Government Including Elena Kagan

      This essay shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and its units (like the Goldman-Robert Rubin-funded Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution) in the Obama government. These names are in addition to those compiled on an older such list and published here at FDL. In the future, I will combine the names here and those on the earlier article but I urge readers to look at the earlier list too (links below). Combined, this is the largest and most comprehensive list of such ties yet published.

      For readability and clarity, I have NOT included many of the details and links that are found in the earlier article so as to make this one less repetitive and easier to read. So, if you want more documentation, please look at my earlier diary here at Firedoglake called “A List of Goldman Sachs People in the Obama Government: Names Attached To The Giant Squid’s Tentacles” published on April 27, 2010.

    • U.S. Attorney Sends a Message to Wall Street

      Every few days during the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group’s co-founder, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, would quietly enter the courtroom and take a seat in the last row of the gallery.

      From that unassuming vantage point, Mr. Bharara watched his colleagues try to persuade a jury to convict the former hedge fund titan of securities fraud and conspiracy.

    • Reflections of the Evolution of Capitalism

      Then came the 2008 financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression. Many believe that the crisis was the direct result of the prevailing anti-regulation ideology of the past few decades, which once more led to a reckless, largely unregulated behavior by financial institutions.

      Our system of checks and balances has started to react to the crisis. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction, with the Financial Reform law signed by President Obama in July of 2010. It is too early to tell whether this law will make the US financial system transparent and accountable enough to avoid another major economic crisis, as well as ensure that individuals are protected against the excesses of large financial institutions. There continues to be strong opposition to the bill, by many who are still holding on to their anti-government ideological position despite our recent experiences. These include not only politicians but also academics and economists who by now should know better.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Close the Revolving Door.

      US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the conflict of interest of the FCC commissioner who voted to approve the Comcast-NBC merger, then quit to become a lobbyist for the merged company.

  • Censorship

    • Americans face piracy website blocking

      The Protect IP bill gives government and copyright holders tools to stop Americans reaching illegal material.

    • Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales criticises injunctions

      Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has waded into the debate over super-injunctions, saying current privacy laws are a “human rights violation”.

      The online encyclopaedia has fallen foul of UK privacy law in recent weeks, with details about those using super-injunctions appearing on the site.

      Mr Wales told the BBC that such information would be removed because it did not come from a reliable source.

  • Privacy

    • New FBI Documents Provide Details on Government Surveillance Spyware. Looks mostly like Windows trash, but the intent and disregard of basic principles of law is alarming.
    • Facebook profile access ‘leaked’ claims Symantec
    • Facebook Faces Lawsuit Over Unauthorized Sharing Of User Data With Advertisers

      A judge yesterday threw out most of the claims made in a lawsuit against Facebook, in which two California individuals, David Gould and Mike Robertson, accused the social networking giant of sharing their names and other private information with some advertisers in direct violation of its own privacy policy.

      That said, the judge also ruled the lawsuit will not be dismissed in its entirety either, as Facebook had pleaded.

    • TalkTalk or StalkStalk plans should be opt-in

      TalkTalk today announced their plans for their website malware software, which has been criticised for opening up potential interception issues under RIPA.

      We met with TalkTalk and Richard Clayton has produced a technical note on the software. Nick Bohm, below, outlines the potential legal issues. Linked is Talktalk’s legal analysis.

      ORG believes an opt-in system should avoid both technical problems and legal breaches.

    • Canadian company develop new flying CCTV camera

      The company are attempting to acquire permits to fly the Scout in America, and have already spoken to a variety of law enforcement and security agencies who are interested in it’s versatility and ease of use. Due to the fact it can be fitted into a small, covert suitcase, it can be deployed almost anywhere instantaneously without attracting attention. Pictures from the attached gyroscopic camera can be beamed to any sort of electronic device, from a central computer to something as small as an iPhone.

  • Civil Rights

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • The Economist supports more money for patent review to support more innovation.

      In response, David and I submitted the following letter to the editor:

      “The assumption of your editorial (Patently Absurd, May 5) that patents foster innovation is wrong. All the constantly growing evidence shows that patents hurt rather than help innovation. To be sure, in the US patents are required by law to be original, useful, and not obvious. When hundreds of thousands are being issued each year, that beggars credibility. Instead, the patent system fosters endless efforts to hijack the profits of successful innovators, generates endless time consuming costly litigation and worse, leads to monopolization with the concomitant expensive products – and indeed discourages real innovators.

      “This isn’t merely a matter of theory, nor yet one of empirical studies – although both are in plentiful supply: you might take a look at the many references in Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine. But more to the point: why don’t you talk to engineers and venture capitalists – or even patent examiners? Or at least read the comments they left on your website? You will find that they too view patents as time-wasting defensive operations that provide little protection to real innovators and instead serve merely to protect entrenched monopolists and encourage patent trolls. You are right that the present patent system is broken, but your proposed cures will only make matters worse.”

    • Trademarks

      • Using (and Abusing) Trademarks In An Attempt To Monopolize The English Language

        “By definition, intellectual property includes the words, images, and sounds that we use to communicate, and the courts are strongly admonished not to ‘indulge in the facile assumption that one can forbid particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process’.”

      • US cleaning company claims UK NGO cannot call themselves “eco labs”

        A small UK based NGO, EcoLabs, using the domain eco-labs.org, is being taken to the .org arbitration process by the US cleaning company Ecolab. The corporation claims that the NGO EcoLabs is infringing their trademark by using the name “Eco labs” and the domain should therefore be withdrawn from the NGO.

    • Copyrights

      • Forget the iPod Tax, Canadian Copyright Collective Demanding Memory Card Tax

        During the most recent election campaign, there was no shortage of debate over the so-called iPod Tax, a proposed levy on iPods and similar devices to compensate for copies of sound recordings. While the prospect of an iPod tax in Canada died with the Conservative majority, the existing private copying system remains unchanged. Canadians currently pay levies on blank CDs (and cassettes) and now the Canadian Private Copying Collective, which collects the private copying revenues, would like to establish a new levy on blank memory cards used in a wide range of devices such as smartphones and digital cameras.

        [...]

        There are many problems with the current private copying system, but this latest attempt to extend the levy should serve as a wake-up call to the government. While there may have been a sense that the private copying levy would gradually diminish in importance, the CPCC (which has been sharply critical of the Conservatives in the past) has made it clear that it will work to extend the levy within the full extent of the current law. Even without iPod levies, there is still room for the collective to expand the levy system, despite the weak linkages to actual copying of music. If the government is broadly against iPod taxes, it may be forced to take legislative action to stop extensions that can still occur within the current legal framework.

      • Limewire pays $105m settlement to music firms
      • Twitpic angers users over copyright grab

Clip of the Day

Man Beaten By Durham Regional Police Tells His Story at Toronto Freedom Festival May 7 11


Credit: TinyOgg

05.15.11

Links 15/5/2011: GNU/Linux in Munich and Fire Stations

Posted in News Roundup at 11:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Munich/Limux at the Halfway Point

    Actually Limux is further along than halfway since all of the applications in use are now FLOSS but the operating system on 6000 PCs is now GNU/Linux. At the rate they are going sometime in 2012 12000 PCs will be running GNU/Linux. Apparently they will have 3000 still running that other OS when the migration is complete. That’s a bit puzzling since everyone is using FLOSS applications for everything. There should be no reason to leave that other OS on anything. Perhaps something is lost in the translation:
    LiMux project celebrates mountain festival

  • More Free/Non-Free Angst in Germany

    Sigh. Apt-get update;apt-get upgrade is too much for them? They could not use a local repository, check things out and do the updates from time to time when convenient? That’s an awful lot less work than keeping one machine running that other OS and can be extended to hundreds/thousands with no extra effort.

  • Desktop

    • Desktop Linux Success

      I came across an article with a simple thesis: Desktop Linux needs a controller who looks out for the needs of the end-user; there isn’t one; Linux fails…

      [...]

      The authour claims the success of Android/Linux is due to the magical control of Google but that is only part of the story. Google’s Android is just another distro (He derides distros…). The success of Google is not because of the central control but the energy of the hundreds of thousands of developers who tweak the systems and write applications for it and the hardware manufacturers, outside M$’s and Apple’s control, who invest in Android/Linux.

    • Computer Centers in West Virginia’s Volunteer Fire Stations

      The refurbishing program buys large batches of used computers, usually about 5 years old, from various government agencies through its partner organization, MissionWV. Our refurbishers test, and in some cases upgrade, the hardware, and then install Ubuntu on them. We sell them to our partner fire departments at cost, who then sell them to the public as a fundraiser. The end-user price is between $125 and $175 for a laptop. We are also have 200 refurbished desktop computers ready for the new computer centers we’re adding this year.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux needs rebranding

      I’ve never truly lost that sense of wonder from computers, and it was this wonder that eventually led me to Linux. It’s the modularity of the computer that gets the imagination running, and I think many software developers from the ’80s and ’90s, many of whom have contributed to the free software projects that got us to this point, feel the same way.

    • What’s up with ARM

      Over the course of the last month or so, numerous people have asked me for my opinion on what’s going on with the ARM architecture in Linux. It seems time to broadcast those thoughts more widely. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, the short version is this: Linux on ARM is a victim of its own success and, as a result, is going through some growing pains. That has created a lot of noise, but all that’s really needed is a bit of house cleaning.

      ARM processors are generally found in embedded applications; your phone, network router, video camera, and more are quite likely to be running Linux on ARM. Supporting ARM on Linux brings some challenges which are much less of a problem on desktop and server-oriented systems. ARM is not so much an architecture as a family of architectures with lots of little quirks; the size of the kernel’s ARM-specific code – nearly three times the size of the x86-specific code – reflects that. ARM also has traditionally suffered from the “embedded problem”: every vendor does its own work and, likely as not, never gets around to contributing its code upstream. That has resulted in a lot of fragmented and duplicated code.

      [...]

      The ARM mess is not small, but it’s really just another cleanup job of the time that we have done many times in the past.

    • Ideas for a cgroups UI

      On and off over the past year I’ve been working with Jason Baron on a design for a UI for system administrators to control processes’ and users’ usage of system resources on their systems via the relatively recently-developed (~2007) cgroups feature of the Linux kernel.

      After the excitement and the fun that is the Red Hat Summit, I had some time this week to work with Jason on updating the design. Before I dive into the design process and the mockups, I think it’d be best to do a review of how cgroups work (or at least how I understand them to) so that the rest makes more sense. (And maybe I’ve got some totally incorrect assumptions about cgroups that have resulted in a flawed design, so hopefully my calling out the current understanding might make it easier for you to correct me :) ).

    • Graphics Stack

      • AMD Already Adds On Two Open-Source Developers

        AMD’s John Bridgman has now confirmed that they have hired two open-source developers. These two new development hires was done previous to the announcement a few days ago that they are still looking for another open-source developer to work on their open-source Linux (kernel DRM, Mesa / Gallium3D, DDX) stack for Radeon graphics hardware.

      • Kicking Around The Wayland Display Server

        The “still very experimental for the foreseeable future but promising” Wayland has been discussed more at UDS Budapest, on the mailing lists, and now this weekend in Berlin at LinuxTag.

        Wayland was already discussed earlier in the week during the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest, Hungary. While I had left early on Friday to make it back to Deutschland for LinuxTag, Wayland was discussed some more.

      • OpenGL ES 2.0 Support For Compiz, KWin, Cairo

        There’s been a lot of references this week at UDS Budapest to OpenGL ES support since this version of OpenGL is what’s predominantly supported on ARM/embedded devices. There’s already been talk of OpenGL ES support in QEMU, among other projects. OpenGL ES 2.0 support is also coming to the Compiz and KWin compositing window managers. An OpenGL ES 2.0 back-end for Cairo was also brought up separately.

        There’s already initial OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Compiz, but it’s not yet been merged upstream. OpenGL ES 2.0 support for KDE’s KWin is also being worked on.

        The Compiz GLES 2.0 push upstream is expected to take place after the new Compiz shader API is integrated. Support for missing plug-ins also needs to be added along with per-plugin shader support. Clean-ups are also needed and potentially better consolidation between vanilla GL and GL ES code. Build-time support for OpenGL vs. OpenGL ES suppoort was also discussed as well as testing.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • KDE at LinuxTag

        Sharing a nice, big booth at LinuxTag, the KDE, Kubuntu and Calligra teams are pulling together to promo all things KDE. As you can tell from the picture below, the booth is very well visited, with lots of people interested all ’round – showing off Plasma on the desktop in the middle there, and the brand, spanking new Plasma Active running on an openSuse powered tablet nearest the camera – already a real crowd puller, even in its experimental stage! Kudos to the Active team there, great stuff, very demoable :-)

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 8th May 2011

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME Outreach Program for Women Reincarnates

        “It’s not rocket science,” says Marina Zhurakhinskaya, the organizer of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women,talking about efforts to get more women involved in free software. “You just need to say that women are welcome in your project, because that in itself sends a signal. Also, you want specific people they can get in touch with to do their first patch and to ask questions.” It’s a simple formula, but the first indications are that it is a reliable enough foundation to make the recently revived Program a success.

  • Distributions

    • Zenwalk 7, it didn’t go well…

      I cannot blame Zenwalk 7 at all for this mishap. I understand that it was entirely my fault because I was not prepared to carry out this kind of installation. Zenwalk is a well-built, functional Linux system. That its installation is presently beyond my limited knowledge should not be taken as a negative point at all.

    • Robby Workman Answers a Few Questions on the Occasion of Slackware-13.37 Release

      Dear fellow Slackers! We are happy to publish another interview with Robby Workman, a Slackware developer and one of the leading mainainers of the SlackBuilds.org project, he has kindly given us on the occasion of the Slackware-13.37 release. Enjoy!

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Squeeze + btrfs = FAIL

        Executive summary: Don’t use btrfs on Debian Squeeze.

        Longer summary: Don’t use btrfs RAID with the kernel Debian Squeeze comes with.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 11.04 – Adding my electrons to the deluge

            If I were installing an OS on a tablet, I’d be all over this interface. But I’m not. And a desktop is not a tablet. Keep repeating that to yourself, Canonical. I hope it gets better.

          • Y PPA Manager: One Stop Shop For All Your PPA Related Needs in Ubuntu Natty

            Y PPA Manager lets you search, add, remove or even purge PPA’s in Ubuntu the easiest way. This is not a command line tool and is very easy for even a newbie Ubuntu user to understand and use. Below, you will see a brief review of Y PPA Manager and instructions for installing it in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu Studio 11.10 Will Get Xfce Desktop

              Ubuntu Studio 11.04 comes with Gnome 2.xx not Unity or Gnome-Shell cause it don’t target audience or intended workflow. Now Ubuntu Studio developer mentioned on the mailing list they will re-base the project on Xfce lightweight desktop environment with custom user interface UI instead of Gnome 2 desktop.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • The Plex “Penguin-Friendly” Media Server

      With 227 replies, and almost 400 votes in this thread, it’s obvious that there is a sizable bunch of you who would really like to run the Plex Media Server on Linux. And who can blame you, with sexy Linux-based storage devices on the market like the ReadyNAS pictured below? A device like this (or an unRAID for the DIY-ers, and damn it, why did I have to go read about unRAID and end up falling in love with this case?) running the Plex Media Server, combined with a rich assortment of clients (a Mac Mini, an iPad, an iPhone, an Android tablet, an LG Smart TV for the guest room, and a Roku Streaming Player for the kids’ room?), makes for an amazingly flexible, unified, and powerful media solution. Not to mention, the NAS is the only device that has to be left on, so Al Gore would yet again be proud.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Global Android phone sales to top 180 million units in 2011, says Sony Ericsson CTO

          Global sales of Android-based smartphones are expected to grow from 60 million units in 2010 to 180 million units in 2011 and over 400 million units in 2014, according to Sony Ericsson vice president and CTO Jan Uddenfeldt.

        • Others

          The world designs and makes better software more efficiently than any single corporation. The Linux organization makes the hardware-abstraction layer and manages computing resources. Google designs the GUI and provides a virtual machine in which portable software runs. Thousands of developers produce software for the “app stores”. ARM designs the CPUs and ARM’s licensees customize ARM’s modular designs as they see fit. The smart phone manufacturers pull together material from dozens of industries and integrates the whole system. The system works and everyone does their best, makes a good living and there is no tax on the OS.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

    • Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 — Day 4

      Day four was the last day of the LGM. Sad… But it was filled with action packed talks and some good hacking. Of course, today is already Day 5 so I’m a bit late reporting. It’s not because I went to the after-party — instead I went to the hotel room to hack and write this blog. But instead of blogging, I spent all evening helping people to get Krita up and running on #krita. Though I did have a nice beer with it.

    • LGM: Day 4

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Some things Oracle just doesn’t get

      Yesterday at the NLUUG conference I picked up a Solaris 11 Express CD in a nice brownish CD sleeve (I say “nice” because it feels and looks different from the generic white sleeves). Here’s a scan of the back of the sleeve, with a big sticker over the flap (click on image for a larger, readable version).

  • Programming

    • Perl 5.14

      A new version of Perl, 5.14, was officially released on 14th May following the successful test period, including the testing of release candidates. This is the first release of Perl 5 using the new annual schedule.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Codec Wars explained

      Let’s assume you have some spare time on your hands. Who should you support then? Naturally, the underdog attitude wins. It’s always the champion of freedom and openness that ought to win our hearts. This war is no exception. Having a well known and open format helps standardize things, reduce monopoly and improve technology.

      Now, as a developer or a website owner, you may have a special interest, since the technology could govern your revenue or success. It’s more than just which algorithm is used. It boils down to Flash versus HTML5. In your case, it’s not just fancy words, it’s the quality of audio and video delivery, it’s the scripting language, the backend, the debugging tools, the ease of use, the portability, everything. Can you be impartial? Hardly.

      In this case, you should support what works best. And this has yet to be determined. Flash has been around for a while. H.264 family of codecs has been around for a while. WebM is a new kid on the block and has a lot of fighting ahead.

Leftovers

Clip of the Day

Ubuntu UDS O Budapest – Mark Shuttleworth interviewed by Amb


Credit: TinyOgg

05.14.11

Links 14/5/2011: The New Commodore 64 Runs Linux, 20 Years of Linux Kernel Celebrated

Posted in News Roundup at 5:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • The Commodore 64, that ’80s computer icon, lives again

      It was chunky, a hideous tan color, and, by today’s standards, ridiculously feeble.

      It was limited to 64 kilobytes of memory — about the equivalent of one long e-mail.

      And yet 25 years ago, almost everyone seemed to have one.

      It was the Commodore 64, an 8-bit, mass-produced machine that brought personal computing into the home for millions of users in the early- and mid-1980s. People used their C64s, as they were known, for everything from basic office functions to primitive games like “Impossible Mission.”

    • What You Should Know When Migrating From Windows to Linux

      Linux has indeed some important advantages compared to Windows operating systems. Here are two main advantages: both distribution and programs are free of charge and the security level is much better than that provided by Windows. Despite these facts, Linux products do not have a very large market share, but it is continually growing. Actually many laptop and desktop systems already have the preinstalled version on Linux.

    • Google’s Chrome OS machines arrive

      Google has announced that Samsung and Acer will be making the first Chromebooks; instant-on, always-connected laptops that run the company’s open sourced and Linux-based Chrome OS. As well as being available for purchase, Google is offering companies a subscription plan at $28 a month per user, which includes a Chromebook and online services, and a $20 a month subscription offering for educational users. UK pricing for subscriptions will be announced closer to the 15 June launch. The machines are enhanced production versions of the CR-48 notebook which Google gave away to interested parties late last year.

    • How to Make Your Own Chrome OS Chromebook

      On June 15, Samsung and Acer will release the first consumer-oriented Chrome OS laptops, or Chromebooks as Google likes to call them. Both hardware- and software-wise, these netbooks are nothing special: You can download Chrome OS’s open source brother, Chromium OS, for free — and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering.

  • Kernel Space

    • Celebrating 20 Years of Linux

      Happy Birthday, Tux! Happy Birthday, Linux! Many of you might not know this but Linux is the underlying basis for many of today’s mobile platforms, Android being one of them. Also, Linux is considered to be as the most “potent” open-source system for PCs, acclaimed by developers and enthusiasts alike.

      Everything started in 1983, as the GNU Project, engineered by Richard Stallman.

    • Video: Inside the Linux Powered Xirrus Wi-Fi

      Interop is one of the largest non-vendor conferences still around.

      All those conference goers connect over the Xirrus Wi-Fi array network that is deployed at the show.

      Have you ever wondered what’s inside of a Xirrus Wi-Fi array?

      Sure there are some Atheros chips, but there is also a grain of open source goodness. That’s right Interop’s Xirrus Wi-Fi deployment is based on a Linux 2.6.x kernel.

    • Graphics Stack

      • X Input 2.1 Not Coming Until X.Org Server 1.12

        X Input 2.1 was originally talked about for X.Org Server 1.10 with its initial multi-touch implementation having been published back in late 2010.

        After this version of the X Input extension missed the 1.10 cycle, it was getting back on track for a xorg-server 1.11 merge. The multi-touch work has already went through several revisions by Daniel Stone and Canonical.

        This work was looking like it would finally land for X.Org Server 1.11 when it’s released in August, but it doesn’t look like it will make the merge window closing in a few weeks. One of the problems causing a delay in the merge deals with touchpads and where touch/mouse events are delivered to different windows.

  • Applications

    • Proprietary

    • DNS/IPv6

      • DNSMasq – Best Way to Surf Internet

        After growing tired of slow response times I decided it was time to just run a personal domain name caching service. Bind seemed a bit overkill and it can be quite complicated. Other alternatives are much easier – such as DNSMasq. DNSMasq is available in just about every distro’s repository and is really easy to set up and use.

      • Alternative DNS services: pro and contra
      • World IPv6 day @ home

        This is by no means the “launch of IPv6″ (IPv6 has been available for over a decade since the early days of the 6bone). Instead, this is the opportunity for some large-scale service and content providers to test their IPv6 readiness with a sizable audience over a 24 hours period. Although not the first of its kind, since this event is sponsored by the ISOC and supported by several core content and network providers (some of the participants are big names such as Google, Yahoo, Akamai and Facebook) it has a good chance of becoming the largest IPv6 awareness raising event in history. It is no coincidence that IANA has just allocated the last few available IPv4 blocks to the regional registries, marking the depletion of the IPv4 space (at least when it comes to global allocations, but regional allocation exhaustion will follow soon).

      • Whose Fault is it When Your Internet Dies? Troubleshooting Networks with Linux

        When you can’t access the Internet you can’t install software (unless you have your own local repository), so you should have these commands available on your computers:

        * ping
        * ifconfig
        * dig
        * GNU screen

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Easiest Way to Play Angry Birds in Ubuntu

        It is called Chrome Web Store. Yes, Angry Birds is now available in Chrome Web Store for free installation.

      • Thoughts on Wine Technology

        If you have used a Unix operating system on a desktop computer for any extended period of time then odds are you have heard of Wine technology. In case you haven’t, Wine is an acronym that stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. In actuality Wine is a “windows compatibility layer”. To put it in laymen’s terms it allows you to natively run Windows binaries in a Unix environment.

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Calligra is the Future of Free Software Office Suites

        A couple of days ago Michael Meeks published a blog called ‘LibreOffice is the future of Free Software Office suites’. Michael is one of the lead developers of LibreOffice and also one of the founders of the Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice. In that blog he makes a number of points that leads to his conclusion in the title:

        * LibreOffice is vendor neutral
        * LibreOffice is robust to participants leaving
        * Linux distributions are safer with LibreOffice
        * LibreOffice has a different, and better QA model
        * Division is (sadly) sometimes necessary
        * The Document Foundation champions ODF
        * We are transparent about our contributors

        Each of those points is a section in the text. If you haven’t read the blog already, you should probably do that now before continuing your reading here. It’s quite long but it’s a good read.

        However…

        What is obvious when reading that text is that Michael only compares LibreOffice to one other free office suite: OpenOffice.org. He probably has a good platform to stand on when saying that compared to OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice is more future secure.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • gnome 3

        Well the new gnome 3 has certainly polarised the community. I must say I generally really like it, but also I’m not yet running it on my default machine. Historically I’ve upgraded my primary laptop to the current development release of Fedora around the beta release. This time I’ve not. Why? Well there’s one major feature that has “Just Worked” for me for as long as I remember and I use it every day I’m in the office that isn’t yet working well in gnome 3 and it would cost me way too much time on an average work day.

        [...]

        There’s lots of other nice things about gnome 3 and I look forward to being able to run it properly to get access to those things.

      • My experience with GNOME 3 so far

        My general feeling towards GNOME 3 is this: ♥. Yes, I love it

      • Don’t like change? Create Gnome 2.32 panel with Gnome shell extensions

        Lets accept it, some users don’t like changes. There are always a subset of users in every DE who don’t like or need a change whatever merits the changes could bring to them. When gnome 3.0 was released and its new shell became the point of attraction, many users were disappointed. They did want their old Gnome 2.32 panels and nothing else.

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Big Blue plus Red Hat plus Private Cloud equals Purple Reign?

        Just last week, IBM and Red Hat dove head first into Enterprise virtualization, after their March 2010 initial team-up to create a development and test cloud built on IBM hardware and Red Hat’s KVM hypervisor software. So, according to the former press release, this Big Blue to Red Hat connection exists simply to “extend this partnership to include cloud computing – broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services.”

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 LTS reaches end of life

            The desktop version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has now officially reached its end of life as previously reported. From 12 May 2011 (yesterday), no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available. The server edition of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will continue to be supported until May 2013. Code named “Hardy Heron”, version 8.04 of the Debian-derived Linux distribution was released on 24 April 2008. Hardy Heron users are advised to upgrade to a later release to continue receiving updates.

          • Ubuntu 11.04 Open Source OS: Looking at the Pros and Cons
          • Canonical joins GENIVI, creates Ubuntu IVI Remix

            Canonical has announced that it is joining the GENIVI Alliance, the non-profit industry alliance which is creating an open source “In-Vehicle Infotainment” reference platform. Canonical is also creating a GENIVI-compliant Ubuntu IVI Remix, based on the Ubuntu Core subset of the Linux distribution, which supports Intel and ARM processors.

            Talking to The H, Chris Kenyon, VP of OEM services at Canonical, said that automotive suppliers had been asking for something from Canonical in the IVI space for as much as eighteen months. The suppliers already used Ubuntu in their development systems and wanted to be able to use the same technology in the products they delivered. “This is more a pull by them than a push by us” said Kenyon though Ubuntu now had all the right elements for the automotive market. Companies wanted to get their product to market faster and were looking for a platform with a “proven cadence” which was “fundamentally cross architecture”. Ubuntu’s ARM support and Canonical’s work with Linaro along with its work with Qt, a core component in the in draft GENIVI specifications, puts Ubuntu IVI Remix in a strong position to be the “off the shelf” solution for GENIVI members.

          • Is Ubuntu’s Unity Interface Ready for the Masses?
          • Mark Shuttleworth UDS Interview [Video]
          • Pitivi and Computer Janitor to be Removed, New Features Planned for Software Center in Oneiric

            There had been some really nice discussions on the last day of Ubuntu Developer Summit and some new changes are being introduced in Ubuntu 11.10.

            But Google’s Blogger service had an outage for about 30 hours that not only deleted few past articles but also blocked me from posting any new content. Finally couple of hours back, the service has been restored.

          • Expected Changes In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot [Ubuntu Developer Summit Overview]g

            Ubuntu 11.10 will use GNOME 3. The GNOME 3 Natty PPA will be maintained with bug fixes for GNOME 3.0 and there will probably be an GNOME 3.1 PPA for Oneiric until 3.1 is ready to be included by default.

          • Ubuntu 11.04 – review of unity interface

            Ubuntu is a great operating system and know tons of people who use it every day as their primary operating system, unity, however, is an entirely different matter. I was one of those people who was outraged when it was announced that 11.04 was going to have unity and by default, but what really did it in for me was when I found out unity cannot be removed, it just simply cannot be removed. It’s like cancer. Thinking back I know one other piece of software in a popular operating system that cannot be removed and starts with the letter I and ends with the letter R, and uses the abbreviation IE.

          • Ubuntu Software centre changes planned for Oneiric

            Plans on improving the Ubuntu Software Centre on Ubuntu 11.10 have been outlined at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest this morning.

            Faster start-up times, refined visuals making use of larger icons, and Unity Launcher integration are all tacked for inclusion.

          • Ubuntu 11.10 Will Stay With Evolution But Switch To Thunderbird If It Integrates With The Desktop [UDS]

            Even though in the beginning of the default email client session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, it looked like it’s certain that Evolution will stay as default in Ubuntu 11.10, towards the end of the session things changed and it was decided to stay with Evolution for now BUT switch to Thunderbird as the default email client in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot as long as it integrates with the desktop.

          • RIP Eucalyptus. Ubuntu Standardizes on OpenStack
          • OpenFlow running on Ubuntu Linux
          • Ubuntu adopts LightDM, login screens to get more exciting

          • Flavours and Variants

            • CrunchBang interview with Darth Wound

              A while ago, I was contacted by Darth Wound with regards to answering some questions for an interview about CrunchBang. Now, being asked to do interviews about CrunchBang is not unusual, I must receive several a month at the moment, but I know Darth Wound through the excellent work he is doing with the French CrunchBang forums, so I was more than happy to try and answer his questions.

            • Q&A with Jeff Hoogland, lead developer of Bodhi Linux

              A: I use Linux & FOSS in the classroom. I have Bodhi installed on my netbook, and I use it with the SMART Technologies interactive whiteboard every day. My favorite applications for teaching mathematics, which I use a fair amount are GeoGebra and KAlgebra.

            • Ubuntu Makes Lubuntu Official Derivative

              It’s official: Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu derivative. In a UDS session in Budapest, Colin Watson and Mark Shuttleworth clarified the details with project member Julien Lavergne. There are still no ISO and packages on the official Ubuntu site, but Lavergne will announce on the Ubuntu project development mailing list when the application is in the official repositories and there is an installable image. Lubuntu 11.10 will be the first officially supported version of the derivate.

            • Giving Back: Lubuntu 64bit now Available

              This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 11:32 AM and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Will Amazon Become the Dominant Player in the Android Ecosystem?

          There is an elephant at the door of the Android ecosystem. Nobody quite wants to look at it or acknowledge the whispers, but Amazon may be set to become the leader in Android devices later this year.

          Officially, Amazon has said nothing about creating its own Android devices. There has been talk of a tablet in the works for a while now but its specs and ship date is shrouded in mystery. But Amazon may have bigger ambitions than just a tablet. Rumors have come out today that not only is the online retail company looking at a slate, but an entire family of Android devices. If this happens, will the waves topple the balance of power of players in the Android ecosystem?

Free Software/Open Source

  • Need open source Django CRM? Cuddle up to Koalix

    CRM is an application with a long history of open source development, with many projects written the PHP language. However, a Swiss developer has released one of the first open source CRM systems developed with the Django Python framework.

    The brainchild of Aaron Riedener, Koalixcrm is aimed at taking the complexity out of CRM, particularly for small businesses and individuals.

  • Events

    • Android Open Conference launches

      O’Reilly Media announced a new Android Open Conference Oct. 9-11, in San Francisco, designed for anyone who creates, sells, or markets Android-related products. In other open source conference news, the Linux Foundation last week announced keynote speakers, including Linus Torvalds, for LinuxCon Japan, June 1-3, and Linux Expo of Southern California announced events for Software Freedom Day 2011 on Sept. 17.

  • Web Browsers

    • WebGL & Security

      Recently Context Information Security Limited gathered a lot of attention for a blog post on the state of WebGL security. For Mozilla, WebGL was first released in Firefox 4, and there are implementations in Chrome, Safari and Opera as well. The blog post outlines an abstract concern that WebGL is inherently insecure because it allows fairly direct access to the hardware, along with two specific attacks, a Denial of Service and a Cross-Domain Image Theft.

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • Free ‘Browser in a Box’ Runs Firefox 4 with Ultra Security

        Security is an oft-debated topic in the ongoing browser wars, but there’s no denying that malware is a common problem for all of the leading contenders.

      • SHA-512 w/ per User Salts is Not Enough

        More to come on this subject, as our goal is to increase security and the time in which it would take in order to brute or dictionary the hash. Our goal is and always to provide better protection around authentication systems.

      • Upgrade offer boosts Firefox 4 share by 30%

        Firefox 4′s share shot up 11% the first day after Mozilla started offering users the upgrade last week, and climbed 30% in four days.

        The boost moved a long-time Mozilla employee to compare the gains of Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) since the two browsers debuted last March.

  • Databases

  • Healthcare

    • Childhood leukaemia linked to mosquito bites

      BITES from mosquitoes carrying unidentified viruses might explain childhood leukaemia clusters around the town of Fallon in Nevada. And last week, a separate UK report found no link between nuclear power plants and childhood leukaemia.

      The Nevada cluster is the largest in the US. Previous research failed to find a link between the cases and carcinogenic chemicals. The new study of the 14 Fallon cases that arose between 1997 and 2003 – a rate 12 times higher than normally expected in such a period – concludes that military personnel may have brought a virus to the area, which was then spread by mosquitoes. The cluster “fizzled out” once all vulnerable children had been infected.

  • Business

    • Semi-Open Source

      • GroundWork Adds Cloud Connector to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4

        GroundWork Inc., (www.groundworkopensource.com) the leading open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has released GroundWork Cloud Connector for GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4. An automatic, monitoring provisioning system, GroundWork Cloud Connector gives users the ability to monitor Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus cloud instances right along side traditional data center infrastructures.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Why Google Choosing Arduino Matters and is This the End of “Made for iPod” (TM)?

        This week is the yearly Google I/O at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s a meet and greet for lots of people and companies, a big dot-com over-the-top party, and most of all it’s geared towards “web, mobile, and enterprise developers building applications in the cloud with Google and open web technologies… Products and technologies to be featured at I/O include App Engine, Android, Google Web Toolkit, Google Chrome, HTML5, AJAX and Data APIs, Google TV, and more.” Maybe not so much Google TV or Google Wave this year :) but for open hardware and mobile folks, this was one of the most important weeks in history.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • It’s Time for Government to Back the Semantic Web

      Long time readers will know that I have been reporting on the Semantic Web for many years – since June of 2005, in fact, when I dedicated an issue of my eJournal to The Future of the Web. The long interview I included with Tim Berners-Lee remains one of the most-read articles on this site of all time. Ever since then, I’ve periodically given an “attaboy” to the Semantic Web. And guess what? It’s that time again.

      Why? Because the more the Web is capable of doing, the more we can get out of it. And given how much we now rely on the Internet and the Web, we can’t afford to allow either to be less than they are capable of being.

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Cablegate

    • Activist who supports soldier in WikiLeaks case sues U.S. over seizure of laptop

      The co-founder of a group advocating for an Army private accused of leaking classified material to the antisecrecy Web site WikiLeaks is suing the U.S. government for unlawfully seizing his computer and copying its contents to aid a criminal investigation of the site.

      Computer scientist David House’s laptop was taken in November at an international airport by two Department of Homeland Security agents without a hint that it contained evidence of wrongdoing, but rather because House was a vocal supporter of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the accused leaker, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged in a complaint to be filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Boston.

  • Finance

    • Is Apple’s share price being manipulated?

      It was 3:48 p.m. on Friday April 29 and traders who had purchased Apple (AAPL) April 29 $350 “calls” — options that gave them the right to buy Apple shares in blocks of 100 for $350 per share — were sitting pretty. The stock was trading around $353.50 and those calls were worth more $350 apiece (the difference between the price of the stock and the so-called “strike price” of the option times 100).

      Then, in an extraordinary burst of trading — exacerbated by the rebalancing of the NASDAQ-100 scheduled for the following Monday — more than 15 million shares changed hands and the stock dropped below the $350 strike price just before the closing bell. Result: The value of those calls disappeared like a puff of smoke.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Koch suit vs. pranksters dismissed

      A federal judge in Utah on Monday tossed Koch Industries’s lawsuit against the pranksters who set up a fake website and sent out a bogus press release saying the company had found religion on climate change.

      In a case being watched for First Amendment implications, Judge Dale Kimball of the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City also said Koch can’t disclose the identities of the “Youth for Climate Truth” members or use any other information obtained via subpoena from two Utah-based domain hosting companies.

    • The Order Dismissing Koch Industries v. John Does 1-25

      I thought you’d enjoy to see the order, as text, that the Hon. Dale Kimball just issued in Koch Industries v. John Does 1-25, the case I told you about in April. Yes, it’s the same judge who handled both SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell through the first appeal. I admire him greatly, and when you read this order, so firmly upholding the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the right to anonymity, I think you are likely to join me.

    • FCC Commish-Turned-Lobbyist Can’t See What All The Controversy Is About

      FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker has been receiving a ton of criticism for taking a high level lobbying job at Comcast just months after approving its huge merger with NBC Universal. The response has been almost universally to condemn Baker in a move that smacks of the corruption of regulatory capture and the revolving door between corporations and the government that regulates them. I had been wondering if all of this publicity would lead to Baker backing down and no longer taking the job (only to take a similar job, more quietly, down the road). But, instead, it looks like she’s digging in her heels and insisting that nothing (nothing!) improper is going on here.

  • Censorship

    • Comcast Users Blocked From The Pirate Bay

      During the last few hours reports have been trickling in from Comcast subscribers who are unable to access The Pirate Bay website. Although there is no sign that Comcast is actively blocking user access to the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, something is clearly not in order. The Pirate Bay team have confirmed that they are not the ones who are blocking, and they’re investigating the issue.

  • Privacy

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Overinstaller Awareness Day

      Now, continuing the reforms it introduced last year, the BSA calls these numbers theft and piracy, but studiously avoids describing them as ‘losses’ to industry. That’s because very few people who pirate software would actually buy it at high legal prices, especially in developing countries where price-to-income ratios become astronomical. Instead, the BSA describes the number as the ‘commercial value of pirated software,’ which is technically correct and may even be roughly accurate. But they are no longer making any claims about actual industry losses.

    • Canadians using illegal software less and less

      University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, however, said the numbers make a mockery of industry and American government suggestions that this country is some kind of haven for piracy.

    • Trademarks

      • Microsoft challenging “Apple App Store” trademark in Europe

        Microsoft is jumping into the Apple AppStore battle overseas. On Thursday, Microsoft joined HTC, Nokia and Sony Ericsson in filing filed formal applications for declaration of invalidity in the Community Trade Mark office, the office that oversees trademarks in the Euro Zone.

        Microsoft has already challenged the Apple App trademark in the U.S., the asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to refuse the iPhone maker’s registration request on the basis that it’s a generic name, not something to which Apple can lay exclusive claim.

    • Copyrights

      • 3-minute speech limit at EU copyright hearing

        The European Commission threatens to handbag* all speakers who go over 3-minutes at a public hearing on the IPR Enforcement directive (also known as IPRED). A key focus of the hearing will be Internet copyright enforcement and peer-to-peer file-sharing. What will the Commission’s new, ex-IFPI, head of copyright have to say?

      • ACTA

        • Why Innovation Is Under Attack

          3.

          As we confront numerous threats to innovation — ACTA, the PROTECT IP Act, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the Obama Administration White Paper on IP enforcement — these are just some of the challenges that we face. Figuring out ways to refocus the debate on key issues in innovation, rather than in protectionist efforts, is going to be key.

Clip of the Day

GIMP Tutorial: Day for Night


Credit: TinyOgg

05.13.11

Links 13/5/2011: Lubuntu 11.04 in Focus

Posted in News Roundup at 9:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Podcast Season 3 Episode 9

      In this episode: David Braben creates a low-cost Linux machine. Matt Zimmerman leaves Canonical while Mark Shuttleworth wants 200 million Ubuntu users within 4 years. Discover our discoveries, hear the latest conversion stories from TuxRadar and join us on IRC.

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Planning the first release of KDE Telepathy

        Given the various blog posts, and (somewhat unnecessary) hysteria over the news of Skype I felt like I should give an update on what’s going on in KDE Telepathy.

        Pace over the past 5 months has been ace, we’ve got a lot done, and as mentioned by a few people already – we’re releasing “soon”! We don’t have a fixed date, but instead we will release when a set list of outstanding bugs are fixed. Probably about 4 weeks time. (unless I die of stress organising it all in the meantime)

        [...]

        We have a GSOC student that I’m mentoring over the summer to really nail bringing instant messaging into the core of the Plasma Workspace.

      • KDEMU Certified Scrotum Master

  • Distributions

    • Red Hat Family

      • Scala daddy wraps his Java baby in Red Hat-ness

        Martin Odersky – the man who created Scala, the Java-based programming language that now drives such big name web services as Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn – has launched a company that provides service and support around an extensive open source application stack for the language.

        Both the company and the stack are known as Typesafe. Officially unveiled on Thursday, the Typesafe stack includes the most recent releases of the Scala programming language, the open source Akka middleware, and various open source tools designed to facilitate the development of Scala applications. “We want to provide stable versions of the stack, stable supported versions where you can get backports of fixes and improvements”, Odersky tells The Register. “It’s very much the open source support model you see with Red Hat”.

      • Fedora

        • Fosscomm 2011 & Fedora Activity Day

          May was here again, and it was time for our annual Greek Meetup. Fosscomm is the (now-standard) annual meetup of Greek foss communities, and this year it was Patras time to host it. My good friend Vasilis and the rest of his gang have done extraordinary good organizational job (arranging our accommodation, creating custom web apps for the conference, providing extensive info and material etc), and in overall I can say safely that it was the best Fosscomm so far.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian 6.0: Upgrade

        I finally cleared enough time to upgrade my computer from Debian 5 “Lenny”, to the new Debian 6 “Squeeze”. Debian Linux 6 was actually released in February, but I wanted to have a few days of no commitments, just in case my computer would be down for an extended period. And a good thing, too.

        The short version: I successfully upgraded my desktop from Debian 5 to 6. It was not trivial….though it was easier than my last upgrade, from Debian 4 to 5, two years ago.

      • DNS security extensions now available for Debian’s zone entries

        The Debian Project is pleased to announce that its domains debian.org and debian.net are now secured by the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). The corresponding DNS records have recently been added in the .net and .org zones.

        “This enables users with security aware DNS resolvers to securely retrieve information from the domain name system such as IP addresses, or for those who have shell accounts on debian.org machines, SSH host key fingerprints. Any tampering with DNS replies would be detected by a user’s resolver,” says Peter Palfrader, member of Debian’s System Administrator Team. “DNSSEC is an important step in securing the Internet’s name resolution infrastructure.”

      • Derivatives

Free Software/Open Source

  • FOSS Experts, Where Are You Hiding?

    Linux has been around for a long time, but people were waiting for it to be a mature solution. Large product companies would not consider open source, as they doubted its stability—but now, the research and development phase is over. Over the years, FOSS has proved its stability in the industry, and many organisations are switching to using open source solutions rather than conventional proprietary solutions, because of the high costs associated with the latter. FOSS is very mature now, and it is possible to run Linux on a variety of platforms, making it a favourable commercial solution. This has led to a demand for FOSS professionals, especially in organisations that deal with technology and products. With the Android explosion, Linux on hand-held or embedded devices is an upcoming area, and will see much more growth in the coming years, especially because over 50 per cent of smart-phones run on Android today. The main sectors driving this demand are industries like technology, semi-conductors, telecom companies and phone manufacturers.

  • LGM – Day 3
  • Harnessing the Benefits of Open-Source Sustainability Tools

    OAKLAND, CA — The bedrock of capitalism based around innovation has for years been the idea that when someone invents a unique and in-demand product or service, it should be patented and protected at all costs.

    But a growing number of companies are turning the concept of intellectual capital on its head in the name of sustainability. Count IBM, Nike and the Outdoor Industry Association among the growing list of business interests turning to open source models to lower costs and scale best practices and technologies.

  • Mozilla

  • Public Services/Government

    • German Foreign Office explains open source elimination

      The German government has given details of its reasons for migrating the German Foreign office from Linux and free software back to Windows and Microsoft software. The SPD (Social Democrats, the main German opposition party) submitted an initial question on “the use of open source software in the Foreign Office and other Government departments”, but, according to the Green parliamentary group, the German government’s response left various questions unanswered.

Leftovers

Clip of the Day

Lubuntu Linux 11.04 Natty First Look Review & News


Credit: TinyOgg, Twitter

05.12.11

Links 12/5/2011: Google’s Linux in Headlines, Only 20% of Google Staff Uses Windows

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Open Ballot: What is Linux’s killer feature?

    As we rev up our podcast engines for the next recording, we want to hear your words: what do you think is the killer feature of Linux? What’s its strongest selling point, the thing that makes it better than its competitors? Perhaps you reckon the kernel’s rock-solid stability is key, or maybe you think the plethora of desktop environments gives it an advantage.

  • Desktop

  • Google

    • Google Launching Chromebook for Business on June 15
    • Google may offer £12 a month Chromebooks on contract

      Google is rumoured to be set to announce a scheme where students can get a Chrome OS toting laptop for a $20 (£12) a month contract, mimicking the way in which many people get the latest mobile phones.

      According to Forbes, Google will announce the deal later in the day at its Google I/O conference, and the package will include Google Apps.

    • It’s Not A Linux Laptop

      I’ve been watching the commentary on Google’s announcements yesterday that their Chrome OS will be available on laptops from partners – ChromeBooks – and that they will offer a scheme where they provide a ChromeBook to businesses and students for $20-$30 per month. It’s clear that some people are not seeing the real deal here. I’ve seen comments on early reviews, Identi.ca and Twitter saying this is just a Linux laptop and asking why it will be any more successful than previous abortive attempts at the same, such as putting Ubuntu on “netbook”-style laptops.

    • Samsung Chromebook: 12 things you need to know
    • Five Reasons why Google’s Linux Chromebook is a Windows killer

      When Google first started talking about Chrome OS, I thought it might be turn into a Windows killer. Well, now we know that the first commercial Chromebooks will be available in mid-June and there’s no question: Google is aiming right at the Windows business desktop market.

    • Why Google Chrome OS is Crucial for the Linux Desktop

      As Google Chrome OS nears a grand release, everyone is excited about a brand new operating system entering the monopolized desktop market. On the other hand, Mark Shuttleworth has set a target of 200 million Ubuntu users in the next four years. With Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ not being as good as expected, Shuttleworth’s plans, if not impossible, may seem a bit too ambitious.

      Many people believe that Chrome OS’s release can further hamper Ubuntu’s stagnating growth. However, if we consider the recent desktop trends, and if everything goes well for Google, Chrome OS might actually be the magic boost Ubuntu so desperately needs. Here’s why:

    • Sergey Brin: Only 20% of Googlers still on Windows

      Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said that only about 20 per cent of Google’s employees are still using Microsoft Windows, and that all of those users are on Windows 7.

      He stressed, however, that he is not sure of the exact percentage.

      Rumors had indicated that within the company, Google had almost entirely banned Windows. Speaking at Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, where and when the company announced that it will offer Chrome OS notebook for a subscription fee, Brin said that Google hopes to move most of its employees to Google’s Chrome OS, an operating system that puts all applications inside the browser.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Btrfs Support For Ubuntu’s Update Manager

      Eventually we will see Ubuntu Linux deploy Btrfs as the default file-system. While we will likely not see the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs with Ubuntu 11.10, there is work underway on Btrfs integration support into Ubuntu’s Update Manager.

      With Fedora 13, Red Hat introduced system roll-back support whereby anytime a yum transaction takes place for installing a new RPM package on a Btrfs root file-system, a snapshot will be created. Btrfs supports efficiently creating copy-on-write snapshots. Fedora has been quicker to adopt Btrfs installation support and its features, but now Canonical is finally supporting this path.

  • Applications

    • Proprietary

      • Skype-ing out an open source future

        Now, be honest: do you remember that aQuantive deal? Are you aware of any benefit that Microsoft has managed to extract from a purchase with that “shocking” purchase price? No, me neither. Now compare that acquisition with its current move, which has also “shocked” people for its “substantial overpayment”. Sounds like déjà vu all over again.

        But leaving all this shock aside, what will the impact of an undoubtedly important move be for open source?

        Whatever else it might mean, one consequence of the deal is that Microsoft now has less money in the bank, which will have knock-on consequences in all the markets it is active in. Given that it started out with $50 billion, and now has “only” $42 billion, you might think that effect will be minimal. But according to this interesting analysis, most of Microsoft’s money is held outside the US, which means that it’s actually quite constrained in the things it can do with it.

      • Evil Empire Buys Skype

        Now, before any Skype fan-boys get on soap boxes to tell Mr. Vaughan-Nichols and myself just how wrong we are, that Skype is worth every penny being paid and maybe even more, let me dig-up a few facts to explain our position. eBay bought Skype when it was a two year old start-up, in 2005, for $2.6 billion. A few years later, eBay was forced to admit to their shareholders they’d paid way too much. In 2009, they were happy to dump the company onto a group of investors for $2 billion, a $600 million loss. In the first six months of 2010, Skype finally realized a $13.2 million profit, after losing $99 million in 2009.

        As I like to do sometimes, let me quote the great television sage, Thomas Magnum: “I know what you’re thinking…”
        Easy AdSense by Unreal

        You’re thinking that Skype has to be worth gazillions of dollars because practically everyone on the planet is using it and it’s finally making a little bit of money.

      • Linux Community Working On Skype Alternatives!

        The message that Skype is being acquired by Microsoft got GNU/Linux community worried. There are indications that Microsoft may stop the Linux client of Skype. Microsoft won’t have to pull the binaries from the site. They can delay the development of Skype for Linux, either way Skype’s Linux kind is behind its Mac/Windows version.

    • Instructionals/Technical

  • Desktop Environments

    • glibc – inconsistent interfaces due to arrogance

      To start off, I don’t actually mind arrogant people as long as they back their attitude up with some semblance of sanity, however arrogance without ability pisses me off, and it seems that its the number 1 trait to be a maintainer of glibc.

    • The Desktop Linux Paradox

      Believe me, I used to think Linux on the desktop was one user interface revamp away from hitting it big time. Now I realize the problem is much more fundamental: Linux was never created to serve an end-user market, and end users are hard to serve properly. The only way Linux can be so reworked is if someone removes it from its native environment and single-handedly shapes it into something else.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • New Features in digiKam 2.0: XMP Sidecar
      • I need a new distro version 2

        Recently I’ve been surveying a lot of KDE distros. I tried a lot of live cds and looked at a lot of videos and screenshots. Things have changed a little bit since I last searched for a distro. People have started modifying KDE (KDESC?) a bit more from the defaults but not by much certainly nothing that compares to how much Gnome2/Kde3 were/are customized. In any case I eventually decided I had to settle on something. So I went to my s.o.p for distro selection. Make a list and use each distro long enough to decide if it was something I could use with minimal annoyance. Here are my findings so far.

        [...]

        My next distro was going to be Arch. I have a great many good memories of my time on Arch.

      • Next Gen KDEPIM Coming in June with KDE 4.6.4

        KDEPIM users have been suffering through a variety of bugs and lagging development releases since KDE 4 first hit download mirrors. Developers tried to fix some, but others were just ignored or given up on. Now word is coming out of the project that KDEPIM 4.6 is finally coming, but will that fix users’ problems?

        Bugs have plagued KDEPIM ever since KDE 4 was released over three years ago. Some did get some attentions, but for the most part users were told to wait for the next major release. Well, that next major release is immenent, but according to a recent developer’s blog post, some of the same issues experienced in 4.4 will rear their wiggly heads in 4.6. In addition, other regressions are being reported as well.

      • Some News from the ALERT Project

        The ALERT Project, as already explained, aims to improve bug tracking and resolution in free software communities. KDE is participating as a project partner by providing expertise on how free software communities work and by providing testing and feedback for the ALERT software.

      • Resources and Activities

        After an update by Sebastian Kügler on the status of PlasmaActive, let’s see what’s happening lately on its semantic Contour user interface and backend.

        During Tokamak together Sebastian, we designed a plugin system for delegates of arbitrary Nepomuk resources.

      • What’s new in Plasma Active?

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Deja Dup (backup tool) to become default in gnome 3.2?

        As you probably know after the gnome 3.0 release developers are back on releasing the second iteration of the ‘awesome’ desktop, gnome 3.2. There have been discussions going on in gnome development lists. One of the discussions is about including deja dup backup as default in gnome. This will help to create a unified experience from the start.

      • Deja Dup (backup tool) to become default in gnome 3.2?
      • GNOME Board of Directors Elections 2011

        I can’t believe it’s been this long already, but it is time for yet another Board of Directors Election! Having had the opportunity to serve on the Board for these last 12 months, I want to encourage anyone who have the time and interest to improve the GNOME project to run for one of the seven spots on the Board of Directors! For more information on this, please read the official announcement here!

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • BackTrack 5 Release
      • Zenwalk Live version (ZenLive) 7.0 has been released!

        We are happy to announce the highly awaited Zenwalk Live 7.0, which will allow more people to try out Zenwalk without having to install it first.

        Zenwalk Live 7.0 is based on the sophisticated Slackware-Live-Scripts, being the first distribution using the brand new and not yet official released version 0.3.3

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon 6, Entropy 1, a new Era is about to come

        It’s been some time since my last blog post, but if you’re a Sabayon user, you may know that I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff lately. Entropy eventually entered the final Beta phase: API documentation is complete, Entropy Services infrastructure has been rewritten from scratch taking advantage from the best communication protocol ever invented: HTTP (and JSON as “data format”), Sulfur eventually got its awaited speed boost (1.0_beta15), packages.sabayon.org has been deployed, www.sabayon.org will follow, Python 2.7 is now the default, same for GCC 4.5, and Entropy in general is as rock solid (and fast) as ever in all its 300.000+ lines of code, millions of line changes, that I’ve been able to work out in 4 years. You know, when you’re 20 you think everything is possible. Well, this time I was right and we can, today, all enjoy the most advanced and crazy package manager ever written by a single human being.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Rancore wins JBoss and Red Hat Innovator Awards
      • Why Choose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Over VMware or Microsoft?

        Talk to Navin Thadani, Red Hat’s senior director, virtualization, and he’ll tell you that RHEV’s attractions are that it offers high-performance server virtualization, it’s scalable, and it’s very secure. And, perhaps most importantly, it offers “solid economics for customers.” What does that mean? It’s less expensive than Hyper-V and VMware, in other words.

        Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) doesn’t seem to sell RHEV based on the features it offers, and that’s probably because it lacks a few key ones. Despite Thadani promising as long ago as February 2010 that “you will be able to do an apples-for-apples feature comparison between us and VMware,” RHEV is still quite a few pieces of fruit short of a full picnic basket vis a vis VMware.

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project at LinuxTag 2011

        The Debian Project is happy to announce that it will be again represented at the LinuxTag event in Berlin, Germany, this year. At the booth members of the project will be available for questions and discussions.

        The Debian booth will be at Hall 7.2b stand 118c. We invites users, developers and everyone else interested to visit it and ask questions, discuss technical issues and meet the Debian project and its developers in person.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Weekly News Revival
          • Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

            Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal, rose from the depths last week. The update brings a number of significant new features to the Linux-based operating system. It includes a much-improved refresh of the Unity shell and a number of other significant improvements throughout the application stack.

            This is the first version of Ubuntu to ship with Unity on the desktop. Due to the far-reaching nature of the changes that accompany the transition to a new desktop shell, this review will focus almost entirely on Unity and how it impacts the Ubuntu user experience. We will also look at how Unity compares with GNOME 3.0 and the classic GNOME experience.

          • Nouveau Gallium3D, LLVMpipe In Ubuntu 11.10?

            - Nouveau Gallium3D will finally be enabled by default, hopefully. For the past few releases it’s been optional in the package repository, but now it’s finally ready to enter the limelight. Why? Largely because upstream Nouveau developers are willing to look at Gallium3D bug reports, according to Canonical. There’s still some concerns by the Ubuntu X developers over the state of the OpenGL driver, but following my comments — and noting that the Nouveau support can be like a game of Russian Roulette depending upon the kernels — they’ll still likely move forward. In enabling this open-source NVIDIA driver, users could then use the new Unity (3D) desktop without the NVIDIA binary driver. The enabling will likely occur soon for Oneiric but if there’s too much fall-out around the time of Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3, the feature could be reverted.

          • [UDS Updates] Evolution For Now, But Thunderbird Will be Default if Proper Desktop Integration Can be Done in Time
          • Ubuntu 11.10 To Switch From GDM To LightDM

            Earlier, during the Natty development cycle we reported that LightDM is being considered as a replacement for GDM. That did not happen for Ubuntu 11.04, but today it has been confirmed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest that LightDM is finally replacing GDM.

          • Lubuntu 11.04 review – If it’s good enough for Mark Shuttleworth…

            This lightweight distro could be the perfect match for your netbook or for that old computer you’ve refurbished. Find out why Mark Shuttleworth has seen fit to welcome Lubuntu into the official Ubuntu family…

            Pros: Lubuntu 11.04 is a mature Ubuntu derivative featuring the LXDE desktop environment and lightweight applications
            Cons: Some software choices are odd, and Lubuntu lacks the Ubuntu Software Center. i586 processors aren’t supported any more
            Homepage: Lubuntu.net

          • LightDM, or: an examination of a misunderstanding of the problem

            LightDM’s a from-scratch implementation of an X display manager, ie the piece of software that handles remote X connections, starts any local X servers, provides a login screen and kicks off the initial user session. It’s split into a nominally desktop-agnostic core (built directly on xcb and glib) and greeters, the idea being that it’s straightforward to implement an environment-specific greeter that integrates nicely with your desktop session. It’s about 6500 lines of code in the core, 3500 lines of code in the gtk bindings to the core and about 1000 in the sample gtk greeter, for a total of about 11,000 lines of code for a full implementation. This compares to getting on for 60,000 in gdm. Ubuntu plan to switch to LightDM in their next release (11.10).

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • GNU Radio – Opensource Software Defined Radio (SDR)

    GNU Radio is an open source Software Defined Radio (SDR) project that was started about ten years ago by Eric Blossom, an electrical engineer. The main idea which is behind this project, as its founder says, was to turn all the hardware problems into software problems, that is move the complexity of a radio equipment from the hardware level to the software one, and get the software as close to the antenna as possible.

  • What Do Your Processes Say About Your Free Software Project?

    In an effort to broaden my horizons beyond writing code, I’ve been reading a lot of business books lately. Coming from a mostly Free Software background, it’s been an enlightening experience1. One thing sticks out the most: Processes matter, and they matter more than I ever thought.

    It’s common for me to contribute to random projects. Launchpad and Github and the like make it easy (can we get a Launchpad version of this shirt2?). However, I’m not likely to contribute to a project that has a HACKING document longer than any source file in the entire tree. If it takes me longer to figure out how to send a patch than it takes to write the patch, there might be some problems.

  • Open source designer Ian ‘Izo’ Cylkowski talks tools, design tips and talent

    If the name sounds familiar then it should. Ian is an active designer within the open source community – for example, he created the logo for the semantic app launch tool ‘Synapse’ and has been working with the Novacut team on creating a brand identity for the project.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Angry Birds for Chrome Browser

        Just noticed that Angry Birds is now online at http://chrome.angrybirds.com
        Plays pretty well in Chromium Browser. Takes a tad longer to load in Firefox. Most people seem to be able to play the game. Some though appear to have some graphic issues. I’m using the fglrx driver along with Flash 10.3 RC without issue. Check it out if you need a little time waster. *Warning* Game can be addictive. Level 20 here I come!!!

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla: It Has a Spinal Cord

        I know I’m a little late with this news, but that’s because I was kind of busy earlier in the week. Anyway, the news (Nate Anderson, Ars Technica) is that the US government (specifically, the Department of Homeland Security) tried to force Mozilla to remove an add-on for Firefox called MAFIAAFire. The DHS a few months ago seized tens of thousands of website domains without a warrant and without due process; only a few (countable on two hands) of those were truly harmful in any way, while the vast majority of those sites were perfectly legal. MAFIAAFire, whose name jabs at the RIAA and MPAA (frequently referred to as the “MAFIAA” in technology circles), essentially redirects searches for the old domains to the new domains where the content is now hosted. The DHS claims that such redirection violates the orders regarding the original seizures.

      • Mozilla Halts Updates For Firefox 3.5

        Mozilla is currently preparing to phase out Firefox 3.5 and said that it will not release further major updates for the browser version.

  • Project Releases

    • Review: Boxee Box firmware v1.1 arrives

      Boxee released the second major update to the D-Link Boxee Box’s firmware today. The new v1.1 release adds a variety of content channels for both movies and shows, enhances the device’s browser functionality, improves the consistency of its user interface, and squashes numerous bugs.

      The new firmware (numbered 1.1.0.19036) will be pushed out to users’ Boxee Boxes gradually over the next 48 hours, according to Boxee VP of marketing Andrew Kippen. While there will be numerous mostly unseen fixes, changes, and enhancements under the hood, here’s a run-down of the more noticeable improvements…

Leftovers

Clip of the Day

Trisquel GNU/Linux 4.5……….Cry Freedom..


Credit: TinyOgg

Links 12/5/2011: KDE Platform 5, Chrome/Linux Laptops at $20 Per Month

Posted in News Roundup at 4:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • What Linux Needs Is Some Good Marketing

    That’s a great and powerful thing for Linux in general–regardless of the resistance Unity has encountered from some longtime users–and it amazes me to see how far Canonical has come with its mainstream focus. If Linux is to enjoy more success in “the masses,” then this step had to be taken.

    Now that we seem to be getting this close, however, it’s making me think more than ever about what Linux still needs, and one of the biggest things I see is marketing.

  • Linux Heavily Used in the Enterprise by 1999 – And SCO Knew It or Could/Should Have

    Remember how SCO told the court in SCO v. IBM that Linux wasn’t ready for the enterprise until IBM got involved in the year 2000 and allegedly worked to make it “hardened” for the enterprise by donating code? It said that it wasn’t until 2001, with version 2.4 of Linux, that Linux was ready for enterprise use. Linux, SCO said, was just a bicycle compared to UNIX, the luxury car, until IBM did all that.

  • Server

    • Portable thin client has dual-core AMD G-Series processor

      Wyse introduced a mobile thin client using AMD’s dual-core G-Series T56N processor, with integral Radeon HD6310 graphics, and soon to be available with SUSE Linux. The X90m7 offers a 14-inch display with 1366 x 768 pixels, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking, 2GB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, plus a “2G/4G capable” ExpressCard slot and optional smart card reader, the company says.

  • Kernel Space

    • The kernel column #100 with Jon Masters – 100 issues of kernel updates

      To help celebrate Linux User’s landmark 100th issue which goes on sale tomorrow, celebrated Linux Kernel contributor, Jon Masters, recounts some of the biggest developments in the Linux Kernel over the magazine’s last 100 issues…

      I remember the first article I wrote for Linux User & Developer, way back in issue number one. It was a review of the first OpenOffice.org release, following the announcement by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) that it was open-sourcing its Star Office product. Times have certainly changed. Sun is no more, and indeed OpenOffice.org has itself been forked (somewhat without enthusiasm from Oracle) into LibreOffice. In that same time period, untold changes have occurred within the Linux kernel community, which has grown in both size and complexity, along with its body of code…

    • Graphics Stack

      • A Look At Nouveau Driver Power Usage

        There’s been many individuals asking how the work is going in tracking down the major Linux kernel power regression I brought to light late last month (actually, there’s at least two power regressions in the kernel). Not much progress has been made since then as I’ve been out of the office (and country) so I’ve been preoccupied with other matters, but I do happen to have another power test today to satisfy other reader requests.

  • Applications

    • Talking Point: Overlapping Windows

      Back in the 80s, a GUI paradigm called WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) began to establish itself as the new way in which most people interacted with computers. When it comes to one of the most significant elements of that system, overlapping windows, I’m beginning to wonder, has it had its day?

      One of few things that Microsoft can claim to have developed from scratch is an efficient method of application switching called the taskbar, although it’s now in the process of being superseded on most GUIs by the application dock. One side-effect of that form of program management is that it doesn’t penalize the user for running applications fullscreen, and it therefore encourages it. You can glean some ideas about modern user behavior by observing that, in the most popular WM themes and skins, the areas of the window that are used for resizing have almost disappeared. The truth is, if you use Gnome or KDE, you probably run most of your apps fullscreen, most of the time.

    • Proprietary

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments

    • Starting to see more systems with Xfce 4.8 and KDE 4.6.3

      Xfce and KDE are the two desktop environments that I most commonly use, so it is nice when I see distributions that update these environments and keep them close to the most currently available software. In the case of Xfce, Version 4.8 was released near the end of January, so any distribution that offers Xfce really ought to have Version 4.8 available, and the good news is that most of the distributions that I use are now offering Version 4.8, and most of them have the patches that have been added to Xfce 4.8, and some packages are labelled as high as 4.8.3.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Responses to Qt 5

        It’s great to see so much feedback coming in about my Qt 5 blog two days ago. We’ve read and gone through all the comments, but it’s easier to try to answer the questions and concerns in a follow-up post rather than replying to comments.

        We have now created a mailing list for discussions about Qt 5. If you’re interested, please consider subscribing. This will allow us to have better and more structured discussions around Qt 5 than replies to a blog post.

      • relax :)

        After my last blog about a possible future KDE Platform 5 due to Qt 5, it was interesting to watch the number of “Oh no, not another big release that will break the interface we know!” type comments. Let me put all of that to rest:

        The Plasma team has no intention, desire or need to start “from scratch” nor engage in a massive redesign of the existing netbook or desktop shells.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3 And Ubuntu Unity Interfaces: Review

        The next Long Term Support version of Canonical’s Ubuntu is set to ship a year from now, with an October release of the OS in between to address usability and hardware fallback issues. A 2D version of Unity is already available in the Ubuntu repositories. As for GNOME Shell, it’s not clear when the new interface will make its way into the enterprise operating systems from Red Hat, Novell or Oracle.

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

      • BackTrack 5 Has Been Released, Download Now

        Offensive Security, leaders in Online information security training, proudly announced a few minutes ago, May 10th, the immediate availability for download of the new and highly anticipated BackTrack 5 release, an extremely popular security oriented operating system.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat honors UW-Madison partnership, contribution to research computing

        Red Hat Inc., the world’s largest open-source software company, has given the first Red Hat Cloud Leadership Award to the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and named the CHTC its first Red Hat Center of Excellence Development Partner.

        Red Hat and UW-Madison have worked together for four years to integrate into the company’s products research and software produced by the university’s Condor Project — technology widely adopted worldwide by the scientific community to distribute complex computing problems across existing networks (“grids” or “clouds” of computers).

      • Red Hat Elected to DMTF Board of Directors
      • Red Hat’s KVM: A better way to virtualize the data center?

        When you virtualize your servers, do you divide them by operating system, or is it practical to use a bare-metal hypervisor to support all your x86 operating systems?

        That’s what Red Hat thinks is the best idea – which is why it thinks you would be better off virtualizing using KVM, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

        With Reg users reporting that the cost of licenses, the problems of managing multiple platforms and virtual machine sprawl are hurdles to virtualisation, the enthusiasm for virtualisation – and the success of early efforts – creates its own problems.

      • Fedora

        • More thoughts on the Fedora Feature Process

          This is the second release running that another component of the Fedora Feature process has come and bitten me in the proverbial. This time its the “Major Features”(tm), must be landed by the Alpha release, part of the process.

          For Fedora 14 the feature that abused this requirement was python 2.7. Rather than landing by the Alpha release it landed moments before we locked down for the Beta breaking things horribly and causing massive amounts of work post Beta when we were suppose to be stabilising the release. This affected Sugar amongst massively as that’s the language its primarily written in.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • The Goal is 200 Million Ubuntu Users in 4 Years – Mark Shuttleworth at UDS[Video]

            “Our goal is 200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years”, said Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, while delivering the keynote address to the attendees of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, currently taking place in Budapest, Hungary.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Lubuntu to become official Ubuntu derivative

              According to reports, the Lubuntu Linux distribution will become an official Ubuntu derivative. As a fully supported release, its desktop packages will be made available in the Ubuntu repositories for anyone to install – other official derivatives include Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

              In a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), which is currently taking place in Budapest, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu Devleoper Colin Watson discussed the details of integrating Lubuntu into the Ubuntu ecosystem with project member Julien Lavergne. Topics ranged from ISO building to Ubuntu One and a global menu.

            • Linux Mint 11 “Katya” Review

              After testing Linux Mint 11, one word comes to mind: Continuity. Katya does include several new features and enhancements which improve the product further, no doubt about it, but are they enough for Linux Mint 10 users to dump their current installation and upgrade? I personally don’t think so.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • Phones

        • Android

          • Google Activates 400,000 Android Devices Every Day Now!

            During the Google I/O 2011 keynote address, director of Android product management, Hugo Barra, presented a number of interesting statistics. Google has now activated more than 100 million Android devices worldwide and as of April 2011, Google is activating nearly 400,000 Android devices every single day. That number was just around 100,000 just an year ago!

          • Android 3.1 released, as Ice Cream Sandwich waits in the wings

            At the Google I/O conference, Google announced Android 3.1, an update that fixes bugs, tweaks the UI, improves USB support, and adds an Arduino-based Android Open Accessory gadget control platform. Briefly tipping an upcoming “Ice Cream Sandwich” release that will integrate Android 2.x and 3.x, Google also announced Android Market movie rentals, an 18-month Android upgrade program, and an Android@Home home-automation framework.

      • Sub-notebooks/Tablets/Laptops

        • Google To Announce Chrome Laptops-$20/Month

          Google tomorrow will announce sales of the new Chrome laptop in a $20 a month “student package” that combines both hardware and online services, according to a senior Google executive.
          The product is almost certainly a precursor to an enterprise offering. Google Apps, an online product with features similar to Microsoft Office (word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, and other productivity software) is sold to business for $50 a year

        • Acer and Samsung unveil Chrome OS ‘Chromebooks’

          Samsung and Acer will start selling the first Google Chrome OS notebooks starting June 15, priced from $349 to $499 but also available as part of monthly business/school subscriptions. The 12.1-inch Samsung Chromebook Series 5 and the 11.6-inch Acer Chromebook offer dual-core 1.66GHz Intel Atom N570 processors, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 16GB solid state disk, memory card reader, a webcam, USB, Wi-Fi, and optional 3G.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Time for a new open source definition?

    Andrew C Oliver recently wrote “I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source.”

    What makes this fascinating is that it involves a director of the Open Source Initiative – the stewards of the Open Source Definition – stating that the Open Source Definition is not enough to define software as open source.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • SeaMonkey: More Than Just a Firefox Clone

        SeaMonkey is a good browser choice and solid alternative to the more popular and traditional Linux-based Web browsers. It will seem like home if you come to it from Firefox.

        If you are an enamored add-on user, the more limited extensions inventory may disappoint you. But its configurability can make up for this. All in all, SeaMonkey is a full-feature

      • [Mozilla] Merge dates vs release dates

        The schedule on the rapid release process specifics document generally focuses on merge dates. There is some confusion as to what to expect on those dates, so hopefully this post will make it clear.

        The main takeaway is that the merge date is not necessarily the date users on a particular update channel will see an update available.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/Sun/LibreOffice

    • SGI Expands Support for Lustre File System

      SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that it is expanding its support of the Lustre® file system to include Level 3 support, and now provides complete end-to-end coverage for its customers. Lustre is a massively parallel file system, capable of supporting compute clusters of thousands of nodes and many petabytes of storage. The addition of Level 3 support brings the SGI® Lustre® solution for scale-out computing environments to a support level equivalent to CXFSTM, SGI’s own high-performance scale-up clustered file system.

    • Sonatype donates Maven 3.x integration, Eclipse Integration to Hudson

      We’re very excited about the proposed move of Hudson to the Eclipse foundation. To get the project off the right start in its new home, Sonatype has committed to donating all our Maven 3.x related work to the Hudson project. This includes the Maven 3.x integration for Hudson itself, our Eclipse integration, and our Maven Shell integration.

    • Some Observations on Oracle v. Google, by Mark Webbink, Esq.

      Google believed (and believes) it avoided this licensing structure by implementing a clean room version of the Java runtime. The problem with clean rooms is that, while they may help avoid copyright claims, they are not particularly helpful in avoiding patent claims — the ol’ two-edge sword of software. So if you are going to develop a new implementation of something like the Java run-time environment, you have to not only use a clean room in order to avoid copyright claims, you also have to work around any relevant patents (and this doesn’t require a clean room). Suffice it to say that the approach Google has taken has some potential holes in it with respect to patents. Of course, Google believes the Oracle patents are either invalid or not infringed in this instance. [Editorial aside – none of this commentary is intended to imply that patents are a good thing for software; in the eyes of this writer they clearly are not.]

  • Business

  • Project Releases

    • Puppet Labs Releases MCollective Version 1.2.0

      The 1.2.0 release is the latest production release of MCollective and supersedes the 1.1.4 and older releases. This new MCollective release is fully backwards compatible with earlier releases. It is available for download at http://www.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/introduction/.

Leftovers

Clip of the Day

Welcome to Minecraft – Bonus 001 – Chicken


Credit: TinyOgg, Twitter

05.11.11

Links 11/5/2011: Linux 2.6.39 is Coming, Skypocalypse Analyses

Posted in News Roundup at 1:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.39 (Part 4) – Drivers

      The kernel now supports USB 3.0 hubs, the latest Radeon graphics cards and Intel’s previously problematic GMA500 graphics. Other new additions include drivers for notebooks by ASUS and Samsung, and for audio and multimedia hardware from various other vendors.

      Linus Torvalds released the seventh pre-release of Linux 2.6.39 on Monday night. He wrote: “So things have been pretty quiet, and unless something major comes up I believe that this will be the last -rc”. If Torvalds sticks to his usual work patterns, then 2.6.39 could well be released early next week.

    • Linux 2.6.39 Kernel Is Imminent

      “So things have been pretty quiet, and unless something major comes up I believe that this will be the last -rc,” began Linus Torvalds in announcing the release of the Linux 2.6.39-rc7 kernel.

      [...]

      Bit more information on LKML.org. Overall the 2.6.39 kernel is turning out to be a great release so far, sans the outstanding power regressions.

    • Linux 2.6.39 nears completion
    • Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel

      In continuation of the recent topic about NVIDIA Optimus coming unofficially to Linux, Red Hat’s David Airlie has just pushed several patches into drm-next that deal with Optimus. These patches will be part of the DRM pull request to then go into the Linux 2.6.40 kernel once its merge window opens.

    • Linux, History, Contributors and Thanks

      One of first things we need to have clear here, is what we are calling Linux is it the GNU/Linux or the just the Linux Kernel. Well usually when people talk about Linux they are referring to GNU/Linux, but what is the difference?

    • Graphics Stack

      • Wayland, X.Org For Ubuntu’s Future

        I had some other Ubuntu testing matters to tend to, but the notes can be found on this page.

        Phoronix readers should already be very familiar with Wayland due to all the articles I’ve written on the topic and even being the first to break the story about Wayland way back in 2008. With that said, here’s the interesting bits from the notes:

  • Applications

    • Proprietary

      • Microsoft deal will boost open Skype alternatives

        When rumors began circulating that Facebook was eyeing Skype for potential purchase, more than a few observers began to get nervous.

        Now that Microsoft has bought the VoIP leader, the shock in many circles is palpable. Widely viewed as primarily a defensive move, the acquisition has many wondering how Microsoft will integrate the service with offerings of its own — most notably Windows Live Messenger — not to mention how it will affect the 170 million or so Skype users around the globe.

      • Open Source alternatives for Skype

        So with Skype — already proprietary software, already dubious — probably going to Microsoft (as I read via Simon Phipps to the Grauniad and Johan Thelins) there’s an extra impetus to find something else.

      • Microsoft’s Skype acquisition may impact Linux users

        After a week of rumors about Skype being heavily courted by buyers such as Google and Facebook, it looks like the winning bidder may be Microsoft.

        According to a story the Wall Street Journal broke late Monday evening (and later confirmed early Tuesday morning), Microsoft has closed a nearly $8 billion deal for the popular voice-over-IP company.

        (In the video below, Keith Shaw talks with CIO.com’s Shane O’Neill about Microsoft’s $8.5 billion offer to buy Skype, and what it means for Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise voice offerings.)

      • Microsoft’s Ballmer $7.7-Billion Skype Blunder

        I’m bemused to see that Microsoft’s Grand Poobah Steve Ballmer has blundered yet again. This time, instead of Vista, the operating system that never should have seem the light of day, or Windows Phone 7, the far too little, too late, attempt to play in mobile devices, he’s wasted a cool $8.5-billion (Billion!) on Skype.

        Seriously? Ballmer just burned more money than Oracle did on buying Sun for a video-conferencing and Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) company? Come on! The only thing that Skype has over any of the dozens of other video-conferencing and VoIP companies out there is brand recognition and Skype’s brand is not worth $850-million much less $8.5-billion.

      • What Does Microsoft Buying Skype Mean For Linux?

        After speculations that Facebook is going after Skype, it has turned out that Microsoft too was interested. In fact, today, we heard that Microsoft has bought Skype for $ 8.5 billion.

        One thing that I wondered when I heard this new is what will happen to Skype on Linux. Everyone who has used the Skype client on Linux knows that it is not even anywhere near the level of the Windows and Mac client. The Linux client of Skype is plagued with problems of video chat, voice chat etc. And to top it off, there is the lack of updates.

      • Skype purchase highlights a weakness in “free enough” philosophy

        If you’re a Linux and heavy Skype user, the announcement that Microsoft is purchasing Skype no doubt sent shivers down your spine. You can relax, though: Steve Ballmer says everything will be OK. Reassuring, right?

        Ballmer has assured us that Microsoft will continue to provide Skype for “operating systems and devices not sold by Microsoft,” though I’m not sure that explicitly includes Linux. Let’s assume for a moment that it does include Linux, though — this is an obvious gap for free software nonetheless.

      • Opera — well worth a look

        The Opera Internet browser goes way on back to 1994 but has struggled for fans over the years.

        That’s a shame, too, as Opera is an incredibly useful Internet suite that — once configured — can do away with a heck of a lot of applications that a good number of users access daily.

      • LibreOffice 3.4 Will Have Native Support for Ubuntu Global Menu

        The Document Foundation and LibreOffice developers have been keeping quite busy. The foundation is busying itself getting ready for the LibreOffice Conference in Paris this fall, organizing speakers, accepting papers, and other thankless tasks while developers are coding full steam ahead.

        Version 3.4 will come with several new features besides its usual bug fixes and performance enhancements. For example, Writer will soon support color and line styles in columns and footers. Greek characters mode will be available for bullet lists too.

        Calc will soon be able to support multiple subtotals for a given subset of number ranges on a single sheet. A complete rewrite of the drawing layer will improve “precision on re-positioning and re-sizing of drawing objects.” Impress with sport improved HTML export with images.

      • Is Netflix Coming To Linux?

        Netflix is still not available on Linux platform. One of the reasons being, Netflix says that providers demand strong DRM (digital restriction management) which makes it hard to make content available under Linux.

        This is also one of the reasons Netflix is not available on Android. I think its time for Netflix to follow Apple and force providers to offer content without DRM.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

  • Desktop Environments

    • Fedora and Gnome 3, Ubuntu and Unity, will openSUSE and KDE benefit?

      Right now it seems like some of the top Linux distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu are heading down a slippery slope.

      Fedora 15 will be based on Gnome 3, it is still early days for the Gnome 3 project and over time I am confident it will get better but many (including myself) feel its not ready for use.

    • Are Usability Studies Hurting the Free Desktop?

      Few FOSS projects are as concerned with usability as GNOME and Ubuntu. For GNOME, the Sun usability study proved a turning point, especially when its lessons were codified and expanded into the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Qt5 .. KDE5?

        As most of those who read my blog have already heard, Qt5 is on its way. The target is 2012 and the focus is QtQuick where there is a high degree of separation between display and data and things are rendered using a hardware accelerated (read: OpenGL) scene graph. This is very much in line with where we are heading with Plasma as well. Exciting times!

      • Muon – KDE Package Manager and Software Center

        During the UDS sessions yesterday about Kubuntu Defaults there was an interesting demo regarding a package manager and software center called Muon.

        [...]

        I know I have left out TONs of features from this but, I wanted to show off something that is bringing Kubuntu forward in the way of assisting users.

      • Amarok 2.4.1 adds new “Preview” feature

        Code-named “Resolution”, Amarok 2.4.1 features the addition of a new “Preview” feature for the Organize Collection dialog, as well as support for remote NFS & SMB/CIFS collections. Users can now change text alignment in the lyrics applet and string filtering has been added to the albums applet.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • 50 Top Linux Distributions

      The list is organized into several different categories. The “major” distributions come first, followed by distros based on Ubuntu, Debian, Red/Hat Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, Arch and Gentoo. Next come some distros that are optimized for cloud computing, some very lightweight distributions, some that are designed to look as much like Windows as possible and finally, some notable distros that didn’t seem to fit into any other category. Of course, some distributions could fit into more than one category, but we tried to place them where they seemed to fit most naturally.

    • CTK Arch: Fast and Furious

      CTK Arch is very interesting distro from my perspective. It is well balanced between graphical and CLI sides of Linux. Maybe I am little bit too unexperienced for it yet, but still can do quite a lot there.
      I will not recommend CTK Arch for beginners. You need to be prepared to take some of challenges. But once you have some basic knowledge, then digging within CTK Arch will give you unrivalled pleasure of control over system!
      I should probably look into CTK Arch (or other Arch-based distros) later, when have more Linux experience myself.

    • On technical support, and other things

      So there seems to have been some discussion, lately, about this blog post by Jeff Hoogland on his experience asking a question in #fedora.

      I noticed that no-one has actually posted the discussion, yet, so I will: you can find the full log from Jeff’s initial question to when he leaves the channel at the end of this post. Note: my log is from bip and prints nicknames in an ugly and unreadable way so I went through and fixed those by hand, any errors in nicknames are my mistake, but I did not alter the text at all.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Awesomeness!

          There have been a lot of people complaining about the Fedora community (Not planning to name any) and the way it works. I am not going to say that everything they say is false or made up, its their opinion and everyone should have one. Well from my opinion the Fedora community is just plain Awehellovcarfun (Yes I made a new word just to prove my point [Awesome + helping + loving + caring + fun]) Its like a fun family where there are all kinds of people, sure there might be some weird people around, but thats what a family is made up of.

        • Freeing up a Fedora Board seat

          As you can see from the Fedora Board History, I have held Elected Seat #5 since July 2008, and while I am rather proud of what we have accomplished during my tenure on the Fedora Board, I do not feel that it is healthy for a community to be run by the same people forever and ever. Accordingly, I will not be seeking re-election to the Fedora Board at this time. (I reserve the right to run in a future election, but I have no immediate plans to do so.)

        • Will Fedora Ever Learn?

          People can argue that Red Hat has nothing to with how Fedora’s ran. I was also told it’s distinctly outside of Red Hat. Then there’s the statement that the Fedora Unity Project runs the ‘Official’ Fedora Forums and the IRC channel(s), which Red Hat and Fedora have no control over. That’s all fine on paper, fact of the matter is Red Hat owns the Fedora trademark (which in my opinion means it owns the rights and responsibilities to Fedora, period), is its biggest sponsor, and it’s largest contributor. On top of that you have paid Red Hat employees conducting business for Red Hat and Fedora in the various Fedora IRC channels. If all of that wasn’t enough, the current Fedora Project Leader himself, Jared Smith, and every other project leader before him, has been an employee of Red Hat.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • What’s happening in Edubuntu for Oneiric?

            Today we had a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest covering the work in Edubuntu for the next release cycle. Not all of the items are assigned to someone yet (especially with the documentation), so if you’d like to get involved, please give us a ping on IRC or mailing list.

          • Shuttleworth bid to sell copyright policy

            He made the admission during his keynote to the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit which is taking place in Budapest this week.

            The experienced media operator that he is, Shuttleworth ensured that nobody would refer to this aspect of his speech by throwing out a figure of 200 million as being the number of users he aims for in four years – growth of nearly 1700 per cent, given that Ubuntu now has around 12 million users.

            That number has been spouted over and over again in the tech media and his statements on copyright assignment have been totally ignored. Which I think is what he intended – copyright assignment is a ticklish issue from which he has shied away.

          • 10 Useful Application Indicators for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

            Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is probably the most criticized may be even a tad too under rated Ubuntu release ever. But as we had noted in our previous Ubuntu 11.04 review, it doesn’t feel that bad for everyone anyway. Application Indicators are good way to extend the functionality of brand new Ubuntu 11.04 and here are some of the most useful among them.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • LinuxMint11 “Katya” RC is released! | With Screenchots Tour

              With the release of Ubuntu 11.04, at the end of April, the countdown for Linux Mint new release had begun. As Lefebvre, the founder and developer of Linux Mint, announced the release candidate Katya for version 11 of Linux Mint, the moment of discovery is here.

            • Kubuntu 11.04

              The release of Ubuntu 11.04 has garnered an enormous amount of attention, mostly due to the inclusion of Unity as its default desktop environment. But, as with any new version of Ubuntu, there are alternatives available and one of the most prominent is Kubuntu. Kubuntu 11.04 is a KDE-based distro that might work well as a substitute for those who are uncomfortable with Ubuntu’s Unity.

              [...]

              Rating: 4/5

    • Devices/Embedded

      • SOURCE: Tilera Corporation

        Tilera® Corporation, the leader in manycore general purpose microprocessors, today announced the addition of Wind River support for their TILEPro and TILEGx processors. Such support enables Tilera customers to utilize state-of-the-art commercial Wind River Linux and Wind River Workbench tools and enables easy migration of legacy designs to Tilera’s scalable platform.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Verizon Recognized for Technological Achievements and Innovation in Use of Open Source and Middleware Solutions

    Verizon has won in the Superior Alternatives category of the 2011 Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards competition. The award, announced during the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World on May 6 in Boston, recognizes Verizon for “the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.”

    Specifically, Verizon won the award for the company’s implementation of a new standards-based business process-management system for the company’s Integrated Management Platform for Advanced Communications Technologies automated platform, which monitors, troubleshoots and resolves network service interruptions.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • don’t let them* re-define open

        If you can substitute the word “participatory” for the word “open” and still be telling the truth, then you’re using “open” properly. If you cannot, then you are not.

      • Mozilla Aurora – There will be blood – and fun

        Whether Aurora is a pointer in the right direction, only time will tell. It could turn out to be a useless gimmick, a copycat feature with no purpose at all. On the other hand, it could become a powerful tool for developers and web designers. Increased exposure should guarantee fewer surprises, better compatibility and smoother transitions to new versions. This is particularly important for Firefox addon developers, who now must adapt to the new quick release cycle.

        Media hypes aside, I do believe Aurora has its place in the software testing tier. It’s a nice compromise between wider-use betas and wild nightlies, allowing more people to conduct checks and look for bugs without getting scarred by the experience. Overall, in the long run, such practice will draw in more people toward Firefox, or at the very least, make major releases easier and less painful, which is always a good thing.

        Aurora will always be a geek tool, but one with good potential of breeding a new generation of Firefox hardcore fans, obsessed with the thrill of living on the edge, the bleeding edge, where heroes are made or broken. Or at the very least, software is tested.

      • Mozilla Removes User Limit From Firefox 5 Beta

        Mozilla also revealed that there are 417,000 Firefox beta users in total, all of which will be eligible to sign up for the beta channel. If you are not part of the beta program yet, you can sign up for Firefox 5 Beta once it becomes available as a final build on May 17 here.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • 7 Nifty Tricks to Get the Most out of LibreOffice Writer

      Since the death of OpenOffice and the release of Ubuntu 11.04, LibreOffice has gained a lot of popularity in such a short amount of time. Though there is not much of a difference between LibreOffice Writer and its Oracle-owned predecessor, there are some tricks that can help you get the most out of it. Here’s a look at 7 such tricks.

  • Licensing

  • Openness/Sharing

    • First day at Libre Graphics Meeting

      So here I’m sitting at my desk at my “Cosy Studio” in the Therese Casgrain student housing facility/hotel calles Les Studios Hotel in Montreal. Too tired to do anything but nibble cherry tomatoes and drink a beer, after the first day at the Libre Graphics Meeting, 2011 edition.

      Perhaps slightly less busy than last year, and I’m missing a lot of familiar faces, but the quality of the talks has been outstanding so far. I’m working on experimentally getting colord up and running on my OpenSUSE laptop so I can check whether I can generate Qt bindings for the dbus interface to experiment with integration in Krita.

      If the number of questions people want to ask after a presentation is a measure of success, then Lukas’ Krita presentation was a huge success. By that metric, but also by any other metric was a huge success indeed! Lukas showed off all the new stuff we’ve created since LGM 2010 — and was followed by Animtim giving a workshop on creating a comic in Krita. The audience was completely silent as he used Krita’s mirroring feature, sketch brush, vector layers, hatching brush and color modes to quickly create the first panel for a comic. (But admittedly, I came away with notes on three points where Krita must improve, because Krita made Animtim fumble at times.)

  • Standards/Consortia

    • PJ, Goodbye and Good Luck

      There was a time when daggers were drawn on Linux and its demise was plotted in dark detail. At that hour stepped out a shieldmaiden with a blog, and that blog was Groklaw. Eight years later, we hear the news that Groklaw will cease new postings after May 16th. My sadness in hearing this news is more than equaled by my gratitude to PJ and her community of researchers and commentators, for their enormous effort and unparalleled achievement over these years. The world is a better place because of PJ. Who can hope to say better?

Clip of the Day

Introducing Music Beta by Google


Credit: TinyOgg

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