10.29.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• People see and want but then don’t.

  Then there is Linux. It makes no promises, it offers no excuses. It is what it is and you can take it or leave it. Linux has it’s beauty spots and it’s warts and they are both out there, side by side, for all to see. Linux has features that windows users see and they exclaim “I want this on my computer!” They claim this quite emphatically, sometimes even going so far as to actually installing Linux and using it for a while.

• 20 years of Linux: Looking back, forging ahead

  In the larger scheme, however, Linux is arguably one of the most influential technologies of our time. It’s providing the backbone for tech applications that are changing the way the world works and plays. The most powerful computers in the world use it to crunch complicated algorythms. Linux has paved the way for companies’ move of information into “the cloud” and for the general spirit of collaboration that has fueled everything from social networking to Wikipedia.

  This year, Linux turns 20. The computing community is celebrating the anniversary of the date when Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds released Linux to the world, looking back at Torvalds’ vision for modern computing and looking ahead at some of the ways Linux might change business in the future.

• Hanging on by their fingertips – the last bastion of the proprietary-ware industry

  Want to watch a Blu-ray on your PC? That’ll be £50 please. Simon, for one, is fed up of this game. Join him as he looks at one of the many wheezes the proprietary software and hardware industry are still trying to pull…

  I’ve just opened up my e-mail mailbox, to be greeted by press releases for another round of product announcements. The one that caught my eye, as it does every year, is the release for another piece of DVD playback software. In this case, it’s Corel WinDVD Pro 11, although it’s not the only offender. And if you’re looking for an example of the wheezes the proprietary hardware and software industries pull, then look no further.

• Desktop

  • Desktops – the final Linux frontier

    Linux Inside Where will you find Linux … Inside your phone? In your car? In your living room? Open Source Software has long been at home in the data center, providing the engine to drive everything from web servers to high performance computing to Cloud. Its versatility, combined with low cost and massive community are pushing it out of the raised floor and into your pocket.Let’s take a look inside a typical consumer router as an example. Chances are, you’ll find Linux at the core.

  • Canonical and Dell Push Ubuntu PCs Into China

    Ubuntu has found some new horizons in China. In a post on Canonical’s blog, it was announced that Canonical and Dell will bring PCs loaded with Ubuntu to the Chinese market. According to the post: “The stores will feature Ubuntu on a range of Dell computers, and will carry branded marketing collateral in-store, trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers and will be supported by a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores. The work was carried out by the Canonical teams based in Beijing and Shanghai, working with Dell China.”

  • Ubuntu Gets Retail Shelf-Space In 220 Retail Stores In China

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Full Circle 54 – Closing Windows

  • CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.10.28

• Kernel Space

  • Intel’s Dirk Hohndel on 20 Years of Linux

• Applications

  • The Linux Desktop: Rich with educational software

    Linux for education is a great win, for all PC users. I have read about schools making the move to open source and Linux in the classroom, with countless success stories. I have been a GNU/Linux user for many years, and I admit that I have never really dug into the open source educational software that is available for the Linux desktop, until recently. I also read many articles written by Windows users about how Linux is dead on the desktop. Is it really? When I see articles that put down the Linux desktop, I am almost 100% assured that the author has not even tried to download a copy of GNU/Linux, installed some software and actually given it a test drive. For those that have actually used GNU/Linux enough to know what it is, you generally hear a completely different tone. Linux is definitely not taking over the market, but it is FAR from dead; there is a huge amount of software that comes with each and every GNU/Linux distribution that a lot of people are not even aware exists. To me, this makes the Linux desktop a very viable and economical solution for educational environments. It is also fine for business and personal use as well, but that is a harder nut to crack. As I have found for myself, it is definitely worth taking a look at what software is available; I guarantee you will be surprised.

  • The Best Time Tracking App for Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How To Migrate Mailboxes Between IMAP Servers With IMAP TOOLS

    • Cloud Computing Course, Part 3: Introducing the Virtual Machine Manager

    • How to Get Wireless to Connect Automatically in Sabayon Linux

    • How To Configure A pfSense 2.0 Cluster Using CARP

    • Dual-boot Ubuntu 11.10, Windows 7 on a PC with 2 hard drives

    • qrencode: Generate QR code via command line on Ubuntu

    • Use s3cmd for Managing Amazon S3 Storage from the CLI

    • How To Migrate Mailboxes Between IMAP Servers With IMAP TOOLS

    • How To Make Your Own (Almost) Chromebook

• Distributions

  • BackTrack Linux: The Ultimate Hacker’s Arsenal

    Penetration (Pen) testing and security auditing are now part of every system administrator’s “other duties as assigned.” BackTrack Linux (http://www.backtrack-linux.org/) is a custom distribution designed for security testing for all skill levels from novice to expert. It is the largest collection of wireless hacking, server exploiting, web application assessing, social-engineering tools available in a single Linux distribution.

  • Kwort is Still Around?

    I’ve always liked those smaller more obscure Linux distributions. The good ones usually offered a unique personality and the atmosphere around those projects were friendly and accessible. Kwort was one of these. However, it had faded from my memory since my last tests until I noticed on Distrowatch.com that a third release candidate for 3.2 had been released. Because it’s been four years since my last look, I thought another was waaay overdue.

    The first thing I did was look back at my old reviews of Kwort. Back then it was based on Slackware (a big plus in my book) and featured Xfce as the desktop. These days it appears Kwort is now based on CRUX and uses Openbox for the desktop. Well, CRUX is cool I hear. Openbox is a little too minimal for my tastes usually, but let’s take a look anyway.

  • New Releases

    • SalineOS 1.5 Has LibreOffice and Grub-Doctor

    • A Puppy for Slackers

    • Crash course: Virtualization with KVM on Ubuntu Server

    • SalineOS 1.5

    • DEFT 6.1.1 ready for download

      For some important needs of international computer forensic experts and our community, we decide to release this micro update that allows you to create the “super timeline” using log2timeline (0.60) utility.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat promotes the community at Linuxcon

      Tim Burke, VP of Linux technology development at Red Hat, gave a keynote speech at Linuxcon in Prague this week. Overall he expressed that the Linux community is essential to the open source operating system’s progress.

    • Red Hat certifies RHEL for Facebook’s Open Compute Project

    • Red Hat certifies RHEL for Facebook’s Open Compute systems

      Linux distributor Red Hat has joined the Open Compute Project. The OCP was founded by Facebook and develops specifications for building highly efficient data centres, ranging from specifications for motherboards, server chassis and cabinets, to ones for transformers for connecting to the high voltage electrical grid.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Configuration Settings and Shortcuts in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) – Efficiency Boosters

        • IRL: Kingston Wi-Drive, Dyson DC35 and being an Ubuntu fanboy

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Top 5 Android Launchers Worth Trying Out

      • Android smartwatch smackdown!

        Two startups are about to go “chrono y chrono” with competing Android smartwatch gizmos. The “I’m Watch” exclusively targets smartwatch applications, whereas the “WIMM Platform” is meant to create “a new market of connected wearable devices that deliver timely, relevant information at a glance” — of which smartwatches are but one example.

      • Google TV 2.0 gains Honeycomb, Android Market

        Google unveiled Google TV 2.0, which will roll out on Sony TVs and Logitech Revue boxes Oct. 30. Featuring Android 3.1 (“Honeycomb”), the upgrade includes a revamped interface featuring a new customizable home screen and app shortcuts, provides hundreds of Android Market apps, and offers improved search for TV and YouTube, says the company.

      • Droid Razr goes on sale as Mot unveils Fire XT smartphone

        Motorola Mobility and Verizon Wireless began selling the Droid Razr Android smartphone on pre-order for $300, with shipments promised by Nov. 10. Meanwhile, a 3.5-inch Motorola Fire XT Android smartphone was announced in Italy; Motorola Mobility announced strong third-quarter earnings of $3.3 billion; and more evidence piled up regarding an imminent release of two Motorola Xoom 2 tablets.

Free Software/Open Source

• To the Surface: Great Open Source Projects That Don’t Make the Headlines

  Here at OStatic, we regularly do posts designed to surface unsung but very impressive open source projects. Occasionally, an early look at any one of these unsung projects leads to ongoing coverage. For example, this site broke the news about the Eucalyptus cloud computing project at U.C. Santa Barbara long before there ever was the commercial entity Eucalyptus Systems. If you’re looking to expand your open source arsenal with some tools you’ve never heard of, here are some good resources.

• Web Browsers

  • Luakit Extensible Micro Browser

  • Mozilla

    • Bing Filters LibreOffice And Linux, Yet Firefox Goes In Bed

      Despite these flawed results of Bing which are kind of filtering out open source technologies, Firefox is going with Bing. So, next time when someone searches Microsoft Firefox, they will not find LibreOffice or Linux on the first pages. Well, it seems like Firefox has made its choice. What is your choice?

• SaaS

  • Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 rockets, C devs still best paid

    Demand for Ruby, Hadoop and HTML5 developers jumped this year, with jobs requiring those skills increasing 70 per cent compared to the same period in 2010, according to a survey of the tech jobs in London by recruiters Adzuna. Adzuna collated every tech job advertised for London last month, a total of 100,000. HTML coders are still the most in demand, but also the most poorly paid – both at entry and top levels.

  • First OpenStack cloud now open for business

    Managed-hosting provider turned cloud provider Internap now has an OpenStack-based cloud ready for public consumption, beating even OpenStack founder Rackspace to the punch. It’s a big day for OpenStack, the open-source cloud computing platform designed to rival VMware and create competition for Amazon Web Services, but it’s likely only the first of many.

  • First commercial OpenStack-based cloud compute service announced

• Databases

  • Neo Launches NoSQL Graph Database

    NoSQL type databases have become increasingly popular over the last several years as a way to deliver better scalability and performance. There are a number of different types of NoSQL databases, including a graph database structure, which is what open source startup Neo Technology is all about.

    Neo Technology is the lead commercial sponsor behind the open source Neo4j NoSQL database. This week the company is launching its Spring Data Neo4j 2.0 release, bringing the database to the popular Spring Java framework. The company has also just completed raising $10.6 million in Series A funding.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • New LibreOffice Extension Website Live

    Have you heard about those great LibreOffice extensions but have had a problem locating them? Well, those extensions (and templates) are going to be easier to find now thanks to The Document Foundation’s new online repository.

• Business

  • Digium Cranks Open Source Asterisk to 10

    I make no apologies for being a huge fan of the Asterisk open source PBX project. I’ve been a user since the 1.0 release, which is coincidentally the first time I ever wrote about the project, all the way back in 2004.

  • Digium Confirms Asterisk 10 Release, Media Engine Gets Makeover

    Digium Thursday confirmed the release of Asterisk 10, the latest version of the 12-year-old Asterisk open-source telephony platform that’s slowly but surely gaining traction in the broader telephony market.

    Digium, which is Asterisk’s primary developer, announced the release in line with this week’s AstriCon conference in Denver. According to Digium, the freely available Asterisk platform has seen millions of downloads in the past few years, including 2 million in 2010 alone.

• Project Releases

  • Announcing Orion 0.3

    The Orion project is pleased to announce the availability of its 0.3 release. If you’re using Orion Hub, then congratulations on successfully upgrading to the new release! If you don’t have an account, sign up for free here. If you’re the kind of person who still likes to download and install tools, you can find the latest server on our download page.

• Public Services/Government

  • Thinking out of the server box: HP ProLiant MicroServer

Leftovers

• The KNOS Project demo review

  BSD-based operating systems are considered very secure. More so than Linux, in fact. Now, there are many reasons why this may or may not be so, including the market share, the speed and quality of software validation, the release cycle, the internal security mechanism, the skill and mentality of developers, administrators and users, the deployment setup, and many other factors, all of which are highly debatable.

• Science

  • Why we think there’s a Multiverse, not just our Universe

• Security

  • Penetration Testing Shows Unlikely Vulnerabilities

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • NYFD Removes Gas, Generators From Protest

    New York firefighters removed about a dozen gasoline cans and six generators from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street protesters have camped for almost six weeks, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

    About 30 to 40 firefighters were sent to the park along with the police department’s community affairs unit, Bloomberg said today on his weekly WOR radio show.

    The equipment, which helped power computers and mobile phones and keep people warm as temperatures dipped near freezing, are safety hazards and illegal, Bloomberg said. Forecasts call for rain and snow in the metropolitan area tomorrow.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Frac Sand Mining Companies Could Benefit From ‘Polluters Over People Bill’

    Wisconsin’s environment and the health of its population might be on the chopping block as state Republicans push for mining deregulation in the name of “jobs.”

• Finance

  • With Gupta’s Arrest, Insider Inquiry Goes Beyond Wall St.

  • Gupta Case Targets Insider Culture

  • Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta arrested

  • Former Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta pleads not guilty, is freed on $10 million bail

  • Ex-Goldman Sachs board member pleads not guilty

  • Former Goldman Sachs Board Member Pleads Not Guilty In Fraud Case

  • Former Goldman Sachs Board Member Pleads Not Guilty of Insider Trading

  • With Gupta’s Arrest, Insider Inquiry Goes Beyond Wall St.

  • At Occupy Wall Street in Oakland Echo, Goldman Sachs Indictment

    As the Occupy movement spreads from coast to coast, an attack in Oakland, California on protesters Tuesday night was the buzz of an impromptu march on New York’s lower Broadway on Wednesday night.

    Amid chants of “New York is open, open is New York,” demonstrators moved freely with a growing police presence behind them. Inner City Press photographed, beside City Hall, police horses of the type injured in Times Square only ten days ago.

  • What should Wall Street do?

    “AS THOUSANDS have gathered in Lower Manhattan, passionately expressing their deep discontent with the status quo, we have taken note of these protests,” wrote Lloyd Blankfein, the boss of Goldman Sachs, in a recent letter to investors. “And we have asked ourselves this question: ‘How can we make money off them?’ The answer is the newly launched Goldman Sachs Global Rage Fund.” This will invest in firms likely to benefit from social unrest, such as window repairers and makers of police batons. As Mr Blankfein explained: “At Goldman, we recognise that the capitalist system as we know it is circling the drain—but there’s plenty of money to be made on the way down.”

  • Goldmanite Quant Derman Slams Wall Street’s Hypocrisies: Books

    Disturbed, disillusioned and ashamed: Those aren’t emotions you expect a Wall Street quant to express when asked why taxpayers were obliged to bail out wealthy bankers.

    Unless, of course, the quant is Emanuel Derman, a particle physicist and former head of quantitative finance at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

    “I am ashamed at the hypocrisies of the system,” Derman writes in “Models.Behaving.Badly,” an erudite yet pleasantly readable exploration of why financial models failed during the U.S. mortgage meltdown and why modelers must learn to use them more wisely.

  • Goldman Sachs and Occupy Wall Street’s bank: the real story

    Mega-bank Goldman Sachs (assets $933bn), has declared war on one of the smallest banks in New York (assets $30m), the customer-owned community bank that happens to also be the banker for Friends of Liberty Plaza, Inc, also known as Occupy Wall Street. And you thought Goldman didn’t care.

    The trouble began three weeks ago when the occupiers suddenly found their donation buckets filling with thousands of dollars, way more than needed for their pizza dinners. Suddenly, the anti-bank protesters needed a bank. Citibank and Chase certainly wouldn’t fit. So OWS opened an account at the not-for-profit Lower East Side Peoples Federal Credit Union. Peoples has a unique federal charter – designated to open accounts for low-income folk from all over NewYork, available to those families earning less than $38,000 per year. (Disclosure: the CEO of the Peoples bank is my dearly beloved ex. But that’s another story.)

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • At OWS, Cenk Uygur Announces Effort to Amend Constitution, Get Money Out of Politics

    The “Occupy” movement has been inspired in part by the increasingly outsized political power of the top 1%, which has made elected officials more responsive to deep-pocket donors than those they were elected to represent. In response to the other 99% being left politically and economically disempowered, former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur has announced plans to work toward amending the U.S. Constitution to get big money out of politics and restore representative democracy.

  • Right Wing Front Groups Flood Ohio With Anti-Union Spin

    With Ohio voters looking to overturn Governor John Kasich’s union-busting Senate Bill 5 through a statewide referendum, national Republican donors, strategists and corporations are pumping money into the state to defend the Governor and his bill.

• ACTA

  • ACTA: Get Informed & Take Action!