12.04.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
[I’m on vacation for a week starting now]
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Applications
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As the digital age progresses, the amount of data we produce each year is growing quickly. There was a time when we could fit all of our personal digital data on a few floppy disks, but many of us now have hundreds of gigabytes or photos, music and documents that we need to backup and protect. Backing up our data locally is important, but any good backup plan should also include off-site backups. “The Cloud” has promised us infinite, cheap storage where we can save our ever-growing data. Online cloud backups should be a part of your overall backup plan, but it’s important that your data is secure, encrypted, and backed up automatically. Here are a few online backup tools that aim to make cloud backups easy for users.
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Instructionals/Technical
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rsnapshot is a backup tool written in Perl that utilizes rsync as its back-end. rsnapshot allows users to create customized incremental backup solutions. This article will discuss the following: the benefits of an incremental backup solution, rsnapshot’s installation, its configuration, and usage examples.
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Games
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Thanks to the Humble Bundle i’ve discovered also this nice game: Dungeons of Dredmor.
It’s a classic Rogue-like game, you have to move your hero in 10 level of dungeons where you’ll fight against terrible monsters, to get new equipment, skills and fight the big bad Evil guy, from the official site:
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I really like this game. It was 2001 when Mucky Foot Productions (not existing anymore) released this game. I played it a lot of times, and i never got tired of it. Beautiful music, funny characters, great landscapes. Ladies and gentlemen, a strategic game called… StarTopia!
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There’s three days left to the Humble Introversion Bundle that offers up a collection of DRM-free, multi-platform games at whatever price you wish, but how is this Linux game sale performing?
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Hard to believe, but after 12 years of community development, the guys from the open-source engine based on Bungie’s Marathon trilogy Aleph One have finally released a version called 1.0!
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Metagolf Linux game innovatively combines platforming action and golf. The gameplay style is really unique where upto 4 players can play on same screen with one golf ball to complete various objectives of different levels.
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Desktop Environments
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Yesterday Gnome project announced a site called Gnome Extensions which makes it easier to find and install extensions. A lot of useful Gnome 3 extensions already existed, but not much was known about it until LinuxMint popularised them. It seems Linus Torvalds has tried the extensions and is now liking it. He posts on his Google + page, “Hey, with gnome-tweak-tool and the dock extension, gnome-3.2 is starting to look almost usable.”
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GNOME Desktop
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There are a lot of people that don’t like the changes brought to the Linux desktop with GNOME 3. Among those people is none other than the father of Linux himself, Linus Torvalds.
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In an effort to slim down and improve its cross-platform capabilities, the developers of the Chrome browser and ChromeOS itself appear to be shifting away from Gtk use.
This bit of information was quietly pointed out earlier in the month on the Aura window manager pages for the Chromium Projects. Chromium is the open source implementation of Chrome and ChromeOS, and Aura is the new window manager and shell environment that will support the various interface elements on these implementations.
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Marlin is a relatively new file browser for GNOME somewhat similar with Nautilus when it comes to features, but with a different default interface.
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New Releases
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· Announced Distro: VectorLinux 7.0
· Announced Distro: Clonezilla Live 1.2.11-23
· Announced Distro: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 1
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu is a complete desktop Linux operating system, freely available with both community and professional support.
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Ubuntu 12.04 named ‘Precise Pangolin’ has been released on 1st Dec,2011. This time Ubuntu 12.04 is based on Linux Kernel 3.2.0 relaese candidate 3. There are many more changes are done in the Ubuntu 12.04. It also support for APLS touchpads.
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Ubuntu team is running a pilot project called ‘Ubuntu Friendly community hardware testing programme’. The goal of the program is to find if the hardware is Ubuntu friendly or not.
Members can run a test on “how well their systems work with Ubuntu, and submit this information to a website where data is aggregated and a useful ‘friendliness’ rating is generated for each model. This information is useful, for instance, in determining which systems work well with Ubuntu, and whether a particular hardware component is likely to work or give trouble,” Daniel Manrique write on a mailing list.
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Flavours and Variants
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Since MATE is new, there’s not really a “new features” list for it. However, there are a couple of new features in Linux Mint 12 that also apply to MATE. Some things that are new apply only to GNOME 3 so I haven’t included them here. If you want to see those, please see the Linux Mint 12 GNOME 3 review that I did earlier.
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Linux Mint, the venerable Ubuntu based Linux distro, is in the news again. Linux Mint 12 codenamed “Lisa” is finally released. It based on GNOME 3.0 and runs GNOME Shell with some ingenious tweaks of its own. Detailed review of Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” OS. Read on.
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The week of Thanksgiving in the United States was a shorter week for some, but that didn’t slow the progress of Linux. This past week, Linux Mint 12 was officially released, providing those that don’t want GNOME Shell or Ubuntu Unity with an alternative take on a modern GNOME Linux desktop. As Mint freshened the Linux desktop, developers continued to push forward on KDE and the Linux kernel.
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Phones
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Android
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Android-x86, the famous port of Google’s famous Android platform for the x86 (32-bit) architecture has just reached version 4.0.
Android-x86 is a Live CD Linux distribution created mostly for the Eee PC netbooks, but can also run on any other 32-bit (x86) platform.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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This week there’s been a lot of fuss about Amazon releasing source code for software on its Kindle devices, including the Kindle Fire. A lot of the hype we’ve seen is simply unwarranted; while you can download the source code that Amazon was legally required to publish, most of the software on the device remains proprietary, and every Kindle is still Defective by Design.
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This Android tablet can withstand five ft drops, water and dust ingress (IP65), and boasts the rugged military grade MIL-STD-810G rating. The Z710 can also operate in the coldest and hottest of environments, from -30 degrees C to +60 degrees C.
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The Apache Software Foundation has come under withering attacks lately, with accusations of its politics and bureaucracy getting in the way of its ability to foster open-source software.
The common rallying cry of the Apache attackers is GitHub, a source-control system that has almost blossomed overnight into the industry’s top open-source code repository. But while GitHub clearly does offer a superior code-hosting alternative to Apache and other foundations in many respects, it is deficient in one of the most important ways: branding.
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There’s a new release of the open-source Lightspark software for handling Adobe SWF/Flash support on the Linux desktop. New to Lightspark 0.5.3 among other changes is a working Microsoft Windows port.
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Events
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Over the last four years or so, I have attended numerous conferences in many different locations. It has been, really without any exceptions, an incredible experience. Conferences are one of the main ways that our communities come together and meet face-to-face—something that’s important to counterbalance the standard email and IRC development environment.
In that time, I have also seen many different ways to organize, schedule, and produce those conferences, and, as is the case with free software projects, there are bits and pieces that conferences can learn from each other. What follows is my—fairly opinionated obviously—distillation of what works well and less well, which will hopefully be useful as new conferences spring up, or as existing ones plan for next year.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google has been on a killing spree the last few months, whacking projects that are non-essential to the company strategy or that haven’t caught on. Even though this has angered some users, Google is still stubbornly clinging to one of its biggest dogs to date: ChromeOS and the Chromebooks.
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SaaS
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Databases
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NoSQL data store CouchDB has become Hadoop’s latest convert with delivery of a connector tying together the two big-data architectures.
CouchDB user Couchbase has announced a certified Couchbase Hadoop Connector, developed with Hadoop shop Cloudera.
The connector potentially simplifies movement of data between the Couchbase Server, which Couchbase says is “powered” by CouchDB, and the Cloudera Distribution including Hadoop (CDH). Couchbase uses capabilities of CouchDB such as mobile and sync. Both CouchDB and Hadoop, meanwhile, are Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Little over one month ago The Document Foundation announced their new online extension repository. At that time it had maybe a couple of dozen total extensions and templates, but now the number totals over 100.
A short note from Florian Effenberger expressed the projects pride and gratitude towards those who have been contributing. OpenOffice.org had a wide selection and many articles were devoted to the bounty. Today, LibreOffice is well on its way to closing the gap.
The extension site is easy to use because one can sort and search through the extensions. You can sort by LibreOffice version, or one of several criteria such as Highest Rated, Most Downloaded, or Newest. Extensions can also be filtered by category such as Language Tools or Writer-Extensions. And it doesn’t require Javascript to function.
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Project Releases
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Genode, the interesting research (non-Linux) operating system developed on a unique framework architecture, recently experienced the release of Genode OS 11.11. This operating system, which brought Gallium3D support last year, now has a variety of virtualization modules available.
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Public Services/Government
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Microsoft beware: a major UK government department is to trial open source desktops
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Programming
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Copyrights
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Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs. To make matters even worse, a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.
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Posted in Site News at 5:08 am by Guest Editorial Team
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Security
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Tyler Lyle, 26, who was arrested for blocking a sidewalk, says he sat on a parked bus for at least five hours. During that time, numerous protesters called out to a deputy to complain their hands were turning purple due to too-tight handcuffs. The calls were ignored, as were requests to help a woman who vomited and urinated on the bus. As the protesters called out for help, said Lyle, the deputy turned up the radio volume. “It was the song ‘God Bless America,’”said Lyle.
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Cablegate
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
Finance
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Anti-Trust
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Censorship
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Privacy
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Civil Rights – The crackdown on OWS continues.
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The new National Defense Authorization Bill (S1867) presented to the Senate by the Armed Services Committee is such a disaster for civil liberties and human rights it is difficult to know where to begin.
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The broadcast media’s ignorance and unwillingness to cover the National Defense Authorization Act, a radical piece of legislation which outrageously redefines the US homeland as a “battlefield” and makes US citizens subject to military apprehension and detainment for life without access to a trial or attorney, is unacceptable.
There have been a few print stories but corporate media mostly ignores and defends the act which makes easy what companies have previously done to protesters one at a time with SLAPP and laws defining animal rights protest as terrorism. Banksters would love to be able to round up OWS protesters and throw them into “Communication Management Units or jails built to house undocumented aliens in each state. President Obama again pledged to veto the law but not for the right reasons.
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the ACLU called it “an historic threat to American citizens”, this bill is so dangerous not only to our rights but to our country’s security that it was criticized by the Directors of the FBI, the CIA, the National Intelligence Director and the U.S. Defense Secretary! For the first time in our history, if this Act is not vetoed, American citizens may not be guaranteed their Article III right to trial. … Senator Lindsey Graham declared that suspected citizens open themselves up “to imprisonment and death”. “And when they say, ‘I want my lawyer,’ you tell them: ‘Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.’” … we could witness the US government targeting a large range of political dissidents, human rights activists, humanitarians, and maybe even “occupiers”.
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Free software literally gives you freedom in the area of computing. It means that you can control your computing. It means that the users individually and collectively have control over their computing. And in particular it means they can protect themselves from the malicious features that are likely to be in proprietary software … human rights support each other. In an age when a lot of what we do, we do with computers, if we don’t have freedom in our computing, that makes it harder for us to defend or fight for freedom in other areas.
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The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel shares details of Walker’s plan, which we’ll title “The Safe Capitol Requires Expenditure of Wages, the Protection of Everyone, Official Permits, and Liability E-surance (SCREW the PEOPLE) Act of 2012″
Essentially, the governor would like to charge protesters the cost of beating them. The Milwaukee Journal article
notes that Walker is recycling an old smear about the cost of the protests
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[a stranger] showed up at the very end of our allotted 3 hours of free speech time, and was told she was part of our “event” and that she would be ticketed and could risk arrest if she didn’t leave.
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Frank La Rue, who serves as the U.N. “special rapporteur” for the protection of free expression, told HuffPost in an interview that the crackdowns against Occupy protesters appear to be violating their human and constitutional rights.
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Copyrights
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When Rietveldt bought a Harry Potter DVD early 2007, he noticed that the campaign video with his music was on it. And this was no isolated incident. The composer now claims that his work has been used on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs, without him receiving any compensation for it. … The existence of excellent copyright laws and royalty collecting agencies in the Netherlands should mean that the composer received help and support with this problems, but this couldn’t be further from what actually happened. … a board member of a royalty collection agency offered to to help the composer to recoup the money, but only if he received 33% of the loot.
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12.03.11
Posted in News Roundup at 2:14 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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“Linux is like that classic muscle car, in that if you are willing to put in the hours and don’t mind spending your weekends under the hood, you’ll have yourself a sweet ride at the end of the day and the knowledge you built and tweaked it with your own two hands,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “But if you aren’t willing to put in the work, all it is gonna do is make you frustrated.”
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Behind every successful business, there’s Linux and open source. That might be an exaggeration, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that Linux and open source are at the core of FlickStream. The Linux-powered service adds all sorts of custom content to the Linux-powered Roku digital video player.
I’m not one of those people who doesn’t own a television or get hooked on favorite series. I don’t have a problem with spending too many hours in front of the boob tube, mindlessly losing myself in dramatic story lines or unbelievable plots. In fact, I wish I had more time to sit in front of our big flat screen, and if I did, I wouldn’t be flipping through the cable channels. Instead, I could lose myself in the wealth of options that my magical little Roku box streams onto my screen.
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Desktop
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To compare, Google claims 500,000 Android devices activated every day. Clearly, Chromebook sales leave a lot to be desired.
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Server
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What is interesting to note though is that after a decade of chipping away at Unix’s market share, the way I see the numbers trending, Linux will surpass Unix, sooner rather than later.
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Kernel Space
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This doesn’t look tons smaller than -rc2 or -rc3, but it really is. Yes, there are some ARM updates and fixups to the new Exonys DRI code, and a questionably late ocfs2 update, but if you ignore those three areas (and most people can happily ignore them), things really are calming down pretty nicely.
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Recently I published some controversial benchmark results of the Xen performance on the Linux 3.0 kernel compared to bare-metal and KVM virtualization along with noting awkward Linux power management when using Xen. The results were valid and have now been confirmed by Xen developers and they have narrowed down the cause of the serious performance issues.
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Graphics Stack
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Last month there was a presentation in Brazil by Eugeni Dodonov of the Intel Open-Source Technology Center. The focus was on Intel Linux Graphics and the “following the open-source road from kernel to UI tool-kits.”
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Applications
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This is a very powerful and feature-rich tool for taking screenshots. Written in GTK and blending well in GNOME, Shutter offers just about anything you would ask from such an application: timer, screenshots of whole screen, windows, widgets, a quick and easy-to-use editor for fast retouching or pointing out certain aspects of the image, support for plugins, exporting/importing and saving to PNG, JPG or BMP. Definitely a winner in my opinion.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Red Hat, and their community effort, Fedora, are more or less enterprise-oriented. That being said, it’s only natural they offer enterprise-specific tools that don’t quite make sense on other desktop oriented operating systems. In the enterprise environment, where the system administrator has to manage lots of machines and installations, one tool that helps a lot is one that facilitates automated installations on several computers, using the same options for each of them. Instead of installing each system separately, the administrator just boots the installation media, tells the system where to find the options for installation and comes back after an hour to check on the system. It’s a tremendous advantage in terms of time and effort, especially when dealing with lots of systems. Just like HP-UX offers Ignite or OpenSUSE offers AutoYAST, Red Hat/Fedora offers Kickstart. You will learn what that is, how to get the best of it and how to use the newly created Kickstart file. We assume basic knowledge of Linux and we recommend you try this in a virtual machine first before going into production.
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Games
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The incredible people who brought ioquake3 engine have already started working on a new project – iodoom3. Many popular Linux games like Open Arena and Urban Terror are based on ioquake3 engine. With starting of iodoom3 project we will see more games coming to Linux in future that will be able to utilize high end features of id Tech 4 engine.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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In the weekend of November 11, more than twenty Calligra developers braved the fierce weather of Helsinki to meet up again! Well, the weather wasn’t that fierce actually, but it could have been! We met up in the office tower that houses Nokia’s research department during the weekdays for two days of hacking, presentations and meetings. For several attendants it was their first travel to a community gathering: welcome Smit Patel, Brijesh Patel and Dimitrios Tanis!
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Plasma Active is innovative technology for a smarter mobile user experience…the latest member of the Plasma Workspaces family from KDE. The touchscreen interface is more than just an application launcher. Rather than the commonplace grid of applications, an Activity view shows a single project, task or idea, gathering all related documents, people, web sites, media and widgets. By creating multiple Activities, a mobile device can be customized to respond effectively as the user moves between contexts. Plasma Active is based on Qt and KDE technology, enabling quick and efficient development of touchscreen user experiences.
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Over the last couple of years the KDE Mobile project has been evolving as it targeted many embedded platforms. Currently, the focus is on the shiny Nokia gadgets (N9 and N950) running the platform called Harmattan. Eleven talented developers met in person at a recent KDE Sprint, giving a boost to porting KDE Applications onto this platform, creating new working relationships, and discussing various issues around the KDE Mobile project for handsets.
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Today was the first of two Plasma Bug Days we’re hosting this week in #plasma on irc.freenode.net. It started at noon UTC and people started rolling in. With the help of Ann Marie and Marco, we got the volunteer bug hunters up to speed and working with a high degree of effectivity.
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GNOME Desktop
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Not only did the arrival of Linux Mint 12 deliver a comforting stepping stone for users uncertain about GNOME 3, but Thursday saw the launch of a site dedicated to helping GNOME 3 users further customize that desktop with an array of available extensions.
Even as Ubuntu’s Unity draws continued criticism, in other words, GNOME 3 appears to have gotten a nice boost over the past few days.
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When GNOME 3 was released, the marketing material emphasized how the new interface was uncluttered and contained nothing that users didn’t need. In effect, the advertising copy was a repudiation of everything that the GNOME 2 series had become after seventeen incremental releases in nine years.
A praiseworthy cleanup, you might imagine. So why are most of the extensions for GNOME 3 designed to put the clutter back, and make GNOME 3 look and act more like GNOME 2?
Not all the extensions coming out have that intention. You can find several extensions for Zeitgeist, the combination calendar and file manager. There is also the usual array of minor enhancements, such as windowsNavigator, which enables keyboard selection in overlay mode, and xrandr-indicator for configuring monitors — both welcome enhancements, but neither of which greatly affects how users work.
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With the GNOME Extension catalogue now online it’s never been easier to add extra features to your GNOME Shell desktop.
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Ubuntu is undoubtedly one of the most popular Linux-based distros out there (yes, I know LinuxMint is creating quite a buzz out there, kudos to the hard working LinuxMint team.)
The reason of Ubuntu’s (and LinuxMint’s) success is partly in its ease of use. Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s move to Unity has changed that. Unity while offers new features, has also taken away what people were used to, and they are complaining.
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The Gnome project has dropped a bomb today by announcing a site for Gnome 3 Shell extensions. The site is in alpha stage and brings the much needed extensions for Gnome 3 Shell under one site.
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LinuxMint showed us a completely different side of Gnome 3 by pre-installing and activating useful shell extensions which brings back the much missed functionality in Gnome 3. This customization has made LinuxMint even more popular among Gnome 3 users, and among those who are unhappy with Unity due to its lack of customization [read how to Turn Ubuntu Into LinuxMint].
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VectorLinux was released this week. I have never installed VectorLinux at all so this was new to me. VectorLinux 7.0 Standard Gold is available on one easy to install CD. You can download it from VectorLinux or purchase it on CD from Linux CD Shop. They also have a LiveCD version to give it a test drive. As I mentioned above installing VectorLinux 7.0 was very easy. Below are some screenshots of the process
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Some time ago, I stopped paying attention to Mandriva. I felt that this Linux distribution, which hails from France and is financially backed by Russia, wasn’t quite sure what it wanted to be. All has changed now. Mandriva knows where it is and where it’s heading. Mandriva Linux Powerpack 2011 is available for purchase and is one of the finest releases I have come across in quite some time. What makes it so good? Let’s break it down.
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Denis Koryavov, lead user interface developer at the ROSA Laboratory, proudly announced last evening, November 30th, the immediate availability of a new media player for all Mandriva users.
Called ROSA Media Player (or ROMP for short), the new media player for Mandriva/ROSA is based on the source code from popular MPLayer and SMPlayer video players.
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Red Hat Family
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Recent proposals from the Fedora Project that could change the fundamental infrastructure of Linux have been met with caution and critical analysis. They also may raise questions on why Fedora and its commercial parent Red Hat seem to be pushing away from existing standards.
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Fedora
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If you are a Fedora using running Fedora 15 or even Fedora 14 and want to upgrade to the latest, and the greatest, version of Fedora, you can easily do that using PreUpgrade. The goal of PreUpgrade is to provide a way for Fedora users who wish to upgrade from one release to a newer version of Fedora by easily pre-resolving and downloading all the necessary packages before rebooting the system into the Fedora installer to complete the update.
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Debian Family
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There are a lot of things I like about Debian GNU/Linux. At the moment APT is the thing I love most. I just upgraded my most complex system, Beast, from it’s thin client, using SSH to the next release and I did not even have to reboot the thin client. Everything I use is working smoothly on Wheezy, which actually is still in “testing”. How smooth is that?
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Last night, I came home from a meeting, kissed my wife, and was walking back upstairs when my coat started vibrating. I pulled my phone out to see that I was too late, and wasn’t able to answer a phone call from my dad. I called him back, and here’s a summary of the beginning of that conversation.
Me: “Hi dad.”
Dad: “Hi”
Me: “Did you call? What did you need?”
Dad: “I did. I installed Ubuntu and now I’m trying to figure out how to install the driver for my video card.”
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If you’ve been waiting for the next version of Ubuntu, which is a major upgrade, you can now try it in an alpha version. We covered Ubuntu 12.04, dubbed “Precise Pangolin,” in this post. In addition to catering to individual users, version 12.04 has cloud computing features, Long Term Support and other offerings that will cater to the businesses that the Ubuntu team is increasingly focusing on. You can download the alpha version of Precise Pangolin here, and here is more on what to expect from it.
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Canonical has released the first alpha build of Ubuntu 12.04, dubbed “Precise Pangolin,” and the organization said that the latest version would be a long term support (LTS) release.
Version 12.04, available for x86 and 64-bit platforms, is based around the Linux kernel 3.2 release, and a lot of work has gone into bugfixing around this for Ubuntu’s code, including problems with how it interacts with Intel’s Sandy Bridge and Centrino hardware. The code also includes version 9 of both Firefox and Thunderbird from Mozilla.
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If you’re feeling a little adventurous this weekend, the first alpha is out for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 release. Code-named Precise Pangolin, the alpha release contains software updates and (likely) some exciting bugs that you can help squash.
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This site it’s a sysadmin relative of the Perl Advent Calendar: One article for each day of December, ending on the 25th article. With the goals of of sharing, openness, and mentoring, the authors aim to provide great articles about systems administration topics written by fellow sysadmins.
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Flavours and Variants
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A masterpiece in asthetics combined with a highly functional desktop environment ensures that the release of a new version of Kubuntu is highly anticipated by many Linux users. For all the Kubuntu lovers, 11.10 brings a long list of improvements that will surely excite everyone. Kubuntu offers something for everybody and is built on the highly stable Ubuntu core. With Kubuntu you have access to all the powerful KDE applications, and the polished KDE Plasma desktop. The interface does not seem to have changed much, but under the hood things are running better than ever. Another excellent release by the Kubuntu team, they never disappoint.
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The moment so many have waited for is finally here. Linux Mint 12 has been released! This update to Linux Mint has had many people on edge since it marks the move from the older version of GNOME to GNOME 3.2. GNOME 3.2, as you might already know, has had many detractors. Linux Mint users have wondered how on earth such a popular distribution would make a transition to such a reviled and hated desktop interface.
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Suddenly, everyone’s talking about Linux Mint. A six-year-old distribution based on Ubuntu and Debian, Linux Mint has always enjoyed considerable popularity, but, in the last month, it has started receiving dramatically more attention.
This attention has two main reasons. First, pundits have been debating the meaning (if any) of the fact that Linux Mint has received over two and a half times more page views than Ubuntu on Distrowatch for the past month.
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Linux Mint, probably the most beginner-friendly Linux system out there, has hit version 12 with quite a few neat features and improvements. Chief among them is a new shell based on Gnome 3 (preferred by at least one Lifehacker editor, new themes, and the choice of DuckDuckGo as the default search engine (which is easily changed, if you’d like). It’s free to download and try out on just about any computer.
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Ubuntu has been taking some criticism and heat for its falling Distrowatch rankings. I don’t doubt that after years of popularity, we’re finally seeing a bit of a return to the desktop Linux world of old when a new distribution shot up every week or month, then faded, then re-appeared … and so on. However, when I consider where Canonical and Ubuntu are heading, I question the significance of desktop OS standing and Distrowach rankings.
First off, I must say that Ubuntu’s slip off the ‘king of the hill’ game on Distrowatch came at the expense of Linux Mint, another polished, user-friendly Linux. It wouldn’t surprise me if some Ubuntu users may be migrating to Mint or other distributions largely out of frustration or dislike of the new Unity interface over the previous primary interface, Gnome. However, I think the move will be worth it in the long run to Ubuntu, as I’ll explain further.
If considering desktop OS, the most important aspect to me as an enterprise software analyst is enterprise desktop, and Ubuntu does well there. I’m sure there are plenty of shops running other flavors of Linux, including Mint, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian and many, many others, but for corporate desktop, the list quickly thins. Nevertheless, this is where Canonical has had some big victories, including the French police. In terms of consumer and user desktop PCs, the category itself is disappearing into converged and touch-capable devices, further distancing us from the ‘distro wars’ of the past.
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Softpedia is the first to announce today, December 1st, that the first Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system is now available for download. As usual, we’ve grabbed a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS development.
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GNOME 3 Fallback seems to offer everything I’m used to in GNOME 2, minus the Linux Mint Menu/MGSE Menu, so I’d need to use a standard accordion-style GNOME menu. That said, considering that I’m probably going to replace Linux Mint 9 LTS “Isadora” with Linux Mint 13 LTS “M[...]a” and considering that GNOME plans to phase out GNOME 3 Fallback as it makes GNOME 3 Shell accessible to a far wider range of hardware, I don’t know if that’s really an option worth keeping in mind. Finally, I had no issues with MATE, and it really is just GNOME 2, and I can do with it what I’ve done with Linux Mint and GNOME 2 for the last 2.5 years. As MATE gets worked on even more, I have faith that I’ll be able to use it without any hitch when the next version of Linux Mint comes out, and I think that’s what I’ll end up using. What I would like to see though is a live CD that comes only with MATE, so that I could try the live session and check out MATE’s true stability and usability without committing it to a hard drive. In any case, given that at least one option (MATE) has given me a great feeling and the other two (GNOME 3 Shell and Fallback) have become pretty amazing environments in their own rights in the hands of the Linux Mint developers, I give version 12 “Lisa” my highest recommendation. Phew! (I was really apprehensive about this release and was afraid that GNOME 3 customization might elude even the Linux Mint developers, but thankfully, that is not at all the case.)
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Android this year surpassed both iOS and Blackberry as the most popular smartphone OS, further catapulting Linux into the spotlight in the mobile device industry. Just a couple months ago, Amazon announced what analysts say is the first real threat to the iPad, the Amazon Kindle Fire. This introduction once again put Linux in the spotlight by allowing a major comapny like Amazon to build a self-branded device that is, as BusinessWeek reporter Brad Stone described, “cheap, pretty, and puts Amazon in perfect position to take a bite out of Apple – and every online transaction you make.”
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OK Labs announced a Genivi Linux and Android-ready “OKL4 for In-Vehicle Infotainment” (IVI) hypervisor, designed to keep infotainment and telematics environments separate despite running on the same processor. Meanwhile, Wind River announced a deal with IVI provider Clarion to use its Wind River Platform for Infotainment in an Android-based system.
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Phones
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Android
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As favorable reviews and promises of device support pile up for Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”), it has received an early CyanogenMod9 port to the Samsung-built Google Nexus One and Nexus S phones. Meanwhile, ZiiLabs released a video of Android 4.0 running on its new Jaguar tablet reference platform, and Embedox posted another of ICS running on Variscite’s OMAP4460-based VAR-SOM-OM44 module.
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HCI announced an Android-powered infotainment terminal for hospital patients, enabling users to browse the web, communicate with staff and patients, and view customized content as well as watching TV. The RoomMate Generation III devices come with 22-, 26-, 32- and 42-inch screens, plus Ethernet, serial, USB, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and various remote control accessories.
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M$ had a huge headstart on GNU/Linux locking in OEMs, retailers and ISVs for years. In 2008, Apple started its “app store” tm and Android/Linux started it’s “market place” a few months later. Now, Apple has 2/3 of the app market and Android/Linux has about 1/3 with nearly one million mobile apps between them.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Shipments of 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet PCs from Quanta Computer to Amazon have reached 3-4 million units, according to industry watchers. However, Quanta declined to comment.
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Samsung has begun sampling its first ARM Cortex-A15 processor, aimed at high-end tablets and capable of supporting resolutions up to 2560 x 1600 pixels. Scheduled for production in 2Q 2012, the Exynos 5250 is equipped with two Cortex-A15 cores clocked at 2GHz, providing what the company says is four times the graphics performance of its previous top model.
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Acer announced a new 10.1-inch tablet, initially featuring Android 3.2 but due for an January upgrade to Android 4.0 in January. The Nvidia Tegra 2-based Iconia Tab A200 is slightly leaner and lighter than the earlier 10.1-inch A500, also adding a USB 2.0 host port, but it lacks its predecessor’s HDMI port and rear-facing five-megapixel camera.
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Version 3.0 of the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure has been released, six months after the last major version, LLVM 2.9. For the new update to the Low-Level Virtual Machine, the developers removed “some old baggage” that had built up in previous versions, for example, LLVM 3.0 no longer supports the llvm-gcc frontend; developers will instead have to use Clang or DragonEgg. Similarly, file formats from earlier LLVM versions, such as .bc and .il no longer work in the new version.
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Events
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A developer for The Tor Project, Appelbaum trains interested parties globally on how to effectively use and contribute to the Tor network. Since its initial release, Tor has enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity. Its network has proved pivotal in dissident movements in both Iran and more recently Egypt.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla is in a bit of a quagmire. Not only is usage of the Firefox browser declining, and according to some metrics Google’s Chrome has pushed it into third place, but it’s also having trouble convincing Firefox 3.6 users that it’s the end of the line and it’s time to upgrade to Firefox 8.0.1.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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No sooner did the parties file their respective positions on the subject of patent marking with the court (see Proof of Patent Marking) than Judge Alsup has issued an order on how to move forward. (636 [PDF; Text]) Except for the deadlines (Judge Alsup allowing more time for responses than Google had proposed), the court has, as we anticipated, largely adopted the approach suggested by Google, although at this first step Judge Alsup is only interested in getting a complete list of products the parties contend embody the patents. Where the court then elects to go remains to be seen.
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Google, on the other hand, used all of the permitted five pages to explain that it isn’t quite that simple. (635 [PDF; Text]) According to Google, it does plan on presenting evidence of “the practice (or failure to practice) by Oracle and/or its licensees of each of the six patents still being asserted by Oracle in this action.” Google suggests that the presentation of this evidence could disrupt the trial, depending on the extent of the dispute. Consequently, Google suggests that the parties “narrow the issue now, by identifying the patents (if any) over which there is a legitimate dispute about whether Oracle or its licensees practiced the asserted claims.”
One worthwhile distinction to draw between the two communique’s to the court. Oracle makes no mention of licensee products that may practice the asserted patents, focusing solely on Oracle products. Google makes clear that Oracle licensee products are also in the mix.
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CMS
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Lead WordPress developer Ryan Boren has announced the arrival of a first release candidate (RC1) for version 3.3 of WordPress. Boren says that “Release Candidate stage means we think we’re done and are about ready to launch this version, but are doing one last check before we officially call it”.
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Business
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Semi-Open Source
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The term open core is poison for an open source project today isn’t it?
More often than not, the term open core refers to some crippled piece of open source software that only really works when paired with some type of proprietary shell that make the software usable.
Yet, the open core model – is still what many open source software firms (or at least, those that have raised venture funds) are embracing.
There is another way.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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To see how the GCC 4.7 release is shaping up, for your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of GCC 4.2 through a recent GCC 4.7 development snapshot. GCC 4.7 will be released next March/April with many significant changes, so here’s some numbers to find out if you can expect to see any broad performance improvements. Making things more interesting, the benchmarks are being done from an AMD FX-8150 to allow you to see how the performance of this latest-generation AMD processor architecture is affected going back by GNU Compiler Collection releases long before this open-source compiler had any optimizations in place.
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The father of free software philosophy spoke to RT on evil developers, spying social networks, the almost-legitimacy of Anonymous hacks and the condition under which he would take a proprietary program and a million dollars.
Stallman is the man behind the concept that every computer program must be free for users to study and modify as they want. This is the only way to ensure that by using the software users do not compromise their human rights, he says.
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Project Releases
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Adobe has released version 4.6 of the open source Flex SDK and proprietary Flash Builder development environment. This is apparently the last release of the Flash application framework under Adobe’s remit; in November, Adobe announced its intention to hand development of Flex over to an open source foundation, later clarifying that it did, in fact, mean the Apache Software Foundation.
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Following four release candidates, the QEMU project has announced the arrival of version 1.0 of its open source system emulator. QEMU can be used as a stand-alone desktop virtualisation product or be used to emulate guest hardware, such as an ARM-based board on a standard x86 PC.
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I am pleased to announce that GNU gv 3.7.3 has just been released. It is available for download in the GNU ftp, ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gv
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Public Services/Government
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The European Commission unveiled the Horizon 2020 funding plan on Wednesday, including €13.7 billion (US$18.3 billion) for innovation in key areas such as information and communication technologies, nanotechnologies, biotechnology and space.
However, the proposal effectively states that any resulting product must be promoted in Europe first. Article 41 of the proposal states that “with regard to results which are generated by participants that have received E.U. funding, the Commission may object to transfers of ownership or to grants of an exclusive licence, to third parties established in a third country not associated to Horizon 2020.”
This renders open source licensing impossible, said Member of the European Parliament Christian Engstrom.
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Licensing
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Openness/Sharing
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When it comes to treating, curing, and preventing cancer, modern medicine has largely failed. You could argue that cancer is far too complicated to unravel in the few millenia we have been documenting it. Or that the billions we spend annually on research is far too little. Established incentives and policies that perpetuate research silos certainly seem to slow success.
Medical researchers have been trained in a professional culture where secrecy reigns, where they must protect their own interests. The dominant culture discourages sharing research findings and collaborating on projects. It has become more important to protect vested interests than to take advantage of the huge collaborative network that is available in academia.
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Programming
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Netflix has taken the wraps off of its ZooKeeper library and has given some insight to coming open source projects as well. The company announced four projects in its pipeline, and a portal on GitHub for its projects.
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Sometimes when this old earth is spinning around and around, just for a moment it stops at just the right place.
And so it is that Judge Clark Waddoups has set a hearing for oral argument on SCO’s motion to restart parts of SCO v. IBM, a motion IBM opposes. Guess when he scheduled it for? April!
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Nexenta Core Platform is an OpenSolaris-based system with a Ubuntu application base and the flexible and powerful APT package management. Sounds like a marvelous idea. But then, I have already tested another such system, with little success. Well, a man must never lose hope. Let’s see what Nexenta 3.0 can or can’t do. Expectations are high, the fear even higher.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Obama Administration will be making some important decisions over the coming weeks that will determine to a large extent whether consumers or health insurers will be the biggest beneficiaries of health care reform.
When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act last year, it included a controversial provision that insurers insisted on, but which is undoubtedly the most unpopular part of the law: a requirement that all Americans not eligible for a public program like Medicare or Medicaid must buy coverage from a private insurance company.
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Security
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After a lot of research over the past month I have come to the conclusion that costly Unix, OS X and Linux anti-malware programs, such as Norton anti-virus on OS X, are a waste of money. It is not that unix-like systems are invulnerable to attack, but that the types of attacks I have seen mentioned over this month will get right through most anti-malware software on systems that are vulnerable. All these anti-malware solutions seem able to do is protect your Microsoft using friends and clients to whom you might forward an infected e-mail sent to you from someone else using an infected Microsoft Windows system.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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I finally got home Thursday afternoon after spending two nights in jail, and have had a hard time getting my bearings. On top of severe dehydration and sleep deprivation, I’ve got one hell of pounding migraine. So I’ll have to keep this brief for now. But I wanted to write down a few things that I witnessed and heard while locked up by LA’s finest…
[...]
While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media. And the disgraceful truth is that a lot of the abuse was police sadism, pure and simple:
* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
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Finance
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Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stepped off the elevator into the Third Avenue offices of hedge fund Eton Park Capital Management LP in Manhattan. It was July 21, 2008, and market fears were mounting. Four months earlier, Bear Stearns Cos. had sold itself for just $10 a share to JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)
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Now, Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum chronicles how then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson mislead NYT and then tipped off hedge fund managers as to how the government was about to deal with the crisis at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
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What a pleasure it is to see Bank of America running from its fees program and everyone’s favorite investment bankers facing $15.8 billion in lawsuits over the sub-prime mortgage hocus pocus they helped pioneer and from which they derived great wealth even after the 2008 implosion.
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The article is entitled, “Hank Paulson’s inside jobs,” emphasizing the fact that this wasn’t some one-off lapse of ethics on Paulson’s part, but instead a disturbingly regular practice.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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PHOENIX–The American Legislative Exchange Council opens its annual conference to set the agenda for the coming year in Arizona this week, on the heels of the stunning defeat of one its long-standing legislative leaders, Senator Russell Pierce, who was recalled by voters earlier this month.ALEC plans to feature other alumni, including Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, at a conference underwritten by global corporations at the posh Westin Kierland resort in Scottsdale. ALEC has previously denied press credentials to organizations whose reporting has been critical of ALEC, such as the Center for Media and Democracy, Think Progress, and others.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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A new debate’s upon us! No one would argue the fact that smartphones, tablets and similar devices are “computers”, but would it be appropriate to label the same devices “PCs”? With an analyst firm doing just that recently, we’ve decided to take a look at multiple factors to see if such a classification is a good or bad thing.
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Desktop
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Roll back the calendar only 5 years…
After playing around Linux for a few months I decided to get a version installed on an old Dell Inspiration 3200 laptop so I could surf the Internet without fear. Such an old laptop didn’t have a built-in WiFi adapter, so I used a PCI Card WiFi adapter plugged into a PCI Card slot. A WiFi card that was very common but it had no Linux driver. I used the Windows driver and NDISWrapper to get the WiFi working with Linux
In my first ½ year of experimenting with Linux (mid 2005) many basic functions were not part of the kernel (2.4) of the RedHat 7.2. I had to write scripts to mount and access my digital camera or USB FlashDrives.
Windows NTFS support on RedHat 7.2 was non-existent. Then NTFS support in Linux became experimental. Now it’s completely transparent and build in. It “Just Works”
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Server
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To your typical IT organization, the Top500 Supercomputing list released twice a year — while interesting — has little bearing on today’s operations. Grand proclamations and goals, such as reaching Exaflop performance by 2018, also have little impact on the day-to-day goings-on in most data centers. (As quick background info: A FLOP is the number of FLoating Point Operations performed Per Second; an Exaflop is 1018 or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 FLOPs.)
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Kernel Space
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A number of changes to Btrfs mean that filesystem structures will not be as prone to corruption in case of system crashes. By bundling blocks into clusters, Ext4 should be a lot faster in some scenarios. CIFS also promises speed gains.
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Among many other enhancements and alterations, the Linux 3.2 kernel, the Btrfs file-system has some “pretty beefy” changes. Btrfs in Linux 3.2 merges in some long-standing Btrfs branches with new capabilities.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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One of the most widely used open source picture editing software; My Paint has undergone an upgrade and its latest release i.e. MyPaint Version 1.1.0 has been brought into existence. Subtle yet highly functional changes have been made to the software which includes a new configurable toolbar, configurable mouse actions and many more. Significant changes have been made to the performance and speed of the software and so are its brush collections. There are lots more, so let us take some time to check it out.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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There are certainly arguments to be made against the use of Wine. Linux purists say it defeats the purpose of using free software. Others simply think it doesn’t work very well. But sometimes you just need a Windows app that has no suitable Linux counterpart, and virtualizing a full version of Windows or buying a whole other computer isn’t an option. Time to pour yourself a glass of Wine and hope for the best.
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Games
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For fans of both gaming and open source software, few major video game companies have been revered as id software, one of the only major game studios that has not only perpetually released game clients for Linux, but has also released the source code for many of their proprietary game engines. Admittedly, the source code is always released once the next generation of id’s gaming engine was launched.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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In an effort to slim down and improve its cross-platform capabilities, the developers of the Chrome browser and ChromeOS itself appear to be shifting away from Gtk use.
This bit of information was quietly pointed out earlier in the month on the Aura window manager pages for the Chromium Projects. Chromium is the open source implementation of Chrome and ChromeOS, and Aura is the new window manager and shell environment that will support the various interface elements on these implementations.
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Don’t use DistroWatch as a measuring stick in any way for the popularity of a Linux distribution.
Seriously, stop it.
In fact, why are we even asking the question at all?
“Popularity” is a term that smacks of our days in high school, when we thought we should care about social standing and where we fit in that ranking. Now apparently, we seem to be locked into this notion of figuring out which distro is most popular, too.
This is a silly question, for multiple reasons.
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New Releases
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With all the excitement and discussion surrounding the recent release of Linux Mint 12 (and Fedora 16, and openSuSE 12.1), it is easy to overlook the smaller Linux distributions. Vector Linux is a good example of this, with their recently announced 7.0 distribution. The relatively small number people behind the Vector Linux distribution have put a phenomenal amount of work into this release – I saw the first VL7.0 Beta releases early this year, and there have been several Release Candidates since about May or June. The result of all that hard work is what I consider to be one of the nicest of the Slackware-based “easy-to-use” Linux distributions.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Today Denis Koryavov, lead interface developer at ROSA Labs, announced a new media player for ROSA/Mandriva. ROSA Media Player (ROMP) is a fork of MPlayer and SMPlayer with a sleek design and new features. Today a beta of 1.0 was made available to test and Koryavov says it’s stable.
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Gentoo Family
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Aside from a few applications failing to start before updates were applied, another issues I observed with Sabayon 7 KDE is that a connected printer was not automatically configured, even though cupsd, the printer daemon, is started out of the box. In Pardus, a KDE-based distribution that made the list of the top 6 KDE distributions for 2011, any connected printer in the printers database is automatically configured.
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Red Hat Family
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Recently it was published by DistroWatch that the Linux Mint distribution has passed Ubuntu and is now considered the most popular. In order from most popular on down, this list at DistroWatch starts with Linux Mint, followed by Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, and openSUSE. There are others listed as well.
But I wanted to take a moment and touch on Fedora and the Red Hat based distributions to distinguish the differences among them. I am a huge fan of the Red Hat based distributions. Why? Well, I’ve used them since the early days of Linux distributions, and have been hooked ever since. I’ve had excellent luck with Red Hat, I like the tools that Red Hat develops and places in their distributions, and there is a huge support community for it. I’ve also found that Red Hat is a good company, and stands behind its products. It has been VERY supportive and active in the open source community for decades, and continues to show its commitment to open source software. I also think their software models are highly successful, with the Fedora / Red Hat split that we saw in 2003. Back then I was surprised with the split at first, but after a couple of years using both Fedora and Red Hat Linux, I soon discovered that the move to split the two was ingenious. I will explain why below.
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At a company that values engineers as highly as Red Hat does, Pinchev still commands profound respect, not to mention fear, despite not being able to write a line of code. Over the last nine years, Pinchev’s relentless, dogged determination to increase sales has paid for huge contributions to the Linux kernel and open-source software, generally.
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Fedora
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If you are a Fedora using running Fedora 15 or even Fedora 14 and want to upgrade to the latest, and the greatest, version of Fedora, you can easily do that using PreUpgrade. The goal of PreUpgrade is to provide a way for Fedora users who wish to upgrade from one release to a newer version of Fedora by easily pre-resolving and downloading all the necessary packages before rebooting the system into the Fedora installer to complete the update.
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Another interesting addition inside the context menu is the “Restore Missing Files” option, which lets you connect to an on-site or cloud server to recover from accidental deletions.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Although officially a version 10 refresh and still under the “Statler” moniker, the latest Crunchbang release constitutes some notable changes.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Inspired my Mark Shuttleworth’s recent post about Alan Bell’s Unity TV mockups, I’ve decided to try my hand at some. Alan did his using Pencil, which is an awesome tool for UI mockups that I wrote about previously, so it was easy enough for me to get started. Here is my first one, a mockup where just the Launcher and Unity panel are showing (no Dash):
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For the past few years, Ubuntu has been considered the most popular Linux distribution. Recently, there has been a flurry of blog posts claiming that Linux Mint is now more popular than Ubuntu. While Linux Mint seems to have gained greatly in popularity since the first release in 2006, all meaningful statistics (if there is such a thing) point to Ubuntu’s clear lead in usage and popularity.
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In his own words: “By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.”
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Jan Lehnardt, Chairman of the Apache CouchDB Project Management Committee (PMC), writing on behalf of the CouchDB developers, shed some light on why Canonical dropped its use of the CouchDB NoSQL database from the cloud synchronisation service Ubuntu One. The announcement by Canonical had created some uncertainty about CouchDB and its capabilities. The message from the developers is “Do not worry, the project is alive and well” said Lehnardt.
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The Gnome project has dropped a bomb today by announcing a site for Gnome 3 Shell extensions. The site is in alpha stage and brings the much needed extensions for Gnome 3 Shell under one site.
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Flavours and Variants
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Linux Mint, which has effortlessly managed to usurp the top spot from Ubuntu (according to DistroWatch ranking), has just released its latest version. Codenamed “Lisa”, Linux Mint 12 is based on Ubuntu 11.10 and features a perfect blend of GNOME 3 and the newly designed Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE).
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Linux Mint appears to be soaring in popularity at the expense of high-profile distros such as Ubuntu, figures from DistroWatch have suggested. The site’s latest page hit numbers show a sharp decline in the last month for Ubuntu, which having occupied second spot throughout year has now dropped to fourth place, behind even Fedora, openSUSE and top performer, Mint.
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The Apache Software Foundation has been making life better for open-source developers since 1999, but has its time passed?
A recent blog argues that nonprofit ASF is causing more harm than good by being mired in the past.
“It is my belief that we are, right now, in the middle of a very large evolution in the ecology of open source,” wrote Mikeal Rogers, a developer advocate at Yammer, a private, secure social network for companies. Yet Apache remains focused on problems that no longer exist — removing barriers to entry — creating a “chasm between Apache and the new culture of open source,” he said.
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Events
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A little history: Mimi Cafiero (yes, that’s my girl) and Malakai Wade, two teenage girls who are helping to organize SCALE 10X’s young people’s conference, staunchly proclaimed that, “We are not kids.” So the title of SCALE 10X Kids Conference was in peril from the start.
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CMS
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According to the fourth annual study by water&stone, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are the three most popular among 20 free web content management systems, narrowed down from an initial list of 35. WordPress is in the lead by a long way, followed by Joomla. Having lead the field two years ago and been overtaken by WordPress last year, it is natable how Joomla’s popularity has declined since last year. Among the .NET-based CMS players, DotNetNuke dominates, while among Java-based CMSes, Liferay and Alfresco are the joint leaders.
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As I wrote earlier this week, few markets have such a rich selection of quality open source products as does the content management systems (CMS) space. One of the leaders in the open source CMS market is Drupal. In fact this blog post is written on a Drupal system. Down in the Big Easy on December 8th and 9th there will be a Drupal conference called Drupal on the Bayou.
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Public Services/Government
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The regional administration of the Italian island of Sicily is to consider a law nudging public administrations to use of free and open source software. The proposal, by Massimo Ferrara, a member of the Democratic Party, might also help prevent the break-up of a school on the island, the Instituto Majorana, involved in producing instruction videos on this type of software.
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Cablegate
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange launched the website’s new project Thursday, the publication of files it claims shows a global industry that gives dictatorships tools to spy on their citizens.
In parallel to Assange’s announcement, Wikileaks’ partner Owni.fr released evidence that a French firm helped Moamer Kadhafi’s former Libyan regime spy on opposition figures living in exile in Britain.
It had already been revealed that the electronics firm, Amesys, had worked with the Libyan regime — and French rights groups are attempting to take the group to court — but Owni’s files will prove embarrassing.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) has teamed up with Wisconsin’s right-wing John K. MacIver Institute on a website and TV ad to support Governor Scott Walker as he faces recall. AFP and MacIver are aiming to convince residents that Walker’s fiscal policies have been good for the state.
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Last year, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) attracted attention when reporters revealed Arizona’s SB1070 anti-immigration law was pre-approved by ALEC corporations that stood to benefit from its passage. As ALEC’s legislative and corporate members descend upon Arizona for meetings this week, a new report (pdf) shows that ALEC’s influence in Arizona goes beyond SB1070 to include bills that suppress voting, attack worker’s rights, privatize public education, and limit environmental protections.
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Censorship
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After a series of one-sided hearings, luxury goods maker Chanel has won recent court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. A federal judge in Nevada has agreed that Chanel can seize the domain names in question and transfer them all to US-based registrar GoDaddy. The judge also ordered “all Internet search engines” and “all social media websites”—explicitly naming Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google—to “de-index” the domain names and to remove them from any search results.
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Civil Rights
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The rootkit belongs to a company called Carrier IQ and it seems that it has low-level access to the system that allows it to spy on pretty much everything that you do with your handset. This, on the face of it, seems like an extremely serious breach of security, privacy and trust.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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To avoid the reach of U.S. copyright laws, numerous online pirates have set up shop in countries less willing or able to enforce intellectual property rights. Policymakers agree that these “rogue” sites pose a real problem for U.S. artists and rights holders who aren’t getting paid for the rampant distribution of their music, movies and other creative works. The question is how to help them. Lawmakers keep offering proposals, but they don’t seem to be getting any closer to the right answer.
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- Links 3/1/2017: Microsoft Imposing TPM2 on Linux, ASUS Bringing Out Android Phones
Links for the day
- Links 2/1/2017: Neptune 4.5.3 Release, Netrunner Desktop 17.01 Released
Links for the day
- Teaser: Corruption Indictments Brought Against Vice-President of the European Patent Office (EPO)
New trouble for Željko Topić in Strasbourg, making it yet another EPO Vice-President who is on shaky grounds and paving the way to managerial collapse/avalanche at the EPO
- 365 Days Later, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas Remains Silent and Thus Complicit in EPO Abuses on German Soil
The utter lack of participation, involvement or even intervention by German authorities serve to confirm that the government of Germany is very much complicit in the EPO's abuses, by refusing to do anything to stop them
- Battistelli's Idea of 'Independent' 'External' 'Social' 'Study' is Something to BUY From Notorious Firm PwC
The sham which is the so-called 'social' 'study' as explained by the Central Staff Committee last year, well before the results came out
- Europe Should Listen to SMEs Regarding the UPC, as Battistelli, Team UPC and the Select Committee Lie About It
Another example of UPC promotion from within the EPO (a committee dedicated to UPC promotion), in spite of everything we know about opposition to the UPC from small businesses (not the imaginary ones which Team UPC claims to speak 'on behalf' of)
- Video: French State Secretary for Digital Economy Speaks Out Against Benoît Battistelli at Battistelli's PR Event
Uploaded by SUEPO earlier today was the above video, which shows how last year's party (actually 2015) was spoiled for Battistelli by the French State Secretary for Digital Economy, Axelle Lemaire, echoing the French government's concern about union busting etc. at the EPO (only to be rudely censored by Battistelli's 'media partner')
- When EPO Vice-President, Who Will Resign Soon, Made a Mockery of the EPO
Leaked letter from Willy Minnoye/management to the people who are supposed to oversee EPO management
- No Separation of Powers or Justice at the EPO: Reign of Terror by Battistelli Explained in Letter to the Administrative Council
In violation of international labour laws, Team Battistelli marches on and engages in a union-busting race against the clock, relying on immunity to keep this gravy train rolling before an inevitable crash
- FFPE-EPO is a Zombie (if Not Dead) Yellow Union Whose Only de Facto Purpose Has Been Attacking the EPO's Staff Union
A new year's reminder that the EPO has only one legitimate union, the Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO), whereas FFPE-EPO serves virtually no purpose other than to attack SUEPO, more so after signing a deal with the devil (Battistelli)
- EPO Select Committee is Wrong About the Unitary Patent (UPC)
The UPC is neither desirable nor practical, especially now that the EPO lowers patent quality; but does the Select Committee understand that?
- Links 1/1/2017: KDE Plasma 5.9 Coming, PelicanHPC 4.1
Links for the day
- 2016: The Year EPO Staff Went on Strike, Possibly “Biggest Ever Strike in the History of the EPO.”
A look back at a key event inside the EPO, which marked somewhat of a breaking point for Team Battistelli
- Open EPO Letter Bemoans Battistelli's Antisocial Autocracy Disguised/Camouflaged Under the Misleading Term “Social Democracy”
Orwellian misuse of terms by the EPO, which keeps using the term "social democracy" whilst actually pushing further and further towards a totalitarian regime led by 'King' Battistelli
- EPO's Central Staff Committee Complains About Battistelli's Bodyguards Fetish and Corruption of the Media
Even the EPO's Central Staff Committee (not SUEPO) understands that Battistelli brings waste and disgrace to the Office
- Translation of French Texts About Battistelli and His Awful Perception of Omnipotence
The paradigm of totalitarian control, inability to admit mistakes and tendency to lie all the time is backfiring on the EPO rather than making it stronger
- 2016 in Review and Plans for 2017
A look back and a quick look at the road ahead, as 2016 comes to an end
- Links 31/12/2016: Firefox 52 Improves Privacy, Tizen Comes to Middle East
Links for the day
- Korea's Challenge of Abusive Patents, China's Race to the Bottom, and the United States' Gradual Improvement
An outline of recent stories about patents, where patent quality is key, reflecting upon the population's interests rather than the interests of few very powerful corporations
- German Justice Minister Heiko Maas, Who Flagrantly Ignores Serious EPO Abuses, Helps Battistelli's Agenda ('Reform') With the UPC
The role played by Heiko Maas in the UPC, which would harm businesses and people all across Europe, is becoming clearer and hence his motivation/desire to keep Team Battistelli in tact, in spite of endless abuses on German soil
- Links 30/12/2016: KDE for FreeBSD, Automotive Grade Linux UCB 3.0
Links for the day
- Software Patents Continue to Collapse, But IBM, Watchtroll and David Kappos Continue to Deny and Antagonise It
The latest facts and figures about software patents, compared to the spinmeisters' creed which they profit from (because they are in the litigation business)
- 2016 Was a Terrible Year for Patent Trolls and 2017 Will Probably be a Lot Worse for Them
The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is planning to weigh in on a case which will quite likely drive patent trolls out of the Eastern District of Texas, where all the courts that are notoriously friendly towards them reside
- Fitbit’s Decision to Drop Patent Case Against Jawbone Shows Decreased Potency of Abstract Patents, Not Jawbone’s Weakness
The scope of patents in the United States is rapidly tightening (meaning, fewer patents are deemed acceptable by the courts) and Fitbit’s patent case is the latest case to bite the dust
- The EPO Under Benoît Battistelli Makes the Mafia Look Like Rookies
Pretending there is a violent, physical threat that is imminent, Paranoid in Chief Benoît Battistelli is alleged to have pursued weapons on EPO premises
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