• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired.com, seven years later. “If you play golf with Steve and he loses a five-cent bet, he’s pissy for the next week. Should it surprise you that when I tell Steve I’m quitting and going to work for Google, he would get animated?”

The famous flying chair shows just how volatile Steve Ballmer can be, but it also underlines the talent Mark Lucovsky brings to the art of software engineering. Lucovsky joined Microsoft in 1988 as part of the team that designed and built the company’s Windows NT operating system — which still provides the core code for all Windows releases — and after joining Google, he was one of three engineers who created the search giant’s AJAX APIs, online programming tools that drew more traffic than almost any other service at Google. “[He's] probably in the top 99.9 percentile when it comes to engineers,” says Paul Maritz, the CEO of virtualization kingpin VMware, who worked with Lucovsky as a top exec at Microsoft.

Desktop

• Chrome OS Linux 1.7.932 Has Google Music Manager

  The Chrome OS developers announced today, November 17th, the immediate availability for download of the Chrome OS 1.7.932 Live CD operating system, which brings the new Google Music Manager.

• Life with a ChromeBook

  During May’s Google IO developer conference, the first netbooks using the Linux-based ChromeOS were announced from Acer and Samsung. This was a public follow up from the very public beta of ChromeOS netbooks kicked off in December. One of the morning keynotes was dedicated to describing the new netbooks and their features. In June, the ChromeBooks finally shipped and were available for purchase from Amazon and Best Buy. Amazon actually sold out of Samsung Chromebooks in the first week.

  ChromeOS was the cover topic 2 years ago on the July 20th (2009) issue of Information Week. In that article, the bottom line was “… Google has a shot at gaining respectable consumer market share if it produces a slick, fast, secure OS that delivers a great web experience. And if Google succeeds with consumers, it is logical to expect it to steer that momentum toward the enterprise.”

Kernel Space

• New Kernel Patch Slashes Linux’s Power Appetite

  Linux users working on laptops and other portable devices may soon have cause to rejoice thanks to a new kernel patch that finally promises to fix power regression problems associated with recent versions of the software.

• Linus Torvalds Takes Aim at Proprietary Tech, and Apple

  (Brazil has recently squared off with Apple over policies on iTunes.) Apple co-founder Steve Jobs delivered a defense of the company’s tendency to deliver proprietary tools in Walter Isaacson’s biography of him. He told Isaacson that “people are busy” and don’t want to be bothered with incompatible products and products that don’t just seamlessly work. “They’re busy doing whatever they do best,” Jobs said “and they want us to do what we do best. Their lives are crowded; they have other things to do than think about how to integrate their computers and devices.”

  It seems that that explanation is not good enough for Linus Torvalds.

Applications

• The Best Disc Burning App for Linux

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Mailuils 2.99.94 [alpha]

Distributions

• Comparison of major Linux package management systems

• New Releases

  • Incognito 0.9

  • IPCop 2.0.2

  • CAINE 2.5.1 – SUPERNOVA is out!

    CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is an Italian GNU/Linux live distribution created as a project of Digital Forensics
    Currently the project manager is Nanni Bassetti.

  • Announcement and release notes for Wary (and Racy) Puppy 5.2.2

    Wary Puppy is built from a “Puppy builder” system named Woof (http://bkhome.org/woof), which can build a Puppy Linux distribution from the binary packages of any other distro. There are many “puppies” built with Woof, including Lucid, Wary, Racy, FatDog, and Slacko.

• Gentoo Family

  • Sabayon 7 on Acer Aspire One D255

    The Acer Aspire one is a a 1Gb, Intel Atom Netbook PC, and while you may think the netbook is dead, having a low powered throw in the bag computer is never a bad thing. However even in these heady days when Microsoft are willing to convince you that Windows 7 will happily run on devices such as this, and then effectively killed the market a customers just couldn’t figure out why their £200 netbook ran like a dog there is still hope with the Gnome 3 based Distro..

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Getting the Blooming Flavor of Fedora 16 KDE

      If you have read my review of Fedora 16 KDE Live, you should understand that I liked this Operating System. That’s why I decided to give it a chance to show all bloom in installed version of Fedora.
      In order to run installer, I booted my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop using same Live USB as before.
      Before running the installation, I activated WiFi connection.

    • Fedora 16: A GNOME lover’s paradise

      After several delays, Fedora 16 has been delivered. While hold-ups are a characteristic of the distro’s release cycle, these latest ditherings have put the latest version of Fedora a few weeks behind its main competitor, Ubuntu.

      Fortunately for Fedora fans this release is well worth the extended waiting time, offering an updated GNOME Shell, the Linux 3.0 kernel and plenty of the under-the-hood improvements that Fedora is known for.

• Debian Family

  • I’m back home with Debian

    I have been struggling with my conscience recently over using Ubuntu as a server. From a technical perspective, it’s an excellent choice. It has regular releases, can be both stable and cutting edge, has thousands upon thousands of packages, supports a lot of hardware, has a very pragmatic approach to enterprise server requirements, and much, much more. With all these benefits Ubuntu has been a favorite of mine for a long time. But recently I have been thinking more philosophically.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 3 Interesting Ubuntu Unity Mobile Mockups

        User created ideas and concepts have always been an hallmark of popular Linux based distors like Ubuntu. We have featured such awesome works by loyal users, ranging from awe inspiring Ubuntu Unity mockups to professional looking LibreOffice mockups. Shuttleworth, during the recently concluded Ubuntu Developer Summit(UDS), made it clear that they will be taking Ubuntu to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs. Inspired from that, some users have already created interesting mockups based on the idea of mobile Ubuntu Unity.

      • Ubuntu launches at retail in Portugal with ASUS

        As of this week, Ubuntu is now on sale in over 100 retail outlets in Portugal.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Kubuntu 11.10 review

          Kubuntu 11.10 is the latest stable release of the desktop Linux distribution sponsored by Canonical Ltd., a Linux software provider based in London, UK. It is based on Ubuntu, but uses KDE, the K Desktop Environment. According to the Release announcement, Kubuntu is a “perfect OS for casual users, social butterflies, Linux gamers, software developers, professionals, and anyone interested in a free, open platform that is both beautiful and useful.”

          That statement, by the way, applies to every (desktop) Linux distribution.

        • Lubuntu 11.10 review – Alternative to Unity?

          I just figured out I never did give the LXDE desktop paired with Ubuntu a proper review. We did have several stabs at Kubuntu, Ubuntu with Gnome classic and Unity, even the Xfce-flavored Xubuntu, but not this one. Now that it is officially endorsed by the company shipping the most popular Linux distro, it’s time to dig in and see whether Lubuntu can deliver the missing zen lost in the Gnome 2 and Unity guard change.

          Lubuntu is supposed to be a simple, lightweight alternative to heavier, more fully featured desktops, so it seems like a logical choice for older hardware. But then, all my past experience shows that these dietary environments are always lacking in something, never quite as good as the top two or perhaps top three desktops. And there’s the matter of spotlight and quality assurance. That said, maybe Lubuntu can deliver?

        • The most popular Linux is…

          Trying to figure out what the most popular Linux distribution is isn’t easy. We can safely say that Red Hat’s Rat Hat Enterprise Linux is almost certainly popular server Linux. You don’t close in on a billion in annual revenue without a lot of users. You could argue that it’s Android since there are over two hundred million Android smartphones out there, but I was thinking of PCs. So, which distribution do most individual people use on their computers?

          For years, Ubuntu has been the number one end-user Linux, but, somewhat to my surprise, it looks like Ubuntu has to face not just a challenger, but indeed it appears that Ubuntu has already been dethroned by Linux Mint, my own current favorite Linux desktop distribution.

        • Linux Mint 12

          Linux Mint was officially released on November 12, for almost a week now. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. For those not familiar with the Mint distro, Linux Mint is based on the latest release of Ubuntu, but with a few wrinkles. For starters, it works out of the box with full multimedia support.

          So, no more hassles in trying to get your DVD movies and other multimedia formats to work, which is a common problem for people starting out with Ubuntu. You also get a Windows-like menu system. Hey, anything helps to smooth out the transition when switching from Windows to Linux.

        • How to make Linux Mint look like OS X

          You might be wondering why we’d spend time morphing elements of the Linux Mint desktop into the shape of OS X, but there are several great reasons.

          Firstly, while recent Linux desktops like Unity and Gnome Shell take many of their cues from OS X, they don’t give you the option of only changing what you want to. Our piecemeal modifications will let you add only the features you want, while getting some of that OS X eye candy and usability. This isn’t a betrayal – it’s an example of Linux’s adaptability.

        • Linux Mint 12

        • Review: Pinguy OS 11.10 Beta

          For those who don’t know, Pinguy OS is basically Ubuntu plus everything and the kitchen sink. Also, the interface is made to look much more like Apple’s Mac OS X, with a top panel featuring a global menu, along with docks and similar themes. However, there have been some changes out of necessity because as of version 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”, Ubuntu no longer officially supports GNOME 2, so Pinguy OS has also had to upgrade to GNOME 3. As a result, the whole “Apple Mac OS X” look has had to be adapted to the new interface and restrictions (and there are many such restrictions) of GNOME 3. I’d like to see if it still remains as usable and friendly as before.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Amazon will launch a Kindle phone next year

      ONLINE DEPARTMENT STORE Amazon already has its Kindle e-reader and its Kindle Fire tablet, and it could branch out into Kindle smartphones too.

      The device, so far dubbed the Kindle Phone for want of another name, will be launched around this time next year in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to All Things D. The information comes from Citigroup’s research department which bases its theory on intelligence gathered from supply chains.

Women in FOSS: men need to do more, says senior dev

A long-time member of the FOSS community believes that men need to do much more about increasing the participation of women in the community and improving their experience of being part of the community.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Silent installation – following up

  In my earlier post about administrative installation of LibreOffice i described how its possible to use the program ORCA to manipulate the msi-file by creating a new mst-file.

  Unfortunately this subject is not very well documented from the developers. if you are a developer and find that I am giving wrong or inaccurate information then please notify me ASAP.

  Lately I have investigated some more details and possibilities in the installation process.

• Now you can buy LibreOffice merchandise

• Oracle v. Google – Oracle Names Final Three Deponents

  On Monday of this week Judge Alsup settled the issue of whether Oracle would be permitted to depose any or all of the technical witnesses on which Drs. Leonard and Cox relied in preparing their damages reports by granting Oracle the right to depose any three of seven such witnesses. (Copyright Fight Moves To Trial; Oracle Gains Some Depos) Oracle had already identified Tim Bray and John Rizzo as two of those deponents, and Google had agreed to produce them. So what the judge’s ruling really did was to limit Oracle to one additional deponent out of the remaining five witnesses. Oracle has decided that deponent will be Dan Bornstein, a witness Oracle has already deposed for two full days.

• Oracle v. Google – Google Wins One and Has a Second Deferred

  Google won a victory on its motion to strike the “rebuttal” report of Dr. Serwin. In an order issued yesterday Judge Alsup sided with Google, granted the motion, struck Dr. Serwin’s report, and ordered that Dr. Serwin could not testify at trial. (622 [PDF; Text]) This means that Dr. Serwin’s survey is out the window, as well.

  Judge Alsup not only granted Google’s motion, he appeared to level a good bit of criticism at Oracle’s counsel, calling the attempt to introduce the Serwin report a “highly unusual maneuver.” Judge Alsup also said that “in twelve years of using this form of case management scheduling order, this is the first time anyone has suggested [that reply reports were not explicitly limited to the authors of the opening reports].” He went on to say: “Oracle’s argument that Google has not been prejudiced is meritless. As explained above, the practice urged by Oracle is inherently unfair and frustrates important case-management objectives.” Turn out the lights, the Serwin party is over.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• This holiday season donate support to free software!

  Are you dreading the end of this month and all it entails in terms of mall-parking expeditions and frenzied spending amidst crowds of other buyers? Are you looking for a break from the gimmes and some respite from advertisers’ leitmotif that “you have needs”? Break with the year end’s usual rampant consumerism and give your loved ones a gift that makes a social difference: give back to the community by giving a membership as a gift, and make a positive change for you and your gift recipient.

Project Releases

• wdiff 1.1.0 released

  Translations can now make use of plural forms. While this means a drastic improvement for some languages, it may also mean that some languages for which no such plural forms are available yet might be lacking user visible message strings, not only error messages, but also for e.g. statistics. You might want to check the translation status if your users have problems with English.

• gnutls 3.0.8

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • Mexico’s Largest University to Post Online Nearly All Publications and Course Materials

    The National Autonomous University of Mexico, better known as UNAM, has said it will make virtually all of its publications, databases, and course materials freely available on the Internet over the next few years—a move that some academics speculated could push other universities in the region to follow suit.

    Campus officials at UNAM, Mexico’s largest university, said the program, known as All of UNAM Online, could double or triple the institution’s 3.5 million publicly available Web pages, as the largest collection of its kind in Latin America.

Programming

• [Bazaar developers' blog] What I did on my Rotation

  Bazaar is the version control system used by top open source project hosting site Launchpad so I was surprised to come across a bug which prevented bzr from talking to Launchpad properly on errors. “This is really important to fix. We need error reporting.” said Jonathan Lange over 2 years before. Pleasingly I could fix it, very satisfying. I had to learn about the hooks mechanism in bzr which shows up some of the downside of Python, you have to guess the arguments to send the hook. But who needs API documentation when you can just read the code?

What is Usenet and How Does it Work?

Have you heard of Usenet? Maybe your father once mentioned something about his Usenet account in college. If you are unaware of what Usenet is, don’t worry. You are about to find out.

Usenet was initially an idea hatched by 2 Duke University students in 1979. It was soon available on college campuses around the world. Access was eventually granted to early internet service providers who gave free access to their subscribers.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Digital divides: UBB as part of a much bigger broadband mess

  1) Leadership. The FCC has been making headway with a real broadband strategy over the last 18 months, along with a set of network neutrality rules, because the vision comes from the top – the White House. Harper and his cabinet have never cared about world-class retail broadband, because that would put them on the wrong side of the consumer vs business divide.

• CRTC goes REM on UBB: everybody hurts, sometimes

  The CRTC’s usage-based billing decision is in and boy is it a lot to digest, which is perhaps why there were so many conflicting reports in the media as to who exactly the winners and losers are or will be. After reading and digesting the long document and speaking to a number of the small internet providers that will be affected by it at the ISP Summit dinner on Tuesday night, it’s hard to see how anybody really wins with this decision. Burdened with the impossible task of trying to make everybody happy, perhaps this was the CRTC’s desired outcome.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Universal Music Sues Insurer To Pay For Its Copyright Infringement

    Earlier this year, the four primary members of the Canadian Recording Industry Association (now Music Canada) – Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada – settled the largest copyright class action lawsuit in Canadian history by agreeing to pay over $50 million to compensate for hundreds of thousands of infringing uses of sound recordings. While the record labels did not admit liability, the massive settlement spoke for itself.

  • Creative Commons at WIPO

    This week, Andres Guadamuz (CC Costa Rica) is representing Creative Commons at the 8th Session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The agenda [PDF] promises review of several pending recommendations as well as a discussion of future work by the CDIP. Consistent with protocol, Creative Commons prepared a statement for the opening session, which you can read here, as well as find CC’s prior statements and presentations at the CDIP and other WIPO meetings and conferences.

  • File Sharing Lawsuits Progress in Canada as Dozens Face Payment Demands

    Earlier this fall, I wrote about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada as the copyright owners of the film the Hurt Locker obtained a court order requiring three major ISPs – Bell, Videotron, and Cogeco – to reveal the identities of dozens of subscribers alleged to have downloaded the movie. I noted that the targeted Canadians would likely face the prospect of demands to pay thousands of dollars in order to settle the case (or spend thousands in legal fees fighting the claims in court).

  • ACTA

    • Confirmatory application for legal service’s opinion on ACTA

    • 7 civil society groups ask for European Parliament transparency on ACTA

    • ACTA Secrecy Continues in the EU

      The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure has just released the response it got from the EU INTA committee to the request to disclose the legal opinion the Committee recently received on ACTA. In what would be a shocking response, if it was not so common in the history of ACTA, the Committee released a 16 page legal opinion with everything blotted out except for the legal conclusion that the EU is not required to publicly release any preparatory materials from the ACTA negotiation (ie the previous drafts).

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Linux for Work

  Here is the list of software I use daily in my work:

  1. LibreOffice 4.3 Writer and sometimes Calc
  2. gEdit 3.2.1 for note-taking
  3. FireFox 7 for Internet Research and Email
  4. and Ubuntu Linux 11.10 to make it all run flawlessly

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 3 Episode 22

• # The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 429 [Ogg]

• Salt

• #156 Computer America #44

Applications

• LiveUSB Install – Not Just Another Live USB Creator for #Linux

• Wakeup: An Alarm Clock That Tells You What’s Going On [Linux]

  Wake up to your computer telling you what’s going on. Whether you want to know the weather or how many emails you need to respond to, Linux application Wakeup can start up your powered-off computer and announce a variety of things.

• Revelation Password Manager

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Enabling Compiz On A Fedora 16 GNOME Classic Desktop (NVIDIA GeForce 8100)

  • irssi For Beginners

  • Introduction to LaTeX on Linux

  • Zero-day suspected in BIND 9 DNS server crashes

  • Using a Simple Firewall in CentOS 6

  • Test To Give When Hiring or Interviewing a Junior Linux System Administrator

  • Disable SELinux on Fedora 16 Verne

  • How To Disable Strict Add-On Compatibility In Firefox

  • Enable Gnome-shell 3D Desktop Effects in Virtualized Fedora 16

  • How to Use KVM with Virtual Machine Manager

  • How to install the Nvidia drivers manually in openSUSE 12.1

  • An Easier Way to Generate A Public/Private SSH Key Via a GUI [Linux]

  • Installing Oracle (sun) Java 1.7u1 openSUSE 12.1

  • How to become comfortable with vim

  • Install nomachine in RHEL/centos/Fedora

  • HOWTO: Use APT without the Bloat

  • LPI Announces new Master Affiliate for the UK and Ireland

    The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world’s premier Linux certification organization, has announced a new Master Affiliate for the UK and Ireland (LPI UK). LPI UK will be managed and operated by TDM Open Source Services (www.tdm.info) of Worcestershire, England.

• Games

  • Doom 3 open-sourcing held up while Carmack writes new code

    Before it could release an open-source version of the Doom 3 engine code to all, id Software had to run it by the lawyers. But, their fierce eyes have spotted a slight problem. Chief id technomancer John Carmack is now writing new code to dodge legal issues surrounding the rendering technique, “Carmack’s Reverse,” which gave Doom 3 its lovely shadows.

  • John Carmack is the best of the best (Doom 3 source code)

  • Desura’s Public Linux Client Is Here With 65+ Games

    For those that didn’t notice yet, the public Linux client for Desura is now available and it’s out of the closed-beta process. You can now fetch some 65+ games for Linux from this Steam-like digital distribution platform.

Desktop Environments

• Enlightenment E17 Running On Wayland

  While the GNOME and KDE projects are still working towards making their desktops run on the Wayland Display Server rather than an X.Org Server, the Enlightenment project is also working towards bringing E17 window manager and libraries to Wayland. In fact, they have the first visible signs of success!

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Top 6 KDE distributions of 2011

    There are perhaps hundreds of KDE Linux distributions available, and like an active volcano, more are “erupting” at a rate that is tough to keep pace with.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Greg KH Is Not Happy With Gnome 3, Wants KDE 4. Ouch!

    Greg KH is not happy with Gnome 3. When I met him during LinuxCon and interviewed him (the interview is coming soon), and asked about Gnome 3, he said he was still running Gnome 2. Now, he has tried Gnome 3 and he is not a happy user. He was not as ‘harsh’ as was Linus Torvalds when he called Gnome 3 Shell a holy mess and said someone should fork it.

    Greg posted on his Google + page, “OK, after a day with GNOME 3, I’m finding that I am really not the person that the GNOME developers are trying to satisfy, and that’s fine, I don’t blame them, I know my needs are different from “normal” users.”

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • FrOSCon and OpenRheinRuhr: Mageia on tour

    For six years now, the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg is inviting to the Free and Open Source Software Conference (short FrOSCon) in August.

    Together with the German user community MandrivaUser.de Mageia was present there with a stand and a project room where several talks were done (and where we had the possibility to sleep).
    FrOSCon is not really targeting a public audience but is more some kind of family meeting of the German Open Source community as a whole.

    [...]

    Mageia was (again) sharing a booth with the German Mandriva user community MandrivaUser.de.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Veteran Putting Eucalyptus on the Open Source Path

    Eucalyptus was once “the” open source cloud computing project. It was the core of Ubuntu’s cloud strategy, and more or less the only game in town. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly open project. While most of the code was available under an open source license, it wasn’t developed in the open and failed to develop much of a community. Eucalyptus Systems is hoping Greg DeKoenigsberg can fix that.

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Available

    Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.

  • Fedora

    • First impressions of the Fedora 16 GNOME 3 Live CD

      I’ve spent probably more than a year avoiding new distributions, new releases, distro reviews and the dreaded “I ran the live CD of Project X and here’s what happened” posts.

      But I’m in an inquisitive mood. And here is one of those “I ran the live CD for an hour” reviews. Take it for the proverbial what it’s worth.

    • Fedora 16 KDE – First Impressions

      This time, I had a pretty new computer at hand to try the live system on – an Intel Core i5-2310 2.9GHz Sandy Bridge processor with Intel HD Graphics 2000, 4 GB RAM and an LG DVD drive. I burnt the image on a DVD-RW and booted it. The boot process was a bit slow, the limitation being the DVD-RW. Once the live system was up, it was an absolute delight to use. It was fast and really stable, but with one problem. The supported screen resolution of 1280×1024 was not detected but rather set to 1024×768. Apart from this, there were no other problems.

      On my laptop, a 4.5+ year old Dell Inspiron 6400 with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 1.73GHz with Intel 945 GMA and 2.5GB RAM, there was an error during boot stating that a bookmark couldn’t be saved. Not sure what this was, but, the desktop loaded successfully.

• Debian Family

  • People Behind Debian: Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder

    I probably don’t have to present Mark Shuttleworth… he was already a Debian developer when he became millionaire after having sold Thawte to Verisign in 1999. Then in 2002 he became the first African (and first Debian developer) in space. 2 years later, he found another grandiose project to pursue: bring the Microsoft monopoly to an end with a new alternative operating system named Ubuntu (see bug #1).

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Jason Warner Interview About Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop

        During the Ubuntu Development Summit for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Jason Warner, Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, gave an interview to Amber Graner, an Ubuntu contributor involved in the community since February 2009.

      • Ubuntu Phone, Tablet and TV – discussion opened

        Big thanks to everyone who turned up at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando to discuss Ubuntu’s future on new devices!

        Now, following Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote announcement and a number of initial UDS sessions on tablets, TVs and smartphones, we are setting up new channels to pick up the conversation.

      • Ubuntu loses HP cloud crown status

        The computer giant has told The Reg that, contrary to initial claims by Canonical, Ubuntu won’t be the “lead host and guest operating system”.

        An HP spokesperson contacted us to say: “While it is true that they are the first host and guest operating system powering our private beta, this does not mean that HP would not accommodate other operating systems moving forward.”

      • Ubuntu Development Update

Devices/Embedded

• Fingerprint recognition firmware released, including an open source ‘extractor’ package

  DigitalPersona is shipping Linux- and Android-ready fingerprint recognition software for biometric and mobile device manufacturers. FingerJet OEM provides fingerprint extraction, identification, and verification, runs in just 192KB of code space, and is compliant with NIST’s MINEX Ongoing Test standard — and the extractor function is available separately as a free, open source FingerJetFX OSE product.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Google unveils Android-based online music store

      Google has launched an online music store in the US, which will allow devices running its Android software to buy, store and stream MP3 files.

    • Samsung is the Number One Maker of Smart Phones

    • Motorola welcomes Google slurp with open arms

      Motorola shareholders have voted overwhelmingly to accept Google’s $12.5bn bid to buy the company’s mobile phone arm, and any patents it may happen to have lying around.

      Over 99 per cent of shareholders who voted approved of the deal, representing nearly three-quarters of the total shares. Google had hoped to see the purchase completed by the end of the year, but a probe by federal regulators has scotched that deadline, and the company now says it’s aiming for early 2012, barring factors outside of its control.

How misinformation can still hurt FLOSS

There seems to be a bit of confusion out there about what open source means in terms of security: specifically, there’s a pervasive notion that because software is open source, it’s inherently insecure.

Seriously?

Apparently these folks have completely forgotten about software like sendmail, Apache, MySQL, SSH, and oh, what’s that platform called… the one with the penguin… oh yeah: Linux. The applications and platforms are regarded in the industry has highly secure and generally free of malware in the wild.

And yet, when Google Open Source Programs Manager Chris DiBona recently quoted an article that said that “critics have been pounding the table for years about open source being inherently insecure,” I decided to locate that article… I found myself running smack into what I believe is a serious error.

Open source biometrics technology for mobile devices, PCs and servers

DigitalPersona has open sourced its new MINEX-certified FingerJetFX fingerprint feature extraction technology.

FingerJetFX, Open Source Edition (OSE), is free, portable software that device manufacturers and application developers can use to convert bulky fingerprint images into small, mathematical representations called fingerprint “templates” for efficient storage or comparison.

FOSS over Miami

Here’s a little Larry-the-Free-Software-Guy history for those of you who don’t already know it: I grew up in Miami and didn’t move to San Francisco until I was 29 (and that was the summer of 1987, so you can do the math). More specifically, I grew up in a strip of unincorporated Dade County sandwiched between North Miami and North Miami Beach. So you’ll understand why I have a tendency to pull for the Dolphins and the U on occasion, and I don’t think twice about driving 30 or so miles down Highway 1 into Monterey County to visit The Whole Enchilada because it has the only Key Lime Pie in this region close enough to be considered Miami-class. Listening to Jimmy Buffett puts me back among the palm trees, retroactively sweating in the 80 degree/90 percent humidity coziness for which South Florida is known worldwide.

Web Browsers

• Top 5 Alternative Web Browsers for Ubuntu Linux

  If you’re tired of everyone talking about Chrome and Firefox, it’s time to try out something new. Windows users already have tons of web browsers to choose from, but only a few of them are worth your time. Linux (particularly Ubuntu) on the other hand, doesn’t offer that many choices. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any quality browsers for our favorite distro. In fact, out of dozens of alternative browsers, we’ve chosen the best 5 so that you would be able visit our site from the browser you love rather than sticking to the mainstream ones.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox to get faster, less intrusive updates

  • Native UI for Firefox on Android

  • Save Tabs when Quitting Firefox 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Nov. 21: Free Software’s Stallman

  Richard Stallman, the founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation, will present a visiting lecture from 7-9 p.m., Monday, Nov. 21, in Mitchell Hall at the University of Delaware.

Standards/Consortia

• All Eyes on HTML5 as Mobile Flash Fades to Black

Wintel is Fragmented

UPDATE A part of the changes to make “8″ will be a consolidation of re-re-reboots into one reboot per month where possible. The trolls here who claim re-re-reboots are no problem for competent users are again proven wrong. Even M$ admits re-re-reboots are a problem that needs fixing. Of course re-re-reboots don’t bother those of us who use GNU/Linux because we get to choose when and if we reboot. I have enjoyed that capability for a decade and love it.

The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

You would not have shown your face at, say, ApacheCon, with a MacBook.

Google’s Brin and wife plop half-million into Wikipedia’s hat

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit publisher of Wikipedia and its affiliate sites, has received a $500,000 grant from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation, a philanthropic organization set up by Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki, cofounder of “personal genetic information” website 23andMe.

Security/BIOS

• Attacks on secure boot

  This is interesting. It’s obviously lacking in details yet, but it does highlight one weakness of secure boot. The security for secure boot is all rooted in the firmware – there’s no external measurement to validate that everything functioned as expected. That means that if you can cause any trusted component to execute arbitrary code then you’ve won. So, what reads arbitrary user data? The most obvious components are any driver that binds to user-controlled hardware, any filesystem driver that reads user-provided filesystems and any signed bootloader that reads user-configured data. A USB drive could potentially trigger a bug in the USB stack and run arbitrary code. A malformed FAT filesystem could potentially trigger a bug in the FAT driver and run arbitrary code. A malformed bootloader configuration file or kernel could potentially trigger a bug in the bootloader and run arbitrary code. It may even be possible to find bugs in the PE-COFF binary loader. And once you have the ability to run arbitrary code, you can replace all the EFI entry points and convince the OS that everything is fine anyway.

• UEFI Debugging Tools

  One of the many things I work on is UEFI support. It’s an interesting thing to work on, in part because there’s a lot of new development and it’s at a fairly low level, which is just the sort of thing I like.

  Often during UEFI development, we’ll see a bug and need to diagnose whether it’s a problem with the hardware, the firmware, the bootloader, the OS kernel, or even a userland program. One case of this is when console graphics don’t work right.

• GPT disks in a BIOS world

  Starting with Fedora 16 we’re installing using GPT disklabels by default, even on BIOS-based systems. This is worth noting because most BIOSes have absolutely no idea what GPT is, which you’d think would create some problems. And, unsurprisingly, it does. Shock. But let’s have an overview.

Finance

• State orders Goldman Sachs to repay investors for misleading sales tactics

  Florida’s securities regulators announced a settlement agreement with Goldman, Sach & Co. that has required the investment firm to back back an estimate $20 million in so-called “auction rate securities” because the company claimed they were liquid and secure when they were not.

• Middle-class areas shrink as America divides into ‘two-tiered society’ of rich and poor

  The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.

• Our friends from Goldman Sachs…

  Serious and competent, they weigh up the pros and cons and study all of the documents before giving an opinion. They have a fondness for economics, but these luminaries who enter into the temple only after a long and meticulous recruitment process prefer to remain discreet.

  Collectively they form an entity that is part pressure group, part fraternal association for the collection of information, and part mutual aid network. They are the craftsmen, masters and grandmasters whose mission is “to spread the truth acquired in the lodge to the rest of the world.”

  According to its detractors, the European network of influence woven by American bank Goldman Sachs (GS) functions like a freemasonry. To diverse degrees, the new European Central Bank President, Mario Draghi, the newly designated Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti, and the freshly appointed Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos are totemic figures in this carefully constructed web.

Privacy

• Wintel is Fragmented

  When I wrote about Google making it possible to opt-out of their Wi-Fi access point mapping program, I made a mistake. I thought Google was still using its StreetView cars to pick up Wi-Fi locations. Nope, Eitan Bencuya, a Google spokesperson, tells me that Google no longer uses StreetView cars to collect location information. So, how does Google collect Wi-Fi location data? They use you.

Civil Rights

• Going Incognito

  The Internet can be a dangerous place. Once it was the scam artists and the damage they wrought that users had to watch. These days it seems it’s more governments trying to oppress citizens and so-called respectable companies looking to track and sell your movements that strike fear in the hearts of Penguistas. Perhaps it’s time to go Incognito.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• EU Adopts Resolution Against US Domain Seizures

  The European Parliament has adopted a resolution which criticizes domain name seizures of “infringing” websites by US authorities. According to the resolution these measures need to be countered as they endanger “the integrity of the global internet and freedom of communication.” With this stance the European Parliament joins an ever-growing list of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act .

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Benefits of Migrating to Linux

One of the biggest issues facing IT is finding ways to reduce cost and complexity, particularly in an increasingly competitive environment in which upper management demands justification for every expense. Gone are the days of the CFO signing big cheques for projects just “because the IT guys say we have to have it.” Harvard Research Group (HRG) conducted a survey of professionals involved in migrations to Linux, especially as the migrations relate to initiatives to reduce cost and complexity.

Server

• IBM pushes BlueGene/Q to 100 petaflops

  In February 2009, IBM announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the US Department of Energy’s supercomputing centers, was shelling big bucks to build a 20 petaflops machine that is now known as BlueGene/Q.

• Aruba Advances Instant Enterprise WLAN

  Big enterprises typically deploy Wireless LAN (WLAN) with Access Points (APs) managed by a central controller. But not everyone needs the power and complexity of a controller-based WLAN, which is why Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN) has its Aruba Instant portfolio of products.

  Aruba Instant is a controller-less architecture for WLAN, enabling enterprises both large and small to more rapidly deploy wireless networks. The system includes a virtual controller embedded into the access point, providing administrators with some of the same features that are available on physical hardware controllers.

Kernel Space

• Download Linux Kernel 3.2 RC2 Now

  Linus Torvalds proudly announced last evening, November 15th, that Linux kernel 3.2 RC2 is now available for download and testing as a tar archive, from the kernel.org website.

• AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet, Turbo Core Impact On Linux

  For those wondering about the impact that AMD’s Cool ‘n’ Quiet and Turbo Core technologies have under Linux for the latest-generation Bulldozer processors, here are some tests illustrating the changes in performance, power consumption, and operating temperature.

• AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet, Turbo Core Impact On Linux

• Graphics Stack

  • OpenCL ratchets up to version 1.2

    OpenCL, the open-source standard for programming heterogeneous computing systems – aka CPU/GPU mashups – has reached version 1.2 with the ratification and public release of its latest specification documentation.

  • AMD Catalyst 11.11 Brings Critical Linux Changes

    What’s good about Catalyst 11.11 over previous releases? Well, AMD has still discontinued their tradition of publishing release notes for the public for their Catalyst Linux driver build, but Phoronix has you covered. Some of what’s noteworthy about the Catalyst 11.11 binary blob for Linux is:

Applications

• Clementine Music Player Gets Spotify And Grooveshark Support

• Application Spotlight: Parcellite

  After getting a few comments on my post about NCDU I’ve decided I’m going to start doing a few posts a month with the topic of “Application Spotlight”. Basically I am going to feature applications I use on my Linux desktop every week that I feel haven’t seen enough attention in the FOSS world to date.

• Ardour: An Audio Editor That’s Hard to Master and Tough to Beat

  Ardour is a serious digital audio workstation. Those who want a casual, easy-to-use sound editor probably won’t be well-served by it. But for those willing to put in the time to explore its many options and wade through long help documents, Ardour can be a sophisticated, powerful audio editing and mixing tool.

• Kdenlive Part 1: Introduction to Kdenlive

  GNU/Linux has infamously been wanting for a good, solid, professional-level free video editor for years. There have been glimpses of hope here and there, but mostly the editors that have the look and feel of a professional application are prone to blockbuster-worthy crashes, and those that have been stable have mostly been stable because they don’t actually do anything beyond very basic editing. Kdenlive changes all of that.

• Airtime radio software update brings ‘easy install’ package

  Version 1.9.5 of Sourcefabric’s open source Airtime radio software has been released. The new version focuses on making it simpler to deploy using an ‘easy install’ package which works from a single click under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS or Debian 6.0 via the Ubuntu Software Centre or the GDebi Package Installer.

• Open Source Radio Software ‘AirTime’ Adds Automated Ubuntu Installers

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Install LinuxMint12 extensions Mate & MGSE in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): Winbind

  • How to Automate Tasks in Linux

  • Protect And Audit Your Web Server With ModSecurity

  • Install Fedora 16 on an encrypted btrfs file system

  • Screen – The Path For Beginners

  • Back Up Files With Déjà Dup (Linux Mint 11)

  • How to Automate Tasks in Linux

  • Extending Vim with Scripting

  • Set up a Lightweight Wiki in a Jiffy with LionWiki

  • Learning Linux commands: dd

  • Newbie Guide: Your Thoughts Wanted

    Here at LXF towers, we’re working hard to get ahead of ourselves so we can enjoy a well earned break over Christmas. As such, we’ve planned the content for Issue 155, to be published in January (keeping three issues in mind at once is very confusing!) and decided that for the cover story, we’d create the ultimate newbie guide to Linux – and your insights are the key to us really making this the ‘ultimate’ newbie guide.

• Games

  • A New Commercial Game For Linux That’s Not An FPS

    There’s a new commercial game coming to Linux that’s not yet-another-first-person-shooter. Besides not being an FPS, one of the most common genres of Linux native commercial games, the game studio behind this title claims “there are some technical details about this game that make it completely unique within Linux.”

    What’s the game and who’s behind the port? The game is CoreBreach, an “anti-gravity” racing game that’s developed as a joint-venture by two Austrian game studios (CoreCode and nCreate). This racing game — that also includes some “combat-based game-play” — was originally written for Apple Mac OS X and the Austrian developers then decided to bring this game to Linux.

  • Massive Discounts on Linux Games [VVVVVV, Scoregasm, Revenge of the Titans, Frozen Synapse and More]

    Currently a large sale is going on at Show me the Sales where you can buy recently released Indie games with huge discounts. This sale includes 6 different games for Linux.

    The good thing about Show Me the Sales is that all cash directly goes to developer with no middleman sharing. In fact you directly buy from developers and get discounts as coupon codes.

  • Desura Linux Client Officially Out of Beta and Soon it will be Open Sourced

    Desura supports multiple Linux distributions and allows automatic installation, updating and patching of games. Projects that are currently actively under development are also supported under Alpha Funding initiative.

Desktop Environments

• Future of UI Design

  Let me start this off by sharing a cute “futuristic” video about possible future of the mobile technology. Please keep in mind that this was created by folks at Microsoft so you won’t actually see any innovative ideas or ground shattering paradigm shifts in there. Microsoft basically created a vision of future which is safe – one which it understands.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Amarok 2.5 Beta 1 Released, Integrates Amazon Music Store

    Amarok is one of the most popular music player for GNU/Linux based operating systems. Recently the player has gone through some UI changes and has upset some long-time users. A group of developers forked Amarok and created Clementine. But, Amarok is still kicking and alive.

  • Stop me please!

    In a couple of weeks, I will need to deliver yet another default wallpaper for KDE’s 4.8-49 desktop editions.
    So my brain wile starting to go in to “crazy” mode to try to find that specif edge, design pattern, blue, that will make me happy and hopefully our users happy as well… decided to have a look at what we have done over that 4.x series and, I saw a pattern alright.

Distributions

• Roundup of Linux Distributions for the Schools

  An important field where GNU/Linux is gaining ground is that of schools, both primary and secondary.

  I think it’s important to teach children and young people that there is a whole world of open source software to explore, and that not everything that is connected to a computer means Windows and/or proprietary systems.

• New Releases

  • PHP 5.4 Hits RC1

  • Memcached 1.4.10 improves performance

    Memcached logo In a release focused on improving thread scalability and performance, the developers of Memcached, the distributed memory object caching system, say that version 1.4.10 can now “feed data back faster than any network card can support”. The performance enhancements saw developers report batched multiple key fetches per second rising from 1.6 million keys/second to “around 3.7 million keys/sec” on a quad core system with between 3 and 6 worker threads; more than six worker threads reduced speed, while a system with more cores was able to reach six million keys/second.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 PowerPack: A quick image tour

    As I promised, I bought the PowerPack version of Mandriva to test it. I installed it to a virtual machine because my main goal is not to check for performance, but to see what Mandriva 2011 PowerPack offers that you do not get in Mandriva Desktop 2011.

• Red Hat Family

  • Drupal and Red Hat webcast on open source

    Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, and Opensource.com, the community building initiative of Red Hat Inc. are presenting a webcast on Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 2330 hrs Indian time. The theme of the webcast would explore how Linux and Drupal have evolved to become open source communities by themselves and also compete in the enterprise world.

    The speakers at the event include Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, and Dries Buytaert, creator of Drupal and co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Acquia. They will address the audience on their personal learnings and experiences and how they lead Open Source Affairs and Drupal, respectively.

  • Red Hat: 52-Week High Recently Eclipsed (RHT)

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) traded at a new 52-week high today of $53.42. Approximately 1.2 million shares have changed hands today, as compared to an average 30-day volume of 2.2 million shares.

  • Red Hat (RHT) Showing Bullish Technicals With Resistance At $54.99

  • Taking oVirt for a Spin

    The new open-source project is focused on delivering an openly developed and freely licensed virtualization system.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 review – laying the groundwork for an exciting future

      Fedora 16, dubbed Verne, has a striking new nautical themed desktop. But as Koen discovers, the most exciting features lie much deeper under the surface…

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu, we all should thank you, however its time to move on..

        There are a lot of reasons why Ubuntu has become the byword for Linux over the last few years. It had a promise, a simple one really “Linux for Human beings” and as an Operating system Ubuntu has more than delivered on that promise.

      • 4 Simple Tools For Tweaking Ubuntu’s Look & Feel [Linux]

        Do you like Ubuntu, but wish it behaved differently? Don’t worry, there are a variety of ways to tweak Ubuntu to your liking.

        It’s been a key criticism since the launch of Unity, that Ubuntu is now impossible to configure. Ubuntu 11.10, the latest version of Ubuntu, is a mixed bag on this front. Some things, like automated backup, are easier to configure than ever before. Other things, like screensavers, are seemingly completely missing.

      • 5 Things I Would Like to See Improved in Ubuntu Software Center

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 12 Mini Review

          Once again Linux Mint developers released their release candidate for Lisa and, as is often the case, made it available with no expected date for the final release. Fine by me… Mint RCs are usually very good in quality, very mature and stable, so I rarely wait for the final version to get to grips with it. Those who read my Linux Mint 11 REVIEW probably remember that I was not particularly surprised with it. It felt like a conservative step forward that didn’t include that many surprises. In a sense, Katia was probably a safe bet to stay away from the brand new (and heavily unstable) Ubuntu’s Unity interface and also to ensure the move to GNOME3 happened at the right moment. In that sense, Mint 11 was a great release and one of the best implementations of GNOME 2.32, with a very personal caracter and carefully designed aesthetics. Linux Mint 12 is probably the opposite, for it represents the transition to GNOME3 and GNOME Shell, the developers first attempt to swim in these cold, unexplored waters. How does it do, you ask?

        • Mint 12: Just what the doctor ordered

          If you’ve been following Linux news lately, you know that on November 14, Mint 12 RC1 was released. This isn’t the final version (which is due at the end of November), but it’s unlikely that anything significant will change in the next couple of weeks. The most important aspect of Mint 12 is that it includes GNOME 3.2 as opposed to Unity Desktop, which is used by Ubuntu 11.10, the Linux distribution that Mint 12 is based on.

        • Lubuntu 11.10 review – a cure to Ubuntu’s Unity blues?

          Could Lubuntu 11.10 prove to be the perfect cure Ubuntu’s Unity backlash? Russell Barnes tests the latest LXDE spin to see how it has progressed in the last six months…

          Firstly, congratulations need to go to the Lubuntu project – it’s their first release as a fully subscribed member of the official Ubuntu family since Mark Shuttleworth welcomed the project to its ranks around the release of 11.04. It joins Xubuntu and Kubuntu among others, and slots rather neatly into the pack, each member bringing a slightly different slant to our beloved Linux desktop while staying true to the mainline software on offer from the core Ubuntu repositories.

        • Is Linux Mint the Most Popular Distro?

          It’s never been an easy thing to measure the popularity of a Linux distribution. Downloads alone are not an accurate measure, and distributions don’t always know how many people have actually downloaded their distro.

          Others, like Fedora, try to take stab at usage by counting how many servers contact the main repositories for updates.

        • Is Linux Mint the Most Popular Distro?

        • One Year with Bodhi Linux

          Today marks the one year point from our first Bodhi Linux “0.1.0″ release. I feel we have come a long way in such a short time and I am happy with everything the team has accomplished thus far. Would you believe that I first started Bodhi simply because I was tired of having to recompile E on each of my half dozen systems every week?

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • PandaBoard demo’d running Android 4.0

      PandaBoard.org’s community-driven PandaBoard is the first device to run Android 4.0, according to Texas Instruments (TI) and the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP). Based on TI’s dual-core, 1GHz OMAP4430 processor — similar to the OMAP4460 available in the soon-to-ship Samsung Galaxy Nexus — the PandaBoard has been demonstrated on YouTube running an experimental build of “Ice Cream Sandwich.”

    • PandaBoard demo’d running Android 4.0

    • Turkish company builds 65-inch Android ‘tablet’ with Honeycomb, 1080p support (video)

      Want Honeycomb on your TV? You can take your chances with a Google TV-enabled set from Sony, or you can get the full Android experience by adding a connected tablet to your HD mix — if Istanbul-based Ardic gets its solution out the door, at least. The Turkish company’s prototype uses a 10-inch Android Honeycomb-based tablet to power a 65-inch LCD with 1080p support for basic gestures, like pinch and zoom. The display currently has two touch sensors, but a version with four sensors is on the way, which will bring multi-touch support. The tablet is powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 2 SoC, and includes 1GB of RAM, 16GB of flash memory, dual cameras, HDMI, USB, microSD and 3G and WiFi connectivity. A dock enables instant connectivity with the OEM TV, including HDMI for video and audio, and USB for touch input (a wireless version is in the works as well).

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Review: Amazon’s Kindle Fire isn’t really a tablet

    Amazon’s Kindle Fire is the world’s smallest vending machine disguised as a tablet. In other words, according to this eWEEK review, it’s really a dedicated media device, not something you should expect to use for work.

  • Amazon Kindle Fire sales could top 5 million in two months: report

    Amazon Kindle Fire is poised to be a retail blockbuster, according to one analyst. What makes the Amazon Kindle Fire different from the steady success of the Nook Color?

  • A day with my XO

    I am writing from the Airport of La Rioja, with my blue XO, waiting for my delayed plane to Buenos Aires. I spent this morning with the Minister of Education, professor Walter Flores and his team, visiting two elementary public schools. Today the whole province is celebrating a significant event, every child and teacher is showing their work on their XO, more than 50,000 have been already distributed. Un día con mi XO, is the title of this very peculiar Journey. A very impressive experience indeed, a massive celebration, the first ever, I think, in the OLPC world. An incredible feat for this Argentine province, the first in Argentina to have saturated the whole educational system, in elementary and special schools with the XO laptops, private and public, and also the secondary and technological schools with the Intel netbooks. A detail, the XO were bought by the province and the netbooks by the nation. A perfect solution.

  • Using a Tablet as a Portable Management Console

    With the dozen or so tablet computers on the market, surely you have one by now. If not, you really must buy one. Tablets are not only lightweight, ultra-portable, and capable of performing any remote administrative tasks, but they also give you that freedom that you never had before. But, that freedom that you so desperately seek might also bring along a lengthier chain attached to it. How can you have both freedom and a chain attached? System administrators understand the concept like no other technology professional.

Adobe donates Flex to foundation in community-friendly exit strategy

Adobe and the Open Spoon Foundation are preparing to open up development of the Flex SDK. They plan to donate the technology to “an established open source foundation” so that the Flex community and other stakeholders can participate in developing future versions of the SDK.

Flex is a development framework for building conventional applications with Flash. It’s especially targeted at the enterprise space and has some specialized capabilities for creating data-driven software. The core components of Flex were released as open source under the Mozilla Public License in 2007.

Haiku – Open-source recreation of BeOS

The above title is so full of puns. Firstly, there’s Haiku, which is a wicked form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 5-7-5 morae, somewhat similar to the traditional European eight or ten syllable limericks. Then, recreation could be either recreation, as in we’re going to Ibiza, or recreation as we’re reforging anew the Sword of Whatever. Got it?

Events

• Free Software and Beer: Not just for breakfast anymore!

  Those of you who know me also know that I like a little beer every once in a while. Some of you also know that I often brew my own beer at an establishment called Incredibrew in Nashua, New Hampshire very close to my home, and sometimes use this beer at various Free Software events.

• SCaLE 10x CfP closing Thursday

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Early Mockups Emerge for Firefox’s Upcoming New Tab Page

    Google’s New Tab Page, which got a revamp last month has a new competitor. Oh and it’s not Speed Dial 2 which we talked about earlier, it’s the upcoming New Tab Page for Firefox. For Firefox 11, Mozilla is planning to replace the time-honored blank page with a spiffy new New Tab page. Here are some early mockups of how the page might look when it’s done.

  • Mozilla Releases Firefox 8.0.1

    Mozilla is about to release an update for the latest stable version of Firefox. Firefox 8.0.1 will be released less than two weeks after the release of Firefox 8, the latest stable version of the popular Internet browser.

  • Mozilla censors itself as part of American Censorship Day

    Mozilla has joined with other leading Internet organisations such as AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo, Zynga and public interest groups in opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Also known as H.R.3261, SOPA was introduced in the US House of Representatives in October. The organisations have sent Congressional leaders a joint letterPDF expressing their concern with the legislative measures that are being introduced.

  • Introducing Mozilla Conductors

  • Firefox not to become fully multiprocess in the near future

    Mozilla has announced today that the Electrolysis project, which aims to make Firefox a multiprocess application, will be put in pause for the foreseeable future.

    The reason, the amount of changes required at the architectural level are so deep that it will require a large amount of resources to make this happen. At the same time, it is possible to get some important responsiveness improvements with much smaller investments.

  • Mozilla Builds a 1 Megawatt Data Center

  • How Mozilla Intents To Speed Up Firefox’s Update Process

  • Firefox 8 grabs 35% of traffic in just one week

    Mozilla’s latest version of it’s popular Firefox web browser saw rapid adoption following its release last week. Firefox 8, the fifth major release of the Mozilla browser so far this year, became available for download on November 9th. Within one day, the new iteration had already grown to account for 7% of all Firefox traffic across Chitika’s ad network, the company reported on Tuesday. By the end of the browser’s first week of availability, Firefox 8 claimed 35% of all Firefox traffic.

SaaS

• Guest Blog: The Elephant is in the Room

• WSO2 Simultaneously Launches Newest Releases of WSO2 Carbon Enterprise Middleware and WSO2 Stratos Cloud Middleware Platforms

Semi-Open Source

• SugarCRM Racks up Another Record Quarter, Fueled by Channel Growth and Increased Customer Adoption

Funding

• VC funding for Hadoop and NoSQL tops $350m

  451 Research has today published a report looking at the funding being invested in Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL database-related vendors. The full report is available to clients, but below is a snapshot of the report, along with a graphic representation of the recent up-tick in funding.

  According to our figures, between the beginning of 2008 and the end of 2010 $95.8m had been invested in the various Apache Hadoop- and NoSQL-related vendors. That figure now stands at more than $350.8m, up 266%.

• Index Provides Hortonworks With “Substantial” B Round

• Vyatta Secures $12 Million in Funding Led by HighBAR Partners

  Vyatta, the leader in software-based networking for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures, announced today it has completed a funding round of $12 million led by HighBAR Partners. Also participating in this round of funding are existing investors JPMorgan, Arrowpath Venture Partners and Citrix Systems.

  HighBAR Partners specializes in infrastructure software and solutions companies, and Vyatta will leverage HighBAR’s broad network and operational experience to accelerate customer adoption and acquisition worldwide.

• Network Infrastructure Startup Vyatta Raises $12M

  Network infrastructure startup Vyatta has raised $12 million in new funding led by HighBAR Partners with JPMorgan, Arrowpath Venture Partners and Citrix Systems participating. This brings Vyatta’s total funding to more than $45 million.

  Founded in 2005, Vyatta allows enterprises to segment and secure virtualized environments. The company offers an enterprise-focused network routing, security, and traffic management software that enables network administrators to leverage the performance of Intel/AMD hardware, as well as run in VMWare, Xen, and Hyper-V virtual environments.

Project Releases

• Faster and Leaner Zend Studio 9.0 PHP IDE Paves the Way to Develop and Debug Web Apps More Productively in Cloud and On-Premise

• Apache Hadoop 0.23.0 has been released

  The Apache Hadoop PMC has voted to release Apache Hadoop 0.23.0. This release is significant since it is the first major release of Hadoop in over a year, and incorporates many new features and improvements over the 0.20 release series. The biggest new features are HDFS federation, and a new MapReduce framework. There is also a new build system (Maven), Kerberos HTTP SPNEGO support, as well as some significant performance improvements which we’ll be covering in future posts. Note, however, that 0.23.0 is not a production release, so please don’t install it on your production cluster.

• AquaFold Launches AquaClusters Cloud-Based Social Collaboration Tools for the Open Source Software Community

• DigitalPersona Open Sources New FingerJetFX Biometrics Technology for Mobile Devices, PCs and Servers

• 4 New Blender Features That Will Blow You Away

  In case you missed the news, Blender recently underwent a “merge hurricane”. Meaning that a bunch of new features that were in alpha development phase, have now been merged into the trunk version Blender.

  These features are massive and are going to change the way we use Blender in the future.

Public Services/Government

• Indian Government To Popularise Use Of Open Source

  India may not be a huge contributor to the development of Open Source and Linux, despite being and IT force, it is definitely becoming a big user of Open Source. Emerging economies like Brazil already champion the adoption of Open Source and India is not far behind.

  The Indian government recently prepared a draft for the “Policy on Device Drivers for Procurement of Hardware for e-Governance”. The goal of the policy was to ensure that computers must be capable of running on all general purpose operating systems including GNU/Linux and not just Microsoft Windows.

• : System to display zoning permits online available as open source

  Software that combines geographic information systems (GIS) with zoning regulations and other country wide sources of information on land use, and offered online as an interactive map, was made available as open source software by the Dutch ministry of the Interior last week. The tool, titled Geozet, is hosted on the OSOR Forge since 1 November.

• Open source serves as linchpin to modernization: Justice

  The use of open-source software is making a difference on the ground in combat zones, and it’s proving increasingly necessary to keep up with rapidly evolving technology and requirements, Maj. Gen. Nick Justice, commanding general of the Army Research, Development and Engineering Command said Nov. 16.

  Using open source, the Army can integrate technologies tailored to mission requirements on essentially an as-needed basis, and at a lower cost than traditional approaches, Justice said at the Red Hat Government Symposium in Washington.

Standards/Consortia

• Xyratex Announces OpenSFS Membership

Steve Jobs wanted an Iphone only network

THE LATE FOUNDER of Apple, Steve Jobs had aspirations to build Apple’s own wireless network using unallocated bands of radio spectrum, for Iphones only.

According to Network World, Jobs was going to use unlicensed parts of the spectrum for WiFi rather than work with existing mobile operators.

Defence/Police/Aggression

• How the Plummeting Price of Cocaine Fueled the Nationwide Drop in Violent Crime

  Starting in the mid-1990s, major American cities began a radical transformation. Years of high violent crime rates, thefts, robberies, and inner-city decay suddenly started to turn around. Crime rates didn’t just hold steady, they began falling faster than they went up. This trend appeared in practically every post-industrial American city, simultaneously.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Selling the Oil Illusion, American Style

  US production of crude oil peaked in 1970 at 9.637 mbpd (million barrels per day) and has been in a downtrend for 40 years. Recently, however, there’s been a tremendous amount of excitement at the prospect of a “new era” in domestic oil production. The narratives currently being offered come in the following three forms: 1) the US has more oil than Saudi Arabia; 2) the US need only to remove regulatory barriers to significantly increase production; and 3) the US can once again become self-sufficient in oil production, dropping all imported oil to zero.

• Oil Soars and Natural Gas Withers: But the Energy Singularity is Not Forthcoming

  If you firmly believe higher oil prices will drive energy transition, and the adoption of alternative sources, then do (by all means) feel excited today. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has sold for as much as a 25% discount to Brent oil over the past 9 months, has been slowly filling that gap recently. And, with the announcement today that a major pipeline would further relieve the surplus of WTI at Cushing (taking it away to the Gulf Coast), the discount has closed further. As of this morning, WTI soared to $102.00 as Brent has fallen closer to $110.00. Accordingly, the full impact of the higher global price of oil is now about to be visited upon North America. Is that bad news, or good news?

Finance

• Occupy Wall Street: Crafting A Constitutional Amendment To Stop The 1%

  I’m very sympathetic to the cause of reducing the power of big business corporations to control our government, our economy, our consumer culture, our society, and our lives. We can’t have democracy without a major shift of power into the hands of the people.

  But would an amendment to remove all rights of corporations from the US Constitution accomplish that? Would there be unintended consequences?

  There are two problems with a constitutional amendment that abolishes corporate personhood. One, it does too much, and two, it does too little.

Censorship

• Speaking up for media freedom

  Media freedom and freedom of expression have been big topics in 2011 – just look at what the heroes of North Africa and the Mediterranean have been prepared to do to win or defend these rights. Travelling back from the European Parliament in Strasbourg this morning, it occurred to me that I haven’t written about these issues on my blog. Let me correct that today – because media freedom is high on the EU agenda. We support this in law, through debate and through research. We support it online and offline. So I want you to know we will not waver in that support, and in fact I’ve just finished another important discussion about it.

Privacy

• How to keep your Wi-Fi location out of Google

Internet/Net Neutrality

• UBB ruling will put government in crosshairs

  The CRTC is set to announce the results of its usage-based internet billing proceeding Tuesday afternoon. Far from being one of the regulator’s many dull procedural announcements, this one is surely the most anticipated, at least in recent memory. I’ll have an analysis on Wednesday (my posts generally go live at midnight, Eastern time) and probably some knee-jerk reactions on Twitter beforehand, if you want to check those out. In the meantime’s here a primer of what the ruling will involve and why it’s so important.

• Stop US online Censorship before ACTA brings it to Europe!

  The European Parliament today massively adopted its resolution on Net neutrality, calling on the EU Commission to protect the open Internet, which is put at risk by an increasing number of restrictions imposed by telecoms operators. This overall positive resolution urges EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes to depart from her failed wait-and-see approach by rapidly assessing the need for further regulation to keep the Internet open and free. This votes represent a political commitment by the European Parliament to protecting the Internet from any form of restriction or censorship.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Does copyright protect something useful?

    Nick Bilton poses an interesting question in the New York Times on whether you can copy physical objects without violating copyright link here. His answer is yes and he found intellectual property lawyers who supported that view. He gives several examples, based on 3-D printers actually producing copies of a cup and other useful physical objects, either from the object or from photographs of the object. He asserts that copyright does not cover things that are useful.

  • ACTA

    • Stop US online Censorship before ACTA brings it to Europe!

      Paris, November 16th, 2011 – In a letter sent to the United States House of Representatives, La Quadrature du Net joins leading civil society organisations from across the world to denounce the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill. SOPA aims to create global censorship of the Internet in the name of an obsolete copyright regime. If this dangerous piece of legislation were to pass in the US, it would become the global norm in the war on culture sharing, with the Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) as a vehicle. As the European Union starts debating the ratification of ACTA, citizens must mobilize to defend their freedoms by calling for the rejection of such ruthless online repression.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Has Linux dropped off the face of the Earth?

  “Has Linux dropped off the face of the Earth?” The answer is obviously no. Linux is still around, stronger than ever, but the desktop OS does seem to be disappearing. Of course this is true of Windows and Mac OS, at least from the average user’s perspective. Desktop Linux is strong with those who use it; those who have been using it, but the buzz seems to be gone.

Server

• Penguin Computing Selects Dot Hill Storage for High-Performance Computing Solutions

• Spaniards prototype ARM-GPU hybrid supercomputer

  The Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain has been an enthusiastic supporter of using IBM’s Power970MP blade servers as a foundation for its “MareNostrum” massively parallel Linux cluster, which fills 44 server racks and delivers 94.1 teraflops of number-crunching punch.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation Announces Four New Members from Around the Globe

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that four companies are joining the organization: DENSO Corporation, Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS), ProFUSION Embedded Systems and Savoir-Faire Linux.

  These companies are joining The Linux Foundation to advance the Linux operating system for next-generation electronics, such as connected automobiles, phones and televisions, as well as for industrial automation and the development of mobile and web applications.

• Evolution of the Linux kernel source code tarball size

  Here is a graph showing the evolution of the size of the different linux.tar.bz2 source code packages. It starts with version 1.0 and finishes with the 3.1. We see that the evolution is mostly exponential, we could try to predict that linux-3.19.tar.bz2 should be around 100MB.

• Kernel Log: Coming in 3.2 (Part 1) – Networking

  The TCP stack is now faster at adapting the data transmission rate to the available line capacity. The drivers for Wi-Fi components by Atheros and Broadcom have matured considerably; other drivers will support more LAN and Wi-Fi hardware in 3.2 than they did before.

• AMD Linux KVM Virtualization Benchmarks

  In recent weeks there have been a lot of AMD Linux benchmarks of the latest-generation Bulldozer processor, namely the eight-core FX-8150. The latest unique look at the first-generation Bulldozer CPU under Linux is the KVM virtualization performance.

  Over on OpenBenchmarking.org are the AMD Bulldozer Virtualization Benchmarks that provide a look at the performance overhead of using the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine on this platform. Ubuntu 11.10 with the Linux 3.0 kernel was used on both the host and guest with stock settings. From OpenBenchmarking.org you can compare the Bulldozer KVM results against other Intel and AMD CPUs, etc. A wide variety of open-source Linux benchmarks were run from the Phoronix Test Suite.

• Linux 3.2-rc2 Kernel Doesn’t Bring Too Much Churn

  Linus Torvalds released the Linux 3.2-rc2 kernel this morning. Considering the long development cycle of the Linux 3.2 kernel, this second development release is relatively tame.

  “For being an -rc2 release of a pretty large merge-window, it seems to be quite reasonably sized. In fact, despite this having been the largest linux-next in a release in our linux-next history (I think), rc2 has the exact same number of commits since rc1 as we had during the 3.1 release,” says Linus Torvalds in the kernel mailing list announcement.

• Linux Kernel Vulnerability Affects Ubuntu 11.10 OMAP4

• Linux 3.2-rc2

Applications

• Open Source Display Colorimeter: Is Your Monitor Showing Its True Colors?

  Look at the two birds. Do you wonder why the picture you took and edited on GIMP doesn’t look like the real bird? The reason is simple — your display is not showing you the ‘true’ colors. The solution is simple — use a colorimeter to calibrate your screen for accurate color matching.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Unix and Linux: a bit of history

  • How To Password-Protect Directories With mod_auth_mysql On Apache2 (Debian Squeeze)

  • Testing for Permissions

  • Installing Software With Aptitude

  • Live upgrade Fedora 15 to Fedora 16 using yum

  • Fedora 16 GPT disk partitioning guide

  • Extending Vim with Scripting

  • MySQL migrate to MariaDB

  • How to use whiptail to write interactive shell scripts

  • Get LibreOffice Thumbnails In Nautilus With OOO Thumbnailer

  • Remote Desktop in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot

  • Automatic Indentation Detection in gedit

  • Autohide Top Bar Extension Finally Available For GNOME Shell 3.2 (Bonus: Hamster And Overlay Icons Extensions)

  • How-To Setup Android Build Environment On Arch Linux 64Bit.

• Games

  • Gaming on Ubuntu 11.10 – Still a long way to go?

    Cahilig.net has listed a comprehensive 100 “best free and high quality” games that run on Linux, but will all of them be gratifying if you’re running Ubuntu 11.10?

  • Sonic the Hedgehog went OpenSource?

    Turns out that there is an Open source version of Sonic the Hedgehog and its available on Linux.. (and Windows) I’m really now sure how this is available, if Sega Opened the code? However it’s here and it plays quite well…

  • New Comments By Ryan Gordon On Linux Gaming, Drivers

    Gordon is known for making interesting comments, going back to an interview I did with him over six years ago. Earlier this year Ryan made some controversial remarks about open-source GPU drivers not being ready (for mass consumption) and it’s putting Linux desktops into dangerous positions since distributions are relying upon them. He’s also made comments concerning open-source use of S3TC texture compression and is known for recommending the NVIDIA binary Linux driver as the only reliable Linux driver for serious users. Gordon continued with more Linux driver comments this summer.

  • Humble Voxatron Bundle Stops Short Of A Million

    The latest Humble Indie Bundle, which started as just the Voxatron game and was since expanded to include other titles, has now ended. This latest DRM-free pay-what-you-want offering of indie games has this time failed to pull in more than one million dollars. There’s also information on a new game bundle site as well as the Overgrowth Linux port.

  • Smokin’ Guns – The Game

  • Gaming In Linux : The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim

  • There’s A Patent Issue With Open-Source Doom 3

    There’s some good and bad news concerning the imminent release of the Doom 3 source-code. The bad news is that the lawyers for Bethesda / id Software have voiced concerns regarding some of the Doom 3 source-code due to a patent issue. The good news is that John Carmack himself is now writing some new code for this open-source drop of the popular game built on the id Tech 4 engine.

  • Latest Release of ‘Unknown Horizons’ Brings New Buildings, Ships, Combat System and More

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE vs. Trinity: Is One Really Better?

    The KDE 4 release series is nearly four years old. Yet many users still maintain that the KDE 3 series delivers a faster, more efficient, and more customizable desktop. However, their claims are rarely detailed, so the recent release of a new version of the Trinity Desktop Environment, the KDE 3 fork, seems a suitable time for an examination of the claim.

    The last time I compared the two KDE versions, KDE 4 was still working out some of its rough spots, such as using Akonadi to manage personal information in a database. Similarly, although based on what was then eight year old technology, Trinity was still fine-tuning, adding such features as the ability to run KDE 4 applications.

    Since then, however, both desktops have matured and added features. So how do they compare now in terms of speed, feature, and stability? It’s time for a point-by-point look.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Federico Mena-Quintero talks about the Document-Centric Desktop

    GNOME founder also issues some criticism about the current state of the desktop project

    Federico Mena-Quintero is one of the longest standing contributors to the free desktop, having started GNOME together with Miguel de Icaza back in 1997. He is still a very active GNOME developer, nowadays being employed by Novell / SUSE to work on the desktop. During this years Desktop Summit Andreas Proschofsky had the chance to conduct the following interview with the Mexican. In this Mena-Quintero talks about his concept of the “document-centric-desktop” and the importance of having a journal directly in the GNOME Shell, but also goes on to add some criticism about the current way decisions are made in the GNOME world.

  • Learning from GNOME
    

    Federico says (emphasis mine): “The latest thing is that now things have to go through the design team first, and I don’t think that is a good thing; there should not be a central body of control that decides how things are done, because that simply doesn’t scale. And it also doesn’t teach people in how to do design properly. I really would like to move to a model where, instead of having a central body of people who can veto things in or out, we can have a shared understanding of what constitutes good design and implementation.”

  • Get Gnome 2 Like Classic Menu In Ubuntu Unity

    The latest Ubuntu comes with flashy Unity, which offers different way of accessing apps and data. However, if you are used to the old style drop-down menu, you can still get that in Ubuntu — without having to ditch Unity for Gnome 3 or Gnome 2.

Distributions

• Puppy 5.3 “Slacko” – Slackware With Added Woof

  On 17/10 a new version, or edition if you prefer, of Puppy Linux was released, this time based on Slackware, and it is appropriately named Puppy “Slacko”, because we all know that Slackware users are lazy, right?

  I have not used Puppy before, in part because I felt no need considering the many distributions out there, and in part because some things like its original Ubuntu roots did not appeal to me, but a Puppy based on my favorite Slackware needs to be checked out.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2011 PowerPack just arrived!

    Right on time, Mandriva released its 2011 PowerPack version. With the announcement, they ratify that Mandriva will be now releasing one version per year, not two versions, as they had been doing.

    What does Mandriva PowerPack version offer? Well, the distro promises all drivers, the smart desktop technology, the Fluendo DVD player, and three months of free Web support, among other features.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Stock Hits New 52-Week High (RHT)

    Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) hit a new 52-week high Tuesday as it is currently trading at $52.37, above its previous 52-week high of $52 with 1.2 million shares traded as of 12:36 p.m. ET. Average volume has been 2.8 million shares over the past 30 days.

  • Red Hat Adds App Lifecycle Tools to PaaS Preview

    Red Hat has outfitted its OpenShift hosted application platform with a set of application development lifecycle tools to simplify deployment on the PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service), the company announced Tuesday.

  • Red Hat Expands OpenShift PaaS for Cloud Development

  • Red Hat’s OpenShift Adds Full Java Lifecycle Offering

    Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service offering has been in public beta for a while now. It offers a fairly simple way for people to jumpstart “cloud” development efforts by abstracting out all the messy business of setting up application and database servers. Instead, you simply publish your source code to OpenShift, and their platform does the rest. Supported languages are those used heavily by nimble, agile startup types: PHP, Python, Ruby. Interestingly, OpenShift also supports Java. That’s not a language that many people associate with cloud solutions. Today, Red Hat is announcing that they’re improving their support of Java on OpenShift with support for “full Java lifecycle for developers”.

  • RHEL 6.2 Will Support AMD’s Bulldozer Opterons

  • CentOS 6 Linux, A First Look

    I’ve been running CentOS 5.x for a number of years, mostly on servers, and have been extremely happy with it. In fact, I’ve upgraded servers along the way, up to 5.6 and have also been amazed at the seamless upgrade process from version to version. For those that don’t know, CentOS is the free derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The source is compiled and released as its own distribution that is so close to Red Hat Enterprise that packages can even be interchanged between the two. I have to tip my hat at the developers that release CentOS, they do a ton of work and the documentation on the CentOS Wiki site is excellent.

    This past weekend I finally got a look at CentOS 6, which every CentOS user has been anxiously waiting for since Red Hat announced RHEL 6 a while back. I’m a little late to the game, but unfortunately time has prohibited from checking it out sooner.

  • SGI(R) UV Achieves Largest Certified Configuration for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

    This certification highlights the benefits of the newest generation of Intel(R) processors and SGI’s high performance computing technology for customers with data-intensive workloads requiring outstanding performance in a high-density form factor with excellent power efficiency. Targeting the high-end supercomputing, large-scale database and data analytic environments, the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SGI(R) UV 1000 paves the way for customers in the government, intelligence, and scientific communities to deliver more meaningful scientific and technical results. As we enter the next generation of computing, moving from petaflops to exaflops, Red Hat and SGI are enabling some of the industry’s most mission-critical and large-scale computing applications.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Hardware Summit 2011 December 8th, Taipei

        This year’s Ubuntu Hardware Summit (UHS) will take place on December 8th at the Grand Victoria Hotel in Taipei. You can register your place at www.ubuntu.com.uhs

      • Ask Mark, Wednesday, 23 November, 1500UTC

      • Introducing MyUnity: Ubuntu’s Unity Configurator

        MyUnity is a small system utility for Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) that can handle the customization of the Unity Launcher and Panel.

      • ‘MyUnity’ Is a Small, Simple Unity Tweaking Tool

      • Ubuntu 11.10 is the new Mac OS X ?

        Now this is not a critic point of view type post. I really like ubuntu project and really enjoying ubuntu 11.10

      • Awoken 2.3 Brings New Themes, Better Support for Unity, GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10

      • HealthCheck Ubuntu – The search for unity

        Ubuntu has over 20 million users around the world and is by far the most popular Linux distribution on the planet, but for the first time since the release of Warty Warthog in October 2004, an Ubuntu release is not being greeted with universal acclaim and there are mutterings of discord among the Ubuntu community.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint chief not carried away by success

          Given the rave reviews that Linux Mint has been getting recently, it would be perfectly understandable if the man driving the distribution was a little swollen-headed by this time.

          But Clint Lefebvre appears to have both his feet planted very firmly on the ground as he guides the team that produces what is now predicted to soon overtake Ubuntu as the most widely used GNU/Linux distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Final PCB artwork

  As promised, here are the Gerbers (a visualisation of the printed circuit board or PCB) for the finalised version of the Raspberry Pi. I get several messages every day asking what it can possibly be that we are still working on: I hope you will understand on looking at this why the routing, which has to be quite spectacularly complicated to minimise expensive PCB features and to keep things tiny, took as long as it did! That snarl in the middle is the signal escape for the BCM2835, the chip at the heart of the Raspi. The elves have been working overtime.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Sony Ericsson details its Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update

      The firm spoke earlier of its plans to upgrade its handsets to the ‘next Android platform’ and has now confirmed that its entire range will get the latest version. The entire 2011 Xperia line will get ICS but Sony Ericsson has given no time frame for the rollout.

    • More than half of smartphones are Android

      Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza said, “Android benefited from more mass-market offerings, a weaker competitive environment, and the lack of exciting new products on alternative operating systems.”

    • Android snaps up 52% of mobile phone market

      RIM should start worrying though, as it lost over 4 per cent of its share and is now down to just 11 per cent, the reason that is cited is that the company has fallen out of favour with the US market.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Lenovo will launch an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet this year

    CHINESE COMPUTER MAKER Lenovo could release a tablet running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) before the end of the year.

    The firm already has a handful of Android tablets and now could be the first to launch one with ICS. The 10.1in device will not only have the latest version of Android but also Nvidia’s recently announced Tegra 3 processor, according to Engadget.

  • Lenovo To Release 10.1-Inch Android Tablet

  • Amazon Releases Source Code Of Kindle Fire Tablet

  • Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is ‘really nice’ — but can it withstand the Fire?

    Lightweight, compact and speedy, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is a seven-inch Android 3.2 “Honeycomb” tablet with few minuses. Unfortunately, this eWEEK review adds, it’s saddled with a price twice that of Amazon’s new Kindle Fire.

Adobe Flex SDK bombshell STUNS developers

Adobe is to hand over its Flex SDK, which lets you develop applications for the Flash runtime using XML and ActionScript code, to an open source foundation. The company is committing to HTML 5 as the “best technology for enterprise application development”, according to a statement issued on Friday, November 11 by two Adobe product managers.

The news has caused consternation among Flex developers. “It feels as though Adobe is completely abandoning Flex, and ultimately Flash … My company has invested millions into committing to Flex for our enterprise applications and now I don’t know what to tell them.” says Erich Cervantez, senior Flex developer for a large chain of health clubs.

Adobe Donating Flex to Open Source Foundation; Continues Fire Sale on Formerly-Core Software

Open Source Desktop GIS: Let’s Get Started

A few years ago, a colleague at another institution asked my advice about offering a GIS class at his campus. He wanted to teach students the fundamentals of GIS and spatial analysis, both concepts and applications. The caveat was that he had no money to purchase software. He asked me if there were any worthwhile free applications that could be used for the class. At that time, the only free resource with which I had experience was Esri ArcExplorer Java Edition for Educators (AEJEE). AEJEE is a lightweight GIS tool for exploring geographic data. With AEJEE, you can classify and symbolize shapefiles, integrate image data, project on-the-fly shapefiles and use data over the Internet. A GIS course that relied exclusively on AEJEE would reach its ceiling very quickly.

FLOSS for Science Books October 2011

Apache Mahout: Scalable machine learning for everyone

DigitalPersona Open Sources New FingerJetFX Biometrics Technology for Mobile Devices, PCs and Servers

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Make Firefox Start Quicker By Only Loading Tabs As You Use Them

    If Firefox is a bit slow to start up and fast to use up RAM due to tons of open tabs, you can turn on a quick setting in Firefox 8 to only load tabs one at a time, when you click on them.

  • Firefox 10 Aurora Released, Gets WebGL Anti-Aliasing

    Mozilla just released Aurora 10, the developer version of Firefox that just graduated from nightly status and will move to beta in about six weeks.

  • Mozilla Adopts Real Life Firefoxes to Celebrate 7th Birthday

    Last week, Mozilla’s Firefox browser turned seven years old. To celebrate this milestone, the company has adopted several red pandas cubs (also known as firefoxes). Named Dolly (after Dolly Parton), Bernadette and Winston, the three cubs are said to be quite happy in their new home at the Knoxville Zoo. You might remember Mozilla adopting a couple of red panda cubs earlier this year. Dubbed Spark and Ember, the two pandas resided at the Knoxville Zoo until they were fully grown. They were then shipped off to Cleveland Metropark Zoo and Lee Richardson Zoo in Garden City, Kansas, with the goal of having some cute cubs of their own next year.

  • Mozilla Fights for the Internet’s Future

    Starting at midnight, Mozilla will join other leading Internet companies, public interest groups and citizens in opposing The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US House of Representatives. We’re censoring the Mozilla logo on many of our web sites as part of American Censorship Day and we sent Congressional leaders a joint letter together with AOL, eBay, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga raising our concerns with the bill.

  • Mozilla Public License Version 2.0, Release Candidate 2

  • Mozilla hatches plan to tackle memory leaks in Firefox add-ons

    Mozilla began an aggressive campaign earlier this year to trim Firefox’s memory footprint with a new initiative called MemShrink. The first fruits of that effort landed in Firefox 7, which was released in September. As a result, Firefox’s memory consumption is now between 20 to 50 percent lower. Building on that success, Mozilla is expanding the scope of its MemShrink initiative and looking to address memory consumption in additional areas.

  • Updated: Hollywood and Congress Target Mozilla

    Another dangerous bill is winding its way through Congress, this time it’s the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) by Texas representative Lamar Smith. Smith’s bill would establish a system for taking down Web sites that the Justice Department “determines to be dedicated to copyright infringement.”

    The bill is, by nearly any sane measure, overreaching and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says that the bill targets Mozilla specifically for refusing to comply with Homeland Security’s ICE unit.

  • How To Install Firefox 8 In Ubuntu 11.10

  • Firefox 10 Alpha is Here, How to install it in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric via PPA?

  • Rapid Fire: Firefox 9 Beta is Already Out for Download

    Firefox 8 was just released last week. Some of you have probably yet to update. However, the releases are coming fast these days, as is evidenced by the fact that Firefox 9 Beta is already available for download. Mozilla recently announced that the “new, faster” Firefox Beta is now ready for testing and download with support for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• We have a DevRoom at FOSDEM!

• So Oracle – Are you Supporting Linux or Unix?

  Oracle is in an interesting position. It is now a supporter of both Linux and Unix with their own Oracle Enterprise Linux and Solaris Unix operating systems. This past week, Oracle released Solaris 11 their first official Unix release and it made me wonder if the new Solaris is changing Oracle’s position on Linux.

  I asked Markus Flierl, vice president of software development at Oracle that question and the answer I got, was not what I had expected.

• Analysis: Spark of hope for Solaris 11

CMS

• My Take on PacktPub’s Open Source Awards

  This year I chose to sponsor PacktPub’s Open Source Awards by publishing and sharing the news of the various steps in the voting and nomination process. In return for the CMS Critic logo being posted on the awards page, I would publish their news releases as the process progressed.

Funding

• What recession? Lessons learned through Free Software

  It all started ten years ago, at a beach party called (appropriately enough) “Open Beach”. A young programmer named Douglas Conrad had discovered Free Software about two years before, and dreamed of having his own company devoted to Free Software, making a living from the use and production of Free Software.

  Douglas started his company “OpenS Tecnologia” a year later in 2002, but still did not have a good idea for a sustainable business plan. In the years between 2002 and 2006, his company grew slowly while Douglas investigated different parts of Free Software, until the year 2008.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Join the FSF on American Censorship Day

  When you visit http://fsf.org this Wednesday, November 16th, you won’t see the usual site. Instead, you’ll see a preview of what the site could look like in the future, if we were accused of copyright infringement by companies who routinely manipulate copyright law to attack free expression and sharing on the Internet — values fundamental to the free software movement.

Project Releases

• PHP 5.4 Hits RC1

  The first Release Candidate (RC 1) for PHP 5.4 is now out, marking the end of the feature development phase of the next generation of PHP.

Public Services/Government

• Still Crippled By “Free”

  The recent release of the Open Source Procurement Toolkit by the Cabinet Office has been interesting and encouraging, even if it did stir in me a certain scepticism that things will be different this time round. Under both Labour and Conservative administrations, the Cabinet Office has been tasked with increasing the adoption of open source by government departments, and each time a fine statement has been made that has resulted in very little change.

Licensing

• Germany upholds right to modify GPL-licensed free software

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Fingerprint recognition firmware released, including an open source ‘extractor’ package

    DigitalPersona is shipping Linux- and Android-ready fingerprint recognition software for biometric and mobile device manufacturers. FingerJet OEM provides fingerprint extraction, identification, and verification, runs in just 192KB of code space, and is compliant with NIST’s MINEX Ongoing Test standard — and the extractor function is available separately as a free, open source FingerJetFX OSE product.

Standards/Consortia

• 15+HTML5 Video Player Open Source Download

  Here is open source code HTML5 video player instead of the flash player available free download. HTML5 can play video online without adobe flash player. There are more beautiful HTML5 video interface built in, including a set of controls (play/pause etc.), so you don’t need anything else to play video in them.

  In addition to having a built-in player, browsers also give website developers access to the video functionality through a jQuery API. This allows developers to build custom video player controls or other interfaces, that utilize the browser’s core video functionality html5 video controls

Why Google Will Continue to Deliver Apps Across Platforms

The Chronicle raised the issue of Google’s recent app for Gmail on iOS, which was pulled only hours after Google delivered it. Girouard characterized it as a simple mistake, and stressed that Google will continue to develop apps for competing platforms.

Hardware

• 4004 to Sandy Bridge: A walk down CPU memory lane

• x86 Faces Unexpected RISC Competition

  After routing its RISC competitors, the x86 architecture is suddenly facing an unexpected and potent challenger: ARM

Security

• Apple fails to fix a longstanding sandbox vulnerability in OS X

  TABLET AND SMARTPHONE MAKER Apple has failed to fix a bug in its Mac OS X operating system that allows processes to bypass the sandbox protection in place.

  The flaw was discovered by Anibal Sacco and Matias Eissler from Core Security Technologies. They let Apple know about the problem on 20 September, and while Apple acknowledged their submission, it said that it did not see any security threat, forcing the Core Security Technologies team to publish the report to the public this month.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs International Advisor Mario Monti Is Italy’s New Prime Minister

  Not on even a Sunday is the headline barrage over:

  * MARIO MONTI ASKED TO FORM NEW ITALIAN GOVERNMENT
  * MONTI TO MAKE COMMENTS AFTER ACCEPTING OFFER TO LEAD ITALY
  * MARIO MONTI THANKS NAPOLITANO FOR OFFER TO FORM GOVERNMENT
  * MARIO MONTI SAYS ITALY MUST BE PROTAGONIST IN EUROPE
  * MARIO MONTI SAYS HE’LL ACT TO SAVE ITALY FROM CRISIS

  And so the international advisor to Goldman Sachs drones on. In the meantime, the €300 billion in BTP sales is set to resume in just over 13 hours.

  Yet the reason why the EURUSD is less than jubilant on the news is that Silvio apparently has just come back from the dead and has treatened to “pull the plug” on Monti.

• Walker Recall Gets Underway with Pajama Parties and Sabotage

  The effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker begins today, and organizers and volunteers are readying their clipboards to begin collecting more than half-a-million signatures throughout the holiday season. But as volunteers celebrated the launch at midnight “recall themed” pajama parties, the many challenges ahead were underscored by a deliberate, grinch-like cyber-attack on a key recall website.

• As Zuccotti Park is Cleared, Congress Moves to Gut Financial Reform

  In the dead of night last night, the movement to hold big banks accountable for their crimes took two major hits. Occupy Wall Street activists were swept from Zuccotti Park as radical members of Congress moved to gut funding for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and advance a series of shocking proposals to roll back financial reform.

• Seattle police pepper spray 84-year-old woman as ‘Occupy’ crackdowns occur nationally

  As much of the national press focused on protesters’ return to Zuccotti Park after their forcible eviction, crackdowns took place on “Occupy” protests nation-wide late Tuesday.

  During a crackdown on “Occupy Seattle,” an 84-year-old woman and a pregnant 19-year-old girl were among those attacked by police wielding pepper spray, according to reports.

  “Something funny happened on my way to a transportation meeting in Northgate,” said Dorli Rainey, the octogenarian who said she was nearly trampled after police became violent. “As I got off the bus at 3rd and Pine I heard helicopters above. Knowing that the problems of New York would certainly precipitate action by Occupy Seattle, I thought I better check it out.”

Censorship

• America Heading Towards The Internet Dictatorship?

  The greedy Hollywood is about to change the world as we know it. The entertainment industry which is failing to keep up with the innovation and is relying on Flintstones model is conspiring with the US congress to break the Internet and freedom on the web.

  After the Protect IP bill, the US congress is now working on yet another dangerous bill — SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act), which is apparently a disguise to give unlimited power to Hollywood to break the Internet and shutdown any website without any trial.

Civil Rights

• Secret Snoop Conference for Gov’t Spying: Go Stealth, Hit a Hundred Thousand Targets

• DOJ: Violating a Site’s ToS Is a Crime

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 237 – You Need Classical Training for This

Kernel Space

• The Automotive Linux Summit Marks Linux’s Bright Future in Vehicles

  If you cycled the clock back a few years, you would find lots of people still debating whether Linux had the potential to dominate as a desktop operating system. Fast-forward to today, and it’s clear that Linux is in fact finding many of its biggest opportunities at the server level, in mobile devices, in embedded Linux deployments, and in other scenarios that lie outside the desktop computing arena. There are also more and more signs that the next frontier for Linux may be in cars, with big backers interested in the idea. And now, The Linux Foundation has announced its program for the first-ever Automotive Linux Summit taking place November 28, 2011 in Yokohama, Japan.

• AMD Linux KVM Virtualization Benchmarks

  In recent weeks there have been a lot of AMD Linux benchmarks of the latest-generation Bulldozer processor, namely the eight-core FX-8150. The latest unique look at the first-generation Bulldozer CPU under Linux is the KVM virtualization performance.

• Managing Live and Offline Migrations with Linux’s KVM

Applications

• PdfMasher–E-Book Conversion

• Instructionals/Technical

  • C development on Linux – Types, variables, operators – III.

  • RHEL6 volume encryption using LUKS

  • Set up a Lightweight Wiki in a Jiffy with LionWiki

  • Fast XML Parsing in Ruby

  • LibreOffice Easy Hacks Rotation

  • Packet Sniffing Basics

• Games

  • A New MMORPG On The Linux-Friendly Unigine

    It’s looking like next year may be quite a positive year for Linux gaming with the likely open-sourcing of Desura, open-source Doom 3 code being in the wild, hopefully the Rage Linux client, and several games powered by the Linux-friendly Unigine Engine gearing up for release, among other Linux gaming announcements.

    In fact, there’s another new Unigine Engine licensee that’s using this visually-intense engine to create a new MMORPG.

    Denis Shergin, the CEO of Unigine Corp, tweeted over the weekend: “I’m so eager to tell you about a new mind-blowing MMORPG powered by @Unigine engine, but we have to wait. Hint: GSTAR Korea.”

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Get a GNOME 2-like menu with Classicmenu Indicator in Ubuntu 11.10

Distributions

• “The New Linux Distros Edition” of Dr. Bill.TV Netcast #214

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • The brand new Mandriva Linux Powerpack 2011 is here

    Following the Mandriva Linux free 2011 Mandriva is proud to launch the Mandriva Powerpack 2011, the full version of Mandriva Linux! Based on its new product strategy, Mandriva changes the release procedure, aiming for a one-year period between major releases. However, Mandriva will also release updated versions of its products on a periodic time on a 6-month basis.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat reveals that RHEL 6.2 will support AMD’s Bulldozer power saving features

    LINUX VENDOR Red Hat has said that its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 (RHEL) will support all of the power saving features of AMD’s Bulldozer Opteron processors.

    AMD’s Bulldozer Opteron chips deliver a number of new features that the firm claims help it beat Intel’s Xeon processors when it comes to all-important power consumption. The problem is few operating systems actually make use of AMD’s power tweaks such as the C6 state, but Red Hat has confirmed that RHEL 6.2 will support all of Bulldozer’s power saving features.

  • Taking oVirt for a Spin

    The new open-source project is focused on delivering an openly developed and freely licensed virtualization system.

  • Red Hat Provides Comprehensive Lifecycle Support for Java in the Cloud with OpenShift PaaS

    With OpenShift, Red Hat offers a compelling PaaS built on open source technologies that enables developers to quickly develop and deploy applications on the cloud. OpenShift provides built-in auto-scaling, supports a wide variety of languages, frameworks, middleware and clouds and is available free of charge. In August, Red Hat announced that it was the first to deliver Java EE 6 on a PaaS with OpenShift, powered by Red Hat’s JBoss application platform technology. Today, OpenShift expands upon its Java capabilities with the integration of several technologies that allow OpenShift to offer a fuller Java lifecycle for developers — developers can now code their application in an IDE, as well as build, deploy and scale it with OpenShift.

  • Red Hat: Let OpenShift cloud compile your Java apps

    Red Hat doesn’t just want to run your apps on its OpenShift cloud. It wants you to code, compile, tweak, and repeat the process on its cloud until you get the applications just right and get rid of that workstation or heavy laptop you lug around.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 KDE: Improving Perfection

      Desktop Environment is very important part of today’s Linux distribution which pretends to be used on desktop or laptop. There are some Linux distributions which give you only one Desktop Environment by default, being it Pardus with KDE or CentOS with GNOME. As opposite, there are distributions which are supplied with selection of different DEs available:

    • Fedora 16 Review: When An Ubuntu User Tries Fedora

      Fedora 16 was released a few days ago and I was looking forward to this release. I used to be a Fedora user in the early days, when I had more time to play with my PC. Ever since I switched to Debian and then Ubuntu, I just fell in love with apt-get’s smart dependency resolution. I was finally out of the RMP hell. I did dabble with Fedora here and there, once in a while but 14 and 15 were both quite unstable for me. So, I distanced myself from Fedora.

    • Almost that time of year…

    • Kororaa 14 no longer supported

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and Lubuntu 12.04 Highlights

          As we’ve stated in our previous article, Allison Randal from Canonical announced a few days ago the highlights for the upcoming Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and Lubuntu 12.04, as well as for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS and Edubuntu 12.04 LTS (presented in a separate article).

        • Get an Early Taste of Linux Mint 12

          Just a week or so after revealing that Linux Mint 12 would be taking a hybrid approach to introducing GNOME 3, the project behind the free operating system on Saturday announced the debut of a release candidate of the software.

        • Will a Spoonful of Mint Help the GNOME 3 Go Down?

          If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, as Mary Poppins once sagely said, will a splash of Mint help users swallow GNOME 3?

          That, indeed, appears to be the question of the day now that the Linux Mint project has announced a hybrid desktop strategy for Linux Mint 12 that’s apparently designed to help ease users into the controversial new interface.

          “The future of Linux Mint is GNOME 3,” asserted Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint founder and project leader, in a recent blog post. “The present of Linux Mint is a simple question: ‘How do we make people like GNOME 3? And what do we provide as an alternative to those who still do not want to change?’”

        • Linux Mint 12 RC1 adds GNOME 2.x-like extensions to GNOME 3.2

          Linux Mint 12 (“Lisa”) RC1 was released, based on Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux 3.0. RC1 offers the GNOME 3.2 desktop, but augments it with “MGSE” extensions that let users create a more GNOME 2.3x-like environment, and also supplies a desktop called MATE that’s claimed to be a GNOME 3.x-compatible version of GNOME 2.x.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River Linux stack targets residential gateways

  Wind River announced a pre-validated stack built on Wind River Linux 4.2, aimed at development of home gateway systems for automation and multimedia. Wind River Platform for Gateways supports two ARM11-based processors — the Mindspeed Comcerto 1000 and the Cavium Econa CNS3xxx — and features software from DigiOn (DLNA), Makewave and ProSyst (OSGi for Java), Works Systems (remote management), and Skelmir (virtual machine technology).

• Tuning Embedded Linux: When Less is More

  There’s a saying that you can never be too rich, or too thin. While that’s a bit of hyperbole, thin is definitely in when it comes to embedded Linux. Luckily, trimming the fat off Linux for embedded use is a lot easier than getting rich or losing that spare tire. Intel’s Darren Hart explained how he slimmed Linux down at the Embedded Linux Conference in October.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android 4.0 face recognition flawed

      The face recognition unlock feature in Google’s Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” mobile operating system has been bypassed by a simple photo trick. A blogger recently demonstrated how easy it was to unlock the device. He took a photo of himself using another phone and held it up to the front facing camera on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first smartphone to run Android 4.0, which was then unlocked.

    • Top Free Android Web Browsers

    • Google Releases Source Code for Ice Cream Sandwich. And yeah, there’s Honeycomb too

      Google has just released source code for the latest version of Android, that is Ice Cream Sandwich. According to this Google Groups post by Jean-Baptiste Queru a.k.a JBQ, the code for Android 4.0 is currently being pushed to the servers and will take some time to complete. The release, which also includes the source code for Honeycomb, will enable manufacturers to start prepping their own devices for the big upgrade.

    • Source Code Android 4 (ICS) released

      “Hi! We just released a bit of code we thought this group might be interested in. Over at our Android Open-Source Project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available.”

    • Google Slaps Critics, Releases Android 4.0 And Honeycomb Source Code

      Google has shut the mouth of its critics by releasing the source code or Android 4.0 aka IceCream Sandwich. Jean-Baptiste M. ‘JBQ’ Queru, software engineer from AOSP (Android open source project) wrote on Google group, “Over at our Android open source project git servers, the source code for Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is now available.”

    • Rugged handheld offers capacitive touch plus 1GHz Cortex-A8 processor

      Winmate announced a rugged handheld computer that includes a 4.3-inch capacitive touchscreen and runs Android 2.3.4 on a 1GHz Cortex-A8-based Texas Instruments DM3730. The E430T offers IP65-level sealing, up to 512MB of RAM, five- and two-megapixel cameras, plus wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3.5G cellular.

    • Google releases Android 4.0 source — and Honeycomb too

    • Google releases Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ source

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Amazon’s Kindle Fire ships a day early

    Amazon began shipping its Kindle Fire tablet device Nov. 14, a day early. The $200, seven-inch Android tablet will compete against the Nook Tablet and Apple iPad, among others, for holiday dollars.

  • HTC to unveil quad-core tablet PC at MWC, says paper

    HTC is likely to unveil a new Android-based tablet PC running on a quad-core CPU from Nvidia along with two new Android smartphones in February at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2012, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report.

Adobe moves Flex SDK to independent open source project

Adobe will move its Flex SDK to the Open Spoon Foundation. The vendor said that the “Spoon Project” was created from within the Adobe community, and that it will continue to maintain and develop the SDK. Although Adobe now advocates HTML5 as the best technology for enterprise application development, it has promised to continue contributing to the development of the Flex SDK.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • What Is Mozilla’s Mobile OS?

    Linux users have always been happy with the sheer amount of choice available to them. When the mobile sector is considered, yes, it does lack in the field of choice when compared to the thousands of distros available for the desktop. Well, mobile users, its time for a treat. Mozilla Foundation’s Boot 2 Gecko project is said to be finalized by Q2 2012.

  • HTML5 games, video get boost from full-screen API in Firefox nightly

    Support for the HTML full-screen API was recently enabled in Firefox nightly builds. It allows Web applications to toggle the browser into full-screen mode and stretch a single page element so that it fills the user’s display.

    The feature will be especially useful for the HTML5 video element, making it easy for developers to add native full-screen playback to their custom HTML video player interfaces. It will also likely be useful for games and other kinds of content where fullscreen interaction is desirable.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – Google Files Writ; Oracle Complains About Production of Witnesses

  Google has now filed a petition for a writ of mandamus with the Federal Circuit seeking review of the district court’s ruling on the Lindholm emails. The petition was filed November 4 and the matter is denominated In Re Google, 2012-M106. Oracle is required to respond to the petition no later than November 28.

  A writ of mandamus is an equitable remedy. Consequently, the Federal Circuit has discretion in considering the matter and responding to it. While Google certainly has a good faith argument for protecting the Lindholm email, there should be little doubt that they are swimming upstream in their continued attempts to suppress the email.

• Oracle v. Google – Copyright Fight Moves To Trial; Oracle Gains Some Depos

  Not surprisingly, Google disagreed (615 (PDF; Text]) with Oracle’s characterization that Google was refusing to produce witnesses for depositions. (See, Google Files Writ; Oracle Complains About Production of Witnesses) However, in the end it doesn’t make any difference because Judge Alsup has made the call. (617 [PDF; Text]) Google had offered to make two of the witnesses available to Oracle for deposition (Bray and Rizzo), but Google refused to produce the other five (Agarwal, Bornstein, Rubin, Swetland, and Yellin).

  Judge Alsup, in what appears to be a more and more frequent use of the “split the baby” approach, has granted Oracle the right to depose any three of the seven. Oracle may depose those three for up to two hours each, but only on their testimony related to the Leonard and Cox damage reports.

Social

• AP: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, co-founder of social network Diaspora dies at 22

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Run today’s GNU!

  It’s a fresh QEMU image of GNU (aka. GNU/Hurd), the extensible operating system designed to liberate users from the tyranny of sysadmins, professional kernel hackers, and other restrictions to Freedom #1.

Project Releases

• Tomahawk media player version 0.3 released

  The Tomahawk developers have released version 0.3 of their open source media player. The cross-platform application has the ability to play any file chosen no matter its location. Version 0.3 has many additional features, including a global search bar which can search across all available sources.

Licensing

• GPL upheld in Berlin case

  AVM Computersystems had sought legal sanction to prevent Cybits from making changes to the code that is used in its routers, in particular code covered by the GPL in its popular Fritz!Box product.

  According to the Free Software Foundation Europe, this code comes from the Linux kernel and is thus open to modification, provided the changes are made available to anyone to whom the code is then distributed.

Openness/Sharing

• What a classroom will look like in 10 years

  Classrooms of the future will be equipped with technology that supports the open source way – openness, transparency, collaboration and diversity. We may need to wait more than 10 years, but hopefully not!

Programming

• AMD Bulldozer only FMA4 and XOP instructions are supported by GCC

  AMD’s Bulldozer Opteron 6200 series chips might be the firm’s first 16-core processors but the firm has done a bit more than increase its maximum core count by four, adding two new instructions. Both 4200 series and 6200 series Opteron processors have AMD-only FMA4 and XOP instructions, and the firm told The INQUIRER that popular compilers including the GNU C Compiler (GCC) already support these instructions.

• Obfuscated C contest returns after five year break

  The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) has returned and announced the start of 20th competition; the contest had been on hiatus, with no results published for the last one, which was held in 2006. Now, the contest is back and, from 12 November 2011 to 12 January 2012, entries are being accepted in the competition to write the most obscure or obfuscated C program which will illustrate, perversely, the importance of programming style, stress C compilers with strange code, and demonstrate the subtleties of the C language. Although the competition is already open, online submissions will only be accepted from 1 December 2011 as the submission system is being upgraded.

Health/Nutrition

• Free pharmaceutical drugs prescription: FreeDiams reaches 0.6.0

Finance

• A Decade of MSFT

  M$ can afford to maintain share price by increasing dividends but they cannot stem the flow of mindshare to other technologies. At the moment, predictions are that ARMed thingies will continue to grow while x86 stagnates for years. At this rate, M$’s installed base will start to shrink shortly and it will do well to save 50% of shipments for itself within three years. With that kind of competition the monopoly will be truly dead.

Privacy

• W3C privacy workgroup issues first draft of Do Not Track standard

  W3C has published the first draft of a new Web standard that addresses online privacy. It establishes an official specification for the mechanism that browsers use to broadcast the “Do Not Track” (DNT) privacy preference to websites. The draft was authored by a new W3C Tracking Protection Working Group and could be ratified as an official standard by the middle of next year.

  Mozilla originally introduced the DNT setting in Firefox 4 earlier this year. The feature consists of a simple HTTP header flag that can be toggled through the browser’s preference dialog. The flag tells website operators and advertisers that the user wants to opt out of invasive tracking and other similar practices that have become pervasive with the rise of behavioral advertising.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• The Coming Fascist Internet

  Around four decades ago or so, at the U.S. Defense Department funded ARPANET’s first site at UCLA — what would of course become the genesis of the global Internet — I spent a lot of time alone in the ARPANET computer room. I’d work frequently at terminals sandwiched between two large, noisy, minicomputers, a few feet from the first ARPANET router — Interface Message Processor (IMP) #1, which empowered the “blindingly fast” 56 Kb/s ARPANET backbone. Somewhere I have a photo of the famous “Robby the Robot” standing next to that nearly refrigerator-sized cabinet and its similarly-sized modem box.

  I had a cubicle I shared elsewhere in the building where I also worked, but I kept serious hacker’s hours back then, preferring to work late into the night, and the isolation of the computer room was somehow enticing.

  Even the muted roar of the equipment fans had its own allure, further cutting off the outside world (though likely not particularly good for one’s hearing in the long run).

  Occasionally in the wee hours, I’d shut off the room’s harsh fluorescent lights for a minute or two, and watch the many blinking lights play across the equipment racks, often in synchronization with the pulsing and clicking sounds of the huge disk drives.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• BOSS to shut out Windows

Server

• Where Linux crushes Windows like a bug: Supercomputers

  The faster a computer goes, the more likely is to have Linux at its heart. The most recent Top500 list of supercomputers shows that, if anything, Linux is becoming even more popular at computing’s high end.

  In the latest Top500 Supercomputer list, you’ll find when you dig into the supercomputer statistics that Linux runs 457 of the world’s fastest computers. That’s 91.4%. Linux is followed by Unix, with 30 or 6%; mixed operating systems with 11 supercomputers, 2.2%. In the back of the line, you’ll find OpenSolaris and BSD with 1 computer and–oh me, oh my–Windows also with just 1 supercomputer to its credit. That’s a drop from 4 in the last supercomputer round up in June.

• NetGear Expands Entry-Level Network Attached Storage

  Storage boxes that deliver content sit at the very heart of the cloud. When it comes to building out your own personal or small business cloud, having enough storage performance is a critical component. That’s where networking vendor NetGear aims to help, with a new generation of its home and small business network attached storage (NAS) devices.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation Announces Program for Automotive Linux Summit

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced its program for the first-ever Automotive Linux Summit taking place November 28, 2011 in Yokohama, Japan.

  The Automotive Linux Summit will bring together the brightest minds from the automotive industry, the Linux developer community and the mobility ecosystem. As the premier vendor-neutral business and technical conference focused on Linux and automotive technologies, attendees can expect to learn about how to use Linux and open source software in automotive applications, ranging from in-vehicle on-board systems to cloud solutions for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications.

• Evolution of kernel size

Applications

• Mulawa Dreaming Easy Comes to Linux

  It wasn’t that long ago that we announced a collaboration between behavioral health professionals, academics and coders that would ultimately produce a Linux program to help autistic children learn the mouse.

  That work is still in the developmental stages within our academic team…they are gathering resources and forming the framework for that software.

• Gwibber microblogging client for Linux

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Learn Linux Quickly And Easily

  • How to : Create Desktop Icon in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Recovering Linux file permissions

  • Qemu-kvm 0.15.1 & Spice(0.10.0) & Libvirt 0.9.7-2 USB Redirection support for Ubuntu Precise

  • How to Monitor and Log Network Traffic on Linux Using vnStat

  • Find and Delete Duplicate files under Linux – Fdupes

  • Notifications with Irssi in Screen

  • Fix Missing Images with a One Size Fits All Replacement

  • Playing Magic the Gathering on Linux with Cockatrice

  • Linux Shell Introduction

  • Dynamic DNS Updates with ddclient

  • Packet Sniffing Basics

  • Stunnel – Universal SSL tunnel for network daemons

  • Giver Makes Transfer of Files Easier On A Linux Network

  • How to Generate A Public/Private SSH Key [Linux]

• Games

  • The State of Linux Gaming 2011

    When I decided to take on this article I thought it would be easy. Grab a few quotes from some developers, re-hash WINE support, check out the latest version of Battle for Wesnoth… Simple stuff.

    I was wrong. I wanted it to be fairly comprehensive, and quickly realized there was far too much material for that. So instead of a comprehensive run-down of every Linux game I hope only to give Linux gamers a few more options to feed their addiction.

  • [Quick Update] SuperTuxKart 0.7.3 Final Released

    SuperTuxKart 0.7.3 final has been released after being in development for 4 months. This release features numerous new features and improvements and a surprise new ‘Minigolf’ track that was included at the last moment.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • 2 cool reasons to use the K Desktop Environment

    You can always find a reason or two to like or not like something, and frequently, the reason you like one thing is exactly why the next guy does not. I used to be a fan of the K Desktop Environment (KDE). I said “used to” because I could not make the transition from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4. At that time, there were too many issues with KDE 4 that I decided to look elsewhere.

  • kmail terminates during startup with “Failed to fetch the resource collection”

  • Akonadi misconception #1: where is my data?

    I regularly see the same misconception and fear popping up on the mailing lists, bug reports and IRC: if the Akonadi database gets corrupted, I will lose my data.

  • The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications Part I – Dolphin

  • A look at KDE 4.8 Dolphin 2.0

    As some of you may know, one of the most exciting changes/features landing at KDE 4.8 is Dolphin 2.0. The KDE main file manager is already full of powerful features and has seen its performance heavily improved in recent releases, but sounds like the jump to version 2.0 will bring several impressive extras. Peter Penz goes deep into details in his ARTICLE on the subject, so I very much encourage reading it in full for those interested. For a quick summary…

• GNOME Desktop

  • New Desktop Interface Flops

    If you follow my work, you won’t be surprised to know that I really dislike Windows 8’s proposed new interface, Metro. That’s not because I hate everything from Microsoft. It’s because I hate anything that’s a bad design, and it’s not just Microsoft that’s guilty of that. So are open-source groups such as GNOME.

    Unlike my colleague Ken Hess who hates just about all the newest interfaces, I do like some of the new ones… in their place.

Distributions

• ArchBang 2011 Review

  Here is another light, fast, and fun distribution for everyone to try, ArchBang leaves a long-lasting impression. ArchBang delivers a useful Live CD, the OpenBox window manager, and all the basic applications you might need, all on top of the powerful and robust Arch Linux core. OpenBox will allow users to experiment with a highly customizable interface that remains relatively simple. And of course everyone will be impressed by the blazing speed this distribution will bring to your system. Get the most out of your system with this great operating system, ArchBang is another excellent choice for laptops and desktops alike.

• Five new distros you should not miss

  As one becomes familiar with the rich wealth of distros available, the developer’s and the community’s user experience too grows helping it the drive the resourceful open source platform to achieve greater heights.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mageia wiki finally online

    We wanted to replace that by some really nice wiki since then but there always was something with a higher priority, so it had to wait.

    Now, a few weeks ago, we already had a working MediaWiki instance and the teams were working under quite some pressure to import all the contents that has grown over the months in the temporary wiki, cleaning it up and giving it some structure while doing that.

• Gentoo Family

  • The Linux Setup – Fabio Erculiani, Sabayon Linux

    Fabio Erculiani is the man behind Sabayon Linux, a fantastic, rolling distribution based upon Gentoo (but much easier to manage). My thoughts on Sabayon are here. Fabio does a lot of different things on Sabayon, from the desktop to the server level. You have to appreciate a person that eats his own cooking.

  • Sabayon Linux developers split the Portage sabayon overlay into two new overlays

    If you are a Gentoo Linux user who added the sabayon overlay, or if you are a Sabayon Linux user who already uses Portage, note that the developers of Sabayon Linux have just split the overlay into two overlays. One of the overlays (sabayon-distro) contains ebuilds that are specific to the Sabayon Linux distribution and unlikely to be of interest to users of other distributions that use the Portage package manager. The other overlay (sabayon) contains ebuilds that could be of interest to Portage users of other distributions.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Forges New Cloud Computing Alliance With SAIC

    Red Hat Inc. the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has recently announced a new cloud-computing alliance with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The alliance will be a collaboration with SAIC to develop creative solutions and maximize the use of open source cloud-computing technologies for SAIC and its enterprise customers. This new alliance is Red Hat’s latest move in its play to become a dominating force in the open source cloud-computing arena.

  • SGI® UV Achieves Largest Certified Configuration for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

  • 5 System Monitoring Tools for Ubuntu

    Whether you’re resource-conscious, investigating a system slowdown, or, like me, plain nosey, Ubuntu makes it easy to keep an eye on CPU, RAM and other hardware information.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Can Wipe Out All Other Operating Systems from Grub2 Boot Menu List – A Quick Fix

    • The Trials of Cohabitation: Juggling Debian Sid and Fedora 16

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Is Ubuntu’s Dominance on Personal Desktops Slipping?

        For at least five years, Ubuntu has been the pre-eminent Linux distribution for desktop users. None of the other polished distros, such as Fedora or Debian, came close to capturing Canonical’s market share or mind share in the open source world. But writing on the wall is beginning to suggest that the Age of Ubuntu could be coming to an end, at least on the desktop. Here’s why.

        Lest I come off as too sensationalist, let me point out that neither Ubuntu nor Canonical is going to disappear anytime soon. Even if Ubuntu ceases to be the most popular Linux for personal desktops, we can expect it to remain important as a second or third choice for years to come.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Will Not Support Old CPUs

      • Ubuntu’s Tablet Ambition: Doomed to Fail

        For several years now, Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have worked to make their Linux releases available as a pre-installed option whenever possible. Some of the most famous examples are the Linspire and Xandros offerings that were once found at Sears and Walmart.

        A few years after these flopped, Dell introduced PCs pre-loaded with Ubuntu. However, each of these pre-installed efforts met with an untimely demise. The PC sellers blamed the lack of demand, while others such as myself blamed the worst PC marketing attempts in history.

        The pre-installed Linux PC failure in big box stores coincides with the inability to clearly identity the target of who would want the Linux PC. I feel confident in saying this, because other vendors that sell Linux PCs exclusively have done very well for themselves. Even when targeting non-Linux enthusiasts, the target message was always clearly spelled out.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 241

      • Will 12.04 changes bring Ubuntu back to prominence?

      • What Changes Will Ubuntu 12.04 Bring?

      • HealthCheck Ubuntu – The search for unity

        Ubuntu has over 20 million users around the world and is by far the most popular Linux distribution on the planet, but for the first time since the release of Warty Warthog in October 2004, an Ubuntu release is not being greeted with universal acclaim and there are mutterings of discord among the Ubuntu community.

      • The best Ubuntu backup tools

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Download Linux Mint 12 Release Candidate

          Right after our first look aticle of Linux Mint 12, Clement Lefebvre proudly announced on his blog that the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 12 operating system is available for download and testing.

        • Pinguy OS 11.10 (Final, Yet Beta) Released

          Pinguy OS 11.10 has been released today and comes with GNOME Shell (on top of GNOME 3.2.1) as default. Even though this is most probably the final version, it’s called “beta”…

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Ice Cream Sandwich Source Released

    • Micro SDXC cards work on smartphones and tablets

      ANDROID BLOG Androidnz has confirmed that a 64GB microSDXC card works in multiple devices including smartphones and tablets.

      In general, microSD card slots in today’s devices support up to 32GB of extra storage but despite Sandisk saying otherwise, you can now add up to 64GB. A Sandisk card has been tried in phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S II and tablets like the Asus Eee Pad Transformer.

    • Speeding up Android development with Android-x86 and VirtualBox

Piracy bill could waylay FLOSS projects

If you’re at all tuned into the Internet, then it’s very likely that you have heard about two bills currently making their way through the two houses of the US Congress that several organizations have said will “break the Internet.”

The bills, PROTECT IP (S. 968) and Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) (HR. 3261), are two pieces of legislation with essentially the same theme: give private copyright holders more tools to pull down pirated copy from the Internet. That sounds good on paper, but delving down into the details of each bill reveals some potentially serious problems for free and open source software (FLOSS) developers.

Each bill has the same basic approach: if a copyright holder finds content on a website that they believe infringes on their copyright, then they can go to any vendor who helps provide revenue to that site and request that the vendor cease working with the site. For instance, the request could go to any ad providers for the allegedly infringing site, and under the new law the ad provider would have five days to cut their ads from the site. Or, if the site uses credit cards or an online payment system like PayPal, the copyright holder can also get those organizations to stop supporting the website.

Making an open source software can be more profitable in the long term

Imagine what would happen if Coca Cola shared its secret formula, or a popular restaurant shared its secret sauce recipe. When source codes of software are shared beyond the secret society of their proprietors, a whole new world with unimaginable technical possibilities is opened. Contrary to popular belief that the proprietors of the secret sauce would lose their pie, they actually get a slice of a much, much larger pie, which makes better business sense.

After all, many of today’s tech rock stars like Google and Facebook follow the open source paradigm. These firms had implemented their ideas using open source technologies when they had started. And today, they allow free distribution of software developed by them for their internal use. Such open-sourcing enables newer startups to take advantage, yet again.

Introducing the ColorHug open source colorimeter

For the past 3 weeks I’ve been working long nights on an open source colorimeter called the ColorHug. This is hardware that measures the colors shown on the screen and creates a color profile. Existing hardware is proprietary and 100% closed, and my hardware is open source. It has a GPL bootloader, GPL firmware image and GPL hardware schematics and PCBs. It’s faster than the proprietary hardware, and more importantly a lot cheaper.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 10, What’s New?

    After having some initial troubles getting my add-ons to work under Firefox 10 Aurora I had time to look at the changes and new features of this release. Firefox 10 will be the next but one stable release of the web browser which means that stable channel users will have to wait about 12 weeks before they can upgrade their browser to this version.

  • Firefox 10: Can Mozilla Afford To Miss Silent Updates?

    Mozilla released the downloads of Firefox 9 Beta, which will be released just before Christmas as final, as well as Firefox 10 Aurora, the developer version of Firefox. But even with six new versions within one year, Mozilla may not have accomplished what the rapid release process promised: Most notably, Mozilla released substantial memory improvements this year, but it will miss some features it so desperately needs to compete with Chrome.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice.org: Five Months of Incubation at ASF

  At Apache, they have 75 developers and they are still reviewing the code to check licensing to ASL.

  “Before we can produce an Apache release, we must complete the code clearance step, ensuring that the license headers include License and Notification files for all artifacts in the build be done to the satisfaction of the PPMC and the Incubator PMC which governs the Apache OpenOffice podling. This will clear the way forward to develop a realistic target date for issuing our first ‘Apache OpenOffice.org’ release “

Funding

• Open source software development companies still struggle to survive

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Swedish activist receives Nordic Free Software Award 2011

  Erik Josefsson is the winner of the Nordic Free Software Award 2011. With the award, the Swedish Foundation for Free Culture and Free Software (FFKP) honours Josefsson for his achievements as a campaigner for freedom in the information society.

  “We are proud to honour Erik for the tremendously important work he has done over the past ten years”, says FFKP Executive Director Jonas Öberg. “Erik has an exceptional ability to understand and explain the link between policy and technology. We are hugely grateful for his work. He is an inspiration to all of us.”

Project Releases

• QEMU 1.0 Is Coming Quite Soon

  Version 1.0 of QEMU will be released next month in time for the holidays with several interesting advancements. QEMU is the popular open-source machine emulator and virtualizer that also plays a role in the Linux KVM virtualization stack.

  QEMU 1.0 is expected to be tagged on the first of December. New features to QEMU 1.0 will be a new memory API, support for the Tensilica Xtensa, SCSI improvements, and a Tiny Code Interpreter (TCI).

Licensing

• Copyright in Open Source Software – Understanding the Boundaries

  Copyright ownership tends not to be an issue in closed-source, software development. In that model an individual or business owns – or in-licenses – the copyright in all of the code used in the software application, licenses it to end-users under a binary-only license, and relies on a combination of copyright and trade secret law to enforce contractual rights in the code. By contrast, when software is developed in an open source model, copyright issues abound, and many of these copyright issues are not well understood by software developers. This lack of understanding can undermine the intent of the developers and can potentially lead to unattractive outcomes. As early as the launch of conceptual design in open source software, issues can arise as to ownership of the work and its progeny. When a wide range of hands can touch the open source code, ownership and rights in the code can become blurred. Moreover, not all code contributions to an open source project will be protected by copyright. This paper seeks to explore the application of U.S. copyright law to software, and particularly software that is developed and licensed under an open source model. We address the boundaries of copyright protection and ownership, the importance of intent, timing and creative expression in determining these boundaries, and provide guidance to those looking to launch open source projects.

• German courts say embedded open source firmware open to modification

  A major challenge to the principles of free software was thrown out of a German district court last week.

  German DSL router vendor AVM had attempted to stop Cybits, which produces children’s web filtering software, from modifying any part of the firmware used in its routers, including a key piece of Linux-based free software.

Programming

• Five years of open-source Java: Freedom isn’t (quite) free

  Open source Java has a long and torrid history, rife with corporate rivalry, very public fallings-out, and ideological misgivings. But has all the effort and rumpus that went into creating an officially sanctioned open JDK been worth it?

  Java co-creator James Gosling certainly thinks so – although he didn’t seem entirely open to the idea in the early days.

Google flings Bing into search engine bin

According to ComScore, Bing is struggling to add users – despite Microsoft’s expensive efforts to make the search engine a serious contender against the Chocolate Factory.

Security

• Search Engines Can Expose Open Source Holes

  Tools such as Google Code Search can provide hackers with a wealth of information hidden in open source code, writes Eric Doyle

  The downside of open source is its very openness. Hackers are using Open Source Intelligence (OSint) to find personal information and even passwords and usernames to plan their exploits.

  Organisations like Anonymous and LulzSec have been using Google Code Search – a public beta in which Google let users search for open source code on the Internet – according to Stach & Lui, a penetration testing firm. In Code Search, they can unearth information to assist them in their exploits, for instance finding passwords for cloud services which have been embedded in code, or configuration data for virtual private networks, or just vulnerabilities that lay the system open to other hacking ploys, such as SQL injection.

Finance

• Occupy Wall Street: police evict protesters – live updates

Spam

• South Korea proposes restricting all e-mail sending to official e-mail servers

  According to the BBC, South Korea’s Internet and Security Agency is asking all ISPs to block all e-mail sent from anything but “official” e-mail servers. The idea is to block spam, but will it really accomplish this goal?

  It’s not like this is a new idea. The Anti-Spam Technical Alliance proposed it as a best e-mail practice for ISPs in 2004. It’s a simple idea. If an ISP blocks the default Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) port, Port 25, from sending e-mail messages, users will be forced to use their ISP’s mail servers. This, in turn, the theory, goes will magically stop spam.

Civil Rights

• I2P – Anonymity for the Masses

Copyrights

• Keystone XL and the Future of Bill C-11

  In 2005, the then-Liberal government introduced Bill C-60, the first attempt at digital copyright reform in Canada. The bill included digital lock provisions that linked circumvention to copyright infringement (as supported today by dozens of Canadian organizations) and did not create a ban on the tools that can be used to circumvent. The approach was consistent with the WIPO Internet treaties, but left the U.S. very unhappy.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org, Wayland, Open Gaming At FOSDEM 2012

    The Free and Open-source software Developer’s European Meeting (FOSDEM) is quickly approaching. The developer tracks/rooms for this huge open-source event have been announced.

    Among the interesting developer rooms for the 2012 event in Brussels, Belgium is X.Org, Open Mobile Linux, Mozilla, open-source virtualization/cloud, cross-desktop, open-source game development, LibreOffice, micro-kernel-based operating systems, and BSD operating systems. The full list of FOSDEM 2012 developer rooms is listed at the end of this posting.

Applications

• This Week’s Top Downloads

  Firefox 8 Now Available (Windows,Mac,Linux) Firefox 8 officially releases on Mozilla’s site on November 8th, but technology blog GHacks discovered this morning that the Firefox 8.0 final version is already available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Mozilla’s FTP servers.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to : Display Multiple Time Zone in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

  • How to make dmesg timestamp human readable

• Games

  • Nvidia Optimus with Ironhide

  • Hostile Takeover: New Linux Game Inspired by X-Com and Fallout

    Hostile Takeover takes place in a not-too-distant future devastated by a global economic crisis. In a desperate attempt to counteract this crisis, the world’s governments agreed to grant all large corporations immunity from prosecution. This was meant to free corporations from the oppressions of control and legislation but instead cast the global business world into deadly conflicts. Now, no longer inhibited by law, corporations wage war. And within this new world, a new occupation has seen the light of day: corporate assassin.

  • Indie Royale ‘Difficult Second Bundle’ Hits 25,000 Sold, Adds Two New Games

    The Difficult Second Bundle, the latest independent game download bundle from the Indie Royale website has surpassed a major milestone: over 25,000 units sold in just two days.

    To commemorate, organizers have released two brand new games for all previous and future 2nd Bundle buyers – intense shmups Bullet Candy Perfect and Irukandji from Charlie’s Games, available on Windows, Mac, and Linux directly, or through download platform Desura.

Desktop Environments

• Acer Aspire One 522

  When I started working on it, loading various Linux distributions,

Distributions

• A Disappointing Review of #! 10 “Statler”

  Before I say anything else, I’d just like to say that the reason why I haven’t posted anything in 2 weeks has been due to me being quite busy with classes, my UROP, and other related stuff. I will definitely have another post out this week (and it’ll actually be a bit like this one), but I can’t really promise much more. After all, I did say that I couldn’t count on posting stuff regularly during the semester.

  Anyway, I haven’t done a post like this in a while; in fact, it’s been half a year, when I criticized Dedoimedo’s review of Bodhi Linux 0.1.6. There, I criticized the author for holding Bodhi Linux to an artificially higher standard and then trashing it from there. Well, this time around, it’s another Dedoimedo review that’s caused me to write this: this time, it’s the review of #! 10 “Statler”. Follow the jump to read my issues with the review.

• Red Hat Family

  • Westford encourages Red Hat to stay

    On Oct. 17 voters at special Town Meeting approved a tax incentive for Red Hat, Inc., called a Tax Increment Financing agreement that is designed to encourage the company to remain in Westford and expand its current office space. But the vote does not guarantee that company officials will choose Westford over two California locations that remain on the table. What follows is an explanation of what the vote meant.

  • IT Public Relations; “Red Hat” Selects Promedia Turkey

    Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has selected Promedia as its new PR agency-of-record, following a competitive review. Promedia will help Red Hat on a broad range of communications activities that are aimed at reaching target groups and maintaining relationships with the open source community in Turkey.

  • Red Hat Assists Israeli Startups to Increase Software Revenue

    Seven Israeli early stage technology companies with revenue of less than $1.5 million each were chosen to get free access to Red Hat enterprise software. The program will be expanded in Israel before being extended to other nations, Whitehurst said. Red Hat, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, will offer its software at a declining discount as the companies’ sales grow.

  • Fedora

    • Disk Encryption in Fedora 16

      No distribution’s installer makes setting up disk encryption as easy as Anaconda, the Fedora system installer. And that has not changed in Fedora 16, the latest stable release. On previous versions of Fedora, those released before Fedora 16, the only automated disk partitioning option was one based on LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager. That made it easy to install Fedora on encrypted LVM partitions.

    • The Perfect Desktop – Fedora 16 i686 (GNOME)

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Sneak Peek: Linux Mint 12

          One that really pleased me with Linux Mint 12 is that it runs in VirtualBox with no configuration headaches to get GNOME 3 to run. Compare that to Fedora 16, which is a pain in the ass to deal with since you have to work to get GNOME 3.2 to actually load.

          Note though that if you boot into the live desktop in VirtualBox you will see the fall back desktop (not the GNOME 3.2). Don’t let that bother you, just do the install and make sure that your virtual machine has 3D set to on. When you boot into your installed desktop, GNOME 3 should load without a problem.

        • Linux Mint: Standing Out In a Crowd (Review & Screenshots)

          Linux Mint 12 (right now a release candidate) definitely stands out in the crowd of Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions. It seems the Linux Mint team cares deeply about giving the community what it wants but doesn’t have. Linux Mint 12 is a Gnome 3.x Shell distribution that stands out on its own because rather than accept the default Gnome 3.x Shell interface like most Gnome 3.x Shell Linux distributions have done Linux Mint 12 tries its best to emulate the Gnome 2.x interface through the use of Gnome Shell extensions.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • 7 Android Keyboard Applications

Remembering the promise of FLOSS

Today is Veteran’s Day here in the U.S. and Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth of Nations. It’s a holiday that gets a bit of short shrift these days, so it’s important to take a moment and understand that we have a lot of people to thank for the freedoms we now enjoy.

And there is a lot of work still to do.

That work is being done by armed forces around the world, and it can also be done by us.

In the last decade, one of the ways the free and open source software communities were going to work on the problems of global illiteracy and information distribution was to be the source of computer software for developing nations.

With grand plans like the One Laptop Per Child program in place, the FLOSS community was gung-ho on the notion of delivering great software at a perfect cost: free.

OpenGeo Establishes Victoria Office

The Weather Channel chooses Talend open source MDM over Microsoft

The Weather Channel LLC has chosen open source master data management (MDM) tools from Talend over competing proprietary products from Microsoft Corp. and other software vendors, an official with the organization said.

The Atlanta, Ga.-based news outlet — which is devoted to all things weather — said the plan to go with Talend Enterprise MDM stemmed from a longstanding commitment to open source technology and the fact that it has already been successfully using Talend data integration software for the last two years.

The Weather Channel, which began implementing the open source MDM platform last week, says it was drawn to the idea that the software package fully integrates with the Talend extract, transform and load (ETL) tools already in use. The company also liked that Talend Enterprise MDM comes pre-packaged with data quality and data integration tools of its own.

“We looked a little bit at a couple of players in the space, mainly Microsoft,” said Ben Garrett, the company’s director of advertising technology and business intelligence (BI). “But the compelling argument for us was that, because we are already ingrained with Talend, it made perfect sense for us to pursue this as the right path.”

Interest in deploying open-source clouds is rising–survey

As interest in open-source cloud computing continues to grow, a new–albeit self-interested–survey shows that users are looking to move from experiments to production deployments.

Today, systems management software provider Zenoss released the results of what they’ve titled the “OpenStack Adoption Survey”. (OpenStack is an open-source cloud operating system.) The data was culled from 772 surveys filled out at the recent OpenStack Conference in Boston and the Zenoss open source management community.

Exxon Mobil Corporation (NYSE:XOM) Provides Open Source Software To Energy Industry

Bechtolsheim: AWS, open source rewrite rules for startups

“Software programming levels have improved from C to C++ to Java to Ruby to you name it. You can now do more with fewer people and open source deserves all the credit here for creating and maintaining these tools,” he said.

Events

• ELCE11: Till Jaeger on AVM vs. Cybits

  German lawyer Till Jaeger came to the Embedded Linux Conference Europe to update attendees on the AVM vs. Cybits case that is currently underway in Germany. The case has some potentially serious implications for users of GPL-licensed software, particularly in embedded Linux contexts, so Jaeger (and his client Harald Welte) felt it was important to publicize the details of the case. So important, in fact, that he and Welte are forgoing the usual practice of keeping all of the privileged information (between a lawyer and client) private.

• Lucene Eurocon 2011: Day One

  As we wrote a few days ago we are back from this years Lucene Eurocon, which took place in Barcelona. Despite the fact that the videos will be available shortly, we decided to write something about those presentations we attended.

• Grab Your Free Ticket To Asia’s #1 Open Source Event

  Wish to avail this ‘Silver’ opportunity to attend Open Source India 2011, Asia’s mega open source convention, for FREE? All you need to do is click on this link and register for your FREE Sliver Pass (which is otherwise worth Rs 1000). But you need to hurry as this offer is available only for the first 500 registrants.

• Jimmy Wales To Open The First WikiConference In India

  The Wikipedia Community and the Wikimedia Chapter are hosting a WikiConference for the first in the country in Mumbai next week. The three day event that will see a congregation of thousands of Wikipedians from all over the country, will be opened by Jimmy Wales, the founder, open-source evangelist and chairman emeritus of Wikimedia Foundation.

• Open Source Meets Mobile in Ashoka’s Citizen Media Competition

  Mobile was a major theme running through many of the finalists — most likely because in developing nations, mobile phone use is often more widespread than Internet connectivity, so many people depend on their cell phones as a way to receive crucial information. Open-source software was the platform of choice for many entries. For more on that, Knight-Mozilla’s Dan Sinker has written quite a bit on the intersection of open-source culture and journalism. Security, too, loomed large among entries. Anyone who followed the Arab Spring probably saw examples of how anonymity and security are necessary for real-time reporting of conflicts.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Releases Firefox 8 with Twitter Search

    New features of the Firefox 8 release, which is for desktop editions of Windows, Linux, Mac, and mobile Firefox for Android, includes Twitter search integration, increased support for WebGL graphics hardware acceleration, and on demand tab-group loading. Mozilla explained in its blog post that with the inclusion of Twitter search in Firefox 8, “Twitter search in Firefox makes it easier to discover new topics, #hashtags, and usernames.” Languages supported for the new Twitter search function are English, Portuguese, Slovenian, and Japanese, but the company will release versions for other languages in the future.

  • Knight-Mozilla names news technology fellowship winners

    Five developers, designers and programmer-journalists funded by the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership are to spend a year in five national newsrooms around the world.

    Al Jazeera English, the Guardian, the BBC, Zeit Online and the Boston Globe will each be joined by a winner to produce open-source code and solve challenges within the news organisation.

SaaS

• Tech sugar daddies shovel millions into Hadoop war

  There was once an idyllic time when people like Joe Kraus described an entrepreneur’s dream of starting robust companies on a shoestring budget, powered by open-source software and cloud infrastructure. Apparently Cloudera and Hortonworks didn’t get the memo. Both Hadoop competitors recently raised mountains of cash at sky-high valuations, fuelled by open-source software and cloud infrastructure. And now Cloudera investor Ping Li has declared that his firm, Accel, is prepared to dump $100m more into Hadoop’s meta-market, Big Data.

  What gives?

  Well, venture capitalists do, for one, and at valuations that entrepreneurs might be unwise to pass up. In a hot market like Big Data, where Cloudera and Hortonworks compete, it seems that VCs are trying to preempt competition by going very big, very fast, in a scorched earth policy of sorts for would-be competitors. It’s hard to imagine other VCs having the appetite to find other Hadoop companies when Cloudera and Hortonworks are so richly resourced.

• Rackspace Launches OpenStack Private Cloud

  Rackspace Hosting continues to lease data center space, even as it extends its business beyond its own facilities, as seen in this week’s announcement of its Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition. The new private cloud is powered by OpenStack, the open source cloud computing platform organized by Rackspace at last year.

• Hadoop Start-Up Cloudera Teams Up With Storage Player NetApp

  If a company has a batch of data of any reasonable size and wants to do anything useful with it, chances are that at one point or another it’s going to wind up using some version of Hadoop.

• Open Source Cloud Service Launched by DuraSpace

• Hadoop-based startup Cloudera raises $40M from Ignition Partners, Accel, Greylock

• Who’s Hawking Hadoop? Just About Everyone

  In recent months, the likes of Dell, Oracle, and EMC have unveiled what they bill as specialized hardware appliances for Hadoop, and on Monday, they were joined by storage hardware outfit and EMC rival NetApp, which announced a creation it calls the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop.

  Named for the yellow stuffed elephant that belonged to the son of its original developer, Hadoop is an open source software platform that analyzes data by splitting it into tiny pieces and distributing it across a large cluster of machines. The platform was originally built by Yahoo! using research papers published by Google, and it helps drive such web operations as Facebook, Twitter, and eBay. But Hadoop is evolving into a tool for the average business — which faces its own avalanche of unstructured data pouring from the web.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Does Oracle’s Larry Ellison care about open source and Java?

  Oracle’s indefatigable efforts to convince the world that it truly will pump effort and resources into open source continue. The newest “stewards” of the Java platform and language have used the Java OpenJDK mailing list to detail plans for the JavaFX rich Internet application (RIA) platform.

CMS

• Acquia to push use of free website building software in India

  Open-source software company Acquia today said it will expand its presence in India to promote use of free website building software Drupal.

  “We have two training partners in India, which we are planning to scale up massively. In this visit we are doing need analysis of Indian market and soon we will announce initiative specific to India,” Chief Marketing Officer Ronald C Pruett, Jr. said.

Education

• Moodle Open Source Learning Management System to underpin higher education National Networking Initiative (NNI)

  The NNI will use Moodle, an open source learning management system as the online platform for its collaboration, cross institutional networking and information sharing. Moodle, already used in approximately 40% of Australian universities will be hosted and maintained by NetSpot, an official Moodle and NNI partner.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • 10 Questions for Fonality CFO Dan Rosenthal

  • Alfresco: An open-source ECM alternative for SharePoint

    In any business organization, the need to effectively communicate and collaborate in a timely manner is very important. Contending with mobile workers and shifting schedules, many businesses look toward enterprise content management (ECM) systems such as Microsoft’s SharePoint. Their purpose is to allow users within organizations to collaborate and share work inside of a commonly accessed website framework.

  • A faster Web server: ripping out Apache for Nginx

    Like so many others, I eventually decided to put my own website up on the Internets, and I used the Apache HTTP server to host it. Why? I had an Ubuntu server box sitting in front of me, and Apache was the Web server I’d heard about the most. If Apache was good enough for big sites, it should be good enough for my little static personal site. Right?

    But it wasn’t quite right for me. Here’s why—and what I learned when I spent a weekend ripping out my Apache install and replacing it with lightweight speed demon of a Web server called Nginx.

  • Talend’s New Community Coders Program Highlights Vendor’s Open Source Contributions

Project Releases

• Google Releases sfntly Font Programming Library as Open Source

  “Created by the Google Internationalization Engineering team, the sfntly Java and C++ library makes it easy for programmers to build high performance font manipulation applications and services,” he wrote.

Public Services/Government

• CESG: Open-source software is secure enough for us

  It is wrong to believe that open-source software is implicitly insecure, according to Qamar Yunus, the government’s main official on the subject.

  Yunus, an assistant director in the Cabinet Office ICT policy team, made the comment on Monday, as he outlined the organisation’s guidance on open-source software at the EHI Live event in Birmingham.

  “There was a myth being circulated around the SIs, saying you can’t use open-source software in government as it’s not secure,” Yunus told the conference, referring to the systems integrators who account for large amounts of government ICT spending.

Openness/Sharing

• Hadoop-based startup Cloudera raises $40M from Ignition Partners, Accel, Greylock

  OpenFlow is an open source project borne of a six-year research collaboration between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley. It’s a programmatic interface and protocol that enables software-defined networking, which means that users can define flows and determine what paths those flows take through a network via software, regardless of the underlying hardware.

• Superdesk is an open-source newsroom for citizen media

  Superdesk is a newsroom tool that gives journalists the ability to source, manage, verify, process and eventually present the facts behind a story, across multiple platforms and media — including the web, mobile, radio, television and print.

  The plan is to make the newsroom process collaborative and open-source — pulling in data from wire services, APIs and other sources, letting journalists and editors create content, edit it and even translate it, and then publish or broadcast it. The idea, essentially, is to detach the content from the medium, standardising it so it can easily be passed around a newsroom in a universal format.

Programming

• ActiveState enhances Stackato PaaS

  ActiveState Software today announced new cloud application management and monitoring features for Stackato – its infrastructure-agnostic, polyglot private platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

  Built on VMware-based Cloud Foundry open source project, Stackato is designed to enable private PaaS for Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Perl and Node.js-based applications.

• StackIQ Releases Rocks+ 6.0

  StackIQ today announced the immediate availability of Rocks+ 6, the comprehensive software suite for automating the deployment and management of Big Infrastructure. Rocks+ 6 is designed for environments having hundreds or thousands of servers supporting Big Data, Analytics, or High Performance computing. These environments require powerful management software that turns loosely coupled commodity hardware and open source software into tightly coupled enterprise grade appliances, and StackIQ has been building software to do that for years. With thousands of satisfied customers using Rocks today, StackIQ is well positioned to solve the Big Infrastructure problem.

Adventures with Outlook 2010 Problems

I’ve written recently about Exchange problems and how Outlook problems have been overwhelming the Help Desk. Another issue popped up that tops the cake. It was brought to my attention that some users, receiving some emails, cannot see PDF attachments. But, not only does Outlook refuse to show the attachments, it gives no indication to the user that there is something wrong. So, the user has no idea that there are attachments, other than relying on the sender to notify them in some way. We verified that the attachments are in the message, because Outlook reports the message size correctly which takes into account the extra size that the attachments take up. And, when having the user log in to Outlook Web App, the attachments show up. Seriously, this is idiotic. This is just unexcusable when you are dealing with customers and need to have reliable email correspondence. Already this has caused issues, since the customer needs to ask our staff if they got the attachment and why they have not responded regarding it. Our staff explains that they never got the attachment and back and forth fun begins.

Why Windows Phone 7 Is Too Late

The Windows Phone 7.5 interface is interesting, but no more so than that of Android or iOS. Partnering with Nokia was a bold move, but in the end will be like climbing into a sinking lifeboat. The mobile-market ship has sailed, and while business users will continue to use Microsoft’s products, they will more frequently access them through the devices and operating systems of their competitors.

Security

• Open-source Toolkit Tracks Down Duqu Infections

• NSS Labs Claims Its New Tool Can Detect All Duqu Drivers

  Security research firm NSS Labs has released an open source scanning tool that is capable of detecting all malicious drivers used by the new Duqu threat, according to its engineers. However, other security vendors believe that the malware’s creators are capable of evading detection at any time.

Finance

• Geithner Grilled on Goldman Sachs

  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner found himself on the defensive Tuesday, trying to assuage Rep. Maxine Waters about the role Wall Street behemoth Goldman Sachs played in the lead-up to the federal bailout.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Digital Divide Persists Even as Broadband Adoption Grows

  Broadband Internet adoption has skyrocketed over the last decade in the U.S, though adoption hasn’t been entirely evenly spread across all Americans. That’s the conclusion from a new Exploring the Digital Nation report from The Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

  The report is a followup to one released in 2010 that came to a similar set of conclusions about the so-called digital divide between those that have broadband Internet access and those that do not.

Copyrights

• Warner Bros. Admits Sending HotFile False Takedown Requests

  Hollywood movie studio Warner Bros. has admitted to a federal court that it removed files from the file-hosting site Hotfile without owning the copyrights. Some of the false takedowns were the result of failing filtering software but Warner also admitted that one of its employees deleted Open Source software that could speed up downloads.

• ACTA

  • INTA chairman defends secrecy

    On 9 November we sent the Chairman of the European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA), Mr Moreira, an open letter in which we protested against an INTA meeting behind closed doors on ACTA. On 10 November Mr Moreira replied.

    Below you will find his letter and our reply. Mr Moreira defends the secrecy: the document is, for the time being, confidential. We maintain that secrecy is not compatible with “utmost transparency” (art 103 European Parliament Rules of Procedure).