08.14.09
Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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It’s obviously working — and working well. The Linux Box is currently at work supporting companies, educational institutions and non-profits in industries ranging from engineering to horticulture. It has survived (and grown) in what’s been a tumultuous decade for the economy — and technology. It’s not just because it works with open source software — it’s because it can bring something more to its clients, and the projects its clients use.
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For some, however, the ultimate fun is simply the joy of spreading Linux love to others.
“I have spent the last few years of my life fighting obsolete software and hardware on computer systems in schools,” Pogson said. “I am too tired to have any fun but the next installation of GNU/Linux and the smiles on a user’s face when they find there are better ways to do things with a PC.”
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Desktop
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Perhaps it is an unintended side effect of the Windows-esque desktop I use these days, but I noticed something the other day — a behavior that seems to have changed since the days when I was actually using Windows.
I was having difficulty connecting two machines — my trusty Thinkpad and a relative’s Windows machine on the other side of the planet — and when it became clear that the two things were not going to behave as planned, I did something that I now take for granted: I dove in and tried adjusting things on my side of the fence.
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Others stay because they feel welcome to the Linux community. As some people say, who your friends are make a big difference in staying within any community or organization. Some people who aren’t really into Linux except for work might not feel that the community is an important aspect. But for others, it is. Aside from the fact the community is a rich source of information for sharing and studying, the community is also the place where one can share his/her ideas about the Linux distro he/she uses. It matters especially you’re someone who loves participating in your hobbies then this is something that will encourage you to stay within the community of Linux users.
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That’s the main concern most folks have when they contemplate switching over to Linux. They wonder if things are going to work the same way as in Windows. The answer is, “Yes!” If you can run Windows, you can run Linux. In fact, in many ways, Linux is even easier to run than Windows. And you won’t have to worry about Windows viruses, trojans and spyware. Linux is immune. So say goodbye to the additional cost of Anti-virus software and other programs that are constantly running in the background slowing down your computer’s (Windows) performance.
Linux is fast, familiar, friendly, and easy to use.
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Server
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Despite all the hype associated with a never-ending Linux versus Windows battle, it’s Unix, and specifically Sun Solaris that has felt the most pressure in the server operating system landscape.
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Kernel Space
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Lots of small fixes all over, spread out fairly evenly (50% drivers, and roughly 10% each in arch, fs, kernel, tools/perf, “rest”). And things do seem to be calming down, because outside of some further i915 displayport patches and a couple of perf-counter patches, almost all of them are pretty dang small.
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I expect LinuxCon to turn the page for industry conferences – moving away from “show-n-tell” formats of the past, and towards real technical and business collaboration. I also expect it to represent a time of amazing growth and maturity of Linux and open source software.
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Well, the area where SELinux / Audit and the debugging-enabled kernel really impacted the performance was with the disk and database tests (along with Apache). In the other Linux desktop benchmarks, there was a smaller margin, with some being more noticeable than the others. Disabling SELinux and Audit will certainly improve the performance of Fedora, while running a kernel with all of the debugging code enabled will cost you quite a bit in the way of performance. For developers, having this kernel debugging support is important, while for security-oriented users, having Security Enhanced Linux and system-call auditing support is important and worth the low cost, even with Intel Atom hardware.
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In an interview with the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), Google’s Sean Quinlan says that nearly a decade after its arrival, the original Google File System (GFS) has done things he never thought it would do.
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Applications
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Linux has a cool list of applications. Today, I will talk about the most widely used application, the terminal. The terminal is always required whenever we move out of the premises of inbuilt applications and installed softwares. These three terminals have one thing in common. They can be launched with a single click, and they fly-roll out of the top panel just like in Quake, or UT.
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Games
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During the QuakeCon 2009 press conference, id President Todd Hollenshead announced what many non-Windows computer users had been asking about for months. Quake Live, id software’s browser based shooter, would be adding support for Linux and Macintosh operating system users.
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Grid Wars 2 is a clone of the popular Xbox 360 game, Geometry Wars. It’s an awesome game that plays extremely well on the Mini 9.
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Desktop Environments
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Before we go on it would be best to point out a couple of outstanding locations to find themes. There are two sites that house plenty of E17 eye candy (there used to be three main sites until Freshmeat dumped themes – BOO HISS!). Those sites are: Get-E and E17 Stuff. The latter has far more themes, but the former’s themes are much more interesting.
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KDE
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This time I decided to reveal some of my favorite KDE tricks.
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Qt, and therefore KDE, deals with 3 predominant ways of rendering graphics. I don’t feel like bothering with transitions today, so find your own way from beards and dwarfs to Qt/KDE graphics. Those three ways are:
* On the CPU with no help from the GPU using the raster engine
* Using X11/Xrender with the X11 engine
* Using OpenGL with the OpenGL engine
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Recently Aurelien Gateau of the Canonical Desktop Experience team implemented the Message Indicator for KDE and Konversation. Now if you get messages when you’re away from your computer or not looking at IRC it’ll put them into the message indicator when you can happily not get distracted by them (unlike popup notifications) but can easily find them when you want to.
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KDE 4 is definitively my daily desktop environment, although it’s not yet mature like the 3.5.x branch i consider it enough stable and usable, but sometime the default settings and the few time available, don’t help us to appreciate it, so let’s resume some little tip for beginners that feel lost with everything new and don’t want waste their time.
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On Magnatune.com, we have recently added a number of features to make the memberships more attractive. One of these features (which has actually been around for a while now) is a personal list of favorite albums for each member. On each album page, there is a small button that adds the album to the list of favorites
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Patrick Verner announced the release of Parted Magic 4.4, a Linux distribution that aids users in hard drive partitioning and data rescue. This version features a special program for dial-up networking, sound support through ALSA, Unionfs compression to reduce RAM usage, SSH server initialization upon boot and, last but not least, Super Grub Disk to take care of bootloader problems.
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Pardus is a Linux, desktop-oriented distro that was just reviewed here. This post is to help you configure some very important aspects of the operating system that should have been enabled out of the box. Expert knowledge is not required to make these configuration changes, just the ability to point and click.
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What I liked the most in PCLinuxOS 2009.2?
1.Cosmetics: This point release sports a better look-n-feel than 2009.1.
2.Updates: It endows tons of updates over 2009.1, making it a must for anyone doing a fresh install.
3.Stability: I don’t much of the linux internals but this release seems well tested and polished.
4.CPU management: This release does a great job managing your CPU and power. After installation of 2009.2 when I set out to configure cpu-scaling, I was really surprised to see that pclos had already set proper cpu-scaling for my celeron chip.
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Red Hat Family
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One big investor snapped up a boatload of puts on Red Hat today, positioning for a decline in the shares or increased volatility.
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Debian Family
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Welcome to Karmic Koala Alpha 4, which will in time become Ubuntu 9.10.
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Summary: A great choice for those using older hardware or those who simply prefer a more minimalistic desktop environment.
Rating: 4/5
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It looks just like it was never broken. The display panel is undamaged. The only physical complaint I have about the machine is that they left a little smudge of some sort of goo at the top of the screen, but that wiped off easily.
And it did not come back with Vista. My Linux installation was untouched. Yay Dell!
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Contrary to most of the open-source hardware projects I’ve mentioned on Maximum PC, the Chumby is ready for your attention the moment you pop it out of the box. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t tweak and tinker beyond its simplistic exterior. Although cracking open the soft, loveable digital toy will violate your warranty, the official Chumby site is more than happy to give you a listing of the device’s full hardware and accompanying schematics. From there, only your conscience toward ripping open friendly, plush, communication devices stands in your way of complete hardware transcendence.
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It’s official. ZaReason is launching an Ubuntu Linux netbook called the Terra A20, confirms CTO Earl Malmrose.
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“Going the open source way can address [these] concerns and using the open source development model, it is possible to develop this software at a much reduced cost compared to pure commercial development models. Thus if there was a small team which was driving such a project ensuring the quality of the product, then it is possible to get a lot of assistance from the global IT community to make those systems truly exceptional.
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RoboCar. ZMP, a Tokyo-based company is working on a Linux-based automotive robotics platform that it says “provides the required tools to study various subjects such as applied robotic technology, autonomous movement, communication between vehicles or interaction between cars and humans.” The model shown at left is built at 1/10th scale, and is intended for researchers to study in preparation for experiments with car robotics.
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Web Browsers
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Starting a little later tonight, users with the latest version of Firefox 3 will be getting an offer to update to Firefox 3.5.
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I used to be something of a Web browser junkie. Over the years, I tried just about every new browser that came out. Up until last year, I had five or six browsers installed on my laptop. A bit of overkill, as I came to realize. While I’ve trimmed down my browser consumption, I still check out the occasional one that piques my interest.
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Business
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Fenton tells the WSJ that the real advantage of open source is the distribution model. “Rather than ‘expensive sales efforts and negotiations with the upper management to get the most money possible,’ the people that will be using the software can easily download and try the product,” notes the WSJ.
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Boxee raised its series A round, to the tune of $4 million, last November. With the new financing the company hopes to ink more deals with media companies and set-top box manufacturers, as well as hire more employees to keep building out its technology (which includes a developer platform). Currently in an alpha test phase, Boxee hopes to expand to a beta test in October.
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The Photographer Not a Terrorist campaign is a new British organisation devoted to helping photographers whom the authorities have busted or harassed for being potential terrorists, kidnapping innocent photons with deadly light-sensors.
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Rather than merely dismissing the case, Schwartz found the motorists involved not guilty. The constitutional protection against double jeopardy prohibits the city from appealing the verdict. It is assumed that the court will continue throwing out every photo ticket filed until the city complies with the law. Baylis is now looking to file challenges on behalf of any motorist who has received and paid a ticket in the past.
“As a matter of public policy, I think the public is not in favor of this use of technology,” Baylis said. “I think at some point people are going to become tired of the government intrusion in their lives.”
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But the danger is there, now that e-books are gaining popularity. The Wall Street Journal’s Brett Arends even goes so far as to compare Kindle to Betamax, the Sony-developed videotape format that despite a brief spell of popularity in the ’70s faded into kitschy obscurity when VHS tape became the standard. New consumer technology always means format wars; look at what happened to HD DVD, the would-be competitor to Blu-ray.
The challenge then, is for Amazon’s Kindle competitors to not only embrace ePub but to figure out how to convince would be e-readers that being locked into Amazon — device, format, exclusivity, the whole works — is not what they want.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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I have not bought any of these because they were copyrighted; indeed most of the sheet music is in the public domain but I am still happy to pay good money for a nice edition. The most respect that we can pay to copyright industries is to think only about buying such products and not copyright. The music industry forgot this.
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Google is now offering a way for authors and publishers to offer content for free under the Creative Commons license on Google Books. Rightsholders who want to distribute their books can let users download, use, and share them.
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Canada is planning to reform its copyright law and if the entertainment industries have their way, the rights and privacy of consumers will be thrown overboard. It’s time for all Canadian BitTorrent users to stand up against the increasing power of the anti-piracy lobby, before it’s too late.
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The motion-picture industry has spoken out against a New Zealand proposal to allow them to disconnect entire households from the Internet if one member is accused of copyright infringement; they want to be able to disconnect your Internet connection without giving you a chance to defend yourself in front of a judge because that would be “time consuming.” Instead, they would like to be lord high executioner for your network connection, with the power to shut you out of the benefits of the network (freedom of speech, assembly and the press; access to school, health, family, work and government) without having to prove it in a real court of law.
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“Stringent intellectual property rules could hamper the spread of technology needed to fight climate change.” Paul David, professor of economics at Stanford University, California
“If Hollywood could order intellectual property laws for Christmas, what would they look like? This is pretty close.” David Fewer, staff counsel at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, University of Ottawa, after looking at leaked ACTA documents.
Behind closed doors, the U.S., EU, Japan, Canada and some other countries are negotiating ACTA. No drafts are published. ACTA will contain new rules for the enforcement of copyrights, trade mark rights, patents and other exclusive rights. ACTA will also contain a chapter on “Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement in the Digital Environment”. Other countries will be forced to join later.
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The BMO’s motives here may be more laudable than those of the paranoid doctors. But the collateral damage to our free speech is unacceptable. Using take-it-or-leave-it fine print to assert veto rights over online expression is no way to promote a “society that connects each individual to his or her creative powers.” Burning Man strives to celebrate our individuality, creativity and free spirit. Unfortunately, the fine print on the tickets doesn’t live up to that aspiration.
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Now the retired teacher’s company is being sued by ICBC for what it claims is copyright infringement — a claim that she finds way off base.
“I’m not selling auto insurance,” she told The Province Thursday.
“They’re going after me because I get thousands of visits a month.
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Effective immediately, all PDF books purchased through our site will be free of password protection..
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Back in June, we wrote about how cab drivers in Tampa Bay were trying to get the city council to outlaw new competitors in the form of free ad-supported transportation from some owners of electric vehicles.
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However, what’s fascinating is what happened after that. Scott received an angry email from RSA, the well-known security company, who apparently built the NFCU website, claiming trademark infringement and demanding that he take down the post. RSA was upset with the implication that the site was insecure, but rather than either fixing the problem or explaining why the site is actually safe (which they insist), they threaten Scott with a trademark claim because he has a small screenshot of the NFCU website.
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Gucci America sued several credit card processing companies for trademark infringement on Thursday on grounds those companies facilitated the sale of counterfeit Gucci bags on the Internet.
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A California appeals court on Wednesday overturned a lower court ruling that had paved the way for a $10,000 DVD copying system called Kaleidescape and other products from the company with the same name.
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Open source is the same. Customers subscribe to a series of improvements and services around the software, rather than buying into a big licensing event. The emphasis is on what comes after the initial adoption of the software, not a bunch of marketing and hype to get people to use the software in the first place. The software largely sells itself.
Thomas Bartol, computational neuroscientist for the Salk Institute 03 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.13.09
Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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But Google’s biggest asset is not its search techology per se, but the database of the web which is a by-product of its primary activity and is stored on the proprietary file system that it runs on countless thousands of cheap and cheerful Linux servers, estimated at 650,000 as far back as 2006, and growing by the day.
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Unwin says replacing Windows with Linux would help (80% of viruses are written in China, where Windows dominates). The Ethiopian government has, in fact, made open source software central to its IT plans. Khokhar says it’s no magic solution.
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We’re all familiar with open-source software, such as the Apache webserver or the Linux OS, but in the last few years, open-source hardware projects have risen in popularity, including the open-source electronics platform Arduino.
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Desktop
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If you want to become a Linux Luminary and sponsor the install of a computer to a disadvantaged kid, you can do so by clicking here. The average install costs us 25.00
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But even after all that — and my willingness to sacrifice the contents of the built-in hard drive (all my data is always stored on an external USB hard drive) — I still can’t get Windows Vista or Windows 7 to install or run, even though the open source Ubuntu Linux operating system loads and runs right along without any problems.
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Kernel Space
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This morning Bruce has written on the dri-devel list that they should soon be releasing this new 2D driver. Bruce is hoping that this 2D driver’s source-code will be released in about two weeks. Right now the driver is in the hands of a few community testers for feedback, but they are hoping that the driver will be released very soon unless any new issues are found.
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Applications
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Lazarus may be the most native cross-platform development environment running on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Use it to create native applications with platform-independent code.
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So, now what? What’s the advantage over a full-fledged word processor, aside from having multiple documents? The advantage is the hyperlinking, which we will soon see. Highlight each name you have entered. Then, press CTRL-L like you had done on the first page. Each name is now a hyperlink. From here, you can create a page for each character in your story, giving background information on them, along with personal notes about their history, personality, likes and dislikes, all of that. Then, you can do the same for places, giving as much information or as little as you want about the places and their history. What about events or objects unique or relevant to the story? You can make pages for them as well.
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Games
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Vulcando Games has released the game client for the Linux version of Hive Rise, an extremely fast running online real time strategy game which takes place on huge maps, each providing space for over 1000 human players.
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No release date or pricing information is available for the Linux version of Aquaria at this time.
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GNOME
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We are just a month out from the release of GNOME 2.28, which is the last major update before GNOME 3.0′s expected arrival in H1’2010. With development on GNOME 2.28 winding down, these desktop developers have announced the first beta release. GNOME 2.27.90 is this first 2.28 beta and it includes bug fixes and other work along with the usual variety of documentation and translation updates.
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The most beautiful part of being a linux user is the choice you have, whatever issue it is. Like any other Linux distro, Ubuntu is infinitely customisable with any number of themes and applications. This include login window themes or gdm themes as well. Major source for themes in ubuntu include www.gnome-look.org and www.deviantart.com. There, you could obtain literally thousands of good quality themes.
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The developers of SystemRescueCd have now released version 1.2.3 of the French mini–Linux distribution. The new SystemRescueCd release updates a range of tools and includes a firmware package missing from the previous version (sys-kernel/linux-firmware). The developer has updated the alternative kernels to Linux 2.6.27.29.
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Version 4.4 of Linux distribution Parted Magic was released yesterday (Wednesday). The system, which includes a range of hard drive partitioning and many other useful tools, contains updated software, such as kernel 2.6.30.4, new versions of hdparm, Clonezilla and GNU Parted and a whole range of new features.
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So, my HDD went bust. I have been using GoboLinux since its launch, and there has yet to be a new release since 014.01. Try as I might, I couldn’t switch distributions. So, I installed. This isn’t an easy task. The install CD is so old that you will have to do a lot of updating to install anything new. So where to start?
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Red Hat Family
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In the wake of its acquisition of Virtual Iron, and its hammering out of a converged roadmap for the Oracle VM Server variant of Xen hypervisor, Oracle’s techies are still at work, making tools that wrap around the existing Oracle VM Server hypervisor to make it more useful.
First up is a gadget called Oracle VM Template Builder. This is a graphical utility that allows software developers or in-house IT departments to create a JEOS skinnied down version of Oracle Enterprise Linux. They can then plunk it and a set of system and application software on top of that streamlined Linux inside of an Oracle VM image.
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Oracle has released new tools for building virtual appliances, the software maker’s first significant move in server virtualisation since its purchase of Virtual Iron.
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Debian Family
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Ever since the release team of the Debian GNU/Linux Project announced that it would be adopting a time-based freeze for future releases, there has been much debate about it on the project’s mailing lists.
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The Amahi Home Server, an open source system that handles a range of in-home applications, could soon run on the Ubuntu 9.04 desktop environment. Here’s the scoop and some thoughts about Ubuntu’s potential presence in the home server and media server markets.
According to the Amahi web site, the open source system is a “Home Digital Assistant” (HDA).
“We came up with the term HDA to describe what the Amahi Linux Home Server aims for. Something as simple to use as a PDA, for the home and home networking.”
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Ubuntu’s UNR is a customised version of the standard Linux desktop aimed at making the most of the smaller screen sizes typical in netbook PCs. With its first attempt at the UNR desktop, Ubuntu’s developers removed the obvious top and bottom panels of the standard interface and melded them into the overall appearance of the desktop to maximise onscreen space. They also replaced the bulky panel icons with streamlined tabs for managing open windows as well as making sure all application windows were maximised. By doing this UNR makes it easier to switch between applications and removes the need to drag application windows around.
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The second series, which uses the TI Zoom(TM) OMAP35x Development Kit from Logic, will introduce the use of Qt/Embedded for Linux framework, and will result in a demo-ready medical device.
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Called Facet, it is a hardware version of RealDVD which is Linux-based and has the capacity to hold around 70 DVDs digitally.
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Phones
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A report that O2 will launch the Palm Pré in the UK on 30 October is false, the network operator has told Register Hardware.
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The world’s largest mobile phone vendor will adopt Linux for its higher-end phones, a report claims. Instead of its Symbian-based S60 stack, Nokia will look to open source OS technology such as Maemo, in order to better compete with RIM and Apple, says the Financial Times, Germany.
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Sub-notebooks
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Melbourne-based boutique electronics company Kogan Technologies has reduced the price of its 10-inch Agora Netbook range with the basic model now $399, down from $499.
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Open source software company Inverse released the version 1.0.4 of Scalable OpenGroupware.org (SOGo). SOGo provides a rich AJAX-based Web interface and supports multiple native clients through the use of standard protocols such as CalDAV, CardDAV and GroupDAV. It features a very tight integration with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning and enable mobile devices synchronization through the use of the Funambol middleware. Version 1.0.4 provides new features such as Apple iPhone OS 3 support, better Apple iCal 3 support and memcached support for high-scalability. Moreover, Inverse releases Lightning “Inverse Edition” v0.9.6. This is a maintenance release of Mozilla Lightning based on our 0.9 release which focuses on stability and includes many bug fixes, several small enhancements and some new features of the upcoming Mozilla Lightning 1.0 extension.
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I’m spending the week at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara. Surprisingly, there were something like 1200 registrations and there’s a lively crowd at the Summit. Good news for the business climate, I think. The presentations have been excellent and I’ll be sharing several with you over the next few days. First off is a keynote presentation by Michael Cornwell, Lead Technologist for Flash Memory at Sun Microsystems. (By the way, all of Cornwell’s Flash-related projects have names associated with the fictitious superhero Flash Gordon, hence the map of the Planet Mongo over on the right, which I’ve cribbed from Cornwell’s title slide.)
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The application options available for the midmarket are many and varied. Two popular alternatives to the more traditional — and often more costly — route of on-premise applications are open source and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. Although both provide many benefits, including reduced capital costs and subscription-based pricing models, it’s the differences between the two models that may dictate which is best suited for your organization.
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Unicon, Inc., a leading provider of software consulting services and open source solutions for the education market, today announced new application hosting services for higher education institutions wanting to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of open source learning management systems Sakai and Moodle. Unicon’s hosting service fully supports the community source code versions of the open source software, and delivers a feature-rich, fully functional learning management solution based on the comprehensive out-of-the box product capabilities available in Sakai and Moodle.
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The past year’s economic slump has lead many application architects to explore open source components for their SOA middleware stack – even such complex components as the enterprise service bus (ESB). The decision to adopt an open or closed-source ESB can be tough. It requires a company to weigh cost against complexity and gauge its own programming savvy.
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Open Source’s Green Genes
Open source software negates the existence of software “piracy,” so if enough people began using open source, the industry surrounding the pursuit and prosecution of software “pirates” would go away. All that money and energy could be spend doing something more important. Do you know how many natural resources it takes to manufacture a three-piece suit like lawyers wear? Eliminate “piracy” and you eliminate the need for thousands of three-piece suits every year. Lawyers who work for open source projects don’t need to wear suits. And they probably don’t need to shower as often, either.
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Open source projects in software industry said the programs that the design and construction created for the purpose of free distribution under specific license. In addition to these projects, can participate voluntarily people with little or extensive experience in software issues.Good free open source software programs for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems with no adware and no spyware.
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Business
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Four open-source and proprietary vendors on Wednesday announced a new partnership resulting in a cloud-based BI (business intelligence) stack.
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We’ve reported a number of times before on Acquia, which offers a commercially supported version of the open source Drupal content management system. OStatic runs on Drupal, and Drupal version 6 is expected to soon run over 240,000 web sites, with many large media companies switching to it.
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SpringSource, a software company founded by Australian open source entrepreneur Rod Johnson, has been acquired by virtualisation kingpins VMware in a transaction valued at over US$420 million (AU$505 million).
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Others and I have made much of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million, but one crucial point has been overlooked: this is the first big acquisition of a company that depends on the Apache license.
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In the ideal world, open source software would be free of charges and its communities would operate on a Service Level Agreement (SLA) scale.
There would be virtually no expenses to acquire, use and maintain the software in enterprise IT production environments.
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Nearly three months ago, John Roberts, one of the founders of SugarCRM, a commercial open source CRM vendor, stepped down as CEO. Larry Augustin, a former venture capitalist and one of the driving forces behind SourceForge.net while he was chairman of VA Software, stepped in to replace him. SearchCRM.com sat down with Augustin to discuss his plans while he serves as interim CEO and to get his perspective (as a longtime open source evangelist) on the CRM market.
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FSF/GNU
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GNU Generation, says Shinn in a posting on the Open Source At Google blog, plans to provide a “very informal and relaxed environment”. Participants in the program will have a chance to win a T-Shirt if they are selected as a “contributor of the month” and a GNU/Linux powered netbook if selected as contributor of the year. Details of how to join are available on the GNU Generation wiki.
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Government
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There is one of its services that Google forgot to promote to councils that could save them a lot of money: Google Code. Local government in this country needs to share code as well as using open source software developed by other organisations.
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Local authorities in the UK are increasingly turning to open source software as a way to reduce IT costs, says new research..
Around half of councils surveyed by Public Sector Forums said they will increase use of open source by 2011.
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Licensing
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The second strategy pertains to open-source software.
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Openness
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Sony Electronics is to change the format of the ebooks it sells so that they will work on devices other than its own Sony Reader.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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It’s not certain whether the Middle Kingdom’s U-turn was brought about by public pressure (incredibly unlikely), security fears (significantly more likely) or the impending threat of legal action over copyright infringement (ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!), but it seems that Green Dam will no longer be forcefully installed on every single computer manufactured in or imported to China.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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That’s one revelation from a document we obtained (labeled “AP CONFIDENTIAL — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION”) that offers new insight into how the AP is planning to reinvent itself on the Internet.
[...]
The link economy
Plenty of people have observed — and the AP surely understands — that the consortium’s 163-year-old, print-centric methods of syndication don’t really make sense online, where a link can do the work of distributing content. That sounds like the impetus for this rethinking, but it will surely raise hackles among AP members accustomed to publishing that wire content on their own sites (not to mention selling ads against it).
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The unwillingness to use streaming services is interesting, especially since I’ve seen every one of my son’s friends sign up to Spotify recently. While is is possible that kids really do value “ownership” of music, I suspect it has more to do with the limitations of their online lives.
Thomas Bartol, computational neuroscientist for the Salk Institute 02 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Icelandic National TV channel RUV broadcasted a news story yesterday 11 August 2009 entitlled:
“Nýtt kerfi sparar milljónir” translation “New system saves millions”
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Here are 13 Linux and Open Source graffiti art I found on the Interwebs. I tried to figure out where each was, but for some I just couldn’t find any info.
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The Verdict – Linux serves 90% of my computer needs. Only on occasion must I boot into Windows. Fortunately, dual-booting is now a built-in Linux feature, so readers shouldn’t be intimated if they don’t know how to run two operating systems. Also, supposedly, there is Windows emulation software (such as Wine or Virtual Box), which may completely eliminate my need to boot into Windows – I am yet to figure out how to do this. Aside from these minor hiccups, my verdict is clear: Thumbs up, way up.
Why Didn’t I go Mac?
1). Its Expensive – Should Linux fail to meet my needs, I suppose I can sell a Kidney to buy a $1500+ laptop. But, I’d sooner avoid unnecessary expenses in this never-ending recession.
2). I still run some Windows-only programs.
3). I’ve lost confidence in Apple. Their fascist iphone app store approval system and continued reliance on Digital Rights Management (DRM) for Itunes makes me wary of adopting products that don’t allow for flexibility.
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Desktop
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Before we get started, it would be a good idea to go over exactly what we’re doing and how it all works. When you start up your Linux computer, you go through a series of steps to boot up. GRUB, your bootloader, loads the kernel that’s specified in GRUB’s config file, attaches it to your root partition, and runs the init scripts stored there. From then on, your system is running from within that root partition.
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Windows is like an ocean full of sharks. Do you really want to swim where the sharks swim, even if you take some defensive measures? Macs are like a swimming pool, no sharks. But, the Mac pool is deep and often neglected. Linux also offers a swimming pool, but it’s shallower and better maintained (more later) than the Mac pool.
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You now have to “show” them instead of just “telling” them in order to get them to bite. It’s like fish. You can’t tell them that they should get on your hook. You have to provide a fat, tasty worm first before they’ll even consider looking at your hook.
[...]
Which reminds me. When teaching them about Linux and FOSS, also teach them how to find the answers they need on their own. If they know how to educate themselves, all you’ll need to do is more or less be the mother goose, the one who hatches them and gets them out of the nest, after which they’re able to survive on their own.
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Kernel Space
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I’ve actually written code lately, although for some reason it’s been all these stupid projects. First I needed to fix the kernel tty refcounting, then I got all OCD on the git SHA1 routines.
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Benchmarks
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Have you considered embracing Linux in any of your articles? If you have, but have not acted on such thoughts, why is that? Is it the Linux learning curve? The “lack of benchmarks”? Simply the lack of resources on the part of your editors and product evaluators? After speaking with several editors from fellow publications, these seem to be most of the excuses at hand. However, at Phoronix Media, we have the solutions to these problems — and they are free and easy to adopt. I would invite you to think how using Linux to complement your Windows testing in hardware reviews could benefit your publication by providing more thorough reviews to fulfill the needs of more readers, wooing more hardware companies with having another feature to offer, and generate additional page views from having more content.
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Recently there was a paper published by Avishay Traeger and Erez Zadok from Stony Brook University and Nikolai Joukov and Charles P. Wright from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center entitled, “A Nine Year Study of File System and Storage Benchmarking” (Note: a summary of the paper can be found at this link). The paper examines 415 file systems and storage benchmarks from 106 recent papers. Based on this examination the paper makes some very interesting observations and conclusions that are, in many ways, very critical of the way “research” papers have been written about storage and file systems. These results are important to good benchmarking. And, stepping back from that, they make recommendations on how to perform good benchmarks (or at the very minimum, “better” benchmarks).
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Applications
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One of the first things I hear from people attempting trying to make the switch to Linux distributions such as Ubuntu is that they are finding the sudden shift in how they use their computers to be relatively overwhelming.
Thankfully, there are a number of software titles that I happen to use every day that have made my own switch over to the Linux side of the fence a much smoother one. In this article, I will highlight some of my personal favorites. Hopefully those of you struggling to make the change will find that these options meet your needs.
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The GCDS videos have been online for a while now, but I thought I’d draw some attention to my talk about Grantlee for those that missed it.
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I sincerely hope you have enjoyed this article. I believe it is very detailed and thorough and helps make sense of what Linux gaming is really about. As you can see, it is not a trivial matter. There are many ways of going about Linux games, some very simple and trivial, others more complicated. Some might also cost you money.
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Qt
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Renaming a company can be a torturous process. Developing the new brand, getting the word out, and answering questions can be long and grueling, and at least some customers are bound to be upset, and possibly quite vocal about it. Not everyone is willing to brave these waters, though Nokia obviously is, as it announced today the renaming of its corporate Qt division, Qt Software.
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Photos of Nokia’s upcoming Maemo 5 device have been leaked, and they reveal that it is likely a smartphone and not just a tablet. The device reflects Nokia’s growing commitment to Linux.
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KDE
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The KDE desktop has been the center of changes and controversy for the last eighteen months. However, with last week’s release of version 4.3, the majority of users finally seem to accept — if not necessarily love — the changes. At this point, it seems fair to ask: How successful are the KDE 4 series of releases?
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As usual, Mikolaj Machowski has compiled a commit digest of the work going on in Digikam on his blog. This excellent work deserves a more public spot, so from now you will find them linked on the dot. Those interested in the progress and new developments in the world of digital photography, be sure to click through to the digest!
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The KDE Community released the 4.3 version of its popular Linux/UNIX desktop environment, representing more than 63,000 code changes by 700 contributors, 10,000 bug-fixes, and 2,000 new features. KDE 4.3 adds numerous improvements to the Plasma Desktop Shell and Application Development Framework, among many other enhancements.
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Well, if you like trying out new distributions, certainly give SAM a spin. Despite its problems, it brings forward some original elements that separates it from the crowd. Plus, it is packed with the latest and greatest software. I’m very curious about how the next release will be though, as the developers said that SAM 2009 is the last version using the PCLinuxOS base.
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Arch Linux is a unique distribution, offering the latest free software via a super fast package manager coupled with a “keep it simple” philosophy. It is fast becoming a very popular distribution and now thanks to their split packages, you can install a lightweight KDE 4.3 desktop for even more flexibility and speed.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Trader Media Group and its website Autotrader.co.uk, the UK’s no 1 motoring website, has standardised its platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The combined Red Hat solution has given Trader Media Group a more resilient, high-performing and stable platform allowing Auto Trader’s internal operations team to scale as the company continues to grow.
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Debian Family
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It is in this regard that I was happy to learn of Canonical’s new support service for Ubuntu users. This very strategic but overlooked move could not have come at a right time. The technology world is at a crossroads and the Windows empire is reaching its point of demise. Last week’s DDOS attacks on Twitter and Facebook have provoked lots of anxiety and questions over the reliability of Windows. There needs to be a successor and if Ubuntu is poised to take up that role, then having a formal, reliable and corporate support from the OS vendor is a must.
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The Ubuntu development team has been forced to remove a feature called multisearch from Firefox for the upcoming release, Karmic Koala, following a number of objections by users.
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First you need to install a Linux distribution. This tutorial is based on using CentOS, a free open source operating system.
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The big question is: Is this better than the standard modified Xandros? That’s an easy yes. Apart from the fact that this is a much newer distribution, it has the huge Ubuntu base of applications and support. Yes, you could install plain old Ubuntu yourself and hack away till it’s usable but when you can have a great out of the box experience you’d have to wonder what’s the point.
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Open Source opens the door for companies that are looking to keep on growing despite the current environment.
[...]
Open Source in 2009?
Moreover, as a recent article in Wall Street and Technology) mentions, with the current economic situation cutting IT budgets, even more institutions are reconsidering their attitudes toward open source technology. Think about yourself and the company you work for: How many projects did you want to launch but needed to be put off until next year? How many business opportunities you believe you could have embraced if your budget had been friendlier?
I firmly believe that Open Source opens the door for companies that are looking to keep on growing despite the current environment. It is spreading its influence among different kinds of companies.
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Reviews
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If you are in the market for a blogging platform, content management system or a complete web platform, you can do far, far worse than choose WordPress.
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I think OpenSolaris is interesting to keep an eye on. They are working on some pretty interesting projects, however I think they still need to work on some quirks, before being a good option for students as they would like to associated with. Linux is still far ahead, with the countless amount of drivers, and friendliness.
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Firefox
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In this issue…
* Extend Firefox 3.5 contest!
* MozCamp Europe 2009 needs speakers
* Moz QA Companion 1.0
* User interface performance work
* Firefox startup improvement efforts
* Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 available
* Tips towards building communities
* Animated Personas
* Mozilla Service Week
* Open video codecs discussion
* Configuring web servers for open video and audio
* Lifehacker interviews Firefox Director
* Recent press coverage
* Upcoming events
* Developer calendar
* About about:mozilla
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Today, we are announcing that our Test Pilot platform is opening with the release of the first Test Pilot add-on for Firefox 3.5. We are looking for Firefox users of all levels of skill and all levels of technical knowledge to help improve Firefox and Labs experiments.
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An extension to browser Firefox will suggest cheaper prices for products you browse on the internet.
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Licensing
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Is it reasonable to raise the question “does X still matter?” when the X in question is in use among nearly two-thirds of the target users under discussion?
[...]
Tracking down the real numbers isn’t difficult though and they show that the use of the GPL isn’t decreasing; there may be more and more and projects using open source licences these days, lessening the percentages, but the GPL numbers are only increasing.
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Applications
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If I would pick the best free and open-source internet television desktop client, it has to be Miro. This awesome application (previously called Democracy Player and DTV) is loaded with great features making the TV experience on your computer a lot more fun and exciting.
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Standards/Consortia
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Officially, HTML 4.1 was supposed to be the last word on HTML. According to the W3C, HTML 4.1 was complete and concise, and required no further work. But that was not good enough for the HTML user community, who formed the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG). This group grew strong enough to force the W3C to form an official HTML 5 working group a few years ago, and what they have eventually created is the very small seed that will one day become HTML 5 (I say ‘one day’ because the official specification expects HTML 5 to be completely functional and ready by the year 2022 – and no, that wasnt a typo, I did mean 2022).
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A 34-YEAR-OLD woman, the mother of a 12-year-old girl, has been locked up in a Virginia jail for three weeks and could remain there for at least another month. Her crime? Blogging about the police.
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Back in March of 2008, Comcast’s Gerard Kunkel proclaimed that Comcast was experimenting with embedding cameras in your DVR or cable box, allowing the company to know exactly who is watching what, at what time.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Over the years, we’ve seen a ton of lawsuits against so-called “gripes” sites: people who set up a site because they feel wronged by a company. Company lawyers will often try to bully such sites, and claim that they’re a trademark violations, especially when they use a name like BigCompanySucks.com. The big companies almost always lose such lawsuits. That’s because those sites are obviously not from the company itself and don’t cause any sort of consumer “confusion” over who runs the sites. Earlier this year, we heard that lawyers were finally starting to recognize that suing gripes sites was not a good idea. First, you would almost certainly lose.
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But, really, the bigger point was made by Boyle, via Twitter, where he noted that we are “the first generation to deny our own culture to ourselves and to drive the point home, he notes that no work created during your lifetime will, without conscious action by its creator, become available for you to build upon. For people who don’t recognize the importance of the public domain and the nature of creativity, perhaps this seems like no big deal. But if you look back through history, you realize what an incredibly big deal it is — and how immensely stifling this is on our culture.
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It’s a bit of an odd pairing, but musician Moby was recently interviewed by Walt Mossberg, and among other things they discussed issues like file sharing and the RIAA’s strategy. Moby, of course, has complained about the RIAA’s strategy in the past, calling for it to be disbanded following the Jammie Thomas verdict.
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James Patterson’s latest best seller, “The Angel Experiment,” is a little different from his usual hits. The novel isn’t new; it came out four years ago. Readers aren’t picking it up at bookstores, but mostly on the Kindle site at Amazon.com.
And the price is low even for an old release: $0.00.
“I like the notion of introducing people to one book, while promoting the sales of another,” says the prolific and mega-selling author (and co-author) of numerous thrillers.” His Kindle download is the first book of Patterson’s “Maximum Ride” young adult series.
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Apparently police and the FBI had been trying to track down members of this group for a while, but some good old investigative reporting — from a website — beat them to it.
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Unfortunately, it appears that judge Marilyn Patel (who was also the judge who killed the original Napster) disagrees. She’s issued yet another injunction blocking Real from selling RealDVD, saying that it violates copyright law.
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The use in commercials… however… may be a different story. That would require his authorization, and it’s surprising the team would use the song without any official agreement in place beforehand, but it still seems like quite a leap to then sue for copyright infringement.
Either way, the competing lawsuits seem pretty silly. It’s yet another case of entitlement society. Both sides benefited nicely from the original arrangement: Banks got a lot of free publicity for his song, and the Hurricanes got a song that promoted the team. Win-win.
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Copyright isn’t a war. It’s not us vs. them. It’s about creating a system where society is best off and key incentives are in place to create more content. Our own complaints against those who push for stronger copyrights aren’t about an “us vs. them” attitude. We’ve been quite happy to cheer on smart moves by those who have made mistakes before. Our only concerns are that the end result should be the best for everyone. Not a small group of folks trying to protect an old business model.
Apparently, Access Copyright thinks the laws are just for them.
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It goes on to point out that the answers to these questions aren’t going to come from lawsuits, but by recognizing how people (especially younger generations) view such things and putting in place business models that work. Still, the report does hedge in places, talking about the need for a “favorable regulatory environment,” though it’s not at all clear what’s meant by that. But it’s good to see a gov’t report recognizing this is really a business model (and technology) issue, rather than a legal problem as many in the legacy entertainment industry would have you believe.
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A survey of UK youngsters finds that the only paid music service to interest them is a subscription for unlimited permanent downloads—streaming just isn’t good enough, and buying individual songs is too expensive to appeal.
Thomas Bartol, computational neuroscientist for the Salk Institute 01 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.12.09
Posted in News Roundup at 2:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Ultimately, the desktop virtualization market sounds quiet a bit like a next-generation successor to the thin client market. So it’s safe to expect virtualized desktops to surface within settings where thin clients first emerged — health care, retail and so forth.
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Applications
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Nathive is a libre software image editor, similar to Adobe Photoshop, Corel Photo-Paint or GIMP, but focused on usability, logic and providing a smooth learning curve for everyone. The project run in the Gnome desktop environment and anyone is welcome to collaborate on it with code, translations or ideas.
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Thus I read with interest the related blog posts “Sweet Home 3D” and “Sweet Home 3D: Open Source, Cross Platform Design Application” which, not surprisely, talk about the Java-based open source program called Sweet Home 3D. This seems similar to the programs I used on Windows years ago, though it is, as I said Java-based and open source. I’ll definitely give it a try.
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New Releases
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PC/OS 2009.3 has been released for the general public. This release fixes many of the hardware issues that users had with PC/OS 2009v2 series. With this release we went ahead and and installed all updates so all security updates since PC/OS Maintenance Pack 3 have been applied. The changes to PC/OS 2009.3 application wise are common across all releases except XFCE 4.6 was not included in WebStation due to some issues that are being explored right now on some models of netbooks.
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Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux CD distribution for system administrators, based on Debian testing. Today marks the release of version 93.0 for the x86/AMD64, PowerPC, and UML/Xen platforms.
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The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the second released of the next G:Standard. The G:Standard 3.0.rc01 (2.9.90) is Released. The G:Standard is the original edition first released in the end of October 2004. In the past it was called as GoblinX and later as GoblinX Standard. In order to dismiss doubt about the releases and follow the same criteria used for all distributions (editions) of the GoblinX Project it became simply G:Standard.
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Nokia smartphones may soon be shipped running the phone giant’s Linux-based Maemo operating system instead of Symbian, it has been claimed.
Maemo – also known as the Internet Tablet OS – has been around since 2005 and was originally designed for Nokia’s family of handheld internet gadgets.
Now a report by the Financial Times Deutschland has hinted that Nokia is preparing to drop Symbian from its smartphones, in favour of Maemo. The paper’s source is unclear.
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Inside the Linux-based e-book viewer
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Phones
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Some experts suggest it’s time to warm up to Android, as the Google-backed, open-source mobile-operating system is set to power a growing numbers of handsets, making it an equally vital, if not bigger, long-term play. And though there are only two Android-based phones available in the U.S. (the second one was only introduced last week), Google said 19 Android-based handsets will launch by year-end worldwide, from the likes of LG, Samsung and Motorola, and folks in the app-development space predict about half a dozen of these will be unveiled stateside. Android’s platform is also open source, meaning that unlike the iPhone, anyone can build a device or create apps for it.
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We broke the news on Dell launching a China-only cell phone on Sunday, and today major Chinese news portal 163.com reports the device is on its way: What Dell will be offering in China is an Android-powered “Ophone” called the mini3i.
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Sub-notebooks
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The first netbook pre-installed with Moblin v2 operating system technology may reach market in October. A report suggests that Asus will offer Moblin v2 technology preinstalled on its “Seashell” netbook.
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The Flemish regional Government wants to educate its citizens on “free software (open source)”, it writes in its coalition agreement published on 10 July 2009.
The open source information is meant to help to increase the region’s use of the Internet, including electronic government services, media, culture, health services and eLearning.
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That’s why for some time I’ve been advocating a phased introduction of open source software. This means swapping out programs like Internet Explorer, Outlook and Microsoft Office, and swapping in Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org, but sticking with Windows. Once users are comfortable with these on that platform, it is possible to shift them across to GNU/Linux, using the same apps. Aside from one or two trivial changes of menu structure, the programs work identically across both, which means that users can concentrate on just one aspect of the second move: getting to know GNU/Linux.
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A new way of tracking and capturing employee and customer ideas and data using an made-in-house CRM tool has worked wonders for YES Bank. In a short time, this relatively new banking firm has improved customer service by 60 per cent and turnaround time for its processes by almost 70 percent.
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Around 400 students from various colleges and experts from the IT industry interacted during the event. The topics included Green IT, Cloud Computing, Entrepreneurship, Open Source Software and Natural Language processing which were delivered by experts from IT companies like TCS, CDAC and Omniscient Technologies.
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The other key question that I had for Dasient was how their technology is different than say the mod_security Web Application Firewall (WAF), that is also open source.
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An interesting new piece of security freeware was launched today as Dasient introduced an open source version of its Web server infection remediation technology.
[...]
However, anyone who downloads and installs the freeware version will be granted a limited free trial of the paid services.
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The group, who use open source to power their sites and release their code under the GPL, are looking for ideas which involve the internet and encompass ideas which have an easy to explain “social, civic or democratic benefit”.
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CMS
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Open source custom webhosting platform Joomla! is calling on its users to put it forward for entry into an upcoming awards scheme.
[...]
“There are over 3,000 extensions to Joomla 1.5 in the Joomla Extensions Directory,” the developers explained.
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Matt’s WordPress, which I use at interest.co.nz, is one of the best and most used of these consumer open source softwares. Open source software is built through an essentially cooperative process where developers work together to create and debug software before giving it away. It uses a General Public License (GPL). There’s more information on the GPL here.
Essentially, the free software movement was borne in the early 1980s and led by Richard Stallman, a former MIT student and hacker. See more background here. Other devotees include Linus Torvalds (Linux).
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Business
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“We’ve seen a tremendous growth in interest from companies who really feel uncomfortable with the price hikes and the pricing practices of the big players in the proprietary world,” said Ingres CEO Roger Burkhardt in an interview. “Now that budgets are being squeezed, we see a tremendous interest in the economic model that we offer.”
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One other area to consider: open source. Having strong knowledge of open-source alternatives to purchased products can give you an edge over competitors that are only offering packaged software. Giving your customers options, especially lower-cost options, should help you get work. Open-source solutions are going to be increasingly viable in the future.
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Version 3.3 also allows customers to export to OpenOffice from any screen and the ability to copy one item, row or entire table to the clipbopard. One can export all displays to OpenOffice document formats, as well as HTML and comma-separated text Support for Qt version 4.5, now available under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL),” according to the release.
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Funding
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The price on the deal, $362 million plus the assumption of debt, is curiously close to what another Java framework outfit, JBOSS, fetched over three years ago.
This may also make VMWare a more powerful adversary against Red Hat, although I had thought they were competing with Citrix’ Xensource. Silly me.
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Rather than “expensive sales efforts and negotiations with the upper management to get the most money possible,” the people that will be using the software can easily download and try the product. This helps the best products proliferate and weeds out the underperformers.
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In yet another show of support for open source projects, Google has made another $300,000 gift to the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, increasing its cumulative support of academia’s premiere open source development and hosting operation to more than $1 million. The new funds will support OSL efforts to provide hosting services used by many of today’s most recognized open source projects and communities.
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Government
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“He was one of the early founding members of the Free and Open Source Foundation for Africa as well as being part of the FOSSFA Council. However, he resigned due to differences over governance and direction of the organization and moved on to establish a new organization called AfricanIntelligence with the purpose of focusing on developing developers rather than promoting open source software.”
“He was responsible for the first Open Source project in West Africa (and possibly in sub-Saharan Africa as well) and won awards for creating two of Africa’s top fifty websites. He has made minor contributions to OSS projects like the Linux Cross Reference tool, RedHat’s Interchange e-commerce system, Ruby’s Rannotate and JavaScript and Ruby implementations of a 2D barcode system, DataMatrix aka Semacode.”
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UK
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Mr O’Brien insisted that “open source” systems could be more secure. We guess he means open source database software run by government offices, not inviting all the world’s under-employed programmers to rewrite the UK’s NHS software systems.
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The Conservatives say they “welcome these conclusions” in part because they are “consistent with our plans to free the NHS from Labour’s central control and interference so that it is locally accountable to patients and can focus on improving the results of their treatment”.
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Miram Nisbet has been hired to head the Office of Government Information Services, which is housed at the National Archives and Records Administration. The ombudsman’s office was created by the 2007 amendments to the Freedom of Information Act to be an intermediary between government agencies and requesters.
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US
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The project’s initial strategy will be guided by Brian Behlendorf, an open source advocate and contractor to the Administration’s Open Government team.
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The White House is telling its agencies, which are set to prepare budgets, to pursue an “open innovation”-approach to government, be visionary in their spending requests, and focus on “transformative” projects that help the climate, energy, life expectancy and the economy.
[...]
The “open innovation” concept is akin to that used in open source circles. But longtime open source advocate Eric S. Raymond, author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, read the White House memo and said he believed its call for open innovation is largely meaningless.
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Linux-based and open-source healthcare software has been around for years. Unless you were in health IT, however, chances are you never even heard of it. It’s time to pay attention, because it may soon be tracking your medical records.
With the passage of ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009), $19-billion dollars has been ear-marked for Medicare and Medicaid technology incentives over the next five years. Collectively, this program is known as HITECH. If open-source, medical software advocates have their way, some, if not most, of that money will be going to free software and open standard based EHR (electronic health records).
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Openness
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Forge.mil, a family of services for developing open-source solution for the DOD, is example of the enterprisewide, on-demand services DISA wants to continue to develop, Mihelcic said.
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3-D printers can take blobs of plastic and shape them into almost any object you desire. Now, thanks to open source hardware designs and enthusiastic do-it-yourselfers, these printers are increasingly popular and accessible. People are using them to fabricate iPod docks, plastic bracelets, hair clips and miniature teapots at home.
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Yesterday the website WikiLeaks* published TOP SECRET information about loans made by Kaupthing bank just before the Big Meltdown last October. The info is a 209-page inside document containing slides used at a meeting of the bank’s loans committee on September 25 last year.
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There are currently over 1700 plaques, which can be browsed by area, by person, by role or by organisation. Though the project is currently in alpha the idea is that anyone will be able to add or edit plaques, and display photos uploaded to Flickr. We hope there will be participation from local history groups, schools and so on!
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U.S. regulators have launched an inquiry into whether certain broadcasters are refusing to air the music of artists who demand to be paid when their songs are played on the radio.
The Federal Communications Commission reviewed a June petition by a music coalition that accuses radio stations of skipping songs of artists who support legislation aimed at paying royalties to artists.
According to an official notice dated on Friday, the agency is seeking public comment on the petition until Sept. 23. The FCC customarily seeks comment on proposals for new or amended rules, but petitions received on a wide variety of subjects are also published for public comment.
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If anything, I suspect the internet is going to create a society that is more honest and forgiving. We will be returning to a world of thin anonymity – a world where it is difficult to escape from the choices you’ve made in the past. But the result won’t be a world where fewer people take risks, it will be a world that recognizes those risks were necessary and expected.
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We always knew that any company courageous enough to take a technology designed to help mega-corps monitor their inventory levels and make it mainstream would face an uphill battle, but we never envisioned Nabaztag caving entirely to the pressure.
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This is the sort of question you might ask after trying to actually verify his supposed MS in Information Technology from the University of Maryland, College Park campus. The registrar has no record of it. In fact the current University of Maryland grad department doesn’t even show this degree as being commonly available to anyone. A search of his college records shows no attendance after he received his BS degree in Psychology on 12/20/98. In fact his last day of school 12/19/98 wrapped up the six years it took Kundra to obtain his undergraduate degree.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The UK Pirate Party has been officially registered at the Electoral Commission and is hoping to follow in the footsteps of its successful counterpart in Sweden. With all the recent controversy surrounding anti-piracy legislation and lawyers going after alleged file-sharers, the party has become necessity.
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Posted in News Roundup at 4:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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This is the first in a series of posts on just what the title says: The command line. The main point will be this: Stop worrying about the command line.
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If I were Novell, Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, or Canonical, I would be pushing the idea of Linux as a “green” alternative to Microsoft and Macintosh. I would also push the idea that “green” means saving money while saving the environment. This claim is not without merit. There have been many advances in Linux power consumption technologies.
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The weekly starts with a first look at the brand-new KDE 4.3.0 desktop environment, followed by the Linux distributions announced last week: Linux Mint 7 KDE Edition, PTS Desktop Live 2009.3, Slackware 13.0 RC2, Arch Linux 2009.08 and Trisquel 2.2.
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Events
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Text versions of the presentations given at the Linux Symposium 2009 are now available as a PDF file. They provide wide-ranging information on current and future Linux kernel-related developments. The spectrum ranges from profiling using Ftrace, through recent changes to the PCI subsystem intended to make suspend and standby more robust, to the latest developments, such as topology patches, in 2.6.31 and the Kernel Shared Memory infrastructure planned for 2.6.32.
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The Ruthvens have been regulars at LCA – as it is better known – since 2006, when it was first held in New Zealand, with Dunedin playing host.
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Google
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Microsoft’s troubles make the company’s OS doubly vulnerable. Vista, its current version, has been roundly criticized, and it has never caught on as widely as the company anticipated; many Microsoft customers continue to use the previous version of Windows, XP. A new version being released this fall, Windows 7, promises to remedy the worst problems of Vista. But even 7 may not address a set of technical issues that both galvanize Microsoft’s critics and stoke the appetites of Brin and Page to create a more pleasing alternative. In their view, the Microsoft OS takes too long to boot up, and it slows down even the newest hardware. It is too prone to viral attacks and too complicated.
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While everyone contemplates the place that Android will hold on the mobile device, in home entertainment and on the netbook, there is another interesting use-case for Android that’s not yet been talked about. There’s no reason that Android, as a complete OS, application stack and ecosystem (including the app market), has to be run on the client side. In environments where multiple users might want to use the same client hardware (monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc), such as at the office, the thin-client model could be a very useful way to access any given user’s Android session. This way, the Android session can be displayed at any end-point, be it a desktop, notebook, meeting-room projector, or even smartphone device. Using a VPN or even SSL protected web browser session from home, a user could also bring up their work Android session.
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Desktop
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Back in July, System76 said it was having trouble keeping up with Ubuntu netbook demand. And more recently, another Ubuntu PC specialist told me they plan to introduce an Ubuntu netbook (potentially in August 2009) to fulfill growing customer inquiries.
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Server
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This Linux cluster, being interconnected by Infiniband, is one of the largest cluster systems in the world and is the core system of the RIKEN Supercomputer System. In addition, one of the clusters is equipped with accelerator boards designed specifically for molecular dynamics simulation. The cluster provides very unique service to users.
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PowerSeries focuses on password management and provisioning within heterogeneous UNIX and Linux environments. It also helps extend ActiveDirectory access control into Unix and Linux environments in order to create a single sign-on infrastructure across Windows, Unix and Linux servers.
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Linux cluster vendor Penguin Computing has created a cloud computing environment aimed at the HPC space. Penguin’s POD service is built on the vendor’s Intel-powered Linux clusters, high-speed interconnect technologies like InfiniBand, NetApp SANs, Nvidia graphics chips and Penguin’s Scyld ClusterWare management software, all important technologies for highly parallel, memory-intensive HPC applications. Penguin also is not using virtualization technologies on its server clusters, which officials said will improve server and I/O performance.
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Today, the San Francisco-based outfit announced the debut of what it calls Penguin on Demand – POD, for short – a service that offers remote access to high-performance computing (HPC) Linux clusters. The idea is to provide researchers, engineers, and simulation scientists with the sort of number-crunching power they can’t get from something along the lines of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
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Kernel Space
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While the Intel kernel mode-setting graphics driver entered the mainline Linux 2.6.29 kernel, and is beginning to become the default driver in various desktop Linux distributions, the KMS driver does not yet have a feature parity with the traditional DDX xf86-video-intel driver. However, announced on the DRI development list today is one more feature that has now been introduced into the kernel mode-setting driver and generic DRM mode-setting code. This is video overlay support for Intel hardware.
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Linux.com: What are some of the challenges you believe Linux will need to address in the days ahead?
Bdale Garbee: The biggest challenge for Linux itself may be just that it works so well in so many places that it’s becoming easier to take it for granted and let most of our attention be drawn elsewhere. But Linux itself, the kernel and common core of software packages around it that are at the heart of every distribution, are critical components that we can’t afford to let get lost in the swirl of announcements about new technologies above and around us.
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Applications
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I downloaded several programs (GUI as well as console) and poked around a bit with each. Here are five gui hex editors you can use on ubuntu 9.04.
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There still isn’t a stable release of Google’s Chrome browser for either Linux or Mac users, but Google is getting closer with the Chrome 3.0.197.x dev-channel release.
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GNOME has a basic screenshot application called gnome-screenshot, KDE has an advanced one called KSnapshot, which includes options to take screenshots of selected regions, fullscreen, or window under cursor, with or without a time delay (for taking screenshots of menus for example). But neither one of them compares to Shutter, a complex screenshot tool with many features, and the possibility to edit and apply effects directly from within it.
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Avant Window Navigator (AWN) is an application launcher and dock which would redefine your Linux experience. The good part is it’s highly customizable and hence will fit perfectly well with your Ubuntu theme. Let’s see how to install and customize AWN on your Ubuntu machine.
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More details about the release can be found in the 1.3.x Roadmap and in the change log. A “Get Started with Scribus” guide is provided. Scribus 1.3.5 requires Qt 4.4.0 or later and is available to download from SourceForge.net. Scribus is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).
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There are over 200 collected screensavers in the collected xscreensaver packages. You will most likely find a screensaver that suites your needs here. No, you can not install that latest piece of work from the SyFy channel or from E! magazine, but you can find plenty to use and they will do their job well.
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Almost one year ago, on August 13, 2008, the last version of Amarok 1.4 for KDE3 was released. Since Amarok 2 for KDE4 was launched, bringing a completely redesigned interface and changing mostly all the major design concepts, users of this great player divided into two groups, the ones who still like 1.4 better and the ones who look forward for a complete Amarok 2.x (which still lacks many features from the old 1.4).
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GigaTux is proud to announce that we now support all versions of Turnkey Linux on our standard Virtual Private Server packages. Automatic installs and reinstalls of any Turnkey Operating System can be performed through the provided web interface, and basic support is provided.
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Slack*
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With its novel package manager, Slax makes it simple to install new software and easy to build your own distributions.
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The Slack Mini Server (SMS) Project team announced yesterday, August 10th, the release of Slack Mini Server 1.4.5, which celebrates 2 full years of activity. The new release is based on Slackware Linux 13.0 RC2 and it brings Asterisk PBX, Samba 3.4.0, PHP 5.3.0 and many updated packages (see below for details).
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PCLinuxOS
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This might actually be the very best distro available for new users, and has features that make it a great distro for the rest of us as well. Another distro that is similar to PCLinuxOS, are Mepis even though its Debian based. Really, I can’t say I liked this distro, but I would say I loved it, that it exceeded what I thought possible that a Linux could do. I would recommend PCLinuxOS to anyone, its made me a fan. Now, on a negative note, what did I find that was wrong with PCLinuxOS? You know I have to find something, even if its picky. So don’t take it wrong PCLinuxOS community, but the number one thing I found wrong, is no 64 bit version. Other than that its truly an outstanding job folks, please continue the hard work! The polish and attention to detail in this distro is the best I have ever seen.
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The only hurdle in mastering this operating system involves you familiarising yourself with the PCLinuxOS Control Center. Fortunately, the menus are organised and lots of practice can be done on the Live CD mode anyway. It is completely easy to setup from the start and all the applications mentioned earlier are all ready for launch. The overall environment makes it very appealing to Windows users that never used Linux before thanks to the friendly environment that the KDE 3.5 brings.
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A member of the SAM Linux Team announced a few hours ago the release of SAM Linux 2009. This distribution is based on PCLinuxOS 2009.1 and is fully compatible with its packages, but later releases will be based on another distribution, unspecified at this moment.
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Red Hat Family
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Ten years ago today, on August 11, 1999, Red Hat saw its shares triple in an initial public offering that ushered in a new era of commercial open-source prosperity.
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) is trading 0.8% higher (up $0.18 to $22.02) today on volume of 423,696 shares. The stock is trading near its 52-week high of $23.72. We are watching for a close above that level.
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Red Hat, Inc. (Red Hat) is principally engaged in the provision of enterprise-ready open source operating system platforms. It offers a wide range of open source software solutions including core enterprise operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, enterprise middleware platform, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and other related Red Hat enterprise technologies. These enterprise solutions are designed to address the requirements
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North Carolina-based Linux and open source technology provider Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) has become a technology provider for China’s first government-led cloud computing center, reports eNet.com.cn quoting Red Hat’s August 5 announcement.
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Debian Family
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The cycle was created by Matt Gray and Tom Scott and uses a janky exercise bike and an Arduino board. The input from the cycle connects to a laptop running Ubuntu and wondershaper.
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The Ubuntu design team have published mock-ups of the proposed Ubuntu 9.10 Boot and GDM screens.
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Nokia
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The N900, as we are calling it now, can be termed an upgrade over the N97. The device features a full QWERTY keyboard and a huge 3.5-inch touch screen capable of WVGA resolution (800×480). It is expected to run the upcoming Maeomo5 OS, the latest version of the Linux based smartphone OS that Nokia uses for its lineup of tablet devices. That, we believe, would be the major difference between this one and the N97 which runs on the more “mass market” Series 60 Fifth Edition OS.
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Nokia could be set to ditch Symbian as its main smartphone OS in favour of Maemo Linux. At least that’s the gist of a report in the German edition of the Financial Times (aka the FTD). Read on for all the details.
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Now Qt Software is being renamed as Qt Development Frameworks and the web address will change to http://qt.nokia.com.
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LiMo
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Panasonic Corp and NEC Corp unveiled nine new cellphone models on Tuesday that run the open-source LiMo operating system, wireless Linux group LiMo said.
The focus of the cellphone market has been shifting to software development since Google Inc and Apple Inc entered the mobile market in the past two years, with phone vendors and operators increasingly looking for open source alternatives such as LiMo to cut costs.
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Limo Foundation, the Linux-based open systems development group for mobile phones, yesterday launched nine new phones from NEC and Panasonic for Japanese telco NTT Docomo, bringing the Limo-compliant range to 42.
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Android
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The device blogosphere is working overtime ahead of the flurry of handset launches for the holiday season, with its focus firmly on Linux. As well as the Nokia N900, this week has seen newly leaked details of Motorola’s make-or-break Android phones, and Dell is finally expected to unveil the smartphone it has been promising all year.
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For anyone reading the tea leaves, it should come as no surprise that Motorola will be offering a few Android handsets this year. Om spoke with Moto CEO, Dr. Sanjay Jha, and generally confirmed that the handset maker is focusing on Google’s Android instead of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile for smartphones.
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Mobile content retailer, Mobile Streams, today opened a Center of Excellence for smartphone research and development in Hong Kong which it says will work on the development of new applications for the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android.
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Sub-notebooks
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Sony Ericsson appears set to launch a netbook. Sorry, smartbook – the phone firm’s micro laptop seems likely to be as much phone as portable PC.
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Now I love technology, especially liberating ones, especially for kids (the next generation of humanity), and especially with new GUIs. I love the lost science-art called interface design, and this seems to progress (and sometimes seemingly regress) so slowly that it is wonderful when something new comes along– not to mention it is based on Linux and wholesomely Open Source. It is not difficult to see why one would be so enthusiastic about this project from the get-go.
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The folks at Canonical are in the process of redesigning the user interface for Ubuntu Netbook Remix. UNR is basically a custom version of Ubuntu that includes optimizations for netbooks with Intel Atom processors as well as a desktop environment and program launcher designed for computers with small, low resolution displays.
The first version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix introduced a few key concepts. By default, all program windows opened up in full screen. And instead of a typical desktop and start menu approach, you had a list of application categories on the right side of the screen, program shortcuts with big icons in the middle, and a list of places on the right side.
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The default desktop environment is KDE. In Linux/UNIX circles concerning the desktop you’re either a GNOME or KDE type of user (or a super-lightweight environment like Fluxbox). I personally prefer GNOME, but I’m not turned off by the way KDE does things; it’s just a different type of environment compared to GNOME.
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Sure, Microsoft got away with creating two massive businesses (Windows and Office) by copying its competitors and out-executing, but even Microsoft doesn’t get a free pass anymore. Have you seen how its me-too offerings on the Web have fared? Weak.
This digital upheaval is having a widespread impact beyond software. Record labels, newspapers, health care, and other industries are being overrun by digitization. At some point, we’ll get past this in-between phase and a new era of digital prosperity will ensue. As with Vanderbilt, however, we’ll need to be careful that our exuberance for income doesn’t get carried away into monopoly.
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Researchers and developers at the University of California, Berkeley are working on open source software to help distribute audio and video files of classroom lectures to media services like iTunes and YouTube. The university already publishes full-length videos of classroom sessions on YouTube, but recording, editing, and posting these videos is an costly undertaking. Now, new grant money will pay those expenses and help expand video distribution worldwide.
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The 15-page report, “Open or Closed? A Survey of Open Source Software in Local Government,” is available from the UKGovOSS.org website, an online network sponsored by Bull and One Point Consulting since April 2009. The project is an initiative of the Public Sector Forums originally dedicated in the U.K. to being a public information source on digital television and its use as an e-Gov channel, but having expanding its reach to Internet and open source activist issues.
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Using SunSpider, a JavaScript benchmark, the score for 3.6 Alpha 1 improved significantly over 3.5.; version 3.6 benchmarked at 1107.2 ms vs. the 1517.4 ms Firefox 3.5 benchmarked. SunSpider tests the core JavaScript language, and with this benchmark test, a lower score is better.
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Business
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In other words, provided that open-source companies can fill the revenue hole with premium features or some other value-added service that compels payment, then the other advantages of open source trump that of proprietary products.
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That’s why I think my conversation with my friend will come full circle in the long run. He doesn’t see open source platforms as all that competitive right now, but he likes the Red Hat model. The catch is, though, that the Red Hat model focused on service and support ends being a rising tide that lifts many boats–where the quality of the software directly benefits.
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Fresh off a new round of financing, open source content management (CMS) vendor Acquia is putting its new funds to work in taking the Drupal open source CMS to new heights in the enterprise.
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Government
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A DIY guide to becoming an MP and a database of the connections between the powerful could soon be created online.
The two ideas are among those being considered by MySociety – a charitable group that helps construct civic tools.
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Standards/Consortia
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With video streaming site Dailymotion offering the free Ogg Theora video format, FSF urges other video sites to follow.
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It’s no secret that established businesses or organizations get upset when they see any form of “free” competition — even when it’s utilizing a new or different business model or social model.
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Then the National Enquirer reported that a poet named Damon Lloyd Goffe had filed an audacious complaint claiming copyright infringement. Only problem was that Goffe never registered the copyright on his poems, and more than a week before many news outlets were reporting the $1 trillion lawsuit, a judge had already dismissed the complaint for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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Websense has blocked two ISPs in Yemen from receiving updates after it emerged that they were using its filtering technology in a government-mandated censorship scheme.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Comcast, for its part, denies that the character is Godzilla, though Toho doesn’t buy it. Of course, you might ask where’s the actual “harm” here, as it would seem to only help advertise Godzilla and Godzilla movies — though, Toho would likely argue that the harm is in Comcast not licensing the character (or the potential idea that this makes Godzilla “generic”).
Maria Winslow, open source biz guru 04 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.11.09
Posted in News Roundup at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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We need to let people know about the hardware vendors who sell Linux-preinstalled systems. My personal blog includes a “hardware links” section linking to Dell, ZaReason, and System76 and a badge I made that says “I use ZaReason Ubuntu hardware” is in the sidebar. I remember seeing lots of Emperor Linux ads in magazines, but given their prices and that what they sell are machines that are only sold by the manufacturers with Windows, I get the impression these are simply Windows systems whicha have been replaced with Linux and are being resold.
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Desktop
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Verona is about to become famous for more than just Romeo and Juliet and opera: the university of the romantic Italian city is migrating 4000 of its desktops to Linux and open source.
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Linux Against Poverty was just one of the shining jewels we can claim as our own. While we were focused on that, there is an ongoing sister-effort taking place in Florida. Michael Hall along with his wife (he’s the developer of Qimo,) an Ubuntu-based distro for kids; is doing pretty much the same thing we are. Oh, you really need to read Michelle Hall’s blog. It brings what we do in this business into sharp perspective.
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I will say that we are blessed to be able to adapt so easily. In reality I almost feel guilty it was this easy for me and my family to adapt. But even if I had to pay someone for Linux support, it is easy to see how in the long term it would be a much more affordable computing experience. Having a secure and much more hardware efficient operating system means that trips to the computer tech would be few and far in between.
In my experience, the small challenges to adapt were easily met and conquered. it is certainly within everyone’s scope of possibility to do so as well. The rewards are many,
* longer lasting hardware
* more efficient computing experience
* less financial impact to use and support
* more secure internet experience
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Devices with small screens will ultimately make the desktop experience better for everyone but only if we deliver applications that make the experience better. A desktop and a browser are not enough. “Web applications” that you access through the browser are not enough. We need applications that take advantage of the power the desktop has to offer.
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Kernel Space
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The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) invites participants to the Real-Time Linux Foundation Workshop from September 28 through 30 in Dresden, Germany. Well-known names such as Jonathan Corbet will be present.
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Current conditions: the 2.6.30 kernel was released on June 9. The 2.6.30 development cycle saw the addition of almost 12,000 individual changes from over 1100 developers representing some 200 different companies. 2.6.30 has 624,000 more lines of code than 2.6.29.
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Applications
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GCompris is a excellent educational software suite for children aged 2 to 10. Most of the activities are game orientated educational. GCompris offers more than 100 activities in differentclassifications like classified into mathematics, puzzles, computer discovery, amusement activities,strategy games, experimental activities and reading activities. Gcompris is available in more than 40 Languages.
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Bordeaux is a port area in the southwest of France on the river Garonne. Produces are high-quality wine. Recently it its name in English (wine) of each application and environment, which programs you run Windows on Unix without that you must have installed the Windows operating system.
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The Unigine Engine, which is likely the most advanced 3D game engine that natively supports Linux, has stepped further ahead today. Unigine Corp has provided word of several new features and updates to this advanced game engine.
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K Desktop Environment
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While reading some scientific papers with KPDF Okular I used my mouse to grab the paper and scroll.
Annoyingly, you have to click and drag all the time. Then, after reading intensively for some time, I suddenly realized I hadn’t used my mousebutton for a while. Yet I read through a few pages already. Looking for my mouse cursor, I noticed it was on top of the screen. ???
So – I drag the page down, continue to drag even while reaching the bottom of the screen and lo and behold! Once you cross the bottom of the page, the mouse cursor appears on top of the screen and you can just continue to drag! I used a great feature and didn’t even notice…
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SAM is a pleasant, small LiveCD distribution that doesn’t use Gnome or KDE (although in all fairness XFce does use Gnome libraries). The software selection is small but covers most of the common themes users will want.
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It’s pretty, but I’m not sure how much of that is the work of the maintainers and how much of it is owed to KDE 4. Their differentiating features, PIG and KISS, are less than impressive to a casual user.
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After running into Problems with Mandriva 2009.1 with my sound cutting out and making static sounds and sometimes not working at all I decided to give PCLinuxOS a try. Since PCLinuxOS is based on Mandriva the first thing I did was check to make sure the sound was working properly and it was.
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Sabayon is always fun. It’s pretty, has a good selection of software, and it’s still the easiest way to get a working Gentoo-based system on my computer.
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As someone commented on the FAB mailing list, our pages should feel like invitations to become part of our community. There’s no better way to do that than by showing how fun and exciting Fedora can be, and by making it as easy as possible for people to get it. Something not shown on Mo’s blog is what happens after you click the big download button. The afterpage is so much easier to understand than our previous pages, and makes it a snap for people both to get the help they need, and to learn more about our community and how to get involved.
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Debian Family
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In a long posting on the Debian mailing list, Ubuntu sponsor Mark Shuttleworth sets out his position in the dispute over bringing a fixed development cycle to Debian’s GNU/Linux distribution.
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It remains to be seen how well Canonical can actually deliver the support promised by the Starter package, and whether the new offering will help generate the revenue needed to make the company self-sustaining. I’m also skeptical about the other support plans introduced last week, which, at $110 and $220, seem less realistically priced than the Starter package.
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All in all, Linux Mint 7 is going to be my main machine from now on, at least until I get my claws on another unsuspecting distribution. It is a distribution I spent very little time customizing and I have a pretty specific setup. Flash was there, Gnome Do was there, the GNOME bar was already on the bottom of the screen, I liked the icon theme. Linux Mint is the Ubuntu cake with some extra-delicious icing. The icing doesn’t make it slow, just better. Way better than vanilla Ubuntu. So, if you chose Ubuntu because it does most of the things for you, take Mint for a spin. It does everything, you can just sit back, relax and have a few evil laughs in your secret control tower. Minty fresh.
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A distinguishing attribute to the Chumby is its very open hardware/software environment. By making details available on all the inner workings, Chumby Industries actively encourages users to hack the device and develop new uses for the platform. While many electronic devices have their own supporting software development kit (SDK) environment for third parties, few are as open as the Chumby’s, which provides access to everything from the hardware schematics to an open-source Linux-based software client.
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This chapter explains what Android is, how and why it was developed, and where the platform fits in to the established mobile marketplace.
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Sub-notebooks
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Moblin technology may see use in ARM-based netbooks. In announcing its newly shipping touchscreen-equipped “Touchbook,” Start-up Always Innovating said that “over time, in 2009,” it will support “interesting projects such as Moblin.”
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Moblin is proving itself to be a welcomed “third addition” into the operating system cadre, being comprised today of Windows, regular Linux and now Moblin Linux. Its GNOME-derived GUI has taken on a feel of its own, one which (in my opinion) separates itself sufficiently from the traditional GUIs out there to be in a class all by itself.
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Meanwhile, the Linux-based Touch Book OS software is still in beta, and is missing key pieces of the final release due later this year, including Adobe Flash, a Skype-compatible VoIP app, and OpenOffice 3.1. The final release will also offer iTunes sync, and “3D accelerometer-based iPhone games” (for more on the Apple connection, see farther below).
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The ARK-3400 is designed to run Fedora 9.0 Linux or Windows Embedded operating systems from a Type I/II CompactFlash slot. Alternatively, as suggested earlier, the device accepts a 2.5-inch SATA hard disk drive, which would provide room for Windows 7 or another desktop operating system.
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This video is a demo of Kubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 netbook edition run from within VirtualBox. Karmic Koala Alpha 3 comes with the new KDE desktop environment (build on KDE 4.3 RC), which still looks pretty damn good.
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We need some inter-community collaboration. Can we get everyone, regardless of distro or desktop environment, to agree that new users are a good thing and that we should be encouraging them? Can we get people to do that online, when it’s so much easier than in person to be a jerk without the pesky conscience getting in the way? It’s necessary in order to grow the greater Free Software user community.
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Filmaster.com, the open source movie recommendation service and film buffs community website, was just fully switched from Subversion to Mercurial for version control software.
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On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you’ll find an updated set of more than 45 collections and resources. Hopefully, you’ll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.
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Live chat and CRM software vendor Kayako wants to help charitable foundations and open source software projects provide better customer service to users, so the company has announced it’s offering free and unlimited licenses for all help desk software and add-ons to charities and teams developing open source software.
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Obviously, I would want our ‘National Cloud’ (not that I want any Cloud at all thanks -I prefer owning my own data) to use Open Standards and Open Source technology; e.g. Nimbus, Eucalyptus et al. I would like the debate to start before we read the announcement about what they bought from whom. It would be a disaster for Open Source software if the National Cloud was based on proprietary technology.
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With this post I’d like to tell you a bit more about the coalition Open Source for America and why I believe it is so important for our collective future. I would also like to encourage you to join this coalition yourself. Whether you represent industry, academia, non-profit organizations or are an individual technologist this coalition needs your help and support.
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VMware seems to want the goodies SpringSource snatched up when it bought Hyperic. Rod Johnson and company purchased Hyperic in May, a move which puzzled me a bit at the time. Now that VMware is paying US$362 million for SpringSource, a company built originally to support the Spring framework for Java, I think we all know why Hyperic was valuable.
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Marketcetera feels that open source software is an ideal way for smaller brokerages to keep up with — and perhaps outmaneuver — their larger competition. Marketcetera CEO Graham Miller sees open source hosted/SaaS (software as a service) trading platforms as having particular potential for investors using high frequency trading methods. And Miller isn’t the only one who believes this — the evidence is vibrantly illustrated by Sky Road LLC’s integration of Marketcetera’s open source, automated trading platform into its SaaS financial services product line.
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Robotics
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Ultimately, whether the robot world rallies around an open source OS or a commercial OS will depend on the vibrancy of the developer community and the availability of “apps” that underlie more advanced capabilities.
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Government
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None of this will come as a huge surprise to anyone that has been following this sector for a while. The fear of failure and lack of support from central government are familiar problems. But what is useful is the quantification of other aspects of open source use in local governments that this survey provides. Let’s hope the UKGovOSS site thrives and is able to bring us updated surveys – maybe even ones that show some real progress in this frustrating area.
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Openness
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For another illustration of the growing impact of hybrid open access programs on online journals prices, this time at Oxford University Press, cf. my newest posting to liblicense-l and lis-e-resources, Disturbing spread of dyscalculia in recent publisher price lists and announcements (Aug 7, 2008)
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During the Bush era the Canadian war on science was an embarrassing side show to that of its more wildly offensive southern neighbour which regularly silenced scientists, withheld reports, or simply appointed “expert” panels whose credentials were dubious but whose members could be counted on to produce the “right” answer. Indeed, these sad events are well chronicled in Politics And Science In The Bush Administration drafted for Representative Henry Waxman. (This, as an aside, is what happens when you give elected representatives real research budgets – they look into all sorts of issues to keep the government of the day honest. A similar study by a Canadian MP would have stretched their resources beyond their limit).
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Firefox
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In this article today, you will read about the 10 extensions I find helpful in achieving better productivity when working with the browser, improving the speed and clarity of Web-related work, reducing the web page clutter and accompanying poor coding practice errors, reducing down-the-throat nagging, helping automate tasks and save tremendous amounts of time, and lastly, allowing me to carefully track down and maintain large quantities of data that I come across in my Internet adventures.
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As a believer that competition is generally good for technology products, I’m convinced that Chrome will ultimately be good for Firefox.
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The initial plan for Firefox 3.6 (code named Namoroka) originally aimed for including pieces of Personas, Ubiquity (a command line in the location bar), Jetpack (light extensions), and Prism (ability to make web applications more desktop friendly), but when a few weeks ago, Firefox development team decided for a quick update (later this year) rather than a new year-long development cycle, it was clear not all would get in on time.
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Programming
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To illustrate open source sophistication, just look how easy it has become to start and manage projects. It is almost a cookie-cutter procedure. You pick one of a number of well known licenses, manage the code on SourceForge.net or Launchpad, communicate with the project through skype and mailing lists, and tell the world about it using your blog plus Twitter. Within an afternoon you have set up infrastructure to support efficient collaborative development with team members from Seattle to Singapore. The number of projects itself makes the point: SourceForge.net alone has over 230,000 projects.
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Two disturbing stories this week demonstrated the dangers of rejecting best practice of systematic review where the literature on a subject is surveyed methodically to find all the evidence.
Firstly, the US Public Library of Science used a court order to obtain evidence showing how the pharmaceutical company Wyeth employed commercial “ghost writers” to produce reviews, published in academic journals, under the names of academic authors.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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Telecommunications providers will not have to give the government sensitive revenue and Internet speed data for a program to map broadband use in U.S. homes and bring high-speed Internet service to more people.
The U.S. Commerce Department said on Friday that companies such as Verizon Communications Inc, Comcast Corp and AT&T Inc do not have to share how much money they make from each Internet subscriber. Nor must they say how fast their Internet connections typically run.
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Last month ISP Karoo in the north of England found itself in the middle of a storm when it said it would disconnect its subscribers upon an allegation of copyright infringement. Under pressure it quickly backtracked to a “3 strikes” regime but now they have told TorrentFreak that no-one will be disconnected without a court order.
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I predict that this will happen increasingly, as ISPs realise the implications of what the content industries are demanding with their “three strikes and you’re out” insanity. They would clearly be on very dodgy legal ground if they carried out this threat based on mere accusations. Yahoo for Karoo.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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For the last few years I’ve talked quietly of a project to connect artists with the victims of lawsuits in the name of their bands. After the verdict handed down by the latest case of Sony vs. Tenenbaum I think it is time to put this plan to action. I’ve emailed Joel and received a list of the bands he was sued for and what I’d like to do is draw national attention to the public interfaces these bands have set up for themselves.
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Ars Technica talks to the Joel Tenenbaum defense team about their plans to keep fighting the case, why they refused to settle, and their hope to file a class-action lawsuit against the RIAA in the future.
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Over the years, I’ve found that most people who don’t pay much attention to these things believe that story of copyrights and patents being the “root cause” of American creativity and innovation. It’s a fable that sounds so good as youngsters, and why not? Yet, when you talk to such folks one on one or in small groups, and start going through the real details… and when you explain to them how copyright is used to stifle speech and innovation, and when you show them the new and unique business models that don’t rely on copyright, they recognize the issue. When you finally show them the evidence — the studies upon studies about the harm done by such things, it’s not hard for them to realize that there’s a real problem with copyright laws, and that problem isn’t the fact that some kids aren’t paying for downloads.
The only people I’ve found who resist such things are those whose own income in some way depends on exploiting copyright for their own advantage.
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It’s also a point highlighted by musician David Hahn, writing a response to a mother concerned about her son file sharing. She sent in a note to The Working Musician, a blog by and for working musicians, saying that her son file shares, and she wants him to stop, saying that he would feel differently if it was his music being shared. Hahn replies, however, by telling her that he feels exactly the opposite: and that her son should download as much music as possible…
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The German Green party has defended the idea of a “culture flat rate” to pay for a legalization of file sharing, according to a report from heise.de. Germany’s Greens have been proposing collective licensing in combination with the legalization of non-commercial file sharing for a while, and party officials recently came out to defend the idea against critics from other parties as well as industry associations.
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Shouldn’t there be sanctions for abusing copyright law to file bogus lawsuits just to get some press for your book?
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The Canadian government has set up an online public consultation process to revise its copyright policy, running until September 13, 2009. If you live in Canada, now is your chance to take back your copyright law.
Maria Winslow, open source biz guru 03 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.10.09
Posted in News Roundup at 2:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The question that must be asked, then, looking at reports from Germany’s Electronista that Asus will deliver a Moblin-based netbook this fall, is whether Intel is going to put serious dollars behind the effort, or just point to the Linux Foundation (the official sponsor of Moblin) when the going gets tough.
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Please keep up the pressure dear readers. If you buy a computer where you do not “need” a Windows license, for whatever reason (see Simos’ suggestions for 4 of them above) then make sure you contact your supplier and request a refund. By all means use links and reports gathered around the ‘net to support your claim.
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For a while I still felt relatively comfortable answering questions about Windows machines, but no longer. I tell Windows users to ask Windows users how to solve problems. I really don’t think I can be of much help.
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It is interesting to watch Ballmer as he tries to place labels on competitor’s business models while patting Microsoft’s back. I would have thought that Ballmer would be a little more humble when it comes to business model discussions, as Vista proved to be one of Microsoft’s biggest fiascos in recent memory.
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Desktop
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Many aspects of a modern Linux desktop are just as easy as to get to grips with as Windows Vista or Mac OSX, with some things possibly a bit easier.
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Turn your computer into a open source computer using Linux or BSD and sell it on Buntfu.com for FREE!
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With the exception of computer games, is there an activity that can be done inside of Windows or OS X that cannot be done equally well on a Linux machine?
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No, not Linux OS, not Ubuntu or Fedora or anything of the sort. The Mond OS. Remember, the brand and experience must be absolutely consistent. It doesn’t matter squat what this Mond OS is actually based on to the end user.
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Mac computers are hugely expensive and anybody that goes in to buy a Mac computer is not someone that considers cost in buying a computer. Most Mac users are people that have seen a certain perceived value in the extra cash they pay for a Mac computer as against what they would have paid for a Windows PC.
[...]
There is no doubt that Ubuntu is a powerful alternative to both Windows and Mac OS, a fact that most Windows users attest to after trying Ubuntu, but that message must be wrapped differently in order to deliver to Mac OS users. Canonical must not focus solely on the monetary cost of Ubuntu as a wedge to use in penetrating the Mac OS market. The theme of the strategy must rather focus on the core strengths of Ubuntu that will appeal to Mac users.
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The slowest machine I have up is a Celeron 700 that’s running Puppy Linux. It seems to be really sturdy, and it’s an old-style horizontal (as opposed to tower) case that physically fits into an odd nook. It went 57 days without a restart until I bumped the power cord. I originally had Damn Small Linux on this but Puppy was friendlier to my relative newbie skills.
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Server
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At this point in time, Linux has become part of the data center club. It can be found in organizations of all sizes, in all geographical areas and supporting nearly all workloads. This means that there is a broad understanding of the rudiments of its use, a community of experienced IT folks to operate these systems, and some level of application and development tools support for this platform.
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Previously, OL&T primarily ran its business technology platform on HP-UX and Windows systems and was looking at ways to enhance its infrastructure to support its growing business.
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Kernel Space
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Tux3′s Daniel Phillips has provided an update on the Linux kernel mailing list regarding the activity for this file-system.
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Applications
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Multimedia
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Tangerine is a sharing program for your music. Tangerine allows you to share your media with people nearby over the DAAP protocol. Tangerine hooks into your media player, or watches your file system to share your collection, with the tags and info you’ve given it. Your media- shared.
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Some more awesome VLC capabilities:
* Shoutcast audio/video – Under Playlist -> Additional Sources
* Streaming video from one source to another (or to a file)
* Viewing your webcam (and streaming it elsewhere)
* Playing DVDs
* Playing practically any video/audio file
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Widgets
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I found Makagiga. This program is Java based, so it will run on Linux, Windows, and Mac. It has a nice interface, that didn’t take me too long to figure out. It even has a small collection of plugins allowing you to expand its functionality.
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I’d like to introduce a little pet project of mine: Kustodian, which some people would call a ripoff of the mac dock or windows 7 taskbar. But I maintain it’s a thing of it’s own, but it indeed has some similarities.
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This is my favourite bit, actually, as in addition to the ${image} function, I’ve also discovered the ${scroll} function, which keeps the artist & track names inside the speech bubble by scrolling them.
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Editing
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Images are part of our every day Internet usage and a good image viewer is an integral part of a good operating system. Viewnior is one such application for Linux. Viewnioris an image viewer program. Created to be simple, fast and elegant. It’s minimalistic interface provides more screenspace for your images.
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An outline used to illustrate words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea is called a mind map. A mind map is utilized to manage ideas and arguments making it an effective utility in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
Since mind mapping techniques have been proven to enhance learning more efficiently than the conventional note taking, several mind mapping software have been created. Here are some of the best Free and Open Source mind mapping applications that are available for Linux…
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Games
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LXF: After deciding to port a game to Linux, what’s the next step for you at LGP?
MS: Once we’ve made the agreement, we get hold of the source code and then we just do whatever we need to do for the port. Usually, ports are fairly similar.
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I will never forget my computer science teacher’s belief that games are only an initial distraction to the world of computing for people interested in computers. He perceived that budding programmers could only be fixated on games for up to 6 months. After that, coders would start to use computers more productively, learning earnestly about the operating system and writing system and application software.
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PainTown is a 2D fighting game somewhat similar with popular titles like Street Fighter (it even allows you to play with a character called Blanka), with versions available for Linux too, besides Windows and Mac. The nice thing about PainTown is that it runs natively on Linux and it’s a standalone game, so you won’t need any emulator like NeoGeo to play it.
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As a game engine, Cube 2 surely is powerful enough to develop any kind of FPS game, and as a game, it definitely offers a great joy playing it. Except for the sounds which may become a little annoying after a few hours of playing, this game is excellent. The graphics are great and it performs pretty well on low-end PCs too, especially if settings are tweaked for optimum performance.
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K Desktop Environment
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This is the first KDE4 version that I could really recommed for full time use. KDE 4.1 was ok, 4.2 was better but 4.3 is really good.
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The Plasmediacenter Shell: this is a stand-alone application that can be freely used instead of putting the containment and the applets on your screen 
. The Plasmediacenter can be set fullscreen so that also the playback controls still remain over the mediaplayer applet.
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Though these projects are merely just a snapshot of all the thousands of open source projects out there, they are among the most popular and can arguably be viewed as barometers of the overall community.
Aaron Seigo, a full-time KDE.org developer who is sponsored by Oslo, Norway-based Qt Software, said KDE.org isn’t seeing any big drops in its contributors, despite the economy.
“We track these numbers pretty closely,” Seigo said. “The one effect we have seen is that people have had a harder time coming to our in-person conferences. Travel is more expensive lately and people tend not to travel so much when things are tighter.”
Otherwise, the project isn’t seeing any dips in participation rates, he said. In July, KDE.org had more than 12,000 changes–called commits–contributed to the project code base by developers. That’s up from 10,800 commits in June. Over the past year, the commit rate has ranged from 8,000 to 11,000 per month, Seigo said.
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Besides these reviews you can find buzz surrounding KDE all around the web. Even the more cynical begin to see and appreciate the vision behind the KDE 4 series. Our community, from developers to artists to those members helping out fellow users on IRC or forums, has reason to be proud on the accomplishment which is KDE 4.3. As SoftVision said, “To infinity, and beyond!”
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Think about it for a moment. Let the idea sink in. Now, would you be willing to give up your favorite distribution for this to happen? Or would you be willing to accept the idea that your favorite might have to become nothing more than a variant of the “official distribution”? Because we all know that even this wouldn’t stop the open source community from continuing to create the way they do. But even if forks of the “official distribution” were developed, there would still be “the one” that companies and new users could migrate to and know what they were getting, know that they could get world-wide, standardized support.
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Arch
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Arch Linux 2009.08 features the 2.6.30.4 Linux kernel and version 3.3.0 of its Pacman package manager, similar to apt-get (Debian / Ubuntu) or Zypper (openSUSE).
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We proudly announce the release of the new Arch Linux installation images, version 2009.02. It took us quite a while, but we think the result is worth it: we added some cool new things and ironed out some long-lasting imperfections.
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Mandriva Family
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There were a lots of package updates in Mandriva Cooker during the last two weeks, amongst others because of rebuilds of all Perl packages.
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There were a lot of updates to the PCLinuxOS repository last week. Here is a list of interesting updates and new packages.
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While I had heard and read good things about Pardus for a few years now, I had never tried the distro until the 2009 release. I haven’t been this enthusiastic about a new distro I’ve tried in quite some time. I didn’t find any serious bugs which prevented me from working or which really got in my way at all. The implementation of KDE 4 is probably the best I’ve seen and represents the first time I’ve truly been comfortable working with the latest incarnation of KDE as my desktop environment. The implementation of Xfce is also first rate. Pardus also offers an excellent variety of unique graphical system administration tools that are intuitive and work as expected. Anything available in the GUI also has a command-line equivalent. In the case of PiSi, the Pardus package manager, the CLI edition also offers additional functionality.
Pardus is generally very user-friendly. There are a few convenience features found in the major distributions, such as automated upgrade notification and automatic network interface switching, that are still lacking in Pardus. These aren’t bugs but rather are missing niceties that I’ve gotten used to in other distros. The Pardus developers do encourage filing wish list items in their bug-tracking system and I may just have to add a few. Internationalization and localization is well done and is nearly, but not quite, complete for “unsupported” languages. It is very complete and functions flawlessly for officially supported languages. I found the forum, Wiki, and in general the English-language documentation for Pardus to be excellent. When I did post in the forum, I received a quick, friendly, and helpful response. That’s all anyone can ask of the community behind any distribution.
Pardus has a lot to recommend it and definitely rates a try for anyone who wants an excellent KDE 4 implementation. Pardus isn’t perfect, but its flaws and shortcomings are relatively minor compared to many if not most other distributions I’ve tried, including recent releases of some of the big names in Linux. It’s easy enough to install and use that I would certainly consider it a good candidate distribution for a new Linux user, yet it doesn’t lack the features and, apart from the YALI installer, the flexibility an experienced user will desire. I am definitely impressed with Pardus 2009.
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Overall though, I’m highly impressed with the new Pardus. It’s fast, sleek, stable, and just a good all around new user distro. It’s also a nice improvement on its predecessor. But even with all this greatness, there’s still a few flies in the ointment. Interestingly enough, none are the fault of Pardus, as the issues lie elsewhere in other applications.
Do I recommend Pardus 2009 for new users? Yes, and completely yes. For power users? Not really. There are few distros that properly balance the needs of the new user with that of the power user, and Pardus chose not to try to be one of those, instead siding with new users. But that’s fine, because this is a good distribution for friends, family, and the occasional co-worker who wants to try out Linux, but needs something newbie friendly to cut their teeth on.
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Debian Family
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David Palacio prepared a KDE 4.3.0 livecd with help of the pkg-kde and live-helper teams. You can download it via BitTorrent, fetch the Torrent file from here!.
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The Trisquel GNU/Linux team announced yesterday the release of Trisquel 2.2, codename “Robur.” This is the third and last maintenance update for the Trisquel 2.x LTS branch, tracking the releases of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, on which it is based. However, this Linux distribution doesn’t use Ubuntu’s package repositories; instead, it hosts its own, with all the non-free software removed.
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I think that If you’re like me, and still think that KDE is sitting in the OpenSuSE 9/10 Era, Download a Kubuntu Live CD and have a play around!
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Ubuntu 9.10, codenamed Karmic Koala, is scheduled for release in late October, and it will be the 11th release of the most popular Linux distribution. Although it is scheduled to come with GNOME 2.28, it will be the first release to introduce the first changes that will be featured in GNOME 3.
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #154 for the week August 2nd – August 8th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Karmic Alpha 4 freeze ahead, Landscape: Canonical Systems Management & Monitoring Tool, ubuntu-ph.org is back in business, First Launchpad community meet-up, Code Hosting quick-start guide, notify-osd 0.9.16 released, Migrating to an Encrypted Home Directory, Touchscreen = fail?, Ubuntu-UK Podcast: Day of Reckoning, Full Circle Magazine #27, and much, much more!
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New Releases
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We are pleased to announce the release of paldo 1.19 with many bug fixes and updates.
Enhancements to point out:
* GNOME 2.26.3
* OpenOffice.org 3.1.0
* Firefox 3.5.2
* Linux 2.6.30.4
* X.org server 1.6.2
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This release of GParted includes some bug fixes, and language translation updates.
Key changes include:
* Removed requirement for xxd for ntfs move or paste action
* Enhanced for new linux-swap “filesystem” types from parted-1.9.0
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So, off to the Kubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3 Technical Overview. Not a lot more information there; it just says that there is a netbook image, but all that has been done so far is some changes in desktop and font settings, but more will be coming soon.
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Want to live in the cloud but don’t quite trust it? SourceForge’s open source project of the month for August may be for you! eyeos is a self-hosted cloud operating environment for business, schools and home built in PHP.
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Currently few add-ons are available for this alpha, the other ones are compatible only with 3.5 and older releases (which is normal given that 3.6 is only in alpha and it won’t be available until late 2009). The popular extension Adblock Plus can be installed in 3.6 at the time of writing, however popular themes or add-ons like Greasemonkey or Noia 2.0 eXtreme are not available yet.
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Newly unveiled court documents show that ghostwriters paid by a pharmaceutical company played a major role in producing 26 scientific papers backing the use of hormone replacement therapy in women, suggesting that the level of hidden industry influence on medical literature is broader than previously known.
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Censorship/Web Abuse
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The Lib Dems want tighter controls on surveillance powers for authorities including councils and the police.
More than 500,000 requests to access phone and e-mail records were made in 2008, a report by the Interception of Communications Commissioner showed.
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Malaysia denied on Friday that a proposed Internet filter would be used to police blogs and websites, saying it would be used only to block pornography.
The denial comes after news that the Southeast Asian country was considering setting up an Internet filter similar to China’s “Green Dam” software, a move the opposition said was aimed at suppressing political dissent.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A bunch of folks have been asking my opinion on this past weekend’s NY Times Magazine article by Michael Sokolove entitled What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper? To be honest, there’s not much to say about it. The article itself sort of meanders around, and doesn’t make much of a point. Sokolove is wistful for the “good old days” and hopes that there’s a future for newspapers. He dips his toes into some of the new experiments out there to cover the news, and spends a lot of time with the guy who is currently CEO of the bankrupt big Philly newspapers.
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A US lawyer has claimed that copyright is violated when courts pass legal submissions on to a commercial publisher. The lawyer claims that the US courts’ behaviour undermines the hundreds of hours of work put into submissions.
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And, of course, the fact that EMI become one of the most aggressive companies suing every potentially innovative startup out there didn’t engender much confidence that the company had figured out how to embrace the new online world.
Maria Winslow, open source biz guru 02 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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08.09.09
Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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K. Gopinath, associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science, points out that small manufacturers like HCL, Wipro and Org, adopted Unix and built their own systems. “In the mid-nineties, however, proprietary OS vendor Microsoft became stronger and these firms dropped Unix in favour of MS. Interestingly, as Unix started dying, Linux started coming up.”
In academic departments, Unix was fundamental when the Web first came in. In 1993, the Linux kernel and the GNU system (of the Free Software Foundation) appeared, followed shortly by the Web. “Now, machines that run on the DOS or Win3.1 operating systems were a serious liability as networking wasn’t part of these systems.” But by the early 1994, the Web could be run on Unix machines or Win3.1machines.
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These sorts of discussions, especially on sites like Computerworld and here on Linux Journal tend to bring out the same comments from the evangelists (using the term loosely) that now is the time to move to Linux on the desktop and in response you get people saying the last time I tried to install Linux…. In both of these discussions, both points are valid and, in many cases, there is merit to the position.
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Server
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The NX protocol, using SSH as a transport and for authentication, was developed by the Italian company NoMachine, which released the source code of the core NX technology in 2003 under the GPL. NoMachine offers free (as in beer) client and server software for various operating systems, including Linux. It wasn’t very long before free-as-in-speech NX clients emerged, then, in 2004, Fabian Franz implemented FreeNX, a GPL implementation of an NX server.
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CONNECT is an open source software gateway that connects an organizations health IT systems into health information exchanges using Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) conventions, agreements and cores services to better serve patients throughtout the country.
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Kernel Space
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This week at Phoronix began by learning that Compiz is now running on ATI R600/700 GPUs when using the latest open-source Mesa / DRM stack. Owners of ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards are now just a step away from finding “out of the box” open-source 3D acceleration support. On that same day there was also the release of the OpenGL 3.2 specification, but that didn’t come as a surprise.
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Applications
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Mixxx 1.7.0 features an overhauled MIDI mapping system with advanced scripting capabilities, improvements to vinyl control, and many other tweaks and optimizations.
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It isn’t unknown that Linux/UNIX systems have a powerful CLI. The heritage of these operating systems is in the CLI, and applications are still written for it. Here is a run down of some of the more popular CLI apps.
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So how does it compare with my distro of choice (Wolvix)? Very well, although on my hardware Wolvix Wine performance is better than Zenwalk as is many of the emulation projects I am running. The memory footprint for running Zenwalk and a few basic operations was a respectable 120mb…very impressive, infact even running a rather large document in OO didn’t take it much above 150mb. Compare that to Ubuntu which has a footprint in similar conditions of 255mb.
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mrchaotica writes “I’m in the market for a new HDTV (in the $1200-or-slightly-more range, as I won the extended-service-plan lottery and have a Sears store credit). Several of the TVs I’ve looked at have various ‘Internet TV’ features (here are Samsung’s and Panasonic’s). Some manufacturers appear to be rolling their own, while others are partnering with Yahoo (maybe in an attempt to create a ‘standard?’). Moreover, these TVs also tend to run Linux under the hood (although their GPL compliance, such as in Panasonic’s case, may leave something to be desired). Finally, it’s easy to imagine these TVs being able to support video streaming services (YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) without a set-top box, but I don’t know the extent to which that support actually exists. Here are my questions: 1) Is this ‘Internet TV’ thing going to be a big deal going forward, or just a gimmick? 2) Which manufacturers are most [open standard|Linux|hacker]-friendly? 3) Which TV models have the best support (or best potential and community backing) for this sort of thing?”
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What makes the LINK such a compelling platform for these folks and Linux/open source developers in general is the recognition that a real business entity is stepping forward to spend the money necessary to market and commercialize what tech enthusiasts have been doing for years. Like the early days of homebrew computing, it wasn’t until small computer company startups like Apple and Microsoft came along to validate the computer market did such a market blossom beyond the basement.
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Phones
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Android : With HTC Touch and HTC Hero being a huge success, the Google-promoted mobile stack Android, is touted as something to look forward to. With a Java-like programming interface, the Android SDK is easy to install and start developing apps on. Android Apps for these smart phones are increasing in number and soon can be a serious contender for the iPhone App Store.
Maemo : Nokia’s 770 Internet Tablet was one of the first commercially available MID running Linux. The Nokia N10 is the latest offering from Nokia running on the Maemo platform. Although Maemo does have VoIP apps, it is primarily being designed for Internet Tablets rather than Smart phones.
Moblin : Molin, asuumably short for Mobile Linux, was an initiative from Intel. After the release of their Atom family of processors, Moblin recieved further push from Intel in engaging the community. Moblin, like Maemo, is primarily targetted towards Netbooks, MIDs and Internet Tablets. It utilizes some of the modern embedded linux components like the Gnome-based Clutter toolkit which used OpenGL to create fast and visually rich GUIs.
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TransMedia, makers of the cross-platform Glide cloud computing OS, announced the availability of a Twitter-like service that supports mobile embedded platforms including Android. Glide Engage is a rights-based social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to share messages with cloud-stored attachments, says the company.
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Sub-notebooks
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Awesome news from Engadget about the open source future of the next generation of Eee PCs. Their ‘spies’ have uncovered information that the first Moblin-running Eee netbooks will be in stores come October. Asus, the Eee PC manufacturer, is apparently considering making open source OSes an option for all their netbooks in the future.
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OpenStreetMap.org, the provider of free and royalty-free geographic data.
Guest: Steve Coast for OpenStreetMap.org
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It is hard to have an overriding “theme” at an event as large as O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON), but during the 2009 convention, one subject that came up again and again was increasing the number of connections between open source and government. There are three basic facets to the topic: adoption of open source products by government agencies, participation in open source project development by governments and their employees, and using open source to increase transparency and public access to governmental data and resources. Though much of the discussion (particularly in the latter category) sprang from the new Obama administration’s interest in open data and government transparency, very few of the issues are US-centric: the big obstacles to government adoption of open source technology are the same around the world, from opaque procurement processes to fears about secrecy and security.
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Based on its findings, the site said the future looks equally as bright for Open Source developers, infrastructure analysts and business analysts, even though their current supply of work has thinned since last year.
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Government
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Nobody seems to have stood up in a meeting and said: “You know, there’s lots of very good open source content management systems (CMS) out there – there’s one called WordPress which is free and eminently customisable.” This is peculiar, as WordPress was available (and as solid as any CMS) in 2005, runs on MySQL and PHP (which are both free products used by some of the largest companies in the world, such as airlines and Yahoo). And there are pots of programmers around with MySQL and PHP skills.
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Healthcare
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The code-a-thon is expected to foster personal connections and help expand the talent pool of developers that might contribute to the CONNECT project, according to Brian Behlendorf, an open source advocate and a contractor on the administration’s Open Government initiative team headed White House chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra.
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Bill Vass of Sun (still not Oracle yet he confirms) NHIN CONNECT Efforts is talking about the difference between FOSS and proprietary in which RSA was openly and rigorously examined by experts….
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Openness
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All the software used is free software licensed under the GPL or BSD.
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In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this summer announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions.
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Programming
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I am not of the opinion that concepts have failed. My position was that we needed only a few weeks to “fix” what in my opinion were serious usability problems. Obviously, a majority of the committee didn’t agree with that timescale. But just about everyone I talked to expressed support for the idea of concepts and I had to warn against over-optimism about the timescale to get concepts back once they were removed from the working paper. There is a significant difference between “failure” and “not being ready to become the standard for millions of programmers.”
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Is digital inclusion a good thing? How can we make sure it is?
Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation, USA)
Activities directed at “including” more people in the use of digital technology are predicated on the assumption that such inclusion is invariably a good thing. It appears so, when judged solely by immediate practical convenience. However, if we also judge in terms of human rights, whether digital inclusion is good or bad depends on what kind of digital world we are to be included in. If we wish to work towards digital inclusion as a goal, it behooves us to make sure it is the good kind.
Maria Winslow, open source biz guru 01 (2005)
Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating.
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