• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux in 2012: what to expect

Desktop

• Samsung Updating Google ChromeBooks, Unveils ChromeBox

  Samsung, one of the companies that first jumped on board to produce ChromeBooks, is improving on its design and also launching something completely different: the ChromeBox. Are there channel implications? Oh, yeah.

  Both Engadget and 9to5Google noticed that Samsung had a bevy of Chrome-based devices on display at CES 2012. The new Series 5 ChromeBook isn’t anything remarkably special beyond a speed bump (2GB of RAM, 16GB SSD and a faster Celeron-based CPU) and a new matte aluminum shell. But the ChromeBox, a device few remember Google teased us with in 2011, has finally arrived.

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel 3.2.1 Is Available for Download

  Greg Kroah-Hartman announced last evening, January 12th, that the first maintenance release of the stable Linux kernel 3.2 is available for download and all users should upgrade to it.

• Frontswap Still Not Ready For Linux 3.3 Kernel

  While the Frontswap patches with Cleancache have been available for several Linux kernel release cycles, the Frontswap support still hasn’t been merged. Another Oracle developer is now taking over maintenance of Cleancache and getting Frontswap finally ready for merging, but it’s too late for the Linux 3.3 kernel.

• Btrfs Picks Up Snappy Compression Support

  New patches have been published for the Btrfs file-system that implement support for Google’s Snappy compression algorithm, which promises to deliver better performance beyond LZO compression.

  Andi Kleen of Intel has posted his updated Btrfs snappy compression patches, which he says are now ready for merging. “Here’s a slightly updated version of the BTRFS snappy interface. snappy is a faster compression algorithm that provides similar compression as LZO, but generally better performance.”

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 8.0 LLVMpipe: Fine For Desktop, Not For Gaming

    Continuing in the coverage of the soon-to-be-out Mesa 8.0, here are some benchmarks of the CPU-based LLVMpipe software driver for Gallium3D.

    LLVMpipe is the CPU-based software rasterizer driver that is faster than the standard Gallium3D “Softpipe” since it leverages LLVM for taking advantage of more of the CPU — especially on modern hardware with SSE3/SSE4, multiple cores, etc. See LLVMpipe: OpenGL With Gallium3D on Your CPU and Gallium3D LLVMpipe On The Sandy Bridge Extreme for just a small portion of the Phoronix coverage of this unique software driver.

  • Moving Closer To NVIDIA Optimus On Linux

  • Enlightenment Is Enlightening Wayland

    Back in November I reported on Enlightenment E17 coming to Wayland and shared the first screenshot. That first screenshot was very early and didn’t show EFL (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) doing too much under Wayland, but in the past two months there has been much more progress.

Applications

• First installment: A crude imitation of khanacademy’s video lectures using GNU/Linux

  The following offers a description–prefaced by a narrative about whence came my inspiration–of a rather kludgy GNU/Linux solution I cobbled together for enhancing my on-line lectures with a video element. I am far from being technically adept as a GNU/Linux user, having only lately in my 11 years of GNU/Linux use become reasonably proficient at administering my own small stock of GNU/Linux machines and my small LAN. Despite a lack of anything that could really pass as expertise in this field, I want to offer this description for two reasons: 1) it may be of help to others who are equally inexpert as I am and who wish to do something like what I’ve done; and 2) perhaps those who are more technically adept will weigh in and offer corrections, point out alternative applications, make suggestions for improving what I’ve come up with, or all of the above. It is with these caveats that I offer a description of my humble and rather unsophisticated attempts.

• Bitwig Studio: A Professional Music Creation Software (DAW) Comes to Linux

  Bitwig is an international music software company based in Berlin. The company was founded in 2009 by a team of music enthusiasts with extensive experience in the music technology industry and a strong vision about new cutting-edge methods of music production, live performance and collaboration.

  The team includes many veterans who worked on Ableton Live, a popular software for professional music creation.

• The Best PDF Viewer for Linux

  Linux has quite a few PDF readers available, but Okular stands out as the best of the bunch, due to its ability to comment on, highlight, and otherwise annotate PDFs.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Learning Linux Commands: top

  • How To: Create Custom Quick Lists in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Ubuntu 11.10 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

  • Play Cut the Rope on Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox

  • Mount your box.net (box.com) account in linux

  • 3 must-have extensions for Fedora 16 and other GNOME 3 installations

  • Build An FTP Server on CentOS 6

  • Understanding Linux File System Quotas – Installation and Setup

  • How to install Razor-qt on Linux Mint 12 KDE

  • Run fsck on a XenServer VM

  • How To: Add Gmail to the Message Menu in Ubuntu 11.04 & 11.10 (Unity)

  • Easily Sync Your Local Documents With Google Docs Using Super Flexible File Synchronizer

  • Search for songs through Unity Music Lens with the Grooveshark Scope

  • Search and replace on steroids: Do more with these sed commands

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.37 Rounds Out The DIB Engine

• Games

  • 3 Nice Blender Made Games for Linux

    Blender is known for its 3D creation capabilities worldwide and is widely used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications and games with cutting edge computer graphics. Quite a number of videos and animated movies have already been created using Blender and we have featured the very best of them before. But they are not alone, games are there too. Let’s find out the best games available for Linux made using Blender.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Big Bash Of Video Players On Gnome 3

    Big Bash Of Video Players On Gnome 3 is a lazy comparative study of Linux based video players , specifically those which are available on GNOME 3.2.1 , openSUSE 12.1.openSUSE 12.1 offers a large variety of video players based on various platforms like gstreamer , phonon , xine , mplayer etc : Most of the video player options can be installed through the addition of OSS , Non OSS , Update and Packman repositories in YaST.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fuduntu : funny name but interesting distro launched version 2012.1

    • Fedora vs. openSUSE vs. CentOS: Which Distribution Should You Use? [Linux]

      Not too long ago I wrote a similar article about the top three distributions of the Debian side in the Linux family (Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint), but as a true Linux geek I would never want to forget the entire other side of the Linux family, probably best known as the “RPM family”.

      All of these Linux distributions use .rpm files as installable packages rather than the .deb files which belong to the Debian family. So, let’s get started!

    • Fedora Running Beefy Contest

      Máirín Duffy, head art team designer for Fedora, posted a strange message Friday afternoon. She’s seen a vision of the future and it was of Fedora mascot Beefy Miracle holding some sort of futuristic ray gun at a poor radioactive panda. What could this mean for the popular Linux distribution?

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu — Traitors of Linux, Open Source Software and The Community: Is Ubuntu Becoming Too Commercialized?

        Unfortunately these are similarities that I do not like. Ironically my choice to soon abandon Ubuntu was ultimately caused by the creation of their product they called Unity. It was the final push that tipped me over the edge. With over 700 various linux distributions to choose from, there is no reason for me to continue using a commercialized by-product of one of the most amazing free and open source operating systems ever created –Debian. My choice with considering Slackware is completely based on my desire to try something different during a pivotable point in my journey of learning the most as I can about linux.

      • Ubuntu in the Corporate

        Such a little thing – getting a thumbnail for your images, videos or office documents. In Windows, once a directory has been thumbnailed, it creates a hidden file “thumbs.db” in that directory, so that when other people visit the directory, there’s no need to recreate every thumbnail from scratch.

        In Ubuntu, however, there is. Every user stores their own version of thumbnails . At work, my .thumbnails directory is a little shy of 40Mb. If you multiply that by 1000 employees, you’ve just wasted 39.96Gb of data creating the same set of thumbnails 1000 times. Bandwidth, Disk I/O, wasted. Worse, if you make your staff’s home directories a network share, you’re now wasting 40Gb of storage across your home share.

Devices/Embedded

• Plug Computer takes on education with Marvell SMILE Plug micro server

  Marvell announced an education platform combining its Plug Computer, Arch Linux, and software developed in collaboration with Stanford University. The SMILE Plug micro server runs on a 2GHz Marvell Armada 300 processor, sets up a secure Wi-Fi cloud for up to 60 students, and provides a “Classroom 3.0″ connected, secure, interactive learning environment.

• Aruba Brings Wi-Fi to Wall Plates

  The typical Wi-Fi deployment today involves access points deployed in hallways or rooms as standalone boxes. As the move towards pervasive wireless access grows, so too have the demands on wireless infrastructure. That’s where Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN) is aiming to fill a gap with a new wall mountable access point.

• Raspberry Pi is About to be Served – Manufacturing Has Begun for the $35 Computer

  What do you feel like doing, going out for dinner or buying a computer? The computer’s probably cheaper. In a joyful moment for the the charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that as of “a couple of days” before January 10th, production has begun on their $35 Linux computer. The Raspberry Pi Model B is an ARM GNU/Linux Box with 256 MB memory, 700 MHz processing, HDMI port, and Blu-Ray video quality capabilities. According to the post by foundation spokesperson Liz Upton 10,000 of the Model B computers will be fully constructed in a manner of weeks. As stripped down as a computer can probably be, the Raspberry Pi Model B is little more than a circuit board that fits in the palm of the hand. Yet that tiny bare bones board holds the promise of cheap computing for all.

• Google TV 2.0 review, tweaks, and screenshots

  Google recently rebooted Google TV with the release of Google TV 2.0 based on Android 3.1 (Honeycomb). This detailed review introduces Google TV 2.0, demonstrates its features, apps, and flexible new user interface, and shows how to add customized folders and shortcuts to the homescreen for instant access to all your favorite apps and websites.

• oundation tips 2012 schedule, sends LinuxCon to San Die

  The drone control systems used to operate U.S. military drones appear to have made the switch to Linux, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, in a tweet.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Design site brings UI designers up to speed on Ice Cream Sandwich

      Google launched an “Android Design” website that offers an in-depth style guide for Android 4.0 app developers. Explaining how to create apps for both smartphones and tablets across multiple vendors and devices, the guide gets down and dirty on details such as themes, notifications, typography, navigation, multi-pane layouts, and much more.

    • 5 Best Free Android UPnP Clients

      UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play. It is a set of computer network protocols which enables devices on a home network to be aware of each other and access selected services. This collection of protocols with the appropriate software offers a very easy method of sharing media on your network as it features automatic discovery and supports zero-configuration.

      There are many devices that run UPnP audio visual servers. For example, a wide range of software exists for the Linux, Windows, and OS X operating systems that turn computers into media servers. Many NAS devices also have built-in UPnP media servers. We even see UPnP turning up in routers, audiophile hard disk players, and HD media players.

    • Google Asks Android App Devs to Design by the Book

      Now that Android has “taken the world by storm,” as AppsGeyser VP Eduardo Robles put it, Google apparently wants to tame the beast. It has launched a style guide — Android Design — in the hope of reining in app devs and encouraging a more uniform look and feel for Android products. “It’s only natural to bring out a tool like [Android Design] right now,” said Robles.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Intel’s educational PC gets dual cores, 12-hour battery

    Intel announced the fifth generation of its reference platform for education-focused portable PCs. The Classmate now features a dual-core Atom N2600 processor, delivering battery life of up to 12 hours, plus optional capacitive multitouch functionality, according to the company.

  • Ordered Aakash Tablet? Check Your Status Via Email

    The hottest selling Indian tablet Aakash is overwhelmed by the orders. There are thousands of buyers waiting for the delivery of their Aakash 2 tablets. The anxious customers are looking for the information about their order from various sources. Now the company behind Aakash has stepped up their efforts to help these customers.

  • Android 4.0 Confirmed for Archos G9 Tablets

    Archos is brand name that is quite popular and known all over the world. We all love them for their wide range of Android tablets. If you are familiar with their G9 Tablets or currently using one of them, then you would love to hear that Archos just confirmed an ICS update for G9 Line.

  • Genesi MX Smartbook Review

    Genesi currently offers two products with the EFIKA mx51 ARM board. They are the SmartTop and the SmartBook. I own one of their SmartBook models and today I would like to do a comprehensive overview of the device.

Video editing with Blender VSE: “It’s complicated”

Coming from Kino, Blender’s “Video Sequence Editor” is a huge step up. Most people don’t think of Blender when considering video editing tools, but in fact, Blender contains a very good one. This is not a separate application but an editing mode within the Blender application. It can work directly with animated scenes created within Blender or with video footage from other sources. Evaluating it is a little tricky because of this unique niche.

Perens: the FOSS fire still burns

The primary author of the Open Source Definition, Perens was in Melbourne today en route to Ballarat to attend the 13th Australian national Linux conference where he will be delivering the first keynote on Tuesday. The conference begins on Monday.

[...]

The enthusiasm is still there in 2012. Perens is wiser, older – “I don’t have so much hair now,” he laughs – but open source is still very much what drives him.

Events

• Linux Foundation tips 2012 schedule, sends LinuxCon to San Diego

  The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences. These include the Linux Kernel Summit, which will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.

• Linux Foundation tips 2012 schedule, sends LinuxCon to San Diego

  The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences, starting with the Android Builders Summit Feb. 13-14, co-located in Silicon Valley with the Embedded Linux Conference, Feb. 15-17. The Linux Kernel Summit will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.

• One Week To SCALE 10x Linux Event

  This will be the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) that’s taking place in Los Angeles, California and is all about open-source and Linux. This year’s weekend event will range from talks about Python to MySQL, Git, Qt, and and even a Tux Paint demo. Keynotes include Greg DeKoenigsberg at Eucalyptus Systems (previously at Red Hat and known within the Fedora community) talking about “Amazon and the Future of the Open Cloud” and Selena Deckelmann talking about mistakes and downtime.

SaaS

• OpenStack Doesn’t Want Any Forks

  The notion of being able to fork a project is core to open source. It’s also potentially a bad thing in some cases as it can lead to fragmentation of a user base and compatibility issues.

  The OpenStack effort which is currently trying to figure out how to govern itself in a new OpenStack Foundation isn’t keen on forks. In a Friday Webinar talking about the goals of the new Foundation, Rackspace VP of Business & Corporate Development Mark Collier specifically took aim at the fork issue.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Ten nice Extensions for LibreOffice

  LibreOffice is an open source Office Suite, an excellent alternative to MS Office. If offers a number of features and the added functionalities in the form of extensions. Here are some of the useful extensions for LibreOffice.

BSD

• For a Free Linux Alternative, Try FreeBSD 9.0

  Linux may not yet enjoy the widespread recognition that Windows does, but there’s no denying its popularity on servers, its growing use on desktops, or its ubiquity in the mobile world in the form of Android.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Google To Go After Go-One In GCC 4.7 Compiler

  Google’s Go was originally announced in 2009 and reached a production status in 2010, but in 2012 only version 1.0 of the language is being readied. Go version 1 will be a stable, long-term release with no language or API changes. This forthcoming specification is described in this Google document.

  Ian Lance Taylor at Google has shared his desire of having Go v1 in GCC 4.7. Go was sent into GCC 4.6 already, but Google is just concerned about making sure this long-term version 1 support makes it into next release — GCC 4.7.

Public Services/Government

• ‘German cities following Munich’s open source example’

  Municipal administrations in Germany are starting to follow the example of the city of Munich, and increase their use of free and open source software, reports the Financial Times Deutschland on 3 January. “The demand for open source is growing – and not only at public administrations”, according the newspaper. It mentions the cities of Freiburg and Jena as examples of city administrations following Munich’s lead.

• Call for Leaner US Government

  One thing that reducing complexity should do is to cut the numbers of data-centres and IT organizations in government. This involves a lot of work but in the end more should be doable by fewer people and fewer computers. Probably more will be done with GNU/Linux and thin clients. Obama has already shown with whitehouse.gov that FLOSS works. Several departments have already deployed a lot of FLOSS and the overall plan for a more open government should call for open standards and FLOSS.

Openness/Sharing

• Robotic surgeons get open source boost

  The cost and complexity of commercial robot surgeons has meant slow penetration in the market and to only one player–Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci.

  But that could all change if researchers at the University of Washington (UW) carry out their plans to accelerate innovation in surgical robotics.

  UW researchers will do final testing and then ship their latest version of robots named Ravens to five universities, including Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The common goose

The rapid expansion of digital technologies, and opening up of new channels of communication and information, challenges notions of the ownership of ideas. Richard Hillesley investigates…

Finance

• Market Best Place for Fed’s AIG Bonds, Delaney Says

  Steven Delaney, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC, talks about a Wall Street Journal report, citing people familiar with the matter, that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. offered to buy a bundle of risky mortgage bonds that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York acquired in the 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc. Delaney, speaking with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop,” also discusses the outlook for mortgage securities.

• Goldman Sachs Said to Offer Bid for New York Fed’s AIG Assets

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. approached the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with a bid for a block of the mortgage bonds assumed from American International Group Inc., prompting the central bank to weigh an auction of the debt, three people familiar with the matter said.

  The central bank may sell securities held by its Maiden Lane II vehicle with a face value of about $7 billion, said the people, who declined to be identified because the deliberations are private. New York-based Goldman Sachs may have sought the bonds for itself or clients, they said. Four or five dealers may be asked to assemble bids this month, they said.

• What Does Goldman Sachs Do For You?

  You may have noticed that the rehabilitation of Goldman Sachs is in full throttle. Its brand is coming back according to YouGov’s BrandIndex’s Buzz score. Goldman’s share price has been falling recently but Goldman never seems to go without clients. Goldman is being sued by a number of individuals and firms but that is just the cost of doing business and they have set aside billions of dollars to deal with that contingency.

  Adam Davidson of The New York Times is offering his bit to rehabilitate Wall Street and that includes Goldman Sachs. His take on Wall Street is that without Wall Street “The poor would stay poor;” “There would be no Middle Class;” and “Lots of awesome things would never happen.”

  He asks two questions: “How does Wall Street do this?” and “Is it still O.K. to hate Wall Street?”

Censorship

• European Internet Blocking Plans

• German Court: ISP Must Not Block Access To Foreign Sites, Even If They Are Illegal

  This follows a decision in Düsseldorf at the end of last year, where a judge had ruled that Vodafone and Telekom were not responsible for the content of Web sites, because they played no role in selecting material, and therefore should not be forced to block access. Moreover, the latest judgment can be used as a precedent in similar cases, according to the Der Spiegel report.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Major changes To Take Place In The Internet In 2012

  The Internet is set to witness a phenomenal change in 2012 with 5 major changes under way, having the potential to modify Internet history like never before. A technical upgrade is going to happen from Internet Protocol version 4 to version 6 and key Internet infrastructure and operations contracts controlled by the U.S federal government are going to be re-bid.

• Are Canada’s Digital Laws Unconstitutional?

  One of the first Canadian digital-era laws was the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act, a model law created by the Uniform Law Conference of Canada in the late 1990s. The ULCC brings together officials from federal, provincial, and territorial governments to work on model laws that can be implemented in a similar manner across all Canadian jurisdictions.

  While a federal e-commerce law may have been preferable, the constitutional division of powers meant that it fell to the provinces to enact those laws.

DRM

• The Four Horsemen of the General Purpose Computing Apocalypse

  Cory Doctorow’s “keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress” and follow-up post (Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing) on BoingBoing raise the alarm about keeping the Internet and PC “free and open.” Doctorow makes excellent points and if you haven’t watched the keynote or read his essay, you should do so right away.

  I’m generally in agreement with Doctorow, but I’m not really sure that he goes quite far enough with Lockdown. Doctorow’s focus on the copyright war we’re facing with things like SOPA and PROTECT-IP is well warranted, but I’m not sure it covers everything.

• Microsoft ‘Trustworthy Computing’ Turns 10

  “Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and ‘Anna Kournikova.’ The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company’s 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million. Today, the stakes are much higher. ‘TWC Next’ will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • As SOPA/PIPA Becomes Toxic, Frantic Congress Test Runs Dropping DNS Blocking Provisions

    Well, well, well. It looks like some in DC are starting to get the message that there is real concern with SOPA/PIPA. The latest is that the fact that SOPA/PIPA support is becoming “toxic” is starting to make the press. In response to that, plus significant pressure from those within the government who are concerned about online security issues… the folks behind both SOPA/PIPA are doing some trial running of finding out how people would respond if they just completely dropped the DNS/site blocking aspects from the two bills. The goal is to get the tech industry to “stop opposing” the bills (if not actually support them). Clearly, the opposition is having a pretty big impact, and we’re hearing that some of the “pressure” to “fix” these bills is coming from pretty high places. Separately, even with the House Oversight Committee hearings scheduled for next Wednesday, it sounds like Lamar Smith has decided he wants to restart the SOPA markup on the same day (perhaps with a new version of SOPA… sans DNS/site blocking).

  • Don’t Be Fooled: Leahy Is NOT Removing DNS Blocking Provisions, Merely Delaying Them

  • Lamar Smith Follows Leahy’s Steps With Plans To Delay DNS Implementation In SOPA

  • White House Comes Out Against The Approach In SOPA/PIPA In Response To Online Petition

  • Raging Grannies Come Out Against SOPA/PIPA

  • Free Culture Pitfall: Bait-and-Switch Free Licensing

    Last year, as I was checking the licensing and attribution on the tracks in my soundtrack library for Lunatics, I came across a bizarre and rather disturbing practice: bait and switch licensing as a ploy to sell music. This is a truly weird idea, if you understand what a free-license means, and it’s deeply unethical, but here’s what I think is going on: the artist (or more likely, some intermediary, such as a small record label) gets the idea of using a “free” loss-leader to try to draw people into buying a commercial/proprietary album. This is okay in itself, but the problem lies in that confusing word, “free”.

  • My SOPA Prophecy Has Come Half-True

    Dammit, this is frustrating. You see how prophecy works? It’s just like in the stories, where you make a wish to a genie and you wish to be a millionaire, and then you’re buried in piles of worthless Zimbabwe currency that’s worth about $1.88 American, and the genie goes, “Oooooh, you meant in DOLLARS! Well, sorry, you already spent your wish.”

    A while ago last December, I spake the Prophecy “SOPA shall not pass”. And I promised to follow up on that, which I’m doing now.

    It came half-true: Lamar Smith has now cut the DNS-blocking part from the SOPA bill. This was the part that made the bill so Draconian and had everybody in such an uproar. So, without the Gestapo-like powers to black out millions of websites at the fingertips of the Black Hand of the MPAA/RIAA, SOPA now becomes another toothless, gummy, mushy bill that kinda-sorta makes online piracy a no-no, just like twenty other laws we already have.

    But they’re still trying to pass SOPA anyway.

  • Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy

  • Righthaven complains about ‘scorched-earth’ efforts to enforce judgments

  • Libraries Are The Best Counter To Piracy… So Of Course Publishers Are Trying To Limit Them

    Interesting blog post by Peter Brantley over at Publishers’ Weekly last week, mocking the big publishers for supporting SOPA/PIPA, despite the fact that it (1) won’t stop much, if any, infringement, but (2) will have massive unintended consequences. The first half of the post focuses on SOPA/PIPA and uses the recent Cory Doctorow talk we wrote about to highlight how this is yet another example of old line content businesses not understanding how the technology works.

  • Sega Gets It Right About SOPA: It’s Time For A Hard Reset On Copyright Law & Congress

    With the news that the ESA supports SOPA, thus representing all its member companies on the matter, many gamers have taken to writing to ESA member companies asking for their input on the matter and especially asking them to oppose the legislation. As Kotaku reports, one such gamer has received word back from Sega after writing a very nicely worded letter outlining his concerns over SOPA.

  • US Can Extradite UK Student For Copyright Infringement, Despite Site Being Legal In The UK

    Want to understand just how insane things may get under SOPA/PIPA? Just take a look at what’s already happening under today’s laws. Back in 2010, one of the first websites that Homeland Security’s ICE (Immigrations & Customs Enforcement) group seized was TVShack.net. TVShack was a site that collected links to TV shows. Certainly, many of those shows were likely to be infringing — but TVShack did not host the content at all, it merely linked to it. Richard O’Dwyer, the guy who ran the site, was a student building an interesting project over in the UK. However, the US Department of Justice decided that he was not only a hardened criminal, but one who needed to be tried on US soil. Thus, it began extradition procedures. Even worse, nearly identical sites in the UK had already been found legal multiple times — with the court noting that having links to some infringing content was certainly not criminal copyright infringement. That makes things even more ridiculous, because extradition is only supposed to be allowed for activities that are criminal in both the US and the UK.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

TLWIR 30: Linux++ – The GNU/Linux Desktop, Brother, and Ubuntu Increment by One

Desktop

• Six Great Desktop Linux Features You May Take for Granted

  Maybe it’s just a sign that I’m getting old, but more and more often lately I’ve found myself thinking thoughts like, “Back in my day, Linux didn’t have X, Y and Z. We did without!” With these sentiments in mind, I decided to put together a list of a few major desktop Linux technologies that millions of users now take for granted, but which didn’t exist only a few years ago. Read on for a look.

  First, though, I should caution that this isn’t a paean to desktop Linux’s infallibility. There certainly remains a lot of room for improvement in the Linux experience, both on the desktop and beyond. But that said, it’s also worth recognizing the clear progress that has been made over the course of the last several years, bringing innovations that — if you’re like me — you may now simply take for granted.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 437

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: 15,000,000 lines, 3.0 promoted to long-term kernel

  With the merger of the first changes into Linux 3.3, the number of lines of kernel source code has passed through the 15 million mark. Maintenance of Linux 2.6.32 is set to end in one month’s time, while Linux 3.0 and real-time kernels based on it will be maintained for the next two years.

• The Pull That Finally Fixes ASPM Power Regression

• Finding the Fastest Filesystem, 2012 Edition

• The logger meets linux-kernel

  Toward the end of December, LWN looked at the new push to move various subsystems specific to Android kernels into the mainline. There seems to be broad agreement that merging this code makes sense, but that agreement becomes rather less clear once the discussion moves to the merging of specific subsystems. Tim Bird’s request for comments on the Android “logger” mechanism shows that, even with a relatively simple piece of code, there is still a lot of room for disagreement and problems can turn out to be larger than expected.

• Linux kernel exceeds 15 million lines of code

• Big Switch Networks Open Sources OpenFlow Controller Software

  Network virtualization startup Big Switch Networks this week confirmed the release of an open-source controller based on OpenFlow, the increasingly popular switching and communications protocol that addresses packet routing on a software layer that’s separate from a network’s physical infrastructure.

• Arch-ing ARM: Running Arch Linux On The NVIDIA Tegra 2

  The CompuLab Trim-Slice is quite an interesting dual-core ARM Tegra 2 device. This nettop/desktop-oriented system ships with Ubuntu 11.04 by default, but it is also well supported by Arch Linux. In this article are some tests of the dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 1.0GHz system running under Arch.

• Graphics Stack

  • Announcing The DRM VGEM – Virtual GEM Provider

    Alpha quality patches were published today that introduce the “Virtual GEM Provider” for the Linux kernel DRM, which can improve the software-based acceleration experience for graphics.

    First some history… Back in September the Softpipe driver for Gallium3D became slightly more useful when GLX_EXT_texture_from_pixmap support came for software drivers, which is needed for some compositing window managers to function. In October that support then came to the LLVMpipe driver, which is the more useful software-based graphics driver since it takes advantage of LLVM for real-time shader generation and can take better advantage of modern CPUs to deliver slightly better performance.

  • Radeon Gallium3D With Mesa 8.0: Goes Up & Down

  • r600-r800 2D tiling

  • Mesa 8.0 LLVMpipe: Fine For Desktop, Not For Gaming

    Continuing in the coverage of the soon-to-be-out Mesa 8.0, here are some benchmarks of the CPU-based LLVMpipe software driver for Gallium3D.

    LLVMpipe is the CPU-based software rasterizer driver that is faster than the standard Gallium3D “Softpipe” since it leverages LLVM for taking advantage of more of the CPU — especially on modern hardware with SSE3/SSE4, multiple cores, etc. See LLVMpipe: OpenGL With Gallium3D on Your CPU and Gallium3D LLVMpipe On The Sandy Bridge Extreme for just a small portion of the Phoronix coverage of this unique software driver.

Applications

• The five best Linux file system cleaning tools

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing OpenVZ + Management Of VMs Through ISPConfig 3 (Debian 6.0)

  • How To Adjust Session Control Options In Ubuntu

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Editing Text Files With Vi

  • Listing Files in a RPM package

  • 11 useful commands for Linux/Unix administrators

  • Preventing DDOS attack on Quake 3 Servers

  • How to enable desktop slideshow on Linux Mint 12 KDE

  • Beginning Linux – Part II

  • Installing An Oracle-Ready CentOS 6.2 Server

  • Linux for Users: Animation with X Window System Icons

    The two programs here, “iclock,” and, “ibanner,” are simple, and, hopefully, useful programs that demonstrate how displaying animation on Linux desktops is as easy as accomplishing the same tasks on Windows or Macintosh displays.

    Linux desktops are actually capable of displaying fantastic, animated graphics. The main difficulty, as usual, is that Linux and the the X Window System provide so many options that it’s difficult for beginners to navigage through all of the programs and libraries needed to accomplish any task.

  • Linux SSD partition alignment tips

    Yes, this is another post on the internet about properly aligning your SSD partitions on Linux. It’s mostly my notes that I have gathered from other posts around the net. Please read the whole post before starting to create partitions on your SSD.

  • Syslog replacement Journal integrated into systemd

    The recently released systemd v38 includes Journal, the syslog alternative originally announced last autumn. Developed to a large extent by Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the extension for the sysvinit and Upstart alternative systemd is intended to, in the long run, solve some of the problems the developers see in the logging service syslog. For many years, syslog has been the de facto standard for system-wide protocolling on Unix systems. When Journal was announced, it received a lot of criticism, especially for the extent of its reach, as can be seen in this discussion on an article on LWN.net about the Journal announcement.

• Wine

  • CrossOver 11 Is Coming, Based On Wine 1.4

    CodeWeavers is now working towards CrossOver 11.0 as the next major version of their Office and Gaming products that allow popular Windows software to run unmodified under Linux and Mac OS X platforms. CrossOver 11 will be based upon the Wine 1.4 release and is expected for release in just a few months.

• Games

  • Retro Blazer is Your Old School First Person Shooter, Only Different

    The game is based on Darkplaces engine and brings back Quake like old school goodness with a difference. Rich cel-shaded graphics, sound effects and colorful environment give the game an altogether new feel and make it more light hearted.

Desktop Environments

• Review: Razor-Qt 0.4.0 (via Ubuntu Razor-Qt Remix)

  It seems like the recent discontent over GNOME 3 and Unity has caused a renaissance in DEs that act more traditionally. Xfce is gaining popularity as it basically replicates GNOME 2.X and can do even more now, while KDE is winning over users attracted to its shininess and power. LXDE is also gaining attention as a DE that pushes the limit of how stripped-down a DE can be before it is just a WM again, while Enlightenment seems to be gaining renewed interest thanks to Bodhi Linux. Linux Mint has modified GNOME 3 through MGSE, and now it is replacing GNOME 3/Shell with GNOME 3/Cinnamon. Yet only one of these alternatives (KDE) uses the Qt toolkit; save Enlightenment, which uses the E17 toolkit, all the others use GTK+. Until now.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • January 2012 Issue Of The PCLinuxOS Magazine

  • Mageia 2 A3 Released, Joins systemd Bandwagon

    From the Mageia 2 Alpha 3 release notes, “Following the standardisation effort going on in other distributions, Mageia has decided to adopt systemd for booting. This would lead to a simpler boot process, and easier maintenance. More details can be found on the systemd website. The option of keeping the current init system will be offered for people who prefer to wait a little and switch with a next release.”

  • Here comes Mageia 2 Alpha3!

  • Mageia 2 Inches Along with Another Alpha

    Anne Nicolas announced the release of Mageia 2 Alpha 3 today. With plans of using the latest of major software packages, the alpha ships with some of the latest packages available. The release plans include KDE 4.8, GNOME 3.4, Linux 3.3, MariaDB 5.5, and systemd.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo 12 review – the product of an established community

    Say “Gentoo” and most people think of a source code based DIY distro. However, this is a pre-built desktop system that comes as 3.4GB disk image. Michael Reed takes it for a spin…

• Red Hat Family

  • JasperSoft makes open source analytics suite available through Red Hat

    Open source business intelligence vendor JasperSoft wants its software to become another arrow in the quiver for developers using commercial PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offerings.

• Debian Family

  • People Behind Debian: Steve McIntyre, debian-cd maintainer, former Debian Project Leader

    Steve McIntyre has been contributing to Debian since 1996, 2 years before I joined! But I quickly stumbled upon Steve: in 1999, he was struggling with getting his debian-cd script to produce 2 ISO images (it was the first time that Debian did no longer fit on a single CD), I helped him by rewriting debian-cd with a robust system to split packages on as many ISO images as required.

  • Derivatives

    • Simply SimplyMEPIS 11.0

      I had heard of this Linux distribution a long time ago. Different readers who commented on my blog mentioned it. But I continued postponing a review of it all for a long time. The last time the Mepis name was dropped was during my interview with Geek-in-Pink who mentioned this distribution as her favourite.
      The time has come.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu TV: the case for Unity

      • CES: hands on with Ubuntu TV

        Canonical is showing here at CES Ubuntu TV: a version of its Linux OS aimed at televisions (as the sharper among you may have spotted from the name). Ubuntu TV is still in beta – a spokesman told us it was really ‘more of an alpha’ – but it could be available on retail products within the next 12 months.

      • Canonical seeking testers for Unity 5.0

        The Unity development team at Canonical has published a development build aimed at testers of version 5.0 of its custom desktop interface for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Users running the current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” alpha can install the preview release by manually adding the Unity PPA, which is hosted on the Unity Team’s Launchpad.net page.

      • Becoming an Ubuntu Contributing Developer

      • Running a File System Check

      • My BirthDay Wish List

      • HOWTO: Bodhi Linux on Genesi Smartbook

      • Ubuntu Unity 5.0 is out and ready for testing

        Are you a cutting edge Ubuntu user that’s been using Precise Pangolin since it was made available December 1? If you are, you’ll want to try out the just-released Unity 5.0. It’s an absolute test version, and you won’t want to install it on your production machine, but if you’re running 12.04 we’ll assume you’re already running a test box, so let’s dig into the process and changes.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi makes the sub-$100 PC a reality

  One of the biggest pieces of tech news last year was the development of a $25 PC by a charity in the UK known as the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Producing a fully-functional PC capable of running Linux, Quake III-quality games, and 1080p video is no small feat.

• Texas Instruments demos OMAP 5 processors

  TI (Texas Instruments) used this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to demonstrate its freshly minted OMAP 5 processor, which it claims will be the first ARM Cortex-A15 product on the market. Shown off on an Android 4.0 smartphone reference platform, the SoC (system on chip) will support both tablets and thin-and-light notebooks, the chipmaker promised.

• Phones

  • Leaked screenshots reveal new details on Nokia N9 MeeGo update

    New details on the forthcoming MeeGo update for Nokia N9 users have just emerged this morning, courtesy of a batch of leaked screenshots and firmware information. Originally posted by a user on talk.maemo.org, the shots point to many upcoming functions with which Android and iOS users are already familiar, including copy-paste browser support and a notably iOS-like folder layout. Also included in the screenshots are support for video calls and tweaks to the OS’ camera and gallery apps, though details remain unclear. Equally unclear is the release date for PR1.2, though the screenshots cite a build date of January 30th, so it may very well be nearing.

  • Tizen OS alpha released, may debut on Samsung I9500 smartphone

    The Linux Foundation’s Tizen project has previewed an alpha version of its MeeGo and LiMo-based mobile operating system and SDK. The HTML5-oriented release — including components from the carrier-backed WAC interoperability standards and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — follows rumors of Intel-based Tizen tablets, plus a screenshot leak that suggests an appearance on an upcoming Samsung I9500 phone.

  • gStrings in Your Pocket

    What may sound like a perverse concept is actually one of the many ways smartphones can change your life. If you play a musical instrument but don’t happen to have perfect pitch (most of us, sadly), you can buy a tuner, pitch pipe, tuning fork or any number of other aids to keep yourself in tune. If you have a smartphone in your pocket, however, you also can simply download gStrings. Available in the Android Marketplace in either a free ad-supported version or an inexpensive ad-free version, gStrings will help you tune any number of instruments accurately.

  • Android

    • Android Fragmentation Debate Could be Red Herring

      As new Android flavors develop, particularly with the new version developed by Amazon for the Amazon Fire, the debate rages over whether fragmentation is actually a problem for developers or a red herring introduced as open source FUD.

      Just this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, Eric Schmidt, Google Executive Chairman tried to tamp down any concerns about fragmentation saying that it was about freedom for developers and handset manufacturers to compete on what he calls differentiation.

    • Parrot unveils new auto systems, updates quadricopter with Android support

      Parrot announced three new versions of its Android-based Asteroid in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform: a 3.2-inch Asteroid CK Bluetooth hands-free system, a five-inch Asteroid Nav navigation system, and the Asteroid 2DIN multimedia car radio. Parrot also announced a revised 2.0 version of its Linux-based Parrot AR Drone “quadricopter” flying drone that can now be flown with an Android phone.

    • Polaroid unveils Android-based camera with 16 megapixels and 3x zoom

      Polaroid announced an Android-based, 16-megapixel camera with a 3.2-inch touchscreen, Android Market access, and Wi-Fi for quick uploads to social networks. The Polaroid SC1630 Smart Camera offers 3x optical zoom, 5x digital zoom, geo-tagging, and automatic face and smile detection — but response time isn’t exactly “instant,” according to one preview.

    • Original ASUS Transformer to Receive ICS Update Soon?

      Android 4.0 a.k.a Ice Cream Sandwich is nowadays what every Android fanboy dreams about. We are all looking forward to more ICS powered devices like Galaxy Nexus and Transformer Prime. However, we shouldn’t forget devices that were launched last year and are expected to receive the ICS update!

    • Fun with selective memory: “Dell Streak? What Dell Streak?”

      Oh. It was Dell. Oddly, the Dell CCO seems reluctant to mention the Streak, instead talking up future products with “We have been taking our time.” (Time to recover from the Streak, you mean.) Sadly, WebProNews doesn’t catch the omission either, and dully remarks that it’s “surprising that Dell has not entered into the tablet business”. (Entered it without crashing and burning, you mean.)

      WebProNews gives its source as Reuters, whose article does mention the Streak – though so quickly you’ll miss it if you pause to spoon more corn flakes. After that gloss, Reuters simply goes along with the ruse that the Streak never happened. “Dell Inc intends to launch its first consumer tablet computer in late 2012″, proclaims the article. First?

Open source or proprietary software, which way to go?

In the past week, the Kenyan media has been awash with reports that cyber cafes are ditching proprietary software for the perceived cheaper and user-friendly open source software.

Events

• LCA code of conduct: devil is in the detail

• AdaCamp aims to boost women’s participation in open tech

  Forty three people have registered to attend the inaugural AdaCamp in Melbourne on 14 January, according to the event’s organisers.

  The event, aimed at discussing ways of boosting women’s participation in open source, open culture and open technology in general, is organised by the non-profit Ada Initiative.

• The Best Linux Events of 2012

• The Linux Foundation Announces 2012 Event and Onsite Linux Training Schedule

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle Big Data Appliance Featuring Hadoop Goes Live

CMS

• Missing the Point of WordPress Entirely

  A post by Kevinjohn Gallagher on “no longer recommending WordPress” to his clients has gotten a bit of traction lately. While there’s legitimate criticism to be leveled at WordPress, Gallagher’s isn’t (for the most part) it. If you’re approaching WordPress with the expectation that it’s the be-all and end-all of content management systems (CMSes) you’re going to be sorely disappointed. And frankly, I hope WordPress never tries to fit the ridiculous list of requirements that Gallagher tries to saddle it with.

Education

• SBDC offers free open-source software classes

  The Maricopa Community Colleges Small Business Development Center is launching a series of classes to teach entrepreneurs how to use free open-source software to manage their business operations.

  The program is being funded by a $60,000 grant from Hewlett-Packard Development Co. LP.

• MLK and Open Source: 2 Degrees of Separation

  On Tuesday evening, my teen daughter and I had some quality bonding time over milkshakes and the first season of Star Trek, which was timely considering the conversation I’d have the next day with a couple of NASA employees.

  In my Wednesday phone interview for an article I was writing about the new NASA open source outreach efforts, I asked William Eshagh, a technologist working on Open Government and the Nebula Cloud Computing Platform out of the NASA Ames Research Center, about the efforts NASA makes to help increase diversity in the STEM fields.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Jaspersoft Aims Its Open-source Analytics Suite at PaaS Vendors

BSD

• FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE Announcement

  The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the stable/9 branch, which improves on stable/8 and adds many new features. Some of the highlights:

Public Services/Government

• Organizing Open Source Efforts at NASA

Openness/Sharing

• ‘Open-source’ robotic surgery platform going to top medical research labs

• Open Source Surgery, a Robot called Raven takes Flight

  A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz have developed a surgical robot, called Raven 2, for use as an open source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard , Johns Hopkins, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.

• Scary science, national security, and open-source research

  I’ve been following the story about the scientists who have been working to figure out how H5N1 bird flu might become transmissible from human to human, the controversial research they used to study that question, and the federal recommendations that are now threatening to keep that research under wraps. This is a pretty complicated issue, and I want to take a minute to help you all better understand what’s going on, and what it means. It’s a story that encompasses not just public health and science ethics, but also some of the debates surrounding free information and the risk/benefit ratio of open-source everything.

• Open Hardware

  • Weekend Project: Learning Ins and Outs of Arduino

    Arduino is an open embedded hardware and software platform designed for rapid creativity. It’s both a great introduction to embedded programming and a fast track to building all kinds of cool devices like animatronics, robots, fabulous blinky things, animated clothing, games, your own little fabs… you can build what you imagine. Follow along as we learn both embedded programming and basic electronics.

Why You Need Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Infrastructure as a Service is that part of cloud computing that allows you to lease and manage computing infrastructure for your business needs. Computing infrastructure includes virtual machines (VMs), operating systems, middleware, runtime components, network, storage, data and applications. Cloud computing vendors provide the necessary underlying physical hardware (servers, network, storage) that they own and manage transparently in the background. The two worlds have little crossover. The cloud vendor and customer have a non-intrusive relationship with one another just as you currently do with your web hosting provider. They’re there when you need help but their direct involvement in your business is zero.

ISC Seeks Wider Input for BIND 10

The Internet Systems Consortium is looking for a few more good programmers to bring the next generation of its open source BIND DNS server software to fruition.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs Loses Another Demographic

  I went and found the prospectus and it’s fascinating for someone, like me, whose understanding of Islamic finance basically comes from Wikipedia. Now, even I know that the basic idea of a sukuk is to replicate a fixed income, or let’s say not-quite-common-equity-anyway, financial instrument without the use of “interest,” because interest is forbidden under Shari’a law. This, actually, is a topic close to my heart, because it turns out that in regular old American law sometimes “interest” is also forbidden, and by “forbidden” I mean “taxed,” which means that people who do what I used to do have certain incentives to turn things that look like taxable interest into things that look like non-taxable equity returns and vice versa. One thing you learn in that line of work is that it’s in large part the business of defeating substance with form: you pay for the use of money over time, but fall into some category of “paying for money over time” that isn’t what that is normally called, viz. “interest.” There are ways to do that in American tax law (one is called “option premium,” true story), and there are apparently ways to do it under Islamic law (one is called “murabaha,” which is what GS is aiming at here, and it’s basically the equivalent of “getting paid a fee for brokering a commodity transaction with forward settlement”).

  It’s unclear if Goldman achieved that here. People have said that the Goldman sukuk does and does not* comply with Islamic law, and I am the last person in the world to weigh in on that, so whatevs. Apparently there’s at least controversy. And here’s the thing: when you are in a line of work that exists to privilege form over substance, you really really have to get the form right. Implying that you’ve gotten signoff from people who you haven’t gotten signoff from is … unhelpful.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Internet Opens Up to All Names

  Every since the very beginning of the Internet, new top level domains (TLD) have been added incrementally. Currently the number of TLDs stands at 22, but thanks to a process that begins today that number could be over 1,000 by this time next year.

• Senator Leahy Hopes To Rush Through PIPA By Promising To Study DNS Blocking… Later?!?

• Refusing REFUSED

  The U.S. Congress’ road to Stopping Online Piracy (SOPA) and PROTECT IP (PIPA) has had some twists and turns due to technical constraints imposed by the basic design of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). PIPA’s (and SOPA’s) provisions regarding advertising and payment networks appear to be well grounded in the law enforcement tradition called following the money, but other provisions having to do with regulating American Internet Service Providers (ISPs) so as to block DNS resolution for pirate or infringing web sites have been shown to be ineffectual, impractical, and sometimes unintelligible.

  For example an early draft of this legislative package called for DNS redirection of malicious domain names in conflict with the end-to-end DNS Security system (DNSSEC). Any such redirection would be trivially detected as a man in the middle attack by secure clients and would thus be indistinguishable from the kind of malevolent attacks that DNSSEC is designed to prevent. After the impossibility of redirection was shown supporters of PIPA and SOPA admitted that redirection (for example, showing an “FBI Warning” page when an American consumer tried to access a web site dedicated to piracy or infringement) was not actually necessary. Their next idea was no better: to return a false No Such Domain (NXDOMAIN) signal. When the DNS technical community pointed out that NXDOMAIN had the same end-to-end security as a normal DNS answer and that false NXDOMAIN would be detected and rejected by secure clients the supporters SOPA and PIPA changed their proposal once again.

• CreativeAmerica Denies Copying; Inadvertently Shows Why SOPA/PIPA Are Dangerous

  Either Hoffman didn’t understand what happened or he’s being purposely misleading (neither of which makes CreativeAmerica look very competent). No one is complaining about them sending out an email urging supporters to contact Senators. What they’re complaining about is that the text is almost identical, and uses the same three bullet points that folks at Public Knowledge admit they “over-edited” internally, including a long discussion that turned what had formerly been a paragraph into three separate bullet points.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Public Access Recast: new broad IPR exemption to transparency

  In other words, they created a broader IPR exemption to transparency to make it more difficult to obtain information and found that IPR as an argument could be easier applied to deny access to documents. I wonder why Parliament under its rapporteur MEP Michael Cashman did not attempt to revert it.

• Copyrights

  • SOPA: A Bad Cop’s Best Friend

    In ever-increasing numbers, law enforcement is finding itself on the receiving end of the camera. Every low-end cellphone comes equipped with a still camera at the very least, and most have the ability to capture video. With a large percentage of the population equipped to document their interactions with law enforcement, hundreds of taped encounters have surfaced, most of them capturing policemen behaving badly.

  • Firefighters For SOPA (Again): The Congressional Fire Services Institute Rehashes Cliches And Debunked Anecdotes

    Another pro-SOPA/PROTECT-IP op-ed detailing the horrors wrought by “rogue sites” has appeared at The Hill. This time, it’s William Jenaway of the Congressional Fire Services Institute decrying the ready availability of counterfeits goods and the risk to “public safety” these items pose.

    It opens with the usual “the internet is wonderful but mostly it’s a den of thieves” rhetorical device before wading into the shallowest waters of the overused “appeal to patriotism” argument, stating that “Foreign-owned, rogue websites are increasingly selling counterfeit products to U.S. consumers,” reminding us yet again that xenophobia and lousy legislation still go hand-in-hand far too frequently.

  • Apparently, Someone Forgot To Tell Reality That The Entertainment Industry Was Dying

    We hear it all the time: the entertainment industry legacy players insist that the world is ending, jobs are going away, and that they need new laws like SOPA and PIPA or it’s all over. That’s why SOPA & PIPA are being positioned as jobs bills. Especially popular are the major labels and the big Hollywood studios insisting that they’re really doing this not to save their own companies from having to adapt, but to protect the poor, poor indie creator, who is totally being destroyed by those evil online pirates. We hear time and time again about how it’s really the “indie” folks who are being decimated.

  • Jazz Pioneer ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton’s Music Finally Free For Re-use In Europe — A Hundred Years Too Late

    A recent Techdirt post reminded us that thanks to its crazy copyright laws, the US won’t be seeing anything new in the public domain for many years. But even in those “fortunate” countries that get to use cultural works a mere 70 years after the creator’s death, the situation is still pretty absurd.

  • How Much Do Music and Movie Piracy Really Hurt the U.S. Economy?

    Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement — such as those behind the proposed new Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills in Congress — argue that online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • Three Priorities For Open-Source Radeon Graphics

    While we still haven’t been able to deliver any Radeon HD 7000 series Linux benchmarks, we do know what are AMD’s three priority projects right now for their open-source Radeon Linux driver stack.

    The three priorities right now for AMD and their open-source Linux driver stack come down to Southern Islands support, OpenCL, and UVD/video. If you’re part of the Phoronix Forums community, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since it was there where this information was first shared.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • 11 useful commands for Linux/Unix administrators

  • Updating the ROM in Your Mobile Device

    Follow the forum instructions carefully, because it’s possible to brick the device. Often, the first release day of any community-released code will be athwart with danger — the experimenters that day know it and like the thrill. We don’t. The first day of a recent Google TV upgrade bricked numerous devices. As a beginner, wait a few days after a release for the kinks to get ironed out, and always reads the forums carefully.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Tame the Ubuntu 11.10 Unity interface with MyUnity

        The new interface introduced with the latest version of Ubuntu has had a mixed response. MyUnity offers an easy way to change some of the visual settings. This can make the Launcher and Unity in general easier to use as well as that satisfaction in having it set up exactly as you want.

      • Hands-on with Ubuntu TV, above and under the hood

        At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Monday, platform vendor Canonical unveiled a special version of Ubuntu that is designed for televisions. The platform has an integrated media library manager and will offer DVR capabilities. It includes a variant of the Unity shell that is intended to be operated with a television remote control.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 12 KDE screen shot preview

          The first release candidate of Linux Mint 12 KDE was made available for download yesterday, but do not be surprised if the “stable” version is released next week. While we await that, here are a few screen shots for your viewing pleasure.

Devices/Embedded

• CMOS camera platform from Kappa Optronics enables motion detection

  The CMOS camera platform transmits image data directly to the monitor via HDMI/DVI or is directly saved on the memory card. The processor and the embedded Linux operating system are directly on-board. The platform provides high-definition live streams, up to 5 Mpixels, with a maximum 20 frames/s. Facial recognition and motion detection may also be implemented.

• Diminutive, Linux-based Raspberry Pi Computer Heads to Production

  The tiny motherboard seen in the photo here forms the core of the Raspberry Pi computer, which has generated a lot of interest, as we originally noted here. Last month, as both CNet and Business Insider noted, the Raspberry Pi ultra low-cost computer was moving toward the manufacturing stage. It’s designed to run Linux via an ARM processor, and there will reportedly be versions available for $25 and $35. Now, there is word that manufacturing has begun, and there are more details about this diminutive, low-cost, yet surprisingly powerful computing device.

• Raspberry Pi PCs are being built

  FIFTEEN QUID Raspberry Pi computers are being manufactured and will soon be on sale.

  Sadly, perhaps, the home grown PC on a USB stick is being made overseas due to a desire to keep costs down.

• Phones

  • Tizen OS alpha released, may debut on Samsung I9500 smartphone

    The Linux Foundation’s Tizen project has previewed an alpha version of its MeeGo and LiMo-based mobile operating system and SDK. The HTML5-oriented release — including components from the carrier-backed WAC interoperability standards and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — follows rumors of Intel-based Tizen tablets, plus a screenshot leak that suggests an appearance on an upcoming Samsung I9500 phone.

  • Intel Teases Tasty Tizen Tablets

    Remember Tizen? You know, Intel’s Linux-based OS, which evolved from MeeGo when Nokia bailed. Surprise: It’s one of three OSes Intel is hoping to get onto tablets this year, along with the better-known Windows 8 and Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich.”

    “In our tablet business, we made a commitment to move a lot faster,” said Mark Miller, director of marketing for Intel’s netbook and tablet segments. “We have a lot of room to make up.”

    Here at CES, that includes showing off a slim, light Lenovo Android-powered tablet that runs on Intel’s new Medfield Atom Z2460 chipset. The Lenovo tablet (shown at left) is under 9mm thick and runs for up to eight hours on a charge. It’ll be coming midyear, Miller said.

  • Android

    • HDMI Dongle: Portable set-top box runs Android 4

      HDMI Dongle is an Open Source, USB-sized set-top box from Always Innovating, a technology outfit based in San Francisco, CA USA. A TV on a stick, it is designed to turn any TV with USB and HDMI ports into a connected TV running Android 4. Like the Cotton Candy, it has an HDMI and a USB port. The magic comes via the HDMI port, while the USB port is to power the device from the TV it is attached to.

      The hardware specs of the device are: Texas Instruments Cortex-A9 OMAP 4 processor (1.0 GHz to 1.8 GHz), 1 GB RAM, a microSD slot, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules. It comes with a simple remote control that has voice control and Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities. On the software side, it “can run Android Ice Scream Sandwich and is technically compatible with Google TV.”

    • AT&T offers HTML5 SDK for third-party mobile Web app developers

      AT&T is planning to launch a store for mobile Web applications that run in the browser. The company has released a set of JavaScript APIs and a software development kit (SDK) that provide Web developers with access to certain mobile network features.

High-quality scientific graphics with MathGL: An interview with Alexey Balakin

F4S: What is MathGL?

Alexey: MathGL is …

* a library for making high-quality scientific graphics under Linux and Windows;
* a library for the fast data plotting and data processing of large data arrays;
* a library for working in window and console modes and for easy embedding into other programs;
* a library with large and growing set of graphics.

SMEs opt for free and open source software to cut costs

Free and open source software is steadily growing in popularity in Kenya as firms move to cut costs and achieve more customised technology solutions.

Many companies particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have adopted free and open source software (FOSS) to power their systems in the wake of increasing costs and shrinking IT budgets.

Adoption of FOSS is also seen as a promising solution to software piracy in countries like Kenya.

Google Maps Pricing Sends Real Estate Site to Open Source

In October Google announced pricing for its popular Google Maps API. Though most sites won’t hit the free limits, those with a lot of traffic may be scrambling for a solution. That was the case for a New York real estate service, which discovered their bill would be $200,000 – $300,000 per year.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle fills another gap in its big data offering

  With Oracle’s announcement of general availability of the big data appliance, it is filling in the blanks by disclosing that it is OEM’ing Cloudera’s CDH Hadoop distribution, and more importantly, the management tooling that is key to its revenue stream.

Education

• For Mobile Strategies, Open Source Offers Flexibility

  As universities transition to a mobile-friendly campus, more and more IT departments are considering the benefits of open source technology. Cost is definitely a factor, but schools are just as attracted to the flexibility that open source gives them.

  When the University of Chicago (IL) first introduced mobile technology two years ago, a key goal was to launch a product as soon as possible. Developer skills for mobile apps were hard to come by, so it made sense to go with a vendor. “It was faster to have a turnkey product,” explains Cornelia Bailey, user experience consultant for IT Services. Today, the mobile landscape and the university’s thinking have changed. The original product is now “not flexible enough” for the fast-evolving world of mobile technology. Instead, Bailey and her team decided to explore the possibility of going open source.

Semi-Open Source

• Jaspersoft aims its open-source analytics suite at PaaS developers

  Open-source BI (business intelligence) vendor Jaspersoft wants its software to become another arrow in the quiver for developers using commercial PaaS (platform-as-a-service) offerings.

• At the Intersection of Open Source and Cloud Computing, You’ll Find…Jobs

  As 2012 launches, some good news has rolled in on the employment front, but there are still many people looking for work. As noted in this post, it’s entirely possible to graduate with a technology-related degree but not end up offering in-demand skills to employers. Meanwhile, many tech workers with outdated skills are having to brush up on new skills. For prospective workers looking to differentiate themselves from the pack, new data shows that the intersection of open source and cloud computing can not only lead to a new job, but can lead to a job that will last.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• In Which Eben Moglen Like, Legit Yells at Me for Having Facebook

  Yesterday afternoon, this reporter was scrambling to finish reporting a forward-looking story about how banks are exploring the possibility of using social media data to judge loan and credit applicants. My editor wanted a quote from a privacy advocate, so I immediately thought of Eben “Spying for Free” Moglen, a militant digital privacy advocate, founder of the uber-secure personal server FreedomBox, and the inspiration for the decentralized social network Diaspora. In hindsight, perhaps I should have just called Cory Doctorow.

Openness/Sharing

• ‘Open-source’ robotic surgery platform going to top medical research labs

  SANTA CRUZ, CA–Robotics experts at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Washington (UW) have completed a set of seven advanced robotic surgery systems for use by major medical research laboratories throughout the United States. After a round of final tests, five of the systems will be shipped to medical robotics researchers at Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Nebraska, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, while the other two systems will remain at UC Santa Cruz and UW.

Programming

• IBM updates EGL Web Developer Tools

  IBM has released an updated version of its Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) as part of its updated Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools 0.7 (EWDT),. The open source EWDT is designed to simplify web application development using a combination of web services and JavaScript (Dojo and others). The development environment is of particular interest to businesses that are looking to migrate classical COBOL/RPG applications to current Java and JavaScript environments using solutions from the open source community.

Standards/Consortia/ODF/OOo

• Open Document V1.2 OASIS Standard published

  The Open Document V1.2 OASIS Standard has now been published.

• The Community Forum: New Year Status

  After 4 years of existence, the Community Forum has moved on the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) servers at the end of October 2011 (see details). Here are some figures about how we are doing on the English forum. We will try to make this kind of report on a monthly basis in the forum and perhaps quarterly on the blog.

• Features for GraphicObjects and OLEObjects

  I just wanted to send some notes about added features which are part of AOO3.4 version. This one is actually the result of fixing tasks #118558#, #118485#, #108221# and #67705# which are all about GraphicObjects, OLEObjects (OLE means Object Linking and Embedding) and their geometrical attributes and properties. You may take a look at the tasks if you are interested in details, here I want to describe the benefits.

  GraphicObjects are used when you insert a picture (pixel and vector data) or convert something to it. They already supported the full attribute set, so line style, fill style, text and shadow are possible. Geometrically, they could be transformed widely, but could not be sheared. Because now the content of GraphicObjects is displayed using primitives (and these are fully transformable) it is possible to also use shear and thus now completely support all geometrical transformations used in the office.

M$ Shrinks

The bottom line is that shipments of PCs (notebooks and desktops only) are about flat for 2011/2010, with just 1.6% growth. For Q4 only, there was a decline of 0.17%. Worse, for M$, USA, the most M$-friendly country on Earth, was off 6.7% for the quarter and 4.9% for the year. You know the USA, the country where people want to pay extra for words like “super-dooper” and such,

Security

• Force firms to disclose data breaches, report urges

• Go Daddy not liable for cybersquatting, US court rules

  Go Daddy was not liable for a form of trademark infringement when a system that the domain name registrar operates was used to redirect visitors from allegedly ‘cybersquatting’ web domain names to a pornographic website, a US court has ruled.

  Petronas, the national oil company of Malaysia, had argued that Go Daddy was in breach of US trademark law because it “used” the two domains to re-route visitors to the allegedly infringing sites to the pornography website through its servers in bad faith with the intent of profiting from its actions.

• Microsoft kicks off 2012 with seven security bulletins

  The first Patch Tuesday for 2012 brings seven bulletins from Microsoft. One was held over from December, and only one of the seven is regarded as being critical.

Censorship

• EU Commission Paves the Way for Privatized Net Censorship

  In a milestone strategy document on Internet policy, the EU Commission is getting ready to propose new repressive policies. With the upcoming consent vote on the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA and the revision of the “Intellectual Property Rights” Directive (IPRED), the controversial censorship schemes currently discussed in the United States will soon arrive in Europe.

• Bulgarian police raid two filesharing web sites

  TWO BULGARIAN filesharing web sites have been raided by the country’s organised crime unit.

• Holland moves to block the Pirate Bay

  INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS (ISPs) in the Netherlands must block access to the Pirate Bay website within ten days, following a court ruling.

  Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN demanded the ban, and the Court of The Hague approved it, so now two ISPs in Holland, Ziggo and XS4ALL have been ordered to block the web site.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Is internet access a human right?

  A recent United Nations Human Rights Council report examined the important question of whether internet access is a human right.

  While the Special Rapporteur’s conclusions are nuanced in respect of blocking sites or providing limited access, he is clear that restricting access completely will always be a breach of article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the right to freedom of expression.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA

    This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue.

    But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from?

    From sources that the studios at one time claimed would put them out of business: Pay-per view TV, cable and satellite channels, video rentals, DVD sales, online subscriptions and digital downloads.

  • Music Industry v. Ireland

    The long suffering Irish taxpayer will be delighted to learn that the music industry has joined the queue of those seeking a payout and yesterday issued a plenary summons against the State in the High Court for alleged failure to implement aspects of EU copyright law.

  • Is the Trans Pacific Partnership a re-writing of NAFTA? iPolitics Insight

    When Prime Minister Noda announced that Japan intended to join the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations, a grim reality set in. Canada knew it needed to be at the table. This was decided even before President Obama invited Prime Minister Harper to join at the APEC Summit last November.

    Canada cannot allow Japan, its fourth most important merchandise export market, to become another Korea, with the US inside the tent enjoying discriminatory preferences and eroding Canada’s market position.

  • Response to Federal Register notice seeking comments regarding Canada’s interest in TPPA negotiations

    On December 7, 2011, USTR issued Federal Register Notice 76480-76481 requesting comments on “Canada’s Expression of Interest in the Proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement.” USTR issued similar requests for comments regarding Japan’s (Notice 76478-76479) and Mexico’s (Notice 76479-76480) expression of interest in the TPPA.

  • EMI Records launches action against State over anti-piracy order

    THE IRISH arm of multinational music group EMI has launched a High Court action against the State as part of its bid to stop the illegal downloading of music.

    The Government recently pledged to issue an order to allow copyright holders to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to websites that they consider are engaged in piracy.

  • Anonymous will shut down to protest SOPA

    HACKTIVIST GROUP Anonymous will turn off its lights for twelve hours in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US.

    The hackers are following Reddit’s lead, and will join a communications blackout on 18 January that will begin at 8am and end at 8pm.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Review: Saline’s Linux-Based OS For Desktops

The mission statement of developers for the Linux-based SalineOS for desktops puts it this way:

“The primary goal of the SalineOS project is to deliver a fast, lightweight, clean, easy to use and well documented operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux.”

With a wide range and assortment of Linux-based desktop operating systems available for free, developers seeking to attract eyeballs to their software have a particular mission: Standout with something people will need or want real bad.

Short Notices: News In Linux Audio

I hope all my readers enjoyed the best of the holiday season. I’ve been busy with the predictable confusions and minor crises that attend this time of year, but I managed to find time to jot down some recommendations for my readers. Go on, you’ve been good, give yourself a few extra belated gifts and don’t worry if your budget’s busted – it’s all free software, you can’t beat these deals.

Desktop

• A First Look at New Ubuntu Laptops and PCs from CTL

  I had the opportunity yesterday to visit CTL Corp located in Portland, Oregon and sit down with Erik Stromquist, Executive VP and COO and Michael Tupper, Director of Business Development.

• You made a mistake, your noob!

  Linux will make it big the moment the kernel strings becomes unimportant in the desktop sphere. If you must know it, you will fail. As simple as that. Once the software becomes agnostic to the point that you can use it any way you want, including not looking at little strings or looking as much as you want or need, then we will have passed to the next level in the game. Till then, we will get defeated by tiny mistakes in the major and minor numbers, and woe the fool to cross a number-strict geek.

• Chinese Lenovo Secures Biggest Deal With India

  Chinese PC maker Lenovo has hit a mega deal with Indian state Tamil Nadu. The state will buy 3 lakh (0.3 million) laptops from the company making it one of the biggest deals for the Chinese maker. The Tamil Nadu government recenly announced the free laptop project for students of state-run colleges and high schools. ELCOT earlier issued a controvercial tender where it removed Linux as the requirement. Muktware broke this story. Within a few weeks ELCOT was forced to change its pro-Microsoft policy and put Linux on these computers.

Server

• Plug Computer takes on education with Marvell SMILE Plug micro server

  Marvell announced an education platform combining its Plug Computer, Arch Linux, and software developed in collaboration with Stanford University. The SMILE Plug micro server runs on a 2GHz Marvell Armada 300 processor, sets up a secure Wi-Fi cloud for up to 60 students, and provides a “Classroom 3.0″ connected, secure, interactive learning environment.

• AT&T Jumps Into OpenStack Cloud

Audiocasts/Shows

• Overtone

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation details conferences and summits in 2012

  The Linux Foundation has announced its schedule of conferences, summits and training for 2012. In Europe, and co-locating as they did last year, LinuxCon Europe and Embedded Linux Conference Europe will run from 5-7 November in Barcelona, Spain, alongside the KVM Forum.

• New Year, New Linux Kernel

• Graphics Stack

  • Where Things Fall Short: Eight Shortcomings Of Mesa 8.0

    While Mesa 8.0 has a lot to like about it from advertised OpenGL 3.0 support to performance improvements and new Gallium3D features, there are also several shortcomings of this major Mesa release for open-source graphics drivers.

Applications

• How to make coffee through Linux Application

• Instructionals/Technical

  • [CES] USB Stick Size Computer ‘Cotton Candy’ Running Ubuntu 11.04 and Android 4.0 ICS

  • How to make coffee through Linux Application

  • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.1 (LAMP)

  • A Bash Shell Script to Update Firefox Nightly

  • Book Review for “JBoss AS 7 Configuration Deployment and Administration”

  • Launch DOS Games In Ubuntu From Unity’s Dash!

  • Formatting the output from tail

  • A Beginner’s Guide to Editing Text Files With Vi

  • Easily Install Daggerfall, Doom and Many Classic Games on Linux

  • Keep Configs Under Control With Etckeeper

  • Documentation – Or The Lack Thereof

    The point of all this is, when did the transition from printed documentation to “online” documentation, which I agree is a good thing because of the paper and weight saved, get changed to “no documentation”? Is this happening just because it is not obvious, nobody is looking, nobody cares, or what?

• Games

  • Editorial Humble Indie…Store?

    So the web has been abuzz with news of Humble Bundle doing a Humble Indie Store.

  • 10 Greatest Android Games for 2011

    It’s 2012 already and the impact Android had on the overall mobile eco system in the year 2011 was nothing short of spectacular. Nearly 700,000 Android activations are happening everyday(which doesn’t include Amazon, Nook tablets apparently) and Android Market is teeming with some 400,000 applications. I have never been a good PC gamer of sorts, but I’m really enjoying many Android games. Here are my favorite 10 Android games for 2011.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • The Mystery of KDE Activities

    No feature defines the KDE 4 release series more than Activities. At the same time, no feature is so little understood — Fedora even has a package for removing the desktop toolkit, which provides mouse access to Activities.

    But, when you take the time to learn about Activities, you’ll find them a natural extension of the desktop metaphor that just might help you to work more efficiently.

    Activities are a super-set of Virtual Desktops. They don’t replace Virtual Desktops — in fact, each Activity can have its own set of Virtual Desktops if you choose. Instead, Activities are alternative desktops, each of which can have its own wallpaper, icons, and widgets.

  • When Unity Meets KDE: Video Spotlight

    Today’s video spotlight is a very polished and well-edited one by Youtube user GhindaUcigasa who aims to show us what happens when Ubuntu’s Unity Shell meets KDE. It’s an interesting concept, to be sure.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Spice Up Your Desktop With These 5 Cool GTK2/3 Themes [PPA]

    Are you bored with your current theme? Here are 5 cool GTK2/3 (some also come with a Shell theme) themes that are optimized to work on any “shell”: Unity, GNOME Shell or the GNOME 3 fallback session.

  • Staying happy with Gnumeric: text as “text” (instead of “dates”)

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Webconverger 11.0

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • January 2012 Issue Of The PCLinuxOS Magazine Released

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the January 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

• Red Hat Family

  • Journald: just a reinvention of the wheel?

    Two months back, Red Hat developers Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers proposed a fundamental change to the structure of Linux in the shape of the Journal daemon, meant to replace the venerable syslog.

  • File System Encryption on CentOS 6

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu TV for human being.

      • Ubuntu User Days — This Weekend!

      • Unity 5.0 Available For Testing In Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin [Video]

      • Browse Ubuntu’s Software Offerings Online On Any Computer [Linux]

        Explore the thousands of programs available by default in Ubuntu, online, regardless of what operating system you’re using at the moment. Whether you’re a would-be Ubuntu user curious about the software options or a current Ubuntu user occasionally stranded in Windows-land, Ubuntu’s clean and simple online catalogue is a great place to explore.

      • Top 10 Ubuntu apps that are worth every penny

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Mint With Cinnamon: A New Sweet Spot for Desktop Linux?

          “I gotta ask….why?” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “I don’t see why, now that mint has grown in popularity, they don’t follow Canonical’s lead and pick their own DE which can be customized to their distro instead of trying to keep some horrible kludge of GNOME 2 and 3 running, which I bet will be a buggy nightmare.”

        • Linux Mint 12 KDE Almost Ready

          Last month Linux Mint 12 was released to quite a buzz. It addressed many of the issues disaffected users experienced with GNOME 3 (and Unity). This was great for GNOME users and Linux Mint in general, but hey, what about us KDE users? Well, the KDE version is nearly ready and users can test a release candidate now.

        • Download Linux Mint 12 KDE Release Candidate

          Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, unleashed a couple of minutes ago, January 11th, the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 12 KDE operating system.

          Linux Mint 12 KDE Release Candidate features updated applications, general improvements and new features, all to make your desktop experience more comfortable.

        • A wild Minty Customer appears!

          First, I must say that all that follows here is my own demented view. But blog thingy already implies that, and about the ‘demented’… well, going against the flow might always be demented, no? Our topic here is Linux Mint. It is very popular right now, but does it really deserve that much popularity?

          I don’t think Linux Mint is really important enough to give that much attention. Most of they have, they have because of Ubuntu. And all they contributed to the FOSS is some shiny panels and menus together with some non-crucial tools for package management, hardly worth mentioning in the greater scheme of the things. Cinnamon is still in the works but more on it later. Ubuntu greatly changed their Debian base and started projects like Upstart (which I am fond of), they made great leaps in desktop hardware recognition and use; Mint made some panels and menus. Comparison here is quite clear that I don’t think my intelligent readers (let me butter you up a bit) might need more clarification.

Devices/Embedded

• US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux

  The control of US military spy drones appears to have shifted from Windows to Linux following an embarrassing malware infection.

  Ground control systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, which commands the killer unmanned aircraft, became infected with a virus last September. In a statement at the time the Air Force dismissed the electronic nasty as a nuisance and said it posed no threat to the operation of Reaper drones, but the intrusion was nonetheless treated seriously.

• Anyone for Raspberry Pi?

  The Raspberry Pi Foundation is planning on revitalising computing amongst young people by bringing back the good old days of tinkering around with programmable computers.

  Production has begun for the credit card sized PC, which has an ARM GNU/Linux box that can be plugged into a TV and keyboard. Its system on chip is a Broadcom BCM2835.

• The Raspberry Pi Computer Is Finally Being Manufactured

• This digital picture frame runs Linux better than you might think

  Ah, the beauty of spreading the guts of some hackable hardware across your workbench. This happens to be the circuit board and LCD screen from a Parrot DF3120 digital picture frame. The device is pretty powerful, considering you can still find them available for around $25. You’ll get a 3.5″ screen, ARM9 processor with 8MB or RAM, Bluetooth, a tilt sensor, and more. It seem that [BusError], [Sprite_tm], [Claude], and few others really went to town and spilled all of the secrets this device has to offer.

• Open Source PID Controller

  I used a PID (proportional–integral–derivative) controller to regulate the temperature of my espresso maker. I wrote about it in my book, Made by Hand: My Adventures in the World of Do-It-Yourself. (You can read an except from the chapter on Gizmodo.)

• Phones

  • Tizen Puts Out Some Code, SDK Preview

    The Tizen Linux project, which is backed by Intel, Samsung, and others, have released some initial code and other information in time for CES 2012.

  • Android

    • ‘Medfield’ Atom breaks cover — will be in Lenovo and Motorola phones

      Intel and Motorola announced a multi-year agreement focused on the development of Atom-powered, Android-based phones and tablets. Meanwhile, Intel showed off an smartphone reference platform and a Lenovo K800 handset that both run Android on the “Medfield” processor — now unveiled as the Atom Z2460 — and third-party benchmarks rated the CPU high marks in performance and power consumption.

    • Google’s Schmidt Does the Android Definition Boogie

      Google Chairman Eric Schmidt doesn’t seem to like it when the word “fragmentation” is applied to his company’s Android mobile OS. Android isn’t fragmented, he said during a recent interview — it’s “differentiated.” But to developers and users, the change of wording may not make much difference. “If developers say Android is fragmented, then it is,” said Flurry Analytics CEO Simon Khalaf.

    • Google’s Schmidt: Android’s not fragmented, it’s ‘differentiated’

    • CyanogenMod surpasses 1 million installations

      CyanogenMod development team member Koushik Dutta has announced that the project’s open source modified Android firmware has been installed on more than one million devices around the world. At the time of writing, the CMStats web page currently shows a total of 1,001,177 installs of CyanogenMod across all versions, with 7,895 having been added in the past 24 hours.

    • Android A85 Superfone with Gesture Control

      Micromax and eyeSight partner up to create what seems to be a new type of smartphone. Although, their Android A85 Superfone boasts ordinary specs for today’s standard. This devices offers a 1GHz Dual Core processor, of the Tegra 2 variety, a 3.8” display, and offers Gesture Control.

    • HTC Desire News – Several Desire Models get Unlocked Bootloader

    • Huawei Annoucnes Android 4.0 Powered MediaPad, Along with Line of Color Series

      Huawei is a brand which is rapidly making a highly ranked place in the mobile market. They started from China as a small brand, they are now famous all over the world. Last year in June, they introduced their first ever Honeycomb tablet which was launched as Huawei MediaPad, and it featured Honeycomb and a dual-core processor. Now Huawei is back with the announcement of Huawei MediaPad, which is the world’s first tablet to feature Android 4.0; also the announcement of Huawei MediaPad Color series but this series will be Honeycomb powered, just like the original model.

    • Sony Xperia S coming to Orange UK, Vodafone has no plans to offer it

      Yesterday, O2 and Three UK have confirmed that they would launch the new Sony Xperia S. And today it was Orange’s turn to do the same.

    • Sony Smartwatch accessory launched for Xperia range

      Sony have announced a range of ‘smart’ accessories for their latest Xperia smartphones including this the Sony SmartWatch which connects via Bluetooth

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Intel’s educational PC gets dual cores, 12-hour battery

    Intel announced the fifth generation of its reference platform for education-focused portable PCs. The Classmate now features a dual-core Atom N2600 processor, delivering battery life of up to 12 hours, plus optional capacitive multitouch functionality, according to the company.

  • Android 4.0 tablet sells for $170

    At CES, ViewSonic announced a seven-inch ViewPad E70 tablet that runs Android 4.0 on a 1GHz processor and costs a mere $170. The company also unveiled a 9.7-inch ViewPad 10e tablet for $270, a 10.1-inch, dual-boot Windows/Android model (the $849 ViewPad 10pi), and a 3.5-inch ViewPhone 3 (Latin America-bound with Android 2.3).

  • ZTE shows off a 7 inch, 720p tablet with Tegra 3

    Chinese device maker ZTE has been promising to enter the North American phone and tablet market for a while, but so far hasn’t made much of a splash in the States. So I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for this sleek new 7 inch ZTE tablet to come to the US. But it’d be kind of nice if it did.

Big Switch open-sources Floodlight, an OpenFlow controller

Big Switch Networks, a startup using the OpenFlow protocol to help companies build software-defined networks, has open-sourced its controller software, dubbed Floodlight. The company, which is one of several startups trying to solve networking issues that arise from virtualization and webscale systems, said on Wednesday that it would release the source code for the controller it developed on its website and will focus on developing an ecosystem of applications around the Floodlight code.

A response to a FOSS skeptic

Don Parris wrote a book a while back called “Penguin in the Pew.” The book is an outstanding guide for nonprofits — aimed at churches, but it can apply to any other nonprofit — in the way to use Free/Open Source Software, which Don like to call “libre,” but you know it’s the same thing.

Liferay 6.1 portal software gets new setup wizard

Liferay logo Liferay has released version 6.1 of the Community Edition of its open source and Java-based enterprise portal software. Designed to power corporate intranets and extranets, it combines a content management system and a web application framework in one platform. The Community Edition of Liferay contains the latest features and enhancements for the platform which will appear in a few months in the Enterprise Edition.

Using open source to build the ultimate walled garden

That’s no slam on OpenStack, mind you: the Rackspace-owned cloud computing project is much-beloved in the open source community for the technology and the Apache license that covers the project. The fact that governance will be shifting from Rackspace proper to a planned OpenStack Foundation definitely helps, too.

Google open sources Zygote 3D human body viewer

Google Body has open sourced the enjoyable to use 3D visualisation of the human body built by Google labs engineers in their “20% time”, the fuzzily-measured time slot employees are allowed to use to work on personally inspired creative projects.

The open sourcing of this code is a result of the Google Labs division being closed last year. The code now sits with Zygote Media Group, who provided the imagery for Google Body in the first place.

Open-Source, Real-Time Bus Tracking Is Coming to All of New York City

Second Crack: New Open Source Static Blogging Engine

Admit it, you’ve got something to say, you’ve got something that the world needs to hear. You’ve got something on your mind that you need to get out, and you want to do it in style. Marco Arment may have exactly what you are looking for. He has released the blogging engine that powers his personal site, Marco.org as open source, available on github under a basic BSD style license. If you do not know who Marco is, you might wonder why this is interesting. Marco’s last side project turned out to be a little thing called Instapaper, and the last web publishing platform he helped build was Tumblr, so his new project is worth taking a look at.

Geospatial services with FLOSS: Interview with Oslandia

In this interview Olivier Courtin and Vincent Picavet, founders of geospatial service provider Oslandia, share with us their business story, some advice and how free and open source geospatial software plays a major role in their company. Enjoy the interview!

Rackspace Open Sources Dreadnot for Data Center Software Deployment

Open Source software is created in a number of different ways, but the most common is simply when a developer has an “itch.” Rackspace’s Cloud Monitoring Team had such an itch when it came to having the right tools for the continuous deployment of software to their data centers and that’s how the new Dreadnot tool was born.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Plans for Firefox Enterprise – Will it Slow Innovation?

    One of the perceived shortcomings of Mozilla’s rapid release cycle, with new browsers every 6 weeks – is that enterprises couldn’t keep up.

    So now Mozilla has officially embraced a plan for an Enterprise release version of Firefox dubbed Extended Release Support (ESR). Personally, I don’t think it’s a great idea. In fact, I think it could hurt Mozilla’s mission for improving the web for us all.

SaaS

• AT&T joins ‘Linux for cloud’, boosts HTML5 apps

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle Makes Bold, Risky Move With Big Data Appliance Launch

  Oracle’s speed to market with its Big Data Appliance is indeed impressive, but what still remains to be seen is whether the product will be a success. “Something like 40 percent of computer PhDs are working on Hadoop projects, sometimes unsuccessfully,” noted Schooner CTO John Busch. “It can be a very complex process, so I don’t know if bundling it with hardware will be easy as one-two-three.”

• Oracle’s Big Data Powered by Cloudera’s Hadoop

CMS

• Big rise in registrations for Drupal Downunder

  There has been nearly a 25 per cent rise in the number of registrations for the Drupal Downunder conference this year as compared to 2011, according to one of the main organisers, Donna Benjamin.

Education

• The UK Bumps Up Its Computer Curriculum, While The US Slides Back

  And there’s no reason that US schools couldn’t do exactly the same.

  I listen to the war stories my kids bring home, from the tiny, reluctant, Medieval amount of computer education they get. Here is what a junior-high-school computer class in Iowa (top education achievement in the country, mind you) is teaching as of last month: “OK, kids, today we’re going to create an account at a web page. Open the broooowser, use the moooouuuse, click on the liiiink… We’re going to open a ‘Hotmail’ email account…”

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • SMEs Opt for Free and Open Source Software to Cut Costs

    Free and open source software is steadily growing in popularity in Kenya as firms move to cut costs and achieve more customised technology solutions.

    Many companies particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have adopted free and open source software (FOSS) to power their systems in the wake of increasing costs and shrinking IT budgets.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Joi Ito: Open-source hardware is a no brainer

Programming

• Node.js Selected by InfoWorld for 2012 Technology of the Year Award

• NGINX’s Igor Sysoev Wins 2012 Cloud Award for Developer of the Year

• Developing for Linux under OS X in XCode

The Legend of Apple and Xerox PARC and the Truth About Innovation

Every December for the last few years, NY Times OpEd columnist David Brooks picks the best magazine essays of the year. He describes his choices in two of his cols, with links to the essays in their online versiumns, with links to the essays in their online version. I generally really like his selections. One of his choices this year is a New Yorker article by bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell – Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation.

Security

• Scareware – Symantec come under fire. A sign of a struggling marketplace?
  

  Those who follow my dulcet tones on TechBytes or read my musings on the various social networks I maintain will know that recently (after years of being let down) I changed my ISP. With this change brought the expected, a shiny new router, a nice welcome letter and, shovelled into the box was also a free trial of McAfee Anti virus. Of course there was no way of them knowing that the troubles Windows users may get with malware, virus’s and spyware don’t really have any relevance to a Linux user, but nevertheless their “kind” and “free” trial was put in the same place as probably many a Windows machine when it had been brought to a halt by malicious code and the user (through their own lack of knowledge) merely thought the machine itself was broken.

Finance

• Bureau Recommends: Private Eye alleges second Vodafone tax scheme

  More than a year after first publishing allegations of a multi-billion pound tax avoidance scheme approved by HM Revenue and Customs boss Dave Hartnett, Private Eye has published details of a second tax scheme by Vodafone.

  The Eye alleges that, under the scheme, Vodafone Holdings, a holding company based in the US that owns Vodafone’s 45% stake in Verizon Wireless, borrowed billions of dollars from a second company called Vodafone Luxembourg 5 sarl.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • THE AUTHOR OF SOPA IS A COPYRIGHT VIOLATOR

    US Congressman and poor-toupee-color-chooser Lamar Smith is the guy who authored the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, as I’m sure you know, is the shady bill that will introduce way harsher penalties for companies and individuals caught violating copyright laws online (including making the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime which you could actually go to jail for). If the bill passes, it will destroy the internet and, ultimately, turn the world into Mad Max (for more info, go here).

  • The Other Side of the Internet

    The internet makes it easy to redistribute unauthorized copies – SOPA is an effort to put an end to that, albeit at the price of getting rid of the internet. But the internet also makes it easy to reach audiences. From the point of view of the big distributors represented by the MPAA and the RIAA it’s all bad. I’m pretty sure buggy-whip makers didn’t much like automobiles either. But what about the artist? Chris Phelan points us to a recent article about Louis C.K. a successful but not superstar comedian. Rather than taking the $200K that the big distributors would have paid him, he put up $170K of his own money to produce the video of his show. Unlike the big distributors who hate their customers as much as their customers hate them – Louis C. K. has a good relationship with his customers. He put the video on-sale for a quarter of the price the big guys would have charged – $5 each copy. He did it without DRM, and simply asked politely that people buy it from him and not redistribute it. He took in $2 million, a net of about $1.8 million.

  • Let us Pray: Yea Verily, Filesharing is a Religion. Official.

    You’ve just got to love those crazy Swedes. Liberal, progressive, cool and politically correct. What’s not to like? They’ve excelled themselves this time though. As dedicated filesharers they applied, and succeeded at the third attempt, to register filesharing as a religion.

  • Bach’s Goldberg Variations commissioned for Public Domain Release

    One of the responses to my earlier post about the MusOpen symphony recording project mentioned a project I had overlooked: the Open Goldberg project has created new public domain scores for the Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” using the MuseScore free software musical notation software and is commissioning a studio recording of piano soloist Kimiko Ishizaka performing the pieces, also for public domain release (with CC0).

    This is another fantastic confluence of free software, free culture, and crowd-funding, as the project raised over $23,000 to fund the commission. According to the projects’ site, the score produced will be peer-reviewed, making them on par with commercially produced scores.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Automotive Advances–Linux-Based and Solar–at CES 2012

What to Expect From Linux This Year

One of Oracle’s big contributions to the Linux kernel is Btrfs, a filesystem that adds many features that enterprises would like to see in Linux. For example, Btrfs allows for snapshots, a maximum file size in the exabytes, compression, integrated RAID features and many other features you don’t find in Ext.

However, Btrfs has been missing a few features—most notably a filesystem check (fsck) tool—that you’d want before rolling it out for production use.

Server

• Five questions on Linux and z/VM OS for mainframes

  The evolution of hardware development and operating system support has allowed mainframes to endure in the modern data center. Today, open source operating systems like Linux have found a home on mainframe platforms such as the IBM z114. This has spurred important improvements in both the operating system and the mainframe hardware. In this Q&A, James Vincent, a senior z/VM systems programmer and director of conference operations for SHARE, offers his expert insights on the future of Linux and mainframes.

Applications

• Music Management Takes Flight With Songbird

  Songbird does not fit squarely into one particular category of application. Instead, it is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up all nested in one cozy package. It bears a striking resemblance to the user experience that comes from tabbed Web browsing. And its customization extends far beyond the large collection of plugins.

• Proprietary

  • Corel introduces AfterShot Pro for $99 on Linux, Mac and Windows

• Instructionals/Technical

  • The Linux Command Line

  • Beginning Linux – Part II

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Kubuntu 11.10 for digital painting

    With the new year, hard to escape to the temptation of upgrading tool and system.
    My last working professional system was done over a Linux Mint 11 installation detailed on this blog so I was first tempted to upgrade with Linux Mint 12, but Gnome 3 provided me bad performances while painting, and the operating system was really missing of simple settings already their in Gnome 2 ( windows colors / thumbnail of my files / panel position / changing ergonomy ). In fact, my Gnome 3 experience was a deception because of that feeling of regression and non flexibility.

    So, I tryed the fork of Gnome 2 : Mate ( also delivered on the Linux Mint 12 DVD ). Mate worked pretty well, but was also a regression compare to the Gnome 2 of Linux Mint 11 because of a lot of things who worked for Gnome 2 to readapt to all the new Mate’s name. Plus this, my home hidden preference folder started to look like this : Mate configuration mixed up with Gnome 2 configuration , mixed up with Gnome 3 configuration. So it started to really look like a big mess. And , I don’t really likes to invest a future into forks ; it’s still good to look ahead.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • CloudLinux Integrates with Vembu StoreGrid

• Debian Family

  • Debian Linux Named Most Popular Distro for Web Servers

    inux may be enjoying great popularity in the mobile arena, thanks to Android–and even on the desktop, to an increasing extent–but there’s no denying its longtime success on servers.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • The Tiny Cotton Candy Computer Runs Android 4.0 ICS, Ubuntu

      • FXI Demos Ubuntu and Android 4.0 on its Cotton Candy USB Device

      • Canonical Maps out Ubuntu Strategy at CES

        The name Ubuntu is closely tied to Linux, but that doesn’t mean Ubuntu is only interested in Linux servers and desktops. This week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind Ubuntu, is showing off where it’s headed in the consumer space.

        Canonical is demoing their Ubuntu TV concept, which puts the Linux vendor’s distribution onto TV sets. They’re also showing In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems powered by Ubuntu. Helping to connect those items together with desktop users, the company is also stressing the importance of their multi-platform UbuntuOne service. UbuntuOne enables users to share and synchronize content across desktop and mobile devices.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Release candidate available for Linux Mint 12 KDE

          The Linux Mint team has announced the availability of a release candidate for Linux Mint 12 KDE, the version of the Linux Mint distribution with the latest version of KDE, 4.7.4. Like Linux Mint 12, it is based on Ubuntu 11.10. This is the first Linux Mint KDE release which, like other recent Mint releases, has hybrid ISO images; this enables the simple creation of a bootable USB stick, which can behave just like a live CD or DVD, using just the dd command. A tutorial is provided to explain how to install Linux Mint via USB.

Devices/Embedded

• Car drivers fuel big demand for in-vehicle web access

  Last year Toyota joined the non-profit Linux Foundation, which is dedicated to accelerating the growth of the open-source operating system. The car maker said it was joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold member to maximise its own investment in Linux “while fostering open innovation throughout the automotive ecosystem”.

• Raspberry Pi’s $35, 700MHz Linux computer enters manufacturing

  The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced this week that its $35 Linux computer has entered the manufacturing stage. The system, which is an open board with a 700MHz ARM11 CPU and 256MB of RAM, could be available for sale within a matter of weeks.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Are Tablets Expensive Toys? Not This One

    Many children pick up an iPad and figure out how to use it right away — swiping and poking the screen in a way that just seems to come naturally to them. One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit organization that produces low-cost computers for developing countries, wants to take the tablet experience to poor children as well. It showcased its XO 3.0 tablet at the International Consumer Electronics Show this week.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle in hot water with Java makers

  It wanted to bring in modularisation and licensing plans for Java with version eight under the handle of something called Project Jigsaw. But some of the Java contributors are worried that Project Jigsaw conflicts with the OSGi module system already geared to Java.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Edu-Team 2011 summary

  When I talk to people as a member of FSFE’s education team, there’s always the question what we are actually doing. It is not so easy to come up with something specific. I know we’ve been busy all the time, but ad hoc, it’s difficult for me to name examples, that are worth mentioning. A lot of work that’s being done just doesn’t provide a presentable outcome (more on that below). With this post, I’ll publicly report what we’ve done in 2011 and give a brief overview of what is about to come in 2012.

Finance

• Real Financial Regulators Love Prosecutions of Fraudulent Bank CEOs

  The New York Times published a column by its leading financial experts, Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, on November 22, 2011 which contains a spectacular charge against the Obama administration’s financial regulatory leaders. I have waited for the rebuttal, but it is now clear that the administration does not contest the charge.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Windows to Mac to Windows to Mac to… Linux? It doesn’t matter.

I’m just as productive on Linux as I was on OS X, and there’s no reason you couldn’t be too

Server

• AT&T Makes a Big Bet On Linux and Open Source in the Cloud

  While there are a number of open source solutions emerging for cloud computing, OpenStack remains one of the best backed platforms, with vendors ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Dell to Citrix supporting it. OpenStack got its early momentum from Rackspace and NASA, though, and late last year Rackspace announced Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition, which is an OpenStack-powered cloud platform featuring managed services and–most important of all–operational support. Now, AT&T has announced that it is delivering an open source cloud platform based on OpenStack, dubbed AT&T Cloud Architect. It signals a big bet on open source from a major telco.

Kernel Space

• Stable kernel release candidates

• Greg KH Posts Status of Kernel Tree

• Updates on the Stable and Longterm Kernel Trees

• EXT4 Gains New Online Resize Support In Linux 3.3

  The EXT4 file-system pull request went in today for the Linux 3.3 kernel. The EXT4 updates for this next kernel include the new online resize interface.

• Linux 3.2 Kernel Benchmarks

• Graphics Stack

  • Eight Reasons You Can Enjoy Mesa 8.0

    While OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support in Mesa 8.0 has been what’s talked about lately for this open-source graphics library to be released next month, there’s a lot of other improvements too in Mesa 8.0 for those of you using the open-source graphics drivers under Linux.

    Below are eight of the high-profile features/changes to Mesa 8.0 besides OpenGL 3.0.

Applications

• alternative-To

  I just stumbled across a very useful site: alternativeTo.net. This is a site to help you find “alternatives to” any given software product. The page has a very clean design and a powerful interface: you can specify what platform you want — Windows, Mac, Linux, online (web apps), iPhone, Android, Winphone, or Symbian S60 — and then search for a product by name.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Running TYPO3 4.6 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

  • How To Install Ubuntu TV From A PPA

  • Password guessing with Medusa 2.0

  • Western Digital MyBook Live

  • Spice Up Your Desktop With These 5 Cool GTK2/3 Themes [PPA]

  • Install Ubuntu TV On Ubuntu 11.10

  • Ubuntu 11.10 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

  • How to use laptop function keys in Archbang

    Archbang is a Linux distro based of Arch Linux. It brings the full Arch Linux experience to users without the cumbersome installing process of Arch Linux. Archbang is very lightweight, fast and stable and usually works well out of the box. However, unlike with Ubuntu or LinuxMint, if you install Archbang on a laptop, you need to do some editing to make the laptop function keys work. This article will show you how.

Desktop Environments

• Linux Desktop new goodies: Razor-Qt and Cinnamon

  While there’s no doubt that the leaders in the Linux desktop contest are GNOME and KDE, that does not mean they are catered for everyone. Different people have different needs and there were and still are voices in the community that criticize some of the choices the designers of the two desktops made. We, as always, prefer not to take sides, but we noticed that, as it often happens in Open Source, alternatives started to appear, addressing the aforementioned issues. Today we’ll talk about two of the alternatives, so you know you always have a choice. So, for GTK and/or Qt fans that know how to install software on their distro of choice, we give you Cinnamon, an alternative to Gnome3, and Razor-Qt, a lightweight alternative to KDE4.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Interview with Brian Alleyne, Sociologist Studying KDE

    A few months ago, the British journal Sociology published an article titled “Challenging Code: A Sociological Reading of the KDE Free Software Project”. Eager to find out what a ‘sociological reading’ of KDE entails, Dot editor Oriol Mirosa rushed to contact the article’s author, sociologist Brian Alleyne, who graciously and patiently agreed to be the subject of an interview. Read on to learn more about Brian, sociology, and the significance of KDE for the social sciences:

  • KDE Plasma Desktop Wallpapers

    KDE offers a very attractive desktop environment that is highly customizable. After installing KDE users will most likely want to configure their desktop wallpaper. With KDE you can easily select a different image to use as the desktop background, or you can use solid colors. Background images and be stretched, tiled, and centered as well for convenience. To access your desktop background settings you can simply right-click on your desktop background, then select the desktop settings option. The KDE Plasma desktop provides a fantastic interface for managing wallpapers, and thousands more are only one click away.

  • The Great Features of KDE Workspaces and Applications – Interlude

    Many of you have been asking for my color theme and my widget style that I’m using in the blogseries, so I finally decided to upload it

    The style itself is the nice shiny Oxygen, the default widget style that ships with KDE Workspaces. I just tuned the scrollbars a little and you can do that too – just open System Settings, go to ‘Application Appearance’, select ‘Style’ and right next to the widget style combobox is ‘Configure…’ button. Open that, switch to ‘Scrollbars’ tab and tweak it to your liking. I use 10px width and no top and bottom arrow buttons. All the rest is default.

  • Qt 4 moved to open governance

    Since we released Qt under open governance on qt-project.org, there was always one piece missing. The Qt 4 repository was so far still handled in the old system. This was done as a simple prioritization, to get the parts of Qt that we considered most relevant for the development community out first.

Distributions

• Zorin OS 5.2 Lite released

• BrowerLinux: A Linux Distro For The Sole Purpose Of Browsing The Web

  Apple has made famous the phrase “There is an app for that“. In the open source Linux world, you can apply the same saying too: “There is an distro for that“. Indeed, for whatever functions you want your OS to perform, there is a distro for that. Need a media center? Mythbuntu. Need a multimedia creation tool? UbuntuStudio. Need a distro for kids? DouDouLinux. Need a lightweight OS that runs in old computer? Lubuntu. Need a super lightweight distro that can fit into your USB drive? DamnSmallLinux. Need a distro for browsing the web? BrowserLinux.

• New Releases

  • Astaro Security Gateway V8.300 Released (10/01/2012)

  • Fuduntu 2012.1 Features Linux Kernel 3.1.6

  • Clonezilla 1.2.11-46

  • GParted 0.11.0-10

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Happy New Mageia Year!

    Welcome back from the holidays! It seems like we’re all refreshed, we all had a great time and we’re all ready to dive into 2012 and make Mageia even better.

  • On disaster reports

    2012 started as a rather interesting year. Perhaps influenced by the so-called “Mayan Doomsday” prophecies, people today reported hearing strange rumbling noises coming from the Earth.

    Interestingly, the Linux world also has its own disaster predictions–you always listen that Linux is finished on the desktop, that the desktop computer itself is finished, and a myriad more.

    One of the predictions that I read is that 2012 will be the definite year of Mandriva’s disappearance. Since Mandriva was the distro that made me migrate to Linux, I must admit that I received the news with a grave heart.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat to Host Virtualization-Focused Virtual Event and Announcement
    on January 18

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Times 3: One Month, Three Versions

      I was walking around Fry’s over the holidays. One of the numerous Linux magazines in the technical publications section had an interview with someone at Canonical, and the title on cover was something like “Unity is a Conversation We Must Win”. There was so much wrong with that sentence I wonder now if it read that Unity was a Conversion that they must win. It does not work for me personally either way.

    • Fedora 17 Has More Features: GIMP 2.8, GCC 4.7, oVirt, Etc

      Fedora 17 (a.k.a. the Beefy Miracle) already has an impressive list of new features coming, but several more features have been added to their planned list.

      The Beefy Miracle already has a beefy list of possible changes like maybe the Btrfs file-system by default, multi-touch advancements, GNOME Shell software rendering, and many other features, but now there’s even more.

• Debian Family

  • Debian passes CentOS as most popular Linux for web servers

    Last year, Debian GNU/Linux and CentOS were the most popular Linux distributions on web servers. According to recent monthly figures from W3Techs, Debian has recently regained the top spot from CentOS and was running on 29.4 per cent of Linux-based web servers (9.6 per cent of all web sites). CentOS had held the lead by a few per cent during most of the last year; Debian moved ahead by a small margin at the end of the year.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu TV brings Linux to television

      • Ubuntu TV eyes-on

      • Unity-based Ubuntu TV takes on Google TV

      • Canonical CEO: Ubuntu tablet OS will battle Android, iOS

        Jane Silber is on a mission to get the Ubuntu Linux distribution onto mobile devices and TVs, rather than be stuck on desktop PCs. The CEO of Canonical (which makes Ubuntu) took over from the previous CEO, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, in March 2010, but has been with the company since shortly after its 2004 founding. Right after New Year’s Day, she paid a visit to InfoWorld offices in San Francisco to talk with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill about Canonical’s ambitions in the mobile market as well as reflect on Canonical’s successes and what separates it from rivals.

        [ Also on InfoWorld: Canonical has been looking to attract mobile application developers to its platform. | Read InfoWorld's Mobile Edge blog for the latest perspectives on mobile technology. ]

        InfoWorld: What are Canonical’s goals for the client distro, the server distro, the smartphone distro, and tablet distro, and how will you measure success on these fronts?

        Silber: On the client side, it’s about moving from the desktop to other form factors. So tablet, TV, and at some point down in the future probably phone, but that’s a bit off. And success, there is commercial success in terms of device manufacturers wanting to ship Ubuntu and its user base, its user adoption. There is a real demand for an alternative platform. We believe Ubuntu has all the characteristics that are needed to become that platform.

        To continue reading, register here to become an Insider. You’ll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

        Jane Silber is on a mission to get the Ubuntu Linux distribution onto mobile devices and TVs, rather than be stuck on desktop PCs. The CEO of Canonical (which makes Ubuntu) took over from the previous CEO, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, in March 2010, but has been with the company since shortly after its 2004 founding. Right after New Year’s Day, she paid a visit to InfoWorld offices in San Francisco to talk with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill about Canonical’s ambitions in the mobile market as well as reflect on Canonical’s successes and what separates it from rivals.

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 247

      • Checking Out The Ubuntu TV Prototype

        First of all, after seeing the working Ubuntu TV prototype at Canonical’s CES booth, I was impressed considering that it all came together in just about three months — since the Orlando 12.04 summit where Mark Shuttleworth shared his vision of bringing Ubuntu to TVs and smart-phones. Canonical isn’t ready with any Ubuntu smart-phone yet, which they hope to have ready by Ubuntu 14.04 in two years, but the TV work by them and the community is coming along quickly.

      • Unity 5.0 Arrives In Ubuntu 12.04

      • Flavours and Variants

        • HealthCheck: Linux Mint

          The success of Linux Mint is down to its usability – easy to set up and get running and then use. The latest development is a new user interface, Cinnamon. Richard Hillesley looks at the history of Mint, claimed to be the second most popular Linux distribution after Ubuntu, and considers whether Cinnamon marks a turning point for the distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• British company looks to create cheap, open platforms

  A British community interest company, Rhombus Tech, is part of the way towards developing a micro-computer on a circuit board, much like the Raspberry Pi.

• Raspberry Pi bids for success with classroom coders

  A test version of the Raspberry Pi computer has attracted bids of more than £3,000 in a fund-raising auction on eBay. With the machine about to start its first major production run, could it be the right tool to revitalise computer science in schools?

• We’ve started manufacture!

• The Raspberry Pi is being manufactured

• Raspbery Pis are in the oven!

  Following the news that the Raspberry Pi foundation was auctioning 10 of the beta model B boards on eBay comes the news a lot of people have been waiting for: they’ve started manufacturing the production models! The Raspberry Pi blog has all the details.

• Allwinner A10: A GPL-compliant computer for $15

  This is getting seriously ridiculous. Relative to the power and feature sets computers are getting cheaper and cheaper. But they don’t come much cheaper than the Raspberry Pi, a $25 computer designed specifically to encourage children to program. My colleague, Ryan Cartwright wrote about it right here on FSM.

  At $25 it has excited huge interest. But what if I told that it will be bested by an even cheaper computer. Do I hear $20? Do I hear $15? Yes, you heard that right (and it’s being sold in China for $7, for God’s sake). It is planned for educational purposes and as a retail product too. It’s being developed by Rhombus Tech.

• Phones

  • Tizen Project Releases Preview of OS Source Code

    The Tizen project, which is developing an open-source operating system for devices like smartphones and tablets, is offering a download of the alpha release of the source code of the operating system.

  • Android

    • Polaroid Announces a Smart Camera Powered by Android!

    • Google TV powers Sony, Vizio Blu-ray players, media streamers

      Several companies have announced Blu-ray players and media streaming boxes for Google’s Android-based Google TV TV platform. Sony has its NSZ-GS7 Network Media Player and NSZ-GP9 Blu-ray disc player, Vizio tipped its VBR430 3D Blu-ray player and VAP430 Stream Player — as well as several Google TV-enabled R Series HDTVs — and E Fun will provide its Nextbox set-top.

    • FXI Demonstrated Ubuntu, Android Powered USB PC At CES 2012

    • FXI Technologies’ Cotton Candy: Android 4.0 and Ubuntu on the world’s smallest PC (hands-on)

      FXI Technologies showed off its Cotton Candy PC for us a few months ago, but since then the company has added Android 4.0 and Ubuntu with a Unity UI as supported OSs, along with the original Android 2.3. It still runs on a dual-core Cortex A9 processor and has quad-core Mali 400 graphics that’s purportedly powerful enough to play 3D games. The device itself can be booted via USB or HDMI, effectively turning any television set into a computer. It’s important to note that when using over HDMI, it still requires power over USB.

    • Nuance Announces Dragon Go! For Android, Throws Its Hat In As A Siri Competitor

    • Polaroid develops Android camera combo

      Polaroid clicked into gear at CES this week, launching an Android-powered smart-camera with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities and access to the Android Market.

    • Solar powered Kindle case revealed at CES

      I finally succomed to an ebook reader this Xmas. After having spent years of standing by the traditional “dead tree” format, I made the jump after reading over the shoulder of a fellow passenger on the train recently. I instantly took to e-ink and found its far more comfortable for long drawn out reading sessions than wrestling with a book.

      Despite what I consider as rather high prices for the new ebook titles (when you compare them to the “physical” paperback versions) I still think its a great method of reading and whilst I opted for Amazon’s product, there are a slew of alternatives out there, to which I believe most, if not all are Linux powered.

    • Eric Schmidt: Android Is Differentiated, Not Fragmented

      We’ve spent the better part of yesterday cruising around the Central Hall on a quest to highlight the coolest tech at CES, but Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt was on hand at CNET’s Next Big Thing panel to talk about the future of consumer electronics. While doing so, he (perhaps unsurprisingly) made it clear that he isn’t a fan of the word “fragmentation” when it comes to Google’s Android OS.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Pantech Announces LTE Tablet For AT&T

    Pantech making their second announcement for AT&T today this one is a Tablet. The Tablet will feature a 8 inch screen, and run on the LTE network. The tablet will be $299.99 with a two-year contract, with planned availability on January 22. The tablet runs android 3.2 and will be waterproof as well.

  • OLPC Unveils XO 3.0 Tablet for Kids in Developing Nations

    At the core of the XO3 is Marvell’s 1 GHz, single-core Armada 618 SoC, which we’ve seen in tablets such as Vizio’s $330 8-inch tablet. The SoC supports Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 3, 3G cellular networks, USB 2 and HDMI interfaces, as well as a digital camera with up to 16MP resolution. Marvell says the 618 is capable of delivering 1080p video encoding and decoding at 30 fps.

  • Asus spins more Tegra 3 tablets, starting at just $249

    Not content with shipping the world first quad-core Android tablet, Asus is now showing two more Nvidia Tegra 3 models at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). They’re the seven-inch Eee Pad MeMo ME370T — which will reportedly sell for just $250 — and the Eee Pad Transformer Prime TF700T, with enhanced wireless performance and a 10.1-inch display that packs an impressive 1920 x 1200 pixels.

FOSS and Names

It started recently when I bumped into this Larry’s post.
This persuaded me to think (one more time) about names of operating systems and applications in the world of Open Source.
The post I linked above tells us that names are not always as good as they originally appear. And it gives at least 4 examples where developers needed to think twice before arriving at the current name.

Open Source PageMaker Alternative Scribus 1.4.0 Released With 2000 New Features

After nearly two years since the last stable release and four years since development began, open source desktop publishing software Scribus has released version 1.4.0. Over 2000 new feature requests and bugs have been resolved in this release since the development started, making it the first major release in several years.

Google Release Source Code Of Google Body

Google is one of the strongest proponents of open source. The company has released the source code of Google Body, a project that company retired last year along with many other such projects. The project has already found a ‘suiter’ body.

Zygote Media Group has created a Zygote Body using this open source code. Zygote Body offers the same navigation, layering, and instant search as Google Body. Like Google Body, Zygote Body can be used in browsers that support WebGL, like Chrome and Firefox, without needing to install additional software.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla Gets Down to Business With Slow-Burn Firefox

    Six months ago, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler — one of the original members of the team that built the Firefox browser — made it quite clear that the open source outfit wasn’t interested in helping businesses. Their only aim, he said, was serve individual web surfers. “Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours,” Dotzler said.

  • Delivering a Mozilla Firefox Extended Support Release

    We are pleased to announce that the proposal for an Extended Support Release (ESR) of Firefox is now a plan of action. The ESR version of Firefox is for use by enterprises, public institutions, universities and other organizations that centrally manage their Firefox deployments. Releases of the ESR will occur once a year, providing these organizations with a version of Firefox that receives security updates but does not make changes to the Web or Firefox Add-ons platform. We have worked with many organizations to ensure that the ESR balances their need for the latest security updates with the desire to have a lighter application certification burden.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Firms Up, Drops Half Its Excess Weight

  “One of the unfortunate things that LibreOffice inherited, as part of the several decades worth of unpaid technical debt, is unused code that has been left lying around indefinitely,” wrote Michael Meeks, a Linux desktop architect at SUSE who coordinates LibreOffice development work, in a blog post on Monday.

• Oracle releases new Big Data Appliance

  The appliance is an engineered system of hardware and software that incorporates Cloudera’s Distribution including Apache Hadoop with Cloudera Manager, plus an open source distribution of R.

CMS

• Drupal conference keynote to focus on accessibility

  One of the major plus points about free and open source software is that it adheres to widely accepted standards. Rarely does any software of this genre seek to create its own standard in order to do what proprietary systems do – grab marketshare.

Education

• “An Open-Source World”? Where’s The Open Source?

  If we are to believe the early signs, 2012 may well be the year that British schools finally start to address the continuing shame that is ICT teaching. As I and many others have noted, the current approach essentially consists of sitting people in front of Microsoft Word and Excel and making them learn a couple of commands on the menus. It seems that the message has finally got through to the powers-that-be:

  Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum. Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11 year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch. By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in University courses and be writing their own Apps for smartphones.
  (Or they might just sit down and write a new operating system kernel as someone else did a few years ago.)

  Those words – amazingly – were pronounced earlier today by the UK Education Secretary Michael Gove as part of a long-awaited speech about the future of ICT teaching in the UK.

• School ICT to be replaced by computer science programme

  The current programme of information and communications technology (ICT) study in England’s schools will be scrapped from September, the education secretary has announced.

  It will be replaced by an “open source” curriculum in computer science and programming designed with the help of universities and industry.

  Michael Gove called the current ICT curriculum “harmful and dull”.

  He will begin a consultation next week on the new computing curriculum.

  He said this would create young people “able to work at the forefront of technological change”.

  Speaking at the BETT show for educational technology in London, Mr Gove announced plans to free up schools to use curricula and teaching resources that properly equip pupils for the 21st Century.

  He said that resources, developed by experts, were already available online to help schools teach computer science and he wants universities and businesses to devise new courses and exams, particularly a new computing GCSE.

Public Services/Government

• Does your local government promote meaningful citizen engagement?

  In a previous post I discussed how Faith Gordon requested the City Council in Lackawanna, NY to make available to the public copies of the entire Council meeting agenda not just a summary. Ms. Gordon requested that the entire City Council meeting agenda including resolutions, memos etc. be put on-line, so that the public can see what the Councilmembers see when voting at a meeting.

  The response Ms. Gordon received from one Councilmember was, “Why do we have to put it on the website? I don’t understand,” said 3rd Ward Councilman Francis J. Kulczyk. “Do we have to do it? Who else does it?”

Openness/Sharing

• Digital literacy campaign – Michael Gove’s speech in full

  An open-source curriculum
  Advances in technology should also make us think about the broader school curriculum in a new way.

Ottawa prepares to launch anti-spam centre

Health/Nutrition

• Rick Santorum Would Be Best President Health Insurers’ Money Could Buy

  I don’t expect that Rick Santorum will be our next president, despite his near-win in Iowa and a decent showing in the New Hampshire primary. I’m pretty certain that when more voters become
  aware of his views and voting record, Santorum will join Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty as former contenders for the GOP nomination.

  But if by some strange turn of events he is sworn in a little over a year from now as our 45th president, no one will be happier than the executives I used to work with in the health insurance industry. Santorum was without a doubt one of the most reliable go-to guys in the Senate when insurers needed a champion for one of their causes. That was certainly true in regard to the industry’s efforts to shift ever-increasing portions of the cost of medical care from them to us.

Security

• Wireshark 1.4.x and 1.6.x updates close security holes

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Spain’s Ley Sinde: New Revelations of U.S. Coercion

  While U.S. officials are scrambling to pass domestic Internet censorship legislation in the name of curbing copyright infringement, they’ve been much more effective in their efforts to export these laws abroad. Previously, we’ve examined US attempts to pressure the prior Spanish presidential administration to enact harsh copyright laws. A new letter reported by the Spanish newspaper, El Pais, reveals that the U.S. government didn’t miss a beat when they renewed their threat to put in place trade penalties toward Spain unless the new government enacted a copyright law in a timely manner. The US was dangerously close to getting their dream legislation in Spain last year, but were disappointed when the Spanish executive office deferred to fully enact the copyright law, Ley Sinde, due to its wide unpopularity. Digital activists and Internet rights lawyers internationally recognized that this Spanish law would overtly skirt due process, violate personal privacy, and limit freedom of expression.

• US pressured Spain to implement online piracy law, leaked files shows

  The US ambassador in Madrid threatened Spain with “retaliation actions” if the country did not pass tough new internet piracy laws, according to leaked documents.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• ALEC and Westin/Starwood: Who is Your Hotel in Bed With While You’re in Bed at Your Hotel?

  Tucson-based civil rights attorney Stacy Scheff believes that Westin Kierland may have violated federal constitutional law when they threw a journalist (and paid guest) out into the dead of night–due to the simple fact that the journalist evicted had written critically of (and was not liked by) the organization hosting a conference at the hotel. (A new story about these events is available here).

• Inside ALEC: Naked Contempt for the Press and Public in Scottsdale

  Scottsdale, Arizona–A suburb awash in money and golf courses, set against the backdrop of the jagged mountains surrounding Phoenix.

  I was sitting in a sports bar of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa, swapping journalism stories with Olivia Ward of the Toronto Star on one of the bar’s overstuffed leather couches. Over the course of an hour, the bar filled with conventioneers from the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit (SNPS). (A new story on Westin’s connections to other ALEC corporations is available here.)

Censorship

• Notice & Action: EU Commission Must Put Freedom of Expression First

  Following a consultation held in late 2010, the European Commission just announced an action plan on the role of Internet actors in the policing of online content1. One key issue is that of “notice and takedown” measures, which are today implemented in total opacity at the expense of users’ freedom of communication. As the global war on sharing rages, this announcement underlines the pressing need for citizen involvement in this crucial debate to better protect our freedoms online.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Help Preserve the Canadian Public Domain: Speak Out on the Trans Pacific Partnership Negotiations

    Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. Canada’s term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years (without any evidence of additional public benefits).

  • TPP Copyright Extension Would Keep Some of Canada’s Top Authors Out of Public Domain For Decades

    Last week I posted on the government’s consultation on joining the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations and its potential effect on Canada’s public domain. According to a leaked draft of the proposed intellectual property chapter, the TPP would require countries (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Japan – all current or potential TPP members) that meet the international copyright term standard of life of the author plus 50 years to add an additional 20 years to the term of protection. The extension in the term of copyright would mean no new works would enter the public domain in those countries until at least 2033 (assuming an agreement takes effect in 2013).

  • TPP’s Other Copyright Term Extension: Protection of Sound Recordings Would Nearly Double in Duration

    Europe has been embroiled in a controversy over the copyright term of sound recordings for the past few years. While the law provided protection for a 50 year term, major record labels argued for an extended term to generate more profits from older recordings. Proposals to extend the term in the UK and Europe were widely panned as independent studies found that benefiting a few record labels would come at an enormous public cost (see here or here). For example, the UK Gowers Review of Intellectual Property concluded:

  • Up On My SOPA Box…..

    By now, most people who pay attention to our government and have a pulse, are aware of the Twin Titans of Tech Terror, SOPA and PIPA.

    I am guessing those people comprise about 12 percent of America’s population. The rest are either in tears over Kim Kardashian’s divorce or are ticking off the days until the new season of Dancing with the Stars.

    I’ve often stated that if we were to take measure of the average US citizen’s IQ, based on their television viewing habits, they would place comfortably between a bag of hammers and….uh, Kim Kardashian.

  • Reddit’s anti-SOPA “Nuclear” protest is a good start

    Reddit, the popular link-sharing and social networking site with over 2 billion page-views and 35 million active users a month, is taking the nuclear option in protest about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP draft laws by shutting down on January 18th for 12 hours. During that time, Reddit will suspend its normal operations

    “Instead,” the Reddit administrators state, “of the normal glorious, user-curated chaos of reddit, we will be displaying a simple message about how the PIPA/SOPA legislation would shut down sites like reddit, link to resources to learn more, and suggest ways to take action. We will showcase the live video stream of the House hearing where Internet entrepreneurs and technical experts (including reddit co-founder Alexis ‘kn0thing’ Ohanian) will be testifying. We will also spotlight community initiatives like meet-ups to visit Congressional offices, campaigns to contact companies supporting PIPA/SOPA, and other tactics.”

  • Reddit’s Nuclear Attack On SOPA, The Anti-American Bill

    Reddit, one of the most popular social news site, has decided to go Nuclear to protest the dangerous SOPA, the anti-American bill. The site has threatened to blackout reddit on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC). Which means there will be no reddit for 12 hours.

    Wikipedia is also planning to block access to Wikipedia in the USA. Many other sites are planning similar protest. It is shameful that the US congress has ignored all the warning by the IT expert and are going ahead to push the bill. These congressmen are not working for the benefit of users or US citizens. They are working for the Hollywood and the corporations who are funding them to pass this bill.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Training for Your New Year’s Resolutions

Immediately on the horizon is our LF331 Developing Linux Device Drivers class on January 16-20, 2012. LF331 introduces programmers to the Linux kernel and the different device drivers used in the Linux kernel space, while hands-on exercises and demos provide the necessary tools to learn how to develop device drivers for Linux. Register by 5pm PT on January 11th and get an early start on the New Year!

Linux News From The Consumer Electronics Show 2012

It’s now CES (Consumer Electronics Show) week in Las Vegas… Phoronix will have you covered on important Linux hardware news.

The 2012 Consumer Electronics Show doesn’t officially begin until tomorrow, but there’s already some media events, parties, and other meetings taking place.

Desktop

• Happy New Year & Browser and OS stats for 2011

  Operating Systems
  Windows 52.68%
  Linux 38.55%
  Macintosh 6.99%

• A snapshot of Linux on the desktop

  The Linux desktop landscape is a diverse place. As an open-source operating system, anyone can take the code, make whatever changes they want, and release it as their own custom distribution. A land of diversity, however, also has its pitfalls. Mandriva Linux seems like the most recent candidate to fall, with the company purportedly going under on January 16th if it doesn’t receive an infusion of funds. The funds are being blocked by a shareholder dispute, and it will be a sad story for the once-popular Linux distribution. How many Linux distributions have gone quietly into memory, and which have stayed? What makes Ubuntu so popular? Let’s take a quick look into the the history of Linux on the desktop.

Server

• Server wars: Open-source Java vs Weblogic and WebSphere

  Open source is winning the Java application-server war in the age of the cloud, according to a new survey.

• AT&T joins ‘Linux for cloud’, boosts HTML5 apps

  Free whitepaper – Unlocking the Enterprise Cloud: How the OpenStack project eliminates Cloud lock-in

  AT&T – one of America’s largest internet, phone and TV service providers – is throwing up an open-source cloud running OpenStack to court application developers.

  The giant has announced AT&T Cloud Architect, a planned service of elastic public, private and bare metal servers wrapped with different storage, network and monitoring options. AT&T Cloud Architect is a developer-centric service due in the “coming weeks”.

Kernel Space

• Major Linux Vs UNIX Kernel Differences

• The system is insane! It’s completely Linux-based!! Open source programming!!!

• The kernel column with Jon Masters – 2012: the road ahead

  Jon Masters shares his thoughts on what 2012 holds for Linux kernel development…

• Stable kernel tree status, January 9, 2012

  As 3.2 is now out, here’s a note as to the current status of the different stable/longterm kernel trees.

• Linux Takes on a Bigger Role at This Year’s CES

Applications

• Tone Your Photos in a Hurry with Delaboratory

  Can you do high-quality photo correction with an application that is simple enough for normal (meaning non-photo-gearhead) people to use? Jacek Poplawski thinks so, and that’s why he created Delaboratory, a point-and-click photo adjustment app that does not require a lifetime’s worth of darkroom experience to understand.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Get Public External IP From Command Line Terminal – Linux

  • How to Dual Boot Asus Transformer With Ubuntu

  • Great Collection of Small Utility – Littleutils

  • Sync Files with bitpocket

  • How to fix GNOME 3 failed to load of Fedora 16 installed on VirtualBox

  • A Simple Bash Shell Script to Convert MP3s to Ogg Vorbis

  • Secret and Hidden Codes for Android

  • Video editing with Kino: Simple, but very limited

  • How to Remotely Control Computers Over VNC Securely with SSH

• Games

  • Humble Indie Store is Coming?

    Since few days back, the web has been abuzz with rumor of development of a Humble Indie Store that sells cross platform games.

    This rumor was fueled when people found direct links to purchase indie games. Try it yourself. Just add the name of game at the end of link. All small, no spaces. Like this:

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Relearning KDE

    KDE SC is great in many, many ways, but I have found that some of those ways are anything but obvious. Nothing specific to KDE, though, as it happens with all kinds of software and devices nowadays. Users want the quick route to do their thing, which most often results in them using a tiny portion of the application or device functionality… After all, who reads a darn manual, right?

Distributions

• Freezy Linux – A Retro Distro

  Some people don’t like the way Ubuntu’s user interface has changed in recent versions, and a person from Rome, known as lucazade in the Ubuntu Forums, has done something about it. The Italian has produced a distro called FreezyLinux. It’s based on Ubuntu 11.10 and Gnome 3.2.

• KahelOS 111111 review

  KahelOS is a desktop Linux distribution derived from Arch Linux. Unlike Chakra, another Arch Linux-based desktop distribution, which uses the K Desktop Environment, KahelOS uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment. It employs a rolling-release development model, and comes to use by way of the Republic of the Philippines.

• New Releases

  • ExTiX 9 x64 LiveDVD :: The Ultimate Linux System

    ExTiX 9 x64 is a remaster of Ubuntu 11.10 released on 13 October 2011. The original system includes the Desktop Environment Unity with Gnome 3.2. After removing Unity I have installed Gnome Shell and Razor-qt so that everyone on the spot (during live operation) can compare the different Desktop Environments. I have also replaced the original kernel 3.0.0-14-generic with “my” kernel 3.1.6-extix. Kernel 3.1.6 is the latest available stable kernel, which can be downloaded from kernel.org. The system language is English.

• Red Hat Family

  • CentOS upgrade from 6.0 to 6.1

  • Hats Off To Red Hat

    Red Hat delivered solid third-quarter revenue, which was up by 23% to $290 million due to robust license renewals. The company also benefited a lot on the operational front, as it saw operating margin expand further to 18.5% for the quarter. The company’s earnings also rose at a better-than-anticipated rate of 47% to $38.2 million as its margins continued to improve.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical outs Ubuntu TV: Brave or stupid?

        Last week we covered the news that Canonical would announce a new Ubuntu concept device at CES. At the time we believed it would be a smartphone or tablet, possibly made by LG. Everyone in the ET bunker was buzzing with the possibilities of such a device, especially when paired with — perhaps — an Ubuntu-based ultrabook. The smiles that had been pasted on our faces quickly melted away this morning, however, when it emerged that this “top secret” project is actually an Ubuntu TV — an ill-fated attempt to launch Canonical into the realm of commercial consumer electronics, and seemingly the product of delusions of grandeur.

      • Canonical Showcases Ubuntu TV and IVI at CES, Exclusive Images

      • Download the Official Ubuntu TV Wallpaper

        Despite all today’s news about Ubuntu’s latest extension into our lives (Ubuntu TV if you haven’t been paying attention) part of me is still left… wanting more.

      • [Video and Tech Specifications] Ubuntu TV Revealed at CES 2012

      • Linux Kernel 3.2 Officially Lands in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

      • Canonical’s Ubuntu TV Surfaces at CES 2012

      • Interactive TV News Round-Up (III): Ubuntu TV, ConnecTV, Civolution, Dijit

      • Ubuntu to move to rapid release Firefox for 10.04 and 10.10

        Ubuntu icon The Ubuntu developers have now decided to switch older versions of Ubuntu, specifically the 10.04 LTS and 10.10 releases, to current releases of Firefox. The new policy will come into place on 17 January when users of those two editions will see their Firefox updated to the current version. Canonical’s Micah Gersten, in announcing the change, points out that 10.04 LTS and 10.10 users have been receiving 3.6 point updates but not “benefiting from new features, support for new web technologies, security enhancements, and performance improvements.” Gersten says that they need to move users to the rapid release model “so that they will continue to receive security updates in a timely fashion.”

      • Flavours and Variants

        • DebEX-Mint 12 Special with KDE 4.7.4 and kernel 3.1.6

          DebEX-Mint 12 Special Live DVD is a remaster of Linux Mint 12 – codenamed “Lisa” released on 26 November 2011. The original system includes the Desktop Environments Gnome 3.2, Gnome Classic (Gnome 2.32) and Mate (a fork of the venerable GNOME 2 Desktop Environment). In DebEX-Mint 12 Special Edition, I have installed KDE 4.7.4 (latest stable version), as an alternative, so that everyone on the spot (during live operation) can compare the different Desktop Environments. I have replaced the original kernel 3.0.0-14-generic (the same kernel as in Ubuntu 11.10) with “my” kernel 3.1.6-debex. The system language is English.

        • Revamp Linux 12 Review

          There is a new light on the Ubuntu horizon, Revamp is a newly released distribution that aims to offer extremely rich graphical effects, and everything you would expect from a full featured desktop environment. Though this version of Revamp is still in the experimental stages I was very impressed by the stability, and the effects are mind-blowing. Revamp 12 is based on Ubuntu 11.10 and uses the full power of Compiz along with many plugins to add effects for even the smallest of desktop actions. Revamp is also running on Deuce-Visage or Two Face, which means that you can login to the Revamp-Compiz desktop, or Gnome Shell.

        • Where Will You Hide the Bodhi?

          I had a brief flirtation with Bodhi Linux this past week. I nuked my CrunchBang Linux install to give it a go. It seemed pretty solid, but after spending some quality time with the distro, I found the version of Network Manager loved to randomly disconnect me from wireless networks…as in, right in the middle of me transferring files, streaming music, and doing tha IRC thing. Very irritating.

          I did a full update to the most recent released version (released in the past few weeks) and found e17 randomly crashing which wasn’t the best addition to a randomly disconnecting wireless connection…and I know that crashes aren’t a problem in e17 since the handler can just restart all the modules and BOOM you’re back. Regardless, the Network Manager disconnection problem eventually irritated me enough to jump ship. I attempted connman, exalt, and wicd but I found myself lost. Since I haven’t used those tools before and the docs very scarce for uprooting Network Manager from Bodhi, it was a stopping point. No worries, it’s still a great distribution and e17 is VERY fast and looks very good on this 7 year old laptop. However, CrunchBang called me back.

        • Ubuntu variants to get 12.04 LTS releases

          The Ubuntu Technical Board has approved three separate proposals which will see Long Term Support (LTS) editions of the KDE-based Kubuntu, Xfce-based Xubuntu and education-oriented Edubuntu appear alongside Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when it is released in April.

        • Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu LTS

          I was delighted to read this morning that the Ubuntu Technical Board has approved Xubuntu and Kubuntu to be LTS versions, as well as Edubuntu based on some further discussion. You can read the meeting log here.

        • Linux Mint Touches All Time High On DistroWatch, Will Ubuntu Recover?

          There was some nasty mud-slinging when Linux Mint topped the DistroWatch ratings, beating Ubuntu. Those who understand how DistroWatch ratings work knew that higher rating did not mean more users. Ubuntu by far has much more users than Linux Mint. But the way Ubuntu fans attacked DistroWatch for being ‘useless’ and some Ubuntu developers coming out with suggestions to game DistroWatch and bring some unknown distro on top to show it is flawed was disgusting. If they believed in gaming the system so much, why they did not game the system and bring Ubuntu on top again?

        • Linux Mint Came To Ubuntu’s Rescue With Cinnamon

          Ubuntu was heavily criticized for Unity which took away a lot of functionality. Then came Linux Mint with the much needed customization. The rise of Linux Mint on DistroWatch is an evidence that Unity has become the reason users are looking at the alternatives of the much loved Ubuntu. Yes, one can say those figures doesn’t matter but that would be an ostrich approach where you put your head in the sand and say everything is fine.

Devices/Embedded

• Boxee Box screenshot tour

  This Boxee Box Screenshot Tour was created to accompany our detailed review of the D-Link Boxee Box equipped with updated firmware version 1.5. The tour below includes about 180 screenshots showcasing the Boxee Box’s menu system, extensive suite of multimedia apps, movies and shows selection process, Watch Later feature, and more.

• An updated Boxee Box review

  Powered by Boxee’s popular media streaming software platform, D-Link’s Boxee Box delivers movies, show episodes, and other A/V content in numerous formats from Internet sites, LAN shares, and attached media to TVs and audio systems.

• Altair unveils Embedded Linux SDK for LTE chipsets

• Phones

  • Samsung: ‘We’ll nick Nokia’s global mobe crown this year’

    Samsung is feeling confident that it can ship more handsets than Nokia this year, making it pretty much the top mobile phone company in the world.

    The South Korean firm has already surpassed Apple as the world’s biggest smartphone maker, so if it can overtake Nokia in all handsets, it will take the lead in the competitive field.

  • Tizen’s Source Code Released

    The Linux Foundation hosted, Intel and Samsung backed Tizen project has released the source code of first alpha. Tizen was created when Nokia joined hands with Microsoft and started to kill its own open source initiatives, namely MeeGo. Tizen was created to replace MeeGo.

  • Tizen first release goes live

    The first release of the new Tizen device software has been launched by the Tizen Association. First announced in September 2011, the industry group was created by the LiMo Foundation and Linux Foundation. The Tizen Association started operations on 01 January and will work on industry engagement and in-market support for the Tizen software platform.

  • SDK offers early look at Meego successor Tizen

    The Tizen project, which was launched in September by the Linux Foundation, Intel and Samsung, has now announced the opening of source code repositories and the release of an SDK for the Tizen mobile operating system. Both are described as “very early previews” and are aimed at giving developers the opportunity to take a look at and give feedback on the heir to MeeGo and Limo.

  • Android

    • ATandT, Verizon, Sprint unleash 4G LTE Android phones, tablets

      AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint announced a bevy of Android smartphones — and a few tablets — on the first day of this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Highlights include the Sony Xperia Ion phone at AT&T, the Motorola Droid 4 and Razr Maxx on Verizon, and Sprint’s first LTE phones: the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and LG Viper.

    • Lenovo Unwraps Android 4.0 ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ Smart TV

      Lenovo is bringing Ice Cream Sandwich to the big screen with a new take on home entertainment. The company is “allowing consumers to customize their TV experience both with the blending of the Web — but also by heightening that experience with Android applications,” said tech analyst Charles King. “It’s also talking about creating a highly integrated home. … You might call it the home cloud.”

    • Nyxio Smart TV featuring Android at CES2012

      A smart tv is good, but a smart tv with Android could be great. Nyxio Technologies is formally announcing the debut of their latest edition to the 2012 product line, The Nyxio Smart TV with Android OS. Ranging in sizes from 21″ to 65″, the whole line will come with HD/LED technology along with touchscreen capability. Nyxio believes this to be a one-of-a-kind Android product and with full access to the Android Market it sounds very interesting!

    • New Slacker app for Android Tablets comes complete with great new features

      Slacker, one of our favorite Android radio apps, is getting an overhaul today at CES. The new update has been optimized for tablets and features superior graphics and album art that’s been made for a 4G LTE network.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Asus reveals first 7″ tablet with four cores, at “magic” $249 price

    At yesterday’s NVIDIA press conference here at CES, Asus took the stage to talk about using NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 mobile processor in its tablets. Fans of Asus’s Tegra 3-powered Transformer Prime tablet will be thrilled to know that the 10-inch device will have an Android 4 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) update pushed out beginning Wednesday.

  • ASUS EeePad Transformer Prime ICS update arriving today! [updated]

Winners and Losers in Business Open-Source Software

We all know that Linux, Apache and Samba are vital for business data center servers, Web servers and file and print servers respectively in businesses both large and small. What you may not know though what’s trending below the top-tier of open-source software. That’s where OpenLogic, an enterprise open-source software provider and consultants comes in. In their recent study 2011 Open Source Adoption Trending Report, OpenLogic looks at the winners and losers in open-source software adoption.

Open Source: Not Just for Tech Anymore

Politics is experiencing a growing presence and impact from open source software and ideas. Many of the central tenets of the Occupy movement parallel open source software, including transparency, openness and collaboration. “Occupy” has been described as a type of “open source brand.”

The UK Telegraph Diagnoses America’s Problem

I’ll keep saying it and saying it… How can we effectively advocate Free and Open Source Software, open technology, and Internet freedom when we’re still dealing with people who think computers are magic, not science? And how can we teach computer science to a population that rejects science… period?

Nagios Wins Linux Journal Reader’s Choice Award For Best Monitoring Solution

How “Throwing One Away” Makes Open Source Better

There’s a wonderful line in Fred Brooks’ book “The Mythical Man-Month”, where he says that when writing a program, plan to throw one way – you will anyway. But that’s a bit of a problem for conventional software development, because it’s not clear when the best time is to throw that one away.

Doing it during development means delaying the public release, and that will cost you market share and possibly the entire market. First-mover advantage means that the really important thing is to get out there with something – however ropey – and hope to patch it up as you go along (think repairing aeroplanes as they fly….)

Events

• Coming to FOSDEM?

  One of the most important events of the year for Europe’s open source software developers is the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting – FOSDEM. It’s held annually at the start of February in Brussels, and this year’s instance is coming soon, on the first weekend in February.

W
eb Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 9 Officially Lands in Ubuntu 11.10

    A few days ago, Canonical uploaded the final bits of the Mozilla Firefox 9.0 web browser on the official software repositories for the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

SaaS

• AT&T joins OpenStack as it launches cloud for developers

  At AT&T’s Developer Summit in Las Vegas, company CTO John Donovan announced that the company had officially become a contributor to OpenStack, the open-source cloud architecture project that emerged from efforts by NASA and hosting company RackSpace. AT&T is the first telecom services provider to join OpenStack.

• AT&T joins the OpenStack project

• AT&T joins ‘Linux for cloud’, boosts HTML5 apps

Databases

• Hadoop vs. an RDBMS: How much (less) would you pay?

  Many people associate open source data framework Hadoop with managing truly massive amounts of data. And with good reason: Hadoop storage is used by Facebook and Yahoo, which many people (rightly) associate with massive data. As you learned in Part 1 of this series, Yahoo, an early adopter and contributor to Hadoop, has implemented a 50,000-node Hadoop network; Facebook has a Hadoop system with more than 10,000 nodes in place.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle’s latest Java moves frustrate users and vendors

  Oracle, which officially took on the big job of shepherding Java two years ago this month, is traveling bumpy roads lately, with its modularization and licensing plans for Java raising eyebrows and security concerns coming to the fore as well.

• Oracle mounts Cloudera’s elephant for big data ride

  When Oracle co-founder and CEO Larry Ellison clambered onto his own Big Data elephant back in October as his company announced the Big Data Appliance, Oracle gave the impression that it would be rolling up its own implementation of the open-source Apache Hadoop data muncher. This turns out to be not true.

Business

• FuseSource Emerges as a Leader in Professional Open Source in its First Year

• Semi-Open Source

  • Spring Integration 2.1 now available

    Following more than a year of development, SpringSource, the open source Java division of VMWare, has announced the “general availability” of version 2.1.0 of Spring Integration. According to project lead Mark Fisher, the new release includes a number of new features and resolves “hundreds of issues” found in the previous version. Spring Integration is an extension of the Spring framework for building asynchronous, event-driven applications and supporting Enterprise Integration Patterns such as Channels, Adapters, Filters and Translators.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• [FSF] Learn more about who we are and what we do

Project Releases

• Featured projects, January 9

• GNU Stow 2.1.3 released

Programming

• Open Source Development Focuses on Quality PHP Game Development Solutions

  With online gaming development solutions comes many custom game solutions perfect for you, at PHP game development Company game programmer possess the skill-set to meet the game development requirements (in developing basic word or arcade games to any other complicated games) on time without any compromise with quality.

• A Little Bit is A Lot Better

  Buddy Burden explanation of taking over maintenance of CPAN distributions is important. It’s empowering. If you’ve ever thought “I should contribute something to Perl”, start there.

  You can do it.

  Sure, it’s easy for me to say that. I’ve written a few things about Perl a few people have read. I have a few patches in a few projects and a couple of modules on the CPAN myself. (You’re reading this, aren’t you? So I have at least one reader. Thank you for your time!)

• Good and quick kernel configuration creation

  Using the make target “localmodconfig” saves time and effort when creating a configuration for a custom Linux kernel.

• Singleton in a header only library

• Standard JSON API for Java to be developed

  A new Java interface for processing data submitted in JSON format has been approved by the Java Community Process (JCP) as a Java Specification Request (JSR). With 10 yes votes and 6 abstentions, the Executive Committee voted in favour of JSR 353, which is primarily intended as a basis for the standardised development of further JSON APIs and will allow applications to be smaller and more portable by not having to bundle existing JSON libraries.

• Code for America opens 2013 application period

  Does your city need to solve a big civic problem? Cities across the United States can now submit their Code for America applications for 2013. Boston, Philadelphia, and Seattle have just wrapped up their 2011 projects. We’re eager to see what happens in Austin, Detroit, Chicago, Honolulu, Macon, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Santa Cruz in 2012. The application process opened on January 9, and applicants have until the end of March to complete their submissions.

Margin

On the other hand, Wintel is trying to sell “ultra”books at close to $1000 and OEMs are thinking they will sell a bunch at a few percent margin with Wintel raking in huge profits. What’s the consumer going to choose, something that can give the whole family and the in-laws a decent computing experience for a similar price or something that works for only one person and sits idling most of the time? Oh yes. There is a market for these low-end gadgets everywhere on the planet. They are not that “low” and end when it comes to performance. They definitely provide acceptable performance for many purposes with all the advantages of portability.

Dell Denies Data

Michael Dell ignores reality when he claims PCs are selling better than tablets all the while tablets are seeing double-digit growth and shipments of Wintel PCs are down or flat depending on where you look. Of course, Dell makes a lot more money selling desktop/notebook PCs than tablets but Dell has missed a lot of revenue as others did better than Dell selling tablets. The key to selling tablets is of course to sell good performance at lower price than the competition. Others are doing that and growing at huge rates.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Public’s Last Chance to Comment on Fracking in New York

  The public has until Wednesday to comment on a plan to open up 85 percent of the state of New York to the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” In 2010, a moratorium on this form of “natural” gas and oil extraction in the state was put in place, but a plan to lift it, advanced by Governor Andrew Cuomo, could change this.

• For A Million BTU

  The price differential for a million btu is blowing out once again, between Global oil and North American natural gas. The extraordinary discount has persisted for some years. But today, with West Texas Intermediate (WTIC) oil above $100 and Brent oil above $110, the spread has reached new highs. The energy content of natural gas is trading at an 83% discount to WTIC Oil, and at an 85% discount to Brent oil. An economist might be persuaded to say: “That is a gap that must eventually close. Or, at the very least, which gives North American energy markets a huge, competitive advantage to source cheap, domestic btu compared to the rest of the world.” I would not disagree. However, the infrastructure problems associated with energy transition do not make such switching from expensive oil to cheap natural gas an easy, or rapid, endeavor. I address these issues continually, but a post of mine from last year, Vexed By Natural Gas, might be worth a read for those who want to ponder the situation further.

Finance

• Bosma and Daniels Push “Right to Work” Amid Controversies over Financial Backers

  Governor Mitch Daniels (R-Indiana) and the state’s Speaker of the House, Brian Bosma (R-88), are spearheading an effort to pass the controversial, corporate-backed “Right to Work” (RTW) bill, which has sparked huge protests by Hoosiers. The bill’s opponents have called it the “Right to Work (for Peanuts)” bill, the “‘Right to be Fired’ Without Cause” bill, and other names.

• Top Obama campaign aide lobbied for bank bailout

  Senior campaign advisor Broderick Johnson was paid over $1 million to lobby for Wall St. over the past five years

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Lobby firm tries to get ‘wife beater’ nickname for Stella wiped off Wikipedia entry for beer

  For years it used the slogan ‘reassuringly expensive’, a tag-line which reflected its big-budget marketing campaigns.

  But while it aims to entice the upmarket drinker, Stella Artois is still known to the world as ‘wife beater’ because of its high alcohol content and perceived popularity with football hooligans.

• The Alcohol Industry’s Stealth “Joe Camel” Strategy

  A new study published in the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of Public Health examines the sophisticated PR and marketing strategies that alcoholic beverage companies have used to re-make the image of distilled spirits to appeal to underage drinkers. The article, Joe Camel in a Bottle: Diageo, the Smirnoff Brand, and the Transformation of the Youth Alcohol Market, by James Mosher, utilizes a case study of Diageo’s Smirnoff brand to illustrate the tactics.

Copyrights

• Sweden recognises new file-sharing religion Kopimism

  A “church” whose central tenet is the right to file-share has been formally recognised by the Swedish government.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• CES 2012: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Hybrid Demonstration Video

  Earlier in the weekend we heard about Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X1 Hybrid notebook that combines standard Intel x86 hardware with a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor running an open-source Linux OS.

• Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Hybrid hands on: Based on Android, won’t leverage Windows 8

• Desktop Linux Gains Share in Recent Months

  Linux’s prospects as a desktop operating system have long been a topic of hot debate, with some arguing that it will never surpass 1 percent of the market while others–including yours truly–countering that it already has.

• Lenovo ThinkPads at CES

  Other ThinkPad offerings run the usual gamut of T-series, W-series, and ThinkPad Edge to name a few. Lenovo has also decided to move away from the s-suffix (e.g. T420s) and created a new S-series line. The ThinkPad Edge S430 is interesting in that it’s one of the few laptops we’ve seen so far at CES with a Thunderbolt port. Another cool ThinkPad is the X1 Hybrid, which is the same as the X1 but with a mini-PCIe card that contains an SoC capable of running a Linux-style. If you need more battery life and don’t need the performance of a full Core i5/i7 processor you can switch to the SoC. At that point, the Windows environment goes into sleep mode and you switch to a Linux-based (Android-based) environment. There’s shared flash memory storage that can be accessed by both the Windows and Linux platforms, but the Linux OS can only read from the flash memory. The battery life benefit is claimed as being up to 2X when in SoC mode, though others have reported even lengthier runtimes.

• FXI Cotton Candy Hands-On: USB Stick Computer Now Runs Ubuntu, Ice Cream Sandwich

  When we first saw FXI’s Cotton Candy, the tiny dual-core computer on a USB stick blew our minds with its ability to take over either a notebook or a standalone screen and turn it into an Android station. Now, the Norwegian company has managed to port both Ubuntu Linux and Android 4.0 Ice Cream sandwich to its diminuitive device while adding a micro USB port and working on an even slimmer design.

Server

• Open Source Web Server nginx Passes IIS in Popularity

• The road to a successful open source project: Learning lessons from Drupal

  By almost any measure, Drupal, an open source content management system/Web platform, should be a poster child for open source success. The PHP-based CMS, the first version of which was released by Dries Buytaert in 2001, powers the Web presence of a number of major organisations, including, since 2009, Whitehouse.gov.

  When it comes what other open source projects can learn from Drupal’s success, Buytaert, who is now chief technology officer of Acquia and remains Drupal’s project lead, says that although he doesn’t have all the answers — and that “there’s no one right way” to do things — there are some lessons to be learned.

Kernel Space

• What’s New in Linux 3.2?

  What better way to kick off the new year than with a brand new kernel, fresh out of Kernel.org? Linus Torvalds released the 3.2 kernel on January 4th, with improvements in the Ext4 and Btrfs filesystems, thin provisioning features, a new architecture, and CPU bandwidth control.

• Linux kernel hits version 3.2, plenty of power-saving features in tow

• Linux 3.3 Kernel Has A Big, “Pretty Good” Staging Merge

  The Linux 3.3 kernel staging pull request has been submitted to Linus Torvalds. As said by Greg Kroah-Hartman, the 3.3 staging merge is big and “overall, the story is pretty good.”

  Here’s some of the highlights of the staging area pull for the Linux 3.3 kernel:

• Reiser4 Still Lacks Mainline Ambitions

  Reiser4 is still not ready for integration into the Linux 3.3 kernel nor has the file-system even been officially updated yet for any of the recent kernel releases.

  The Reiser4 patch directory hasn’t even been restored since the downing of Kernel.org, but at least their Wiki is back online, which notes the Linux 2.6.38 kernel as the latest. On reiserfs-devel is where some discussions do take place (circa two dozen per month) with some patches for Reiser4.

Applications

• App of the Week: LiLi USB Creator 2.8

• Automating the Linux Desktop With AutoKey

  AutoKey is one of those rare applications that you do not know you need until you start using it, and then it becomes an essential part of your workflow. AutoKey is a system wide service that allows you to create text shortcuts for commonly used words or phrases. For example, you could set the key combination “,,e” (without quotation marks) to automatically expand to your email address. Or, you could set “,,p” to expand into your phone number. AutoKey’s power goes beyond simple text expansion. AutoKey allows you to write your own scripts in Python, and that’s where things get interesting.

• Top 10 free apps in the Ubuntu Software Center

  People generally don’t prefer Ubuntu for the simple reason that it does not provide the variety of apps found in other OSes. Though it is partly true , there are a lot of free apps out there that are just waiting to be found. We bring to you the list of top ten free apps for Ubuntu. Check it out to see whether your favourite app has bagged a spot.Prepare yourselves for some surprises.Here is the list of the free Ubuntu apps that we think are a cut above the rest.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Running TYPO3 4.6 On Nginx (LEMP) On Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.10

  • The Linux Command Line

  • How to Get Public External IP From Command Line Terminal – Linux

  • PAC Manager: All your Connection are belong to us

  • Create and Record Surveys with LimeSurvey

  • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.1 (LAMP)

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Porteus 1.1

  • Core Update 54 + 55 released

  • Tiny Core 4.2.1

  • Porteus 1.1

  • RIPLinuX 13.6

  • Asturix 4

  • Two updates for IPFire open source firewall released

    IPFire Project Leader and developer Michael Tremer has announced the release of two new core updates to version 2.11 of his open source firewall. Core 54 includes updates for network hardware, such as new Intel network drivers, as well as updated versions of the Squid proxy server, the Snort network intrusion prevention and detection system, and the smartmontools package.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva may be forced to shut down

    The French GNU/Linux company, Mandriva, may be forced to shut its doors as soon as January 16, following the refusal of one of its main shareholders to accept a recapitalisation scheme.

  • Mandriva Linux maker could enter bankruptcy next week

  • On disaster reports

    2012 started as a rather interesting year. Perhaps influenced by the so-called “Mayan Doomsday” prophecies, people today reported hearing strange rumbling noises coming from the Earth.

    Interestingly, the Linux world also has its own disaster predictions–you always listen that Linux is finished on the desktop, that the desktop computer itself is finished, and a myriad more.

    One of the predictions that I read is that 2012 will be the definite year of Mandriva’s disappearance. Since Mandriva was the distro that made me migrate to Linux, I must admit that I received the news with a grave heart.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat prepares for growth while key competitor teeters on brink of collapse

    In recent days Red Hat has announced a new enterprise storage appliance platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. The company also anticipates that the growth in cloud computing, particularly as a back-end to consumer appliances, will mean the deployment of more Linux servers by business.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • All Eyes on Ubuntu as CES Draws Near

        It’s obvious that Canonical was never about engineering,” said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “It’s always been marketing, hype, generating buzz by trying to get their fingers into the latest trend, and ‘oh look — shiny.’ Unfortunately for them, unless you have a practical monopoly like Microsoft enjoyed, you ultimately need product engineering to stand out.”

      • TV for Human Beings: Ubuntu Linux

      • Ubuntu TV Demoed At CES [Video]

      • CES 2012: Linux Ubuntu TV launched by British firm Canonical

      • I Want My Ubuntu TV!

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Blue Systems becomes Linux Mint partner and sponsor

          Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, has announced that Blue Systems, a German company, has become a partner of the Linux Mint project. The partnership is focused on improving the KDE editions of Linux Mint KDE and Blue Systems-sponsored Netrunner – Lefebvre says that this should have a positive effect on both distributions even though they offer different experiences. Lefebvre also notes that Blue Systems will become the primary sponsor for Linux Mint, in a deal that has allowed the Mint developers to contract an additional full-time developer for all of 2012.

Devices/Embedded

• Marvell Introduces Tiny SMILE Plug Classroom Server at CES

  Not content to help students only through its partnership with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), Marvell is rolling out a new product designed to revolutionize the classroom learning experience. Not much bigger than a walwart, the tiny SMILE Plug is a Linux-based, wireless learning server that can provide unique educational content to up to 60 students at a time.

• CES: GM Wants To Turn Your Car Into An iPhone On Wheels

  CUE is based on Linux, the same open-source software running many of the world’s servers. Cars last three to four to five years, so Cue’s open, Linux-based architecture will let GM keep the CUE’s interface up to date, Vurpillat said.

• Raspberry Pi’s Gertboard expansion board already works (video)

  In the middle of December last year the Raspberry Pi Foundation made a surprising announcement that not only would we see the $25 PC released in 2012, it would also be getting an expansion board–possibly joining it at launch.

• New Iomega Network Storage Gear Starts at 1TB, $220

  The StorCenter ix2 runs EMC LifeLine, a Linux-based OS created for enterprise-level storage devices. Setup via a web interface requires no CD. The two-drive units support RAID 1 (mirrored) data protection.

• Phones

  • Tizen UI leaks ahead of Samsung I9500 debut

  • Tizen Association Launched to Drive Industry Engagement for Tizen™

  • Tizen releases some code

  • Android

    • UNVEILED: Huawei announces world’s slimmest Android smartphone – the Huawei Ascend P1 S

    • LTE Android Lineup to Expand on MetroPCS

    • Supersonic, Inc. introduces a new Android powered set-top box

      Supersonic, Inc. recently introduced a new set top box, powered by Android. The SC-66G ($199) Android-powered set-top box features a wireless full-size keyboard and Wi-Fi capability. The SC-66G, which is shipping now at a $199 suggested retail, has Wi-Fi capability, four USB ports and a MicroSD card slot, as well as SATA, Ethernet and HDMI ports.

    • ASUS announces Eee Pad MeMO ME370T and new Transformer Prime TF700T

      ASUS is bringing the Ice Cream Sandwich love in 2012 with the EeePad MeMO ME370T, and a new upmarket model Transformer Prime, the TF700T. The new Prime, which doesn’t replace the existing Transformer Prime we all know and love, has a few upgrades from the original model, namely a 1920×1200 display, a 2MP front camera for HD video conferencing, and a re-designed back plate for better Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS reception. It will use the same docking station and battery life should be very comparable to the current TF201 Transformer Prime.

    • Fujitsu leaks quad-core Tegra 3 smartphone, unwraps Ice Cream Sandwich

      Did the performance chops of the Transformer Prime whet your appetite for quad-core Android? Perhaps the UI of Ice Cream Sandwich is almost enough to push you over from your iPhone. Well, Fujitsu may be the surprising choice for your next phone. Pushing the envelope way beyond the Arrows μ F-07D, Fujitsu’s let slip that it has another phone up its sleeve. In a leaflet distributed at CES Unveiled, the brief specification reads like a wish list: a quad-core Tegra 3 CPU and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) right out of the gates. Now, whether we’ll see it in the flesh as CES unfolds this week, well, only Fujitsu knows.

    • At Least 3 New 4G LTE Devices Launching on Sprint in 2012

    • HDMI dongle IPTV device supports Android 4.0

      Always Innovating announced a tiny open source, IP set-top box (STB) that runs Android 4.0 on a Texas Instruments OMAP4 processor clocked as high as 1.8GHz. The HDMI Dongle plugs directly into a TV’s HDMI port, and provides up to 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a remote control that offers NFC, accelerometers, and voice control.

    • CES 2012: OpenMobile Makes Android Apps Run On Everything

      There are more than just Android and iOS powering smart devices today and one company is making apps easier to get on those other platforms.

      OpenMobile announced today at CES their Application Compatibility Layer (ACL) which allows for perfect porting of the more than 300,000 apps available for Android to devices running on other OSes including Windows, Linux and more.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Lenovo puts Android 4.0 in dockable tablet and smart TV

    Lenovo announced two new devices that run Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) on a dual-core, 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 processor. One is a 10.1-inch tablet with a detachable keyboard dock and up to 20 hours’ battery life (the IdeaTab S2), while the other is a television with an in-plane switching (IPS) display and voice-activated remote control (the K91 Smart TV), according to the company.

  • Verizon Announces World’s Thinnest 4G LTE Tablet – Galaxy Tab 7.7

    The newest addition to the Galaxy tablet line up was announced today at CES. The 7.7 inch 4G LTE-Enabled Samsung Galaxy Tab will be available in the coming weeks. It’s the first tablet in the United States to feature a Super AMOLED™ Plus Display. As mentioned above, it is the world’s thinnest 4G LTE tablet weighing only 340 grams (roughly 12 oz) and measuring at only 7.9 millimeters thin.

  • Verizon and Motorola announce Droid 4: Thinnest, most powerful 4G LTE smartphone with QWERTY keyboard

  • OLPC’s XO 3 tablet uses 1GHz ARM SoC to run Sugar Linux or Android

    One Laptop per Child (OLPC) demonstrated a “fully functional” version of its long-delayed XO 3.0 tablet, equipped with a 1GHz Marvell Armada PXA618 processor running Sugar Linux or Android 3.x. Like OLPC’s XO 2 laptop, the eight-inch tablet is aimed at educational systems in developing nations, and it will feature an optional sunlight-readable Pixel Qi touchscreen plus the ability to draw power from an optional solar panel or crank charger.

  • OLPC shows off XO 3 tablet running Android or Linux

  • CES 2012: £70 XO3 tablet to be unveiled by One Laptop Per Child

  • One Laptop Per Child Debuts Rugged Tablet for Students in the Developing World

  • Qooq culinary tablet: recipes and videos in a kitchen-safe enclosure (hands-on video)

  • Qooq: The French Linux-Based Tablet For Your Kitchen

  • CES 2012: New technologies unleashed at show

    The Linux-based device is splash-proof, is held off the ground by feet that allow spilled liquids to run underneath, and can shrug off temperatures of up to 60C (140F).

  • Toshiba’s ‘world’s thinnest tablet’ heads stateside

    Toshiba announced “the world’s thinnest 10-inch tablet,” measuring 0.3 inches (7.7mm) thick and weighing 1.18 pounds (535 grams). Heading for a 1Q U.S. release, the Excite X10 runs the “latest” Android build on a 1.2GHz TI OMAP4430 processor, has 1GB RAM and either 16GB or 32GB of storage, offers a 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 IPS display, and includes five- and two-megapixel cameras.

Prof: Schools moving to OpenSim should pay for hosting

Google’s Open Source Video Player

Perhaps Google isn’t all bad these days! A new open source HTML5 video player is yours for the download. As well as being a good showcase app it is also practically useful. It is the architectural core of the new 60 Minutes and RedBull.tv apps available in the Chrome Web Store.

Google open sources new HTML5 video tool

Google chose the PR graveyard shift slot of 4:30 USA Pacific time on Friday afternoon last week to put out its latest communiqué to us, the consuming masses.

The ‘search giant’ has pushed its latest HTML5 video tool to open source.

The new Video Player Sample is built with open web technology and is designed to allow developers (and other users) to wrap video up in the required code to be able to release it as a web store application.

Rackspace open-sources Dreadnot for failure-free software deployment with Node.js

IBM Delivers Open Source Version of EGL Tools

Consolidation enables open source software strategy

AT&T Signs On With OpenStack Open-Source Cloud

AT&T on Monday officially signed on with the OpenStack cloud, the Rackspace- and NASA-created open-source cloud computing project.

An Interactive eGuide: Open Source

ChannelEyes Social Media Cloud Built On Open Source

OSQA, the open source Q&A system

OSQA is the free, open source Q&A system you’ve been waiting for. Your OSQA site is more than just an FAQ page, it is a full-featured Q&A community. Users earn points and badges for useful participation, and everyone in the community wins.

Events

• SCALE 10x Shows CSPs How to Build A Cloud on Open Source

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • The new MPL

    Last week the Mozilla Foundation released version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License. Immediately recognized as a free software license by the Free Software Foundation and approved as an Open Source license by the Open Source Initiative, MPL 2.0 is a well-crafted modern license that ought to be considered by any open source project desiring a weak copyleft licensing policy.

Databases

• Hadoop vs. an RDBMS: How much (less) would you pay?

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Unused LibreOffice Code Expunged

  The more code an application accumulates, the heavier it gets and the slower it performs usually. It’s just basic physics of programming. Since years of neglect left lots of unused code in LibreOffice, contributors have been busy cleaning it up. The latest scan by Michael Meeks shows the efforts are really paying off.

Project Releases

• LSU Releases First Open Source ParalleX Runtime Software System

  Louisiana State University’s Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) has delivered the first freely available open-source runtime system implementation of the ParalleX execution model. The HPX, or High Performance Parallex, runtime software package is a modular, feature-complete, and performance oriented representation of the ParalleX execution model targeted at conventional parallel computing architectures such as SMP nodes and commodity clusters.

Public Services/Government

• NASA: Prize money a bargain for better software

  In October 2010, NASA and the Harvard Business School launched the NASA Tournament Lab, an online platform for contests between independent programmers who compete to create software and algorithms and solve computational problems.

Licensing

• Mozilla Releases OSI-Approved MPLv2

  Last week saw a quiet landmark in the history of the open source movement with the formal release of version two of the Mozilla Public License (MPLv2) and its approval as an official open source license. While to many it may look like just another legal detail, it is significant both for the way it was conducted and for the intent with which it has been created. This is a license aimed at unity.

• 2011: Top Ten FOSS Legal Developments

  This year, 2011, was one of the most active years in legal developments in FOSS. This activity reflects the increase in FOSS use: Laura Wurster of Gartner, noted in the Harvard Business Review blog that open source has hit a “strategic tipping point” this year with companies increasingly focused on using “open source” software for competitive rather than cost reasons http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=619.

Openness/Sharing

• Public Knowledge opens wireless usage caps website

  The site is sponsored by PK, Mozilla Foundation and the Open Source Democracy Foundation. PK and the Open Technology Initiative last May asked the FCC to investigate data caps generally.

• Open Data

  • Open Source Maps Gain Ground as Google Paywall Looms

Programming

• Zend Updates PHP Server Stack for IBM i

  Zend Technologies has launched a major update to Zend Server for IBM i, its PHP server stack for the IBM i platform. Version 5.6 marks the general availability of the new XML Toolkit, which provides a new way for integrating RPG logic into PHP apps, and a new application deployment mechanism. DBi, the drop-in replacement for MySQL on the platform that was slated for release about this time, is not yet ready.

Finance

• REO To Rental Fed Plan Would Do Little For Housing, Says Goldman Sachs

  The Federal Reserve’s foreclosure rental program would do little to lift the ailing housing market, Goldman Sachs analysts wrote in a research paper released on Friday morning.

  The analysis, written in response to a Federal Reserve paper released earlier this week, calculates the nationwide effects of renting foreclosed properties as “positive but modest,” possibly fostering a 0.5 percent increase in home prices in the first year of program implementation, and a 1 percent increase in the second year. But those are Goldman’s maximum increases, and the researchers are quick to add that the “actual effect would likely be less.”

• Goldman’s Infamous ‘Sh*tty Deal’ Turns Out Not To Have Been As Sh*tty As Others

  The infamous Abacus transaction that cost Goldman Sachs $550 million might have been designed to fail, but it turns out that it actually performed better than its peers, according to a new study co-authored by BlackRock and Columbia Business School.

  The Abacus CDOs’ performance, “while undoubtedly bad, was actually better than average among all bonds that had been similarly packaged.”

Copyrights

• Copying the copyrighted is okay if it transforms: What’s that?

  Writing in the New York Times, Randy Kennedy reports on a court decision that would make it illegal to use most work of others still under copyright as the basis for new works which “transform” the original link here.

  “The decision, by Judge Deborah A. Batts, set off alarm bells throughout Chelsea and in museums across America that show contemporary art. At the heart of the case, which Mr. Prince is now appealing, is the principle called fair use, a kind of door in the bulwark of copyright protections. It gives artists (or anyone for that matter) the ability to use someone else’s material for certain purposes, especially if the result transforms the thing used or as Judge Pierre N. Leval described it in an influential 1990 law review article, if the new thing “adds value to the original” so that society as a whole is culturally enriched by it. In the most famous test of the principle, the Supreme Court in 1994 found a possibility of fair use by the group 2 Live Crew in its sampling of parts of Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” for the sake of one form of added value, parody.”