08.04.10
Posted in News Roundup at 12:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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M$, too, had a lot of willing and unwilling customers who have now seen the light and broken out of their jail. Fortunately there is no doubt in most people’s minds that it is legal to migrate to GNU/Linux. They know PCs are somewhat more open than an embedded thingie. That wasn’t always so. I have met people who thought it was against the law to replace the OS, but lately, folks have been installing GNU/Linux on their own or with some help and a few are buying PCs installed with GNU/Linux.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Today’s blog entry is a simple question:
What would motivate you to contribute to KDE wikis such as Techbase or Userbase?
Within the Plasma team, developers put a fair amount of time and effort into writing tutorials, with some more taking shape on our Community wiki pages. We’re about to start on content on Userbase, starting with documenting how Actitivies work from a user’s point of view in the 4.5 release. Other teams within KDE are doing similarly.
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GNOME Desktop
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Ubuntu’s next version, code-named Maverick Meerkat, is slated for the November release. Mark Shuttleworth once again emphasized the ongoing work on improving the art-work of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu is planning to add a new sound indicator to enhance the ‘music’ experience under Ubuntu. Mark Shuttleworth is toying with the artwork of the indicator.
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This week… 1817 commits, in 202 projects, by 221 happy hackers (and 396 were translation commits).
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, provider of open source solutions, today announced six senior management appointments to boost its Asia-Pacific management team and position the company for growth in the region.
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Debian Family
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The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City, marking the first time the event has been held in the U.S. The event will explore the latest developments with the Debian Linux distribution, which is popular among embedded Linux developers, and also offers the foundation for Linux distros including Ubuntu Linux, Xandros, and Google’s Chrome OS.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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A light-weight version of Ubuntu Linux has hit download mirrors everywhere. While it is not yet officially supported by Canonical, the company behind the world’s most popular Linux distribution, this version of Ubuntu has in the last three months wormed its way up the Linux charts to become the twelfth most popular version of Linux. The name of this light-weight version of Ubuntu is Lubuntu,
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Phones
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Android
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It appears Motorola may have finally given us what we wanted: the open source software for the Droid X. That’s right, now developers can mess around with the 4.3-inch beast even more! This isn’t quite as exciting as the 1-Click Root that came to the Droid X just a few days ago, but it’s still news. And I’m sure some crazy dev will have Froyo up and running on the Droid X in no time.
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With the Droid X, Motorola’s slapped a huge hunk of screen onto a stone-cold slab of a phone that still manages to sit comfortably in the hand and in the pocket. It’s got processor muscle, sharp screen resolution, and an interface that looks kinda ugly even after you customize it. Those widgets and controls might be worth a little homeliness, though.
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Sub-notebooks
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Now that is a friendly, charitable letter, and it illustrates something that the many nay-sayers didn’t realize when criticizing the OLPC effort: It’s extremely common in the open source world for an initial idea to find itself without wings, and then flourish and fly in a metamorphosized new version. It’s entirely likely that the OLPC assets are exactly what Indian developers need to deliver a good device at a low price point.
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Within the framework of this partnership, Datamatics has expanded its BSS portfolio and migrated its core solutions to Ingres Database, including its main applications in the ‘Order to Cash’ sector and ‘DSS Document System Solution’ for template-based mass document generation.
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The software is independent of the operating system, due to the fact that the Rich Client Platform is written in Java. OpenChrom is released under the Eclipse Public License 1.0 (EPL).
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Since Diaspora is based on Open Source, it will be easier to be scrutinized by authorities and by you to see if it is compromising your data. Another major fact is open source technologies are much more secure than proprietary technology. The simply rule was given by Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, “Given enough eyeballs, every bug is shallow.” In common man’s language. ‘If every one in your neighborhood is aware and cautious, criminals can never succeed there. ‘
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Lance Wiggs, Don Christie, and Dave Moskovitz were elected councillors.
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Large companies are increasingly using open source software to conduct pilots, according to Deloitte consultant Mark Lillie.
I met up with Mark today, who is a consultant in Deloitte’s technology group. We were talking about the IT market in general and some trends.
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Events
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The inaugural SPLASH Conference, to be held in Sydney on Tuesday, August 10, 2010, will unite leaders from Ingres, Jaspersoft, Liferay, Sugar CRM, Pentaho and Red Hat to share insights with Australian technology companies.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A while back we announced that we were starting to look for a new CEO for the Mozilla Corporation as John Lilly moves to Greylock Partners sometime later this year. Here’s an update of what’s going on.
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SaaS
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Oracle
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Every once in a while I am reminded of the lunacy of the Internet, especially headline writers. On Monday of this week, Oracle released an update to the Java 1.6 update 21 that fixes a problem in a previous version that broke Eclipse. All the details can be found in the bug or Neil’s good summary. The good news is that Eclipse is no longer broken!!
The irony however is that the issue just yesterday shows up on Ed Burnette’s ZDNet blog ‘Oracle Rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse‘ and the pillar of all Internet lunacy, slashdot Oracle Java Company Change Beaks Eclipse . Credit to Ed for actually reporting and testing the fix.
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CMS
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Joomla! – One of the pioneers of the open source CMS software programs, constantly up dating their options, and thousands of programmers world wide offer all sorts of special apps.
Drupal – Drupal is an amazing piece of technical engineering, simple to use and lots of options to make wonderful websites.
WordPress – WordPress is not so much a website application but more in the form of a blog, many different options are offered and all the templates look really beautiful.
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Business
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Nagios Enterprises gained more than 200 Nagios XI customers in the first half of 2010, setting the stage to become one of the fastest-growing Open Source technology companies in the market. Interest in Nagios continues to gain strength as more companies around the world look to deploy effective IT infrastructure monitoring to ensure operational continuity and minimize the business impact of IT outages.
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Semi-Open Source
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I was wanting to take a break from Dev-Jam to put down some thoughts I’ve been having during this recent renaissance of the “open core” debate when I realized something:
Open core is dead.
At least as a business model. While I don’t expect it to go away overnight, I do expect to see very few new companies using the model and those commercial software companies that tout themselves as open source reframing their marketing to de-emphasize it.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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This GNU Hackers Meeting took place on Saturday 24 July and Sunday 25 July. We organised a hacking space on Monday 26 July and Tuesday 27 July and encouraged people to stay for the extra days. The main GUADEC conference was on Wednesday 28 – Friday 30. This meeting featured a workshop on GNUnet, free secure networking and decentralised applications.
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Openness/Sharing
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Jackson says open science will speed innovation in the same way the open source code movement revolutionized Internet applications. He also wants transhumanists to support the thousands of backyard tinkerers, known as citizen scientists, who are already studying microbes, mapping genomes, and seeking cures for diseases. He calls himself a citizen scientist. At Humanity+, he described the LavaAmp — a pocket-size device for amateur DNA researchers — he is helping to develop.
Jackson recently hosted the Open Science Summit in Berkeley, Calif., which again highlighted the importance of sharing data. One of the speakers was Alexander Wait Zaranek, a research fellow in genetics at Harvard Medical School who is working to build bridges between open-science organizations, citizen scientists, and industry.
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Open Access/Content
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One that I found rather amusing was via FLOSS Manuals (a project I’ve written about before – a group effort to get good manuals written for all the amazing FLOSS out there). The Amsterdam-based foundation has been working on another project: Booki.cc. Booki’s a new book production platform, which takes the same concept as FLOSS Manuals – collaborative online book writing – and expands it beyond the realm of just manuals.
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Programming
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Contegix, a privately held technology firm specializing in Internet infrastructure and hosting services, announced their agreement to provide sponsorship to Clojure development language project.
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Lately, you can’t talk about business without talking about “big data,” which, incidentally, is the focus of the latest package from Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics, which commercialized the open-source R statistics language, emphasizes expanding the use of R beyond its academic roots to business.
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What bugs me about government regulation of monopolists is that while after a decade or so of investigation, complaints and courts, the consumer is usually left out of the picture and the monopoly gets to keep its ill-gotten gains by paying off the government and other businesses. Previously Intel paid AMD to go away instead of compensating them for the many years when major portions of the market were closed for no other reason than that Intel bribed OEMs to avoid AMD. Who knows how much AMD’s business could have grown in those years?
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Human rights campaigners have condemned a wave of evictions and court actions against Gypsies and Irish Travellers which they say are threatening to extinguish a whole way of life.
Dozens of families face the prospect of being pushed off plots of land they own and forced to move back into illegal “side-of-the road” and wasteland camping. Children will be unable to go to school and the elderly and infirm unable to access health services, say the campaigners.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Life can be hard in Moscow. The Russian capital is sweltering in temperatures that reached a record 37.7C last week. Vast stretches of peat bog surrounding the city have dried out and caught fire covering Moscow with choking smog. The changing of the horse guard in Cathedral Square was cancelled as sentries wilted in traditional woollen uniforms. Elsewhere, more than 2,000 Russians – many drunk – drowned trying to cool off in lakes and rivers and at least 10 million hectares of crops have been ruined. States of emergency have been declared in 23 regions.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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You may have noticed recent television advertisements plugging holiday cameras with facial recognition technology good enough to pick out your loved ones in crowds and keep them in focus in holiday snaps.
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I’ve written elsewhere about the Chief Surveillance Commissioner, who issued his Annual Report into surveillance in the United Kingdom this week. It shows that the level of covert surveillance in this country is shocking – these operations are now part of our nation’s everyday life.
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The United Arab Emirates is to block key features on BlackBerry smartphones because of national security concerns.
The move could prevent thousands of users from accessing email and the internet on the handsets starting in October, putting the federation’s reputation as a business-friendly commercial and tourism hub at risk.
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A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers,” researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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A High Court has ruled that devices that allow gamers to play pirated video games are illegal in the UK.
The ruling specifically targets a range of popular devices which can be used to store and play copied games on the Nintedo DS handheld console.
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Copyrights
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This morning, PRS for Music is launching its annual Adding Up The Music Industry report, which puts numbers to recorded music, live music and B2B music revenues in the UK.
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Sorry, Jeff, but you don’t get to decide that. The technology and the market have already decided that the content is or will be free online. It might not be authorized. It might not be legal. But the content is free. “Should” has nothing to do with it, because the technology and the market don’t care about “should.” Yes, this sucks for those who only understand how to run a business when they’re a gatekeeper who controls things, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t really good businesses built on free content. NBC should know this, since an awful lot of its history was built on exactly that… And I don’t recall Zucker’s predecessors whining about that darn “free” broadcast TV.
Tux in the ring
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The members of this community aim to popularise Linux and encourage people to develop their own versions of the free software
They do not come across as your regular geeky computer guys who toil away endlessly to code and develop softwares for various business solutions, nor do they aim to overwhelm people about the work that they do, but for members of the Pune based organisation PLUG (acronym for Pune Linux User’s Group) spreading awareness, about the freedom that Linux as an operating system offers, is a cause that they have been promoting since the last 12 years.
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Desktop
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According to our poll, one in five readers are considering moving over to Linux. That’s quite a swing and a damning result for Microsoft’s latest operating system. By dumping Windows XP, without doubt the most popular piece of software to come out of Microsoft in recent times, the firm may have inadvertantly given Linux the boost it needs on the desktop. Desktop oriented Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Open Suse and Mandriva should take note and capitalise on growing disillusionment among Microsoft users.
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Server
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Flowsoft is a software and systems solution provider specializing in Linux consulting and support for server-based solutions and mobile environments.
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But that’s not all. Sources say Intel has approached ClearFoundation and ClearCenter about leveraging ClearOS — a Linux-based solution — for the Intel Hybrid Cloud. It sounds like Intel plans to leverage ClearCenter’s expertise in VMs for network, gateway and server services, at times replacing and/or integrating with Microsoft Active Directory. Plus, ClearCenter Products (such as ClearSDN Cloud Services) may be sold via the Intel Hybrid Cloud offering, the sources add.
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Isilon said the UCLA lab is using the storage alongside a 5,000-plus compute-core Linux cluster and repository of 2D and 3D neuroimages.
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Demand for Linux programming skills has exceeded that for Unix programming skills for the first time ever, according to Richard Nott, director of recruitment site CWJobs.co.uk.
Possible reasons for this include the fact that more mobile platforms are supported by Linux, as are HD boxes, Nott said. In addition, the increasingly popular open source operating system Ubuntu also runs on Linux.
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Instructionals
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Games
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Chronic Logic announces Gish v1.6 with five new community campaigns totaling over forty new levels and five new VS. levels. Best of all the full version of Gish for Windows, OSX and Linux is now offered at a price of your choosing!
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Many of the LinuxLinks crew grew up playing games on the ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit personal home computer. By today’s standards, the games were simple with basic graphics plagued by attribute clash and primitive sound generation. However, this did not stop the best games being incredibly addictive. The famous Crash magazine (a monthly publication devoted to the ZX Spectrum) used to rate games by their addictive qualities. This was often the rating that interested us the most.
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WAGO Corporation’s updated 758 Series IPCs pair CoDeSys V2 software, Linux OS, IEC programming languages and multiple onboard fieldbus protocols for real-time control applications.
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SSV announced a new member of its “DIL/NetPC” computer-on-module (COM) family, offering a web server designed for remote access via smartphones. The Linux-based DIL/NetPC DNP/9265 incorporates an ARM9 Atmel AT91SAM9263 processor with 32MB SDRAM, 32MB flash, Ethernet and other I/O, and is offered with an “SK30″ starter kit.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Earlier this year, Nokia and Intel announced that they are combining their Linux-based operating systems. Nokia’s Maemo is currently available on the N900, while and Intel’s Moblin was created for netbooks and tablets.
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Meego — the Linux effort headed up by Intel and Nokia — recently scored a fairly major win, with GENIVI selecting it as the platform of choice for in-vehicle infotainment. In case you’re not familiar with GENIVI, it’s a consortium comprised of several high-profile companies including GM, BMW, Hyundai, Intel, Nokia, NVidia, ARM, Freescale, and many others.
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The MeeGo Seminar Summer 2010 edition took place on July 26th, 2010 in Tokyo, Japan. The event was packed. More than 530 registrants, 21 sponsors, 16 speakers, 3 tracks (Business, Technology, Qt+Atom), multiple demos and the announcement that the GENIVI Alliance has selected MeeGo as its future in-vehicle infotainment center.
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Android
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At the same time (i.e. the beginning of 2009), Internet search giant Google also made an entry into the mobile space. Known as Android, they wanted to play their game differently. Following their “Don’t be Evil” corporate slogan, they made their Linux-based mobile OS Open Source. This meant anybody was free to download the source code from Google and change it to their liking, and put it in the device of their choice. But its not like you can download Android and install it on your Nokia in a few clicks, the way you would download and install Linux on your PC. It meant manufacturers, big or small, could easily take Google’s OS and put it in their hardware.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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That little search bar at the top right of your Firefox browser is driving 9.18% of searches, according to research by advertising network Chitika, Inc.
That’s a huge chunk in a market where Google handles more than 80% of searches and its competitors Bing and Yahoo! handle just 8.56% and 6.69%, respectively – suggesting a huge bidding war may be brewing for November 2011 when Google’s contract with Mozilla is up.
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I’m writing this column about Tab Candy while I also have my Webmail open, Twitter and Identi.ca, a page showing flight information and travel plans, and the Linux Magazine backend open. That’s a light load, because I’m traveling. In my home office I usually work on three or four writing projects at a time, plus social media sites, mail, and so on.
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SaaS
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Ecuador has agreed to refrain from drilling for oil in a pristine Amazon rainforest reserve in return for up to $3.6bn (£2.26bn) in payments from rich countries.
Under a pioneering agreement signed with the United Nations, the oilfields under the Yasuni reserve will remain untapped for at least a decade.
The money is about half of what Ecuador would make by selling the oil.
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Finance
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Although peopleʼs rights to their commons are often recognized and validated in smaller
communities, scaling these lessons to the global level will require a new dimension of
popular legitimacy and authority. The world community is rapidly evolving a sense of
social interconnectivity, shared responsibility and global citizenship, yet the sovereign
rights of people to the global commons have not been fully articulated. In declaring our
planetary rights for these commons, we shall be confronting many decisive questions:
(1) Are modern societies prepared to create a framework in which the incentives
behind production and governance are not private capital and debt-based
growth, but human solidarity, quality of life and ecological sustainability?
(2) How soon — and how peacefully — will the subsystems of the Market State
integrate their structures of value-creation and sovereign governance with the
greater biophysical system of ecological and social interdependence?
(3) Can the global public organize effectively as a third power to develop checks
and balances on the private and public sectors and establish the resource
sovereignty and preservation value needed for a commons economy?
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Globally, consumer rights and even human rights are eroding as some vendors infect their consumer electronics with Digital Restrictions Management mechanisms and as DMCA — the law that tries to protect DRM — is being secretly negotiated by a few strong countries and to be forced upon the rest of the world as treaties (ACTA 1, 2). These strong forces are overriding the three laws of robotics (if there ever will be at all) with something else.
As Asimov pictures it, a robot should give highest priority to (L1) protecting human beings (L2) obeying human orders (L3) protecting itself, in that order, above anything else. Any robot in Asimov’s Sci-Fi is equipped with a positronic brain that will go nuts, so to speak, if it ever breaks these laws. This is to a society heavily dependent on robots what a fuse is to an electronic device. Imagine the threat one faces living in a world full of robots without these laws.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Digital Economy (UK)
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Summary
* The measures on copyright infringement will not come into effect until January 2011 at the earliest.
* All these measures will involve (initially) is sending letter to those accused of infringing.
* ISPs are under no obligation to monitor their subscribers’ Internet use.
* Technical measures cannot come into force until further consultation has been done and the regulations have been approved by Parliament.
* It is up to the copyright owner to prove the infringement happened and an IP address was used.
* It is up the the accused to prove that they did not commit the infringement if “their” IP address was allegedly used.
* The government could put in place a method whereby websites and content could be blocked by ISPs due to alleged copyright infringement.
Android Multi-Touch Pinch-To-Zoom
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08.03.10
Posted in News Roundup at 6:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The silly article goes on for lots of pages/clicks until five things are listed to denigrate GNU/Linux. The truth is there is only one thing to know about migrating to GNU/Linux. Any problems you encounter will be solvable and once solved will not recur.
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When North Americans learn to drive a car, they learn to drive on the right side of the road. Those in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, of course, learn to drive on the left. Neither option is “more difficult,” per se, they’re just different. Once you’re used to one approach, however, it can feel awkward at first to do the other.
So it is with computer operating systems. Desktop Linux is simple, elegant and logical, but it works differently from Mac and Windows.
In Linux, the graphical user interface (GUI) is optional, for instance. The desktop environment can be completely customized, and package managers let you install software in just a few clicks, no surfing the Web or searching for serial keys required.
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When contrasting Linux and Windows, one frequently hears the fallacy that Linux is not an OS anyone can use. Read this reaction about it. That recurrent argument is based on several misconceptions that I would like to discuss but, first, let us clarify something: there exists no such a thing as an easy, perfect OS. There is always a learning curve when using a system and the more you get exposed to an OS, the more “manageable” it seems. But easiness of use is only a perception, a mirage. Now, let us take a look at the misconceptions.
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Server
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Microsoft also experienced a loss this month, serving 648k fewer hostnames worldwide and also losing 265k active sites. A big contributor to this was a loss of 388k hostnames due to lower activity on Microsoft Live Spaces.
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Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation. Today, though, people are so lost in the fog of cloud computing, that they have largely forgotten about LAMP’s appeal. Cloud computing may well go beyond LAMP in terms of its power and potential, but so far it lags woefully behind LAMP in terms of simplicity and ease of implementation.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that open source enterprise IT management company Zenoss is its newest member.
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Applications
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Looking for a Linux-friendly groupware suite that can take the place of Microsoft Exchange in your organization? You’ll find a wide range of alternatives for Linux that offer most (if not all) of Exchange’s functionality.
If your organization has standardized on Microsoft Exchange, switching may be a bit tricky (but can be done). But if your organization hasn’t started down that path, it’s a good habit to avoid. The good news is you’ll find several robust Exchange alternatives for Linux.
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So I’m evaluating Bibble 5 Pro (version 5.1f). I had to process over 1,000 images this weekend and LightZone was killing me. I really like LightZone. But, damn… it is slow. It does have batch processing capabilities but they’re not particularly robust (there’s no way to apply some adjustments but not others, for example).
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Gloobus Preview is a beautiful file preview application for Linux. Select a file and click space bar to have a quick preview of the file, as simple as that. And when I say file, they include music, videos, images, documents and everything else!
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Instructionals
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks — with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks — are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests.
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As far as production goes, btrfs is not yet an appropriate choice; as its documentation makes explicitly clear, it is “not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review.” So while the Ubuntu installer might provide btrfs as an option, I wouldn’t go putting it on the root partition of any production system until it has matured a little more.
All the same, the new file system promises a number of significant advances on both Ubuntu desktops and servers. In my experiments with it, it’s also worked pretty well, and I’m excited to explore the new possibilities it offers to Ubuntu users as it continues to develop.
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Phones
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Android
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The question becomes “Why do OEMs not push GNU/Linux?”. The answers are many. OEMs have a tight margin. If unit sales were to drop even a little, their margins and income could drop seriously. They do not want to take the risk so, at best, they want GNU/Linux to be a sideline as Dell has made it. That seems quite unwise in view of the performance of Android. Margins can increase quite a bit per PC if the licence for the OS is taken out of the total. An OEM can either increase share by cutting prices a bit more than competitors selling that other OS or an OEM could charge what they would charge for that other OS and keep the change, increasing margin. Combinations are also possible, cutting a bit in price while cutting out payments to M$. The fact that no large OEM has done this suggests that M$ is paying them handsomely to keep out GNU/Linux.
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I talk to many customers who have installed what I’ll call “traditional” or “commercial” software but what some people call “closed” or “proprietary” software. The most savvy customers understand that most traditional software contains a lot of open source software, and you need to think about open source not just at the application but also at the library level. These customers usually have enterprise installations and either run or outsource huge data centers, have multiple hardware and software platforms, and care a lot about quality of service, service level agreements, maintenance, support, and cost.
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Oracle
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Today sees the launch of the Illumos Project, heralded last week in a message on the OpenSolaris mailing lists. The announcement caused much excitement, with many assuming it was a fork of OpenSolaris or another OpenSolaris distribution.
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If you were hoping that someone would fork the OpenSolaris operating system, you are going to have to settle for a spork. You know, half spoon and half fork. That, in essence, is what the Illumos, an alternative open source project to continue development on the core bits of OpenSolaris, is all about.
The disgruntled OpenSolaris community has been ignored by Oracle since it acquired Sun Microsystems back in January, and the project’s governing board has threatened to commit ritual suicide by the end of August to try to get Oracle participating in the open source Solaris development effort.
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Nexenta, an open-source organization that’s been trying to “combine the OpenSolaris kernel with the GNU/Debian user experience has announced a new open-source effort called “Illumos”. Illumos, Nexenta proclaims “is a 100% community-driven and owned effort that aims to provide an alternative to a critical part of the OpenSolaris distribution, freeing it from dependence on Oracle’s good will.”
This effort, Simon Phipps, former chief open-source officer for Sun and an Illumos supporter, said is not meant to be a fork of OpenSolaris. Still, as the group said in their announcement, “Oracle has significantly reduced their support for OpenSolaris as a distribution.” Actually, that’s too kind. Oracle has essentially ignored OpenSolaris and paid no attention to the OpenSolaris Governing Board.
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Funding
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Status.net, which distributes open-source microblogging software similar to Twitter, has closed a round of financing that it plans to use to take its services into the enterprise market. The Montreal-based startup has raised $1.4 million from New York venture fund FirstMark Capital, along with BOLDstart Ventures, iNovia Capital and Montreal Start Up, and FirstMark partner Scott Switzer — founder of the open-source advertising platform OpenX — will join the company’s board of directors. The new round brings the total amount raised by Status.net to $2.3 million.
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Government
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Thierry Aimé, member of the team of the French Ministry for the Budget, Public Accounts and the Civil Service, has authored a “Practical Guide to using Free Software in the Public Sector”.
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Licensing
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I thought you’d want to hear about what’s just happened in the Software Freedom Conservancy v. Best Buy, et al case. It’s another BusyBox case regarding infringement of the GPL, mostly about high definition televisions with BusyBox in them, and while the case is not finished regarding other defendants, it’s certainly set another precedent. One of the defendants was Westinghouse Digital Technologies, LLC, which refused to participate in discovery. It had applied for a kind of bankruptcy equivalent in California. Judge Shira Scheindlin of the Southern District of New York has now granted Software Freedom Conservancy, a wing of Software Freedom Law Center, triple damages ($90,000) for willful copyright infringement, lawyer’s fees and costs ($47,865), an injunction against Westinghouse, and an order requiring Westinghouse to turn over all infringing equipment in its possession to the plaintiffs, to be donated to charity. So, presumably a lot of high-def TVs are on their way to charities.
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Openness/Sharing
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Berkeley attorney and Shareable.net contributing editor Janelle Orsi is the co-founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which aims to help social enterprises, worker-owned co-ops, and other mission-oriented enterprises sort through legal red tape. The co-author of The Sharing Solution, published by Nolo in 2009, Orsi also has a private legal practice focused on mediation and helping people share housing, cars, land, and other commodities. We talked to Orsi about the legal gray areas that social entrepreneurs can find themselves in, and what SELC is doing about them.
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More than 9,500 comments were published on the Programme for Government website, which was launched on 20 May, days after the formation of the coalition.
Whitehall departments published their responses late last week to no fanfare, revealing as they did that not one policy will be changed as a result of the exercise.
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An anonymous bug filer noticed that the Times seemed to have changed a statistic in the online version of a front-page story about where California’s African Americans stood on pot legalization. As first published, the story said blacks made up “only” or “about 6 percent” of the state population; soon after it was posted, the number changed to “less than 10 percent.” There’s “>a full explanation of what happened over at MediaBugs; apparently, the reporter got additional information after the story went live, and it was conflicting information, so reporter and editor together decided to alter the story to reflect the new information.
There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, it’s good — the story isn’t etched in stone, and if it can be improved, hooray. The only problem is the poor reader, who was reading a story that said one thing at one time, and something different when he returned. The problem isn’t the change; it’s the failure to note it. Showing versions would solve that.
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Michael Reagan, the eldest son of former US President Ronald Reagan, has accused people who use email services from Apple, AOL, Google, Hotmail and Yahoo! of “supporting the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda” and ultimately “hurting our country”.
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Newsweek is running an amazingly bad story today titled “Taliban Seeks Vengeance in Wake of WikiLeaks”. Granted, I have my own beef with Julian Assange but how can an editor let that article go out when the author admits there is no known correlation or causation…
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This is the first in a series of blogs based on a seminar given at the BBC by Buzz Hays, chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center in Culver City, California – where they teach the professionals how to make better 3D. The series starts with an answer to the most common complaint about 3D.
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Environment/Wildlife
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Russia is mobilising more forces to fight hundreds of wildfires still raging across a vast area east and south of Moscow amid a record heatwave.
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In April, two miners were killed at the Dotiki Mine in Western Kentucky after the mine’s roof collapsed. The non-union mine had been cited for 840 safety violations by federal inspectors since 2009, and the Kentucky Office of Mine Safety and Licensing issued 31 orders to close sections of the mine or to shut down equipment during the same period. But when asked about the incident, Kentucky’s Republican Senate candidate, Rand Paul, said “maybe sometimes accidents happen.”
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Finance
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Whether Elizabeth Warren heads the nascent Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection has become the first pitched battle in how the recently passed financial reform laws are put into practice. If the episode so far is any indicator, the battle between interests and reformers is far from over.
Detractors say that Warren lacks experience, that she’s not impartial, and that she could make it so expensive to extend credit that only the richest Americans and biggest businesses could get a mortgage, a credit card, or a loan. But these knocks against Warren obscure the likely impact that she would have on the bureau. And mostly, they are straw men.
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From a strictly economic standpoint — as if economics had anything to do with this — it makes sense to preserve the Bush tax cuts at least through 2011 for the middle class. There’s no way consumers — who comprise 70 percent of the economy — will start buying again if their federal income taxes rise while they’re still struggling to repay their debts, they can’t borrow more, can no longer use their homes as ATMs, and they’re worried about keeping their jobs.
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Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Tuesday it would be “deeply irresponsible” for the Obama administration to support a wholesale extension of Bush era tax cuts, including breaks for the wealthy.
Geithner said in a nationally broadcast interview that President Barack Obama strongly believes those reductions should be retained for the “95 percent” of taxpayers with individual incomes under $200,000 a year and families below $250,000.
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Timothy F. Geithner, traveling salesman, swept through Manhattan on Monday making a pitch to skeptical bankers, business leaders and even the mayor.
His central message: Far-reaching financial regulations signed into law by President Obama last month aren’t something to fear. Rather, they are the foundation of a stronger economy for the months and years ahead.
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What’s $75 million?
For Citigroup, it’s a week of profits, less than 0.1 percent of its market value, a rounding error on a balance sheet worth more than $2 trillion.
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Former shareholders of fallen mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corp. are in line to recoup a fraction of their investments now that a Los Angeles judge has approved a settlement worth more than $600 million settlement.
The payoff doesn’t come close to compensating for the money lost by investors. But it could prompt more lenders to settle legal disputes at the center of the housing bust.
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Ms. Jarrin is part of a hard-luck group of jobless Americans whose members have taken to calling themselves “99ers,” because they have exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits that they can claim.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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It’s been ten days since the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published the massive archive of classified military records about the war in Afghanistan, but the fallout in Washington and beyond is far from over. Justice Department lawyers are reportedly exploring whether WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange could be charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing the classified Afghan war documents. Meanwhile, investigators in the Army’s criminal division have reported
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A secretive volunteer group that tries to track terrorists and criminals on the Internet went to the Defcon hacker conference this past week in hopes of recruiting information security experts, but it will first have to overcome some skepticism.
That’s because most information security professionals have never heard of the group, called Project Vigilant. The group’s director, Chet Uber, came forward Sunday at a press conference run by Defcon organizers to try to recruit volunteers from among the show’s attendees. “We need more people,” he said. “By increasing the numbers, we increase the likelihood that we will get the work done.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Lyons then tries to twist this into a claim that it’s like an easement on physical property. Again, this is simply untrue. The third parties are not proactively going onto anyone’s network. They have set themselves up and connected directly to the open internet (via their own ISPs to which they pay handsomely for bandwidth) and the only times their content crosses those other networks is when the end users (i.e., the customers of these ISPs) reach out and request that the content be sent to their computer. That’s how the open internet works. If the ISPs don’t like it, they shouldn’t have offered an internet service. To twist this and claim that the internet is somehow a “private network” of these ISPs and service providers who connect to the open internet are somehow “invading” that private network is the height of sophistry.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The FBI ordered wikipedia to remove its seal from the article there about the bureau. It threatened to litigate. Unfortunately for the FBI, the law it cited is the one that forbids making counterfeit badges, and Wikimedia’s lawyers mocked them in its response.
John Schwartz in the NYT: “Many sites, including the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica, display the seal. Other organizations might simply back down. But Wikipedia sent back a politely feisty response, stating that the bureau’s lawyers had misquoted the law. ‘While we appreciate your desire to revise the statute to reflect your expansive vision of it, the fact is that we must work with the actual language of the statute, not the aspirational version’ that the F.B.I. had provided.”
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A row has broken out between Wikipedia and the FBI over the use of its seal.
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Copyrights
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Early 2010, a Swedish court banned Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij from operating the site. Last month, the site’s former spokesperson Peter Sunde was also banned and faces a heavy fine for non-compliance. He has now appealed that decision, with his lawyer describing the court ruling as “political gagging”.
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Digital Economy (UK)
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Government certified security software: the French government’s Hadopi wants to spy on everything on your computer, every time you log on, otherwise you cannot defend yourself against breach of copyright allegations. How far does this breach our right to privacy or freedom of expression?
[...]
Although the consultation is supposed to be public, the details of the specification that Hadopi is requiring were kept secret. The leak is significant because it reveals a proposal for surveillance on Internet users’ own computers.
Compiz NOMAD Demonstration
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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One of the biggest challenges we face when we get on site is in familiarizing the child with their new Linux system. Most kids have had Windows exposure from the first time they touch a computer. Getting them through the initial system shock of a new environment has had its challenges.
In some cases, we’ve done a 30 day check-in to see how the child is doing with their new computer and have found the parent or guardian has put Windows on it. Maybe because the child wasn’t familiar with it…
[...]
I am soliciting researchers, ideas, coders, artists, volunteers, and bloggers to help us move this project forward. Sure, the current parameters are pretty loose but that’s why I have put this in front of you.
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And of course he used Linux to save on the Windows license fee.
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A recent poll found 20% or respondents indicate they would switch to GNU/Linux as a result of the ending of support for SP2.
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Server
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Vox Communications, which offers a feature-rich, low-cost, high-quality alternative to traditional phone services by providing VoIP and smartphone applications, has exceeded 20,000 VoIP lines on its award-winning Voice over Internet Linux-based server clusters.
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Google
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With the WWW2010 conference in Raleigh the first week of May, a slew of open source rock stars were in our hometown. Chris DiBona, Public Sector Engineering Manager at Google, was able to visit the Red Hat office and talk with us during his trip. The focus of his talk was the enormous culture of participation that companies like Google and Red Hat—and technologies like the internet—attempt to embrace and extend, despite naysayers and proprietary business habits.
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Kernel Space
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A rather simple kernel update released recently is all what it takes to turn a ten-years old Transmeta-powered computer or appliance into a functional computer again.
By “functional” we mean one which is able to run the latest Linux software without crashing. And that happens because of the work of one stubborn Arch Linux contributor. The main problem is that Transmeta´s original Crusoe CPUs really implement the full i586, which is the Pentium I, or more appropriately, a “crippled i686” implementation, that lacks one particular processor instruction “long NOPs”.
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The technique is one of a number of new features that come with the latest update of the open source operating system kernel, Linux version 2.6.35, which Linus Torvalds released on Sunday.
In addition the usual round of bug fixes and optimizations, the new version has a number of new features to make it more usable in today’s bustling multicore, networked environments.
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The 2.6.35 release also includes new improvements to the Btrfs filesystem, continuing efforts begun by the previous Linux 2.6.34 kernel, which debuted in May to add and enhance support for additional filesystems.
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Applications
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Music education is a field of study connected with the learning and teaching of music. Music is an essential part of the fabric of our society, and the intrinsic value of music is widely recognized. Human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals.
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Instructionals
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.0 is now available.
Whats new in this release:
* Beginnings of a user interface for the builtin Internet Explorer.
* Support for cross-process OLE drag & drop.
* New builtin wscript.exe (Windows Script Host) program.
* Open/save dialogs remember the last used directory.
* Translation updates.
* Various bug fixes.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KRunner is one of the reasons (but not the only one) that I love KDE SC. With this new plugin, it just become a lot better. It will not be included in KDE SC 4.5 (since it is supposed to be released tomorrow :p), But, hopefully, it will make it to KDE SC 4.6.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian GNU/Linux operating system, would like to invite you to participate in the upcoming Debian Conference which will take place from August 1 to 7, 2010, at New York City’s Columbia University in cooperation with the Columbia Computer Science department. This year’s conference is the first DebConf to be held in the United States in the 11-year history of the event. This year, more than 300 developers from all over the world, including Brazil, Argentina, Bosnia, Mexico, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Venezuela, and Latvia, will participate.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The Ubuntu kernel developers tagged the 2.6.35 kernel as Ubuntu-lts-2.6.35-14.19 in their repository. For a step by step article to to compiling the 2.6.35 kernel follow my how to compile article.
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B&N plans to free up room for Nooks in part by shrinking space devoted to CDs; in this era, you gotta think that it probably would be deemphasizing sales of music on shiny discs no matter what. It says it’s not going to carry fewer dead-tree books.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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Cinemo, developers of performance enhanced embedded multimedia technologies for in-vehicle infotainment, consumer electronics, and industrial embedded computing, have announced full implementation of its solutions for the MeeGo open source Linux platform.
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Android
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Two separate reports today place sales of Android handsets ahead of Apple’s iPhone for the first time amid a frenzy of Froyo, or Android 2.2, update news for major smartphones including the Evo 4G and Droid.
Verizon’s Android 2.2 update for the Motorola Droid — and perhaps Droid X — should begin by next week, and news of the upgrade comes on the heels of Sprint’s announcement that Android 2.2, dubbed Froyo, is going to start rolling out tomorrow for the HTC Evo 4G.
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International smartphone trend reporting firm Canalys released its Q2 2010 report today highlighting the growth of Android compared to the previous year and the continued success of Nokia, though the release was quick to point out that the competition is closing the gap.
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Sub-notebooks
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As Google continues to twiddle it’s fingers over Chrome OS a rival ‘cloud OS’ called ‘Jolicloud’ has been making waves for the last few months. Jolicloud Operating System was developed by a company which was started by the founder of Netvibes; the OS has been gaining popularity and already seems like a viable alternative to Google’s Chrome OS.
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Tablets
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Looking at the Kindle more closely, one can see the similarities with existing tablets on the market; Freescale ARM-11 CPU running at 532 MHz, 4GB internal memory, Wi-Fi and running a Linux-based OS. The only things missing are a decent colour touchscreen and a clear commitment from Amazon to proceed further.
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As the saying goes, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.” But in the world of programming, stretching boundaries is just part of the fun. The PHP community has never been one to shy away from bending their favorite language more ways than a shopping mall pretzel, and as the ten wild projects introduced in this article indicate, the fervor for experimentation is as strong as ever!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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August has arrived. Time for a browser market share update. There is quite a bit of news this month, which, depending on your view, can be modified in virtually any direction you prefer. Microsoft likes the version in which IE has gained market share and pushed back Firefox and Chrome. Mozilla may like the one that embarrasses Microsoft and shows that it is about to overtake IE in Europe and Google will most likely state that there is a very good chance that it has now more than 10% of the market.
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Databases
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Oracle
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A number of the community leaders from the OpenSolaris community have been working quietly together on a new effort called Illumos, and we’re just about ready to fully disclose our work to, and invite the general participation of, the general public.
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OpenSolaris is far from alone in the orphanage. However, there are several organisations showing an interest in helping Oracle’s unwanted stepchildren. Since the takeover was completed, Sun’s former chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, has been involved in setting up ForgeRock, a company which provides a new home for a host of Oracle’s apparently unloved and unwanted open source projects.
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Project Releases
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An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.
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Openness/Sharing
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Here’s the thing, software isn’t the only Open Source industry. In fact, many other open source businesses are very profitable and are generally skills that have been around for quite some time.
Let’s think about Open Source for a moment. The first line of the Wikipedia article states…
Open Source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product’s source materials.
To me, it’s just the way we’ve always done things.
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Open Access/Content
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In a recent paper, Prof. Steven Shavell (see Shavell, 2009) has argued strongly in favor of eliminating copyright from academic works. Based upon solid economic arguments, Shavell analyses the pros and cons of removal of copyright and in its place to have a pure open access system, in which authors (or more likely their employers) would provide the funds that keep journals in business. In this paper we explore some of the arguments in Shavell’s paper, above all the way in which the distribution of the sources of journal revenue would be altered, and the feasible effects upon the quality of journal content. We propose a slight modification to a pure open access system which may provide for the best of both the copyright and open access worlds.
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The Federal Trade Commission announced a milestone this week: its Do Not Call registry has just passed 200 million numbers.
It’s quite amazing that any of this came to pass, really. When the registry was being considered back in 2002, telemarketing opposition was fierce, and for obvious reasons. The industry was large, powerful, and willing to be unbelievably annoying. It also saw quite clearly that a tough Do Not Call rule would chop off its business at the knees.
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Police officer Joseph Uhler was caught on film charging out of his unmarked car and waving his gun at a unarmed motorcyclist pulled over for speeding. When the footage was uploaded to YouTube, authorities raided Anthony Graber’s home, seized his computers, arrested him, and charged him with “wiretapping” offenses that could land him in jail for 16 years.
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Security/Aggression
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Radio frequency ID tags embedded in U.S. passports can be read hundreds of feet away, potentially making it inexpensive and easy to pick American tourists out of crowds for illicit purposes, a demonstration at Black Hat 2010 showed.
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I’m not willing to argue that involuntary transparency–or as we’re calling it in this case, a leak–is by definition wrong in all cases. And leaks are hardly new–think of the WWII military refrain, “Loose lips sink ships.” History has been changed, sometimes clearly for the better, by involuntary transparency. If you’d like to consider it further, George Mason University has a webpage devoted to the history of leaks. And more than one person, including Daniel Ellsburg, has noted that it’s difficult not to think of the WikiLeaks story as the 2010 version of the Pentagon Papers.
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The Black Hat security conference attracts the creme de la creme of the security industry. This year the organizers even offered a paid live stream for those unable to make the trip to Vegas. Called Black Hat Uplink, the service carried a $395 price tag. But as security expert Michael Coates found out, the price could be waived entirely, thanks to “a combination of logic flaws and misconfigured systems which provided access to a testing login page that could be used with user credentials that were not fully “registered” (e.g. no payment received). “
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Environment/Wildlife
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Sinar Mas group is notorious for its destruction of millions of hectares of Indonesian rainforest, peatland and wildlife habitat. Two divisions within the group lead the destruction: pulp and palm oil. Recently, the group has diversified into coal.
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Finance
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Local New York City residents are up in arms over a plan by Goldman Sachs to replace a discount shoe shop, a pizza joint, a recently closed New York Sports Club gym and a budget inn outside its new $2.1 billion headquarters with a string of designer restaurants and a luxury hotel. The Telegraph reported that the bank is being accused by denizens of “breaking promises.”
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Iceland’s failed Glitnir Bank hf and other lenders claiming they were stung by internal fraud during the financial crisis are winning U.K. court orders freezing the worldwide assets of ousted executives with ties to Britain.
Glitnir in May froze the assets of Jon Asgeir Johannesson, its former principal shareholder, and won a second court victory last week after he violated the order by paying bills. Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank, which defaulted on $12 billion of debt, and Intercontinental Bank Plc, the bailed-out Nigerian lender, won similar orders against former executives in the past year.
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Goldman has long been criticized for benefiting from the U.S. taxpayer bailout of AIG. Taxpayers pledged up to $182 billion to address problems at AIG’s financial products division.
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An emerging markets hedge fund affiliated to Citigroup (C) has sued Goldman Sachs (GS) for its alleged failure to uphold its part of a trade involving Venezuelan oil warrants.
Emerging Markets Special Opportunities Ltd, a hedge fund managed by Citigroup affiliate EMSO Partners, claims that over a three-year period Goldman failed to deliver oil warrants it had paid for.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Have the copyright enforcers been caught with their hands in the cookie jar? The blog TorrentFreak today published its claim that the US Copyright Group, which has filed more than 14,000 lawsuits against anonymous P2P movie sharers, ripped off another copyright settlement group in crafting its own settlement website.
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As soon as you set up this bureaucratic structure, what really happens is that much of the money that could have gone directly to the artists (or to the artists’ business partners) goes instead into the massive overhead required to keep the “collection society” working in the middle. This isn’t a solution that helps musicians. It’s a solution that helps bureaucratic middlemen.
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A court decision this week may fundamentally change how composers, songwriters and publishers are paid royalties for public performances of their music, as the precedent created has laid the groundwork to shift many more music performances out of the hands of ASCAP, BMI and SESAC and into direct license deals with publishers and writers.
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It’s a trailer. The whole idea of it is to act as advertising for the movie and get people more interested in seeing the movie. And having people put it online for you makes it free advertising, which is even better. So why take it down at all?
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ACTA
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The latest round of CETA negotiations took place last week in Brussels, with the GI issue (along with protections for industrial designs that cover the fashion industry) a top priority for the European delegation. The Canadian government unsurprisingly faces some opposition to the demands from domestic producers.
Similarly, the ACTA negotiations, which have become increasingly acrimonious, have hit a major roadblock with the Europeans demanding extensive new enforcement powers — including criminal and civil penalties — for GI violations. The U.S. and Canada have been resisting the demand, leading Karel de Gucht, a European commissioner, to warn last week that this was a “red line” issue that could cause the EU to rethink the merits of the entire treaty.
How fast does your PC boot? – Ubuntu
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Posted in News Roundup at 1:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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As Michael said, proper use of a credit card requires a level of discipline. Some people get along very well with credit cards, while other people have difficulty in budgeting their purchases. If you’re the sort of person who feels comfortable maintaining a credit line, the Linux Fund (or BSD Fund) card is one way in which you can support open source without making a direct donation. Simply buying groceries, purchasing clothes or paying bills with a Fund card will help, in a small way, to support community events and various open source projects.
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Backup used to be simple in SMB environments: You slapped on your tape and autoloader, scheduled backup in the backup application, and set it to run. Occasionally you would test to see that it actually did run. Most of the time it worked; when it didn’t you could troubleshoot the problem and make sure backup ran that night. No harm, no foul.
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Kernel Space
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Measures to support the power saving mechanisms of AMD graphics chips, network code optimisations for multi-core processors, features for de-fragmenting the working memory and an improved support of the power management and turbo features offered by modern processors are KL 2635 Logo among the highlights of the new kernel version.
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While it may have seemed like PowerTop was idling by for a while without a new release or any major advancements to this open-source utility for analyzing power consumption to find programs causing more wake-ups than necessary and to provide other power savings tips on Intel-based Linux systems, a new release has emerged. Intel released PowerTop v1.13 recently and it adds a few new features to the power table along with a number of bug-fixes.
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Applications
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Been a long time for changing Avant window Navigator theme, found really cool collection on deviantart, you will find many themes appropriate for your desktop and installed themes you have even it was dark theme or bright theme.
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The other day, my normal desktop RSS feed reader decided to cause me more grief than not, so I started looking for another client. At the same time, I decided to give Google Reader a try (I had looked at it briefly when it had initially come out but didn’t do anything with it, satisfied as I was with my desktop client). I liked what I saw and, more importantly, now see the value of a cloud-based service like Google Reader, that can be used and integrated with other applications on other operating systems.
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If you have more than a handful of servers, maintaining them by hand becomes a tedious task. Of course, you can automate this with shell scripts, but this is an ad hoc solution. Puppet can help you to reach a more consistent way of managing your servers. All your configuration changes are made in a central repository and pushed to your various servers, which can be Linux, BSD or Solaris. There are lot of ready-made Puppet modules to configure various system components, and everyone can write their own Puppet modules.
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Proprietary
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Relative newcomer Convirture holds that it is plugging a major hole by specializing in managing open-source Xen, KVM virtualization and private cloud deployments.
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Instructionals
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Linux from Scratch available for free is a project that describes all information for creating your own customized Linux operating system. It can be customized as your choice using the source of software code which has more control capacity for the system.
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Games
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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# tons of work on Plasma Mobile, which can not only make phone calls now but which has an innovative and common sense approach to interacting with desktop widgets even on those tiny screens. Marco is doing some amazing work, including screencasts. It’s Sunday today and guess what I see on the commit logs as they roll past my screen? Yep, Marco hacking on Plasma Mobile. Commitment, baby, commitment! 
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We get asked from time to time “Why Plasma?” or “What is the purpose of libplasma, exactly?”. Or we get compared to other projects out there, even though there are only passing similarities. (I have yet to find another single project that approaches this problem space in the same way Plasma does; either Plasma is fairly unique or I’m just not looking hard enough. I have my stock answer about a scalable, repurposable interface component system with a high degree of data/visualization separation that emphasizes scripting, etc.
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Today, we’ll review 4 different desktop distributions specifically designed for educational and academic use.
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I also think that for a long time there’s been too much emphasis on coding. The people who popularize Linux, the people who write about Linux, the people who run LUGs (Linux User Groups) and community Linux shows, and the businesses that have committed to Linux also deserve credit.
Yes, the people who write Linux are vital, and Red Hat is the clear leader in producing code — but it’s not just about who writes the code. If you look at the bigger picture, I think Canonical deserves a lot of the credit as well for Linux turning into a grown-up family of operating systems.
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Red Hat’s success in proving a viable business model around a distribution was a very significant milestone in that quest, for all of us. I don’t mean to diminish that achievement when I point out that it’s come at the cost of dividing the world into those that buy RHEL, and those that can’t or won’t. Red Hat’s success is well deserved, and our work at Canonical is not in any sense motivated by desire to take that away. Red Hat is here to stay, there will always be a market for the product, and as a result, we all have the reassurance that our contributions can find a sustainable path into the hands of at least part of the world’s population.
Canonical’s mission is to expand the options, to find out if it’s possible to have a sustainable platform without that dividing line. We know that our quest would not be possible without your pioneering, but we don’t feel that’s riding on anybody’s coat-tails. We feel we have to break new ground, do new things, add new ingredients, and all of that is a substantial contribution in turn. But we don’t do it because we think Red Hat is “wrong”, and we don’t expect it to take anything away from Red Hat at all. We do it to add to the options, not to replace them.
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At last week’s GUADEC (GNOME Users’ And Developers’ European Conference), held in The Hague, Netherlands, Neary Consulting published the results of a very interesting GNOME Census study exploring “who develops GNOME.” Of course, readers will already know that GNOME is the default desktop environment for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as it is for many other desktop Linux distributions, such as Debian and Ubuntu.
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Reviews
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Pinguy gained a deserving spot inside my Distro CD/DVD wallet. I will not hesitate to recommend it to anyone who wants a fresh, friendly and featureful Linux OS. More experienced users will most likely diss it for shoving all these applications down their throat, but if they’ll give it a look or two, they might appreciate the effort.
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The benchmarks we ran across Calculate Linux Desktop, Ubuntu, Sabayon, and Fedora were OpenArena, World of Padman, 7-Zip, LAME MP3, FFmpeg, x264, OpenSSL, GraphicsMagick, Himeno, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, Apache, C-Ray, PostMark, Gzip, and Parallel BZIP2. All of this testing was done by the Phoronix Test Suite, which supports automated testing on the aforementioned distributions plus plenty of other distributions and Unix-like operating systems.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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As this video suggests, trying to get users to pay for things which in other distros “just work” is the sign of a bad business model. Technically they’re perfectly within their rights to charge for Gstreamer or other software components, since it’s kosher to charge for free software if that’s what you want to do. However, they would be much better off if the paying element was concentrated on product differentiating applications or services.
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Debian Family
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The tenth annual Debian Developer Conference has opened in New York City. DebConf 2010 is the first time the event has been held in the United States.
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The first day of DebConf is known as Debian Day. While most of DebConf is for the benefit of people involved in Debian itself, Debian Day is aimed at a wider audience, and invites the public to learn about, and interact with, the Debian project.
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Ubuntu
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In This Issue
* The Open Source Community Responds to Dave Neary’s GNOME Census Work Presentation at GUADEC
* Ubuntu Global Jam: Start Your Engines!
* Ubuntu 10.10 Alpha-3 coming next week
* 10.04.1 Release Schedule Update
* Fixing Ubuntu Software Center Descriptions
* New Kubuntu website is live!
* Ubuntu Font Beta: now with added Bold
* Ubuntu News Team – Needs You!!
* Ubuntu Stats
* Monthly Reports
* LoCo Council meeting time change
* Ubuntistas, the magazine of the Greek LoCo
* Ubuntu Q&A community in Shapado – progress
* Ubuntu Hour in Bangalore
* Became members of Ubuntu Colombia
* Come to the Ubuntu side, we have badges
* Limerick Ubuntu hour a success
* Second San Francisco Ubuntu Hour
* Ubuntu China LoCo Team resigning and nomination meeting
* Launchpad News
* Dear Ubuntu Community – Thank You
* My Motivation for Doing Opensource
* Cleansweep Update!
* This week in design – 30 July 2010
* Design by enthusiasm
* In The Press
* In The Blogosphere
* 10 reasons why your kids should be using Linux
* Canonical fluffs one-click Ubuntu cloud stack
* GNOME 3 not ready yet, release pushed back to 2011
* Using ALSA to Control Linux Audio
* Try Out Opera Mini In Ubuntu
* Latest ATI Video Driver Has Support for Ubuntu 10.04
* Ubuntu Server makes gains at SUSE Linux’ expense
* bzr-svn 1.0.3 announced
* bzr-git 0.5.2 announced
* Whitelisting Advances with New Bouncer App
* Dell to Continue to Sell Ubuntu Systems, Just Not on Its UK Website
* TurnKey Linux: GNU high school: teaching kids by contributing to open source
* Full Circle Magazine Issue 39 is available
* Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
* Monthly Team Reports: July 2010
* Upcoming Meetings and Events
* Updates and Security
* UWN Sneak Peek
* and much much more!
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We want to reduce the number of sounds you’ll hear on a default Ubuntu installation, with an emphasis on making sound a usability feature instead of an annoyance. So we’re clipping out things like ‘button-pressed’ and ‘service-logout’, and working towards shorter and less intrusive, more refined audio set.
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Matthew Barker, of Canonical’s Corporate Services told us that Canonical, a private limited company, has offices in London, Boston, Montreal and Taiwan, and well over 300 staff in twenty-five different countries. Some of their customers who have deployed Ubuntu include Qualcomm, University of York, NHS, T-Mobile, French Gendarmes and LVM Versicherungen.
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Flavours and Variants
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Part three of this series, and I am writing this from Linux Mint 9 KDE4. Already I am feeling very at home with it, and already after working heavily with quite a few KDE distros in a short timeframe I begin to realise some things that I find wrong with them are KDE specific.
Is Linux Mint 9 the KDE nirvana I am looking for?
This will only be a short writeup, my full review on Linux Mint 9 KDE will follow later in the week…
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Tariq Krim, the co-founder of web portal company Netvibes, has a new project that takes open source and the cloud into the ever-expanding portable-computing market.
The French entrepreneur’s latest venture is Jolicloud, a Linux distribution that bears as much resemblance to a modern smartphone operating system (OS) as it does to a traditional desktop OS. Jolicloud, which targets the netbook market in particular, has a launcher that is built in HTML 5 and a core cloud-based service that allows the user to back up and synchronise chosen apps between multiple installations.
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Phones
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Nokia/MeeGo
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MeeGo 1.0 for netbooks was released back in May (and an update already released to that) while a month ago there was an early release of MeeGo 1.1 For Handsets released with the official release coming later in the year with MeeGo 1.1 for netbooks. Today “MeeGo 1.0 IVI” has been released and this is designed for in-vehicle infotainment systems.
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Sub-notebooks
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One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) has had its fair share of critique and controversy, but if any of that is putting a damper on the project, someone forgot to tell its founder, MIT Media’ Lab’s Nicholas Negroponte–now he’s partnered with IT consulting group, Virtusa, which has decided to run user scenarios and tests to help improve the software and hardware behind OLPC.
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BSD
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Welcome to the PC-BSD blog! Here we hope to keep you up-to-date with what’s happening with the PC-BSD operating system and what features are in the works. We also want to hear your comments and feedback so we can find out what is useful and interesting to PC-BSD users and become aware of any pain points or requests for new features.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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At this year’s LibrePlanet conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation, Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center gave a keynote speech on the current state of free software and the free software movement.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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The Arduino is a type of open source hardware that we covered in The Atlantic in January. “Using an Arduino is fairly straightforward: buy a board (ranging from about $19 to $65) and attach it to a personal computer via a cable. Then load instructions into the Arduino’s processor via the personal computer,” William Gurstelle explained. “Once programmed, the Arduino makes decisions based on the information transmitted by whatever sensors you’ve hooked up, and does something corporeal, such as turn on or off the motors, displays, valves, and lights attached to it.”
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Programming
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We’re thrilled to honor network protocol analyzer Wireshark as August’s Project of the Month, one of SourceForge’s longest-lived projects. Originally named Ethereal, its been under development for more than 12 years and is used by companies like Google and Citigroup.
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Gerrit acts as an intermediary between developers and the origin repository. You send commits to Gerrit and it holds them in purgatory until they are signed off on by another developer. Then, if the commit applies cleanly to the branch, Gerrit applies it. Otherwise, it asks you to upload a merge commit, which is where the fun really starts.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Uber is the Executive Director of a highly secretive group called Project Vigilant, which, as Greenberg writes, “monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers” and “hands much of that information to federal agencies.” More on that in a minute. Uber revealed yesterday that Lamo, the hacker who turned in Manning to the federal government for allegedly confessing to being the WikiLeaks leaker, was a “volunteer analyst” for Project Vigilant; that it was Uber who directed Lamo to federal authorities to inform on Manning by using his contacts to put Lamo in touch with the “highest level people in the government” at “three letter agencies”; and, according to a Wired report this morning, it was Uber who strongly pressured Lamo to inform by telling him (falsely) that he’d likely be arrested if he failed to turn over to federal agents everything he received from Manning.
GNOME Shell Workspaces
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08.02.10
Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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There are many occupational hazards associated with being a fan of FOSS, but one Linux Girl never expected to have to endure is what’s afflicting her now: whiplash.
Yes, after all the unexpected twists and turns in Dell’s (Nasdaq: DELL) approach to Ubuntu, another surprise maneuver came up last week that was simply too much.
The move in question, you ask? Well, just days after the news broke that Dell had removed all Ubuntu-preloaded machines from its site, reports emerged that the company is actually *expanding* its desktop Ubuntu selection.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE SC 4.0 was released in January of 2008 and KDE SC 4.5 will be released shortly (August 4th, 2010), roughly two and a half years later, and it is time to reflect on what KDE SC4 seeks to accomplish and how well it is doing in its goals. The critical shift KDE SC took in this series is abstracting the desktop from the underlying system through three pillars, phonon, plasma and solid making the desktop some sort of a virtual platform environment and easily portable to other operating systems.
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This one’s an activity and sports tracking application similar to the .NET-behemoth Sport Tracks or Garmin Training Center.
It’s not a hundred percent complete yet and has its share of rough edges, but to give you an impression of what works already,
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today highlights its leadership in open source desktop development with its ranking as the top corporate contributor to the GNOME project. In a census study published by Neary Consulting at GUADEC, held last week in The Hague, Netherlands, Red Hat placed first among the total 106 companies that have contributed to GNOME development over the past 10 years with nearly 17 percent of the total code commits. The study also showed that nine out of the top 20 contributors are Red Hat employees.
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Usually it’s a desire for control or exclusivity in some form, but the outcome is always to negate the “open source effect” by limiting the ability of every participant to get what they want and thus give what they can. While there’s clearly a niche for one or two expertly-balanced businesses, the propensity of commentators to focus on these colourful exceptions has created the perception this is the norm.
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As most involved in the broad content management market, I’ve seen the news of the week: Adobe acquires Day Software, the hot WCM vendor.
[...]
Adobe could concentrate on monetizing global service offerings: Omniture, Livecycle, end-to-end workflows for medias, acrobat.com on steroids, more online services, etc. Commoditizing the core WCM technology would keep the competition busy and let them make money where they hardly have any meaningful competition, innovate more with new services spanning and leveraging the wide reach of their offerings. We also would see an ecosystem thrive on CQ5, providing the ignition — for free — Adobe needs to enter the market. Kinda the Google way, after all.
Actually the more I think to this and after having read Adobe’s plan for Day, I think it’s the best way to achieve it. If they truly want to create a platform for customer engagement management, this is the way. This is how the industry builds big platform nowadays, by open source software.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Research published this week suggests that the majority of federal government departments in Germany are ignoring requirements to implement Open Standards.
A survey was conducted by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) to investigate the state of government adoption of ODF, and to promote wider uptake of Open Standards. “Although federal policy has wisely embraced Open Standards for interoperability, accessibility and security, it is clear that most government bodies are still using inefficient proprietary formats” said Karsten Gerloff, President of FSFE. “Ultimately citizens will end up paying the price for this lack of conformity through higher bills for public IT contracts, and slower services due to interoperability problems” he added. “They will also pay a price in freedom, as they are forced to use proprietary software and standards to communicate with government authorities”.
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Project Releases
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OTRS Inc. has announced the release of the first beta of OTRS (Open source Ticket Request System) version 3.0, the company’s open source help desk system. According to OTRS Research and Development Director Manuel Hecht, the latest development version results in “up to 30% quicker ticket turnaround under demanding high-usage scenarios, on top of enhanced features and accessibility.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Here at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) we’ve recently started taking an interest in open data, and its implication for charities and the voluntary sector.
We know that some voluntary organisations which specialise in open data have been leading the charge – the Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit company, mySociety is a registered charity – and often the most exciting and innovative uses of open data are made by volunteers in their spare time. But we know that many voluntary organisations find it difficult to find the time and skills to develop their ICT capabilities, and can find the challenge of implementing new technologies in their organisation daunting. This is daunting not just because of the time and resources required, but also because it requires a change in organisational culture.
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By contrast, the data underlying Google’s search engine is public – anyone can go out and crawl the entire Web (indeed, companies like Microsoft do that). But for all its support of free software, Google does not make the key part of its code – its PageRank algorithm – public.
So, it’s definitely true that some of the most important players in the digital world offer either open source or open data, but not both: is it *necessarily* true, though?
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Well, the last year has answered that question for us. It has been an incredible one for public data. Obama opened up the US government’s data faults as his first legislative act (http://www.data.gov/), followed by government data sites around the world – Australia (http://data.australia.gov.au/), New Zealand http://www.data.govt.nz/, the British government’s Data.gov.uk and of course the London datastore.
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Open Access/Content
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“We are spending $8 billion to $15 billion per year on textbooks” in the United States, Mr. McNealy says. “It seems to me we could put that all online for free.”
The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.
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Taken in the economic context of the rest of the interview, it makes him appear ignorant of the fact market forces, not the opinions of free culture advocates, are what’s hurting his traditional industry. Not a smart impression to give, even if you are turning a profit.
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Science
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If you want to change the world, you have to think big. Say what you want about the feasibility of Scott Brusaw’s idea to replace asphalt roads with miles of solar ribbons that cars and trucks can drive on, it is a very ambitious idea. Brusaw is the co-founder and CEO of Solar Roadways, a bootstrapped startup in Idaho. He is an engineer, and is building prototypes of solar panels that could be used as roads.
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A quantum memory may be all scientists need to beat the limit of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, according to a paper published in Nature Physics. According to a group of researchers, maximally entangling a particle with a quantum memory and measuring one of the particle’s variables, like its position, should snap the quantum memory in a corresponding state, which could then be measured. This would allow them to do something long thought verboten by the laws of physics: figure out the state of certain pairs of variables at the exact same time with an unprecedented amount of certainty.
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Environment/Wildlife
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Calculated Risk gathers the data on underwater homes:
* There are 14.75 million underwater homes and 4.1 million of these have more than 50% negative equity (the homeowners owe 50%+ more than their homes are worth).
* The total negative equity is $771 billion.
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Thousands of tonnes of garbage washed down by recent torrential rain are threatening to jam the locks of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, and is in places so think people can stand on it, state media said on Monday.
Chen Lei, a senior official at the China Three Gorges Corporation, told the China Daily that 3,000 tonnes of rubbish was being collected at the dam every day, but there was still not enough manpower to clean it all up. “The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the miter gate of the Three Gorges Dam,” Chen said, referring to the gates of the locks which allow shipping to pass through the Yangtze River.
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As Germany’s wild boar population has skyrocketed in recent years, so too has the number of animals contaminated by radioactivity left over from the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Government payments compensating hunters for lost income due to radioactive boar have quadrupled since 2007.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Opponents of net neutrality, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute, have pointed to numerous grounds upon which the detrimental scheme could be challenged. These include its deterrent effect on investment, its unsatisfactory grounding in FCC statutory authority, and that it violates the First Amendment.
A forthcoming paper from Boston College Law Professor Daniel Lyons offers an even stronger basis for challenge: The Fifth Amendment. Under Prof. Lyons’s theory, net neutrality would run afoul of eminent domain. It would constitute a regulatory taking, requiring just compensation.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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An anonymous reader sends over the story, found on Reddit of how Namco Bandai sent a letter complaining that a kid recreated Pacman online using Scratch. If you’re not familiar with it, Scratch is a very simple programming “language,” basically designed to teach kids how to program (or think about programming) from a young age. And what’s one of the best ways to learn to program? It’s to recreate an app that already exists.
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Copyrights
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At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
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It’s getting really frustrating watching the supposedly professional press repeat stats that have been thoroughly debunked as if they’re factual, so I think it’s about time that people started calling out the publications and reporters who make these mistakes directly. So, Stephanie Clifford, reporter for the NY Times, can you give any evidence whatsoever to support the claim that you made in your article this past weekend that counterfeiting “costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year?” I don’t think that Clifford can, because that number has been thoroughly debunked time and time again.
TYT On MSNBC: WikiProtest Launch (Share Your Ideas!)
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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But what about everything else? Do you need to spend Rs. 4,500 (USD 100) to purchase your copy of Windows? Let’s take the basic three requirements of PC users world-wide — surfing the internet, use of office productivity software and multimedia playback. You don’t NEED Windows to do many of the tasks today. Yes, that document you’re typing doesn’t NEED Microsoft Word (it could do just fine with a Google Doc or Open Office). Speaking of Operating Systems, there’s one that is free in the truest sense of the term — Linux
For the uninitiated, Linux is an open source operating system. Actually, Linux is a kernel (i.e. the heart of an OS). Open source means you freely release the code of software you make for the rest of the world. Then anybody can take it and modify it to their liking. To cite recent examples, Google’s Android phones work on Linux’s kernel and their Chrome OS is also going to be based on the same.
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Here’s what would this magical distribution would need to include…
[...]
People would buy this. PC makers might even distribute it on new PCs. Who knows. But ultimately the consumer would be the big winner because they would be getting an operating system on their machine that is stable, secure, reliable, AND runs Windows applications. What more could a use need or want?
Something like this is certainly feasible. It wouldn’t take a Canonical much work at all to roll the above application set into a retail version of Ubuntu and start selling it. I would buy it…if only to support the cause. Would you?
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I’ve been a full time Linux user for the past 6 years. In this post I’ll try to explain why I prefer the Linux desktop for doing all my software development work. I will try to stay as objective as possible about the other OS’s when making my comparison.
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My first foray into Linux was Mandrake 9.1. 2003 was still early days for desktop Linux and I found it difficult to work on – which admittedly was also because I had newly migrated from Windows and had to learn a whole new set of tricks to use. While I enjoyed the change, Mandrake didn’t suit me and I got frustrated enough to make a wholesale change to Kubuntu – Ubuntu using KDE – in 2006. In 2008 KDE 4 came out and I was one of those who decided to ditch it. I then discovered Xubuntu – Ubuntu running Xfce – and made that my new Linux desktop. Now I have migrated to the most popular Linux distribution – Ubuntu, which runs GNOME.
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In the the movie “Blood Work” there is a scene where actor Clint Eastwood is interviewing a witness to a murder.
Prominently displayed behind this person is a Redhat Linux 6.1 book; and the entire bookshelf has Linux books.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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This time on Linux Outlaws: Thesis backs down, NASA drops Eucalyptus, Dell drops Ubuntu, BSOD and the oil disaster, Apple world leader in being insecure and interviews from GUADEC 2010 including Lennart Poettering talking shop on PulseAudio and systemd.
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Kernel Space
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Linux
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So I said -rc6 would likely be the last -rc, and nothing happened to change my mind. I’d always be happier if it had been an even quieter week, but the appended Shortlog of changes since rc6 doesn’t contain anything earthshaking, and I don’t think we’d have been any better off by another rc, and waiting one more week. So 2.6.35 is out, go check it out.
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James Morris has outlined a preview of the security subsystem changes he is currently carrying in his security-testing-next branch of the Linux kernel that he plans to have Linus Torvalds pull into the next kernel development cycle for Linux 2.6.36. The big change in the kernel security world is that AppArmor is being planned for integration into the Linux 2.6.36 kernel.
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Applications
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Instructionals
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Games
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A reader from My Game Company announced the release of Rick Rocket v1.1 for Linux…
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Blendo Games have released Air Forte, described as a “high-altitude game of math, vocabulary, and geography”. A demo is available; the full version can be purchased online for $15 US.
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Desktop Environments
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Something most new Linux users often struggle to understand is the concept of desktop environments. What a desktop environment actually is, I feel, gets further clouded when users start exploring different “spins” of a distro (short for distribution). For example, it is very common for a new user to think that Kubuntu or Xubuntu is something entirely different from the well known Ubuntu. Many do not know that they can easily install any *buntu on any other *buntu with a single command![1]
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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This weekend I finally sat down and wrote a screenshot effect for KWin. This effect redirects the rendering of any window into an off-screen texture and saves the texture into the home directory. The advantage of this effect is that it is hooked into the normal rendering process and so we can also capture the shadow and the translucency to get beautiful screenshots. If we capture a transparent window it does not show the windows below but only the captured window with the alpha channel turned on correctly.
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GNOME Desktop
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Last weeks GUADEC was less like a developers conference and more like a presidential campaign rally! The enthusiasm, positivity and general feedback that it has garnered is incredible but amongst the many interesting things propositioned at GUADEC came the idea of a GNOME as an OS.
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Elegant Gnome Pack is an amazing theme pack we included in a post on 5 great Gnome themes last week so you’re probably already familiar with it.
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Reviews
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After looking at SalixOS 13.0 in my comparison of light weight Slackware derivatives for the desktop I thought I should give 13.1 a full standalone review. This also, I’ll admit from the start, because I’m very fond of it. Yes, I’m biased.
There’s nothing better for me out there apart from Slackware proper, and SalixOS is the unaltered Slackware with a little custom art and a few helpful tools strapped on optimized for the desktop, like easy localization, setting of the clock, adding users tool, and truly one-click adding of multimedia codecs. Thus it makes sense that it’s tracking version numbers closely as well. It has not diverged in the way Zenwalk and Vectorlinux have. This makes for one very solid, extensible system. But let’s take it one step at a time.
[...]
To sum it up, SalixOS is smooth and there really isn’t more to say about it. Particularly the LXDE install is a great way of starting with a basic fast but still functional desktop that can be built and upgraded into a fully featured work space with KDE or Gnome should you wish. Or you can use standard with Xfce. I’ll conclude with the same findings as in the previous article. Whether you’re an aspiring ex-Ubuntu or ex-Mandriva user, want a quick and easy Slackware install or just something light but with lots of possibilities, give Salix a try. It’s easy, very easy.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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So I started over and chose “install” this time. The process went on fast and I restarted the computer. The new Mandriva Spring Powerpack was working perfectly.
I noticed that Avidemux, the video editor was included, which made me very happy because I had problems to install it with Mandriva 2010.
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Debian Family
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I’m not trying to set any records here. I’m just lazy enough to avoid re-installing my OS and setting it up. But I seriously doubt than any other OS or distro can handle it. It’s unique combination of Debian’s approach to distro development, package upgrade-ability policies and attention to software quality that makes it possible.
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I mean, in 20 years time are there going to be IT students sitting in a lecture (virtual environment I would imagine), making notes on how 2010 was the year that the proprietary software model tipped into terminal decline?
I have already seen the change happen in the world of content management. As we came out of the summer of 2009, hard on the tail of a global economic meltdown, something changed in the take up of open source ECM in the blue chip arena of business. Our projects suddenly shifted from strategic, point solutions leveraging the open source model of Alfresco to become main stream, enterprise adoptions of Alfresco as a chosen, strategic enterprise content management platform across global corporations and organisations. Not just on one or two occasions, not just in one or two sectors, but across the board.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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First of all, it’s important to keep things in perspective. Internet Explorer has gained 0.42% in a month: that’s little more than statistical noise, and only from one data source. As for Firefox, it’s important to remember that over the last year its market share has hovered around the 23-24% mark, and so is essentially static in what is presumably a growing market: it is still gaining users. The main change in this time has been the undeniable rise of Google’s Chrome.
That’s significant for a number of reasons. First, because it signals Google’s willingness to enter mature software markets. It confirms Google’s tactical use of open source to undermine proprietary competitors (something that other companies like IBM were one of the first to twig) – precisely its approach in the mobile sector too. It also has wider ramifications for Google’s future products, notable ChromeOS, which seems to be a browser-based approach to computing that places Chrome at the heart of the user experience.
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The web browser is becoming the single most important piece of desktop software, if it isn’t already. Not only is the web a huge source of information, but also the conduit to a huge world of hosted apps and interconnected cloud services covering a range of new computer-based experiences.
When you’re shopping, you want security; when you’re working, you want reliability; and when you’re being entertained, you want speed and compatibility with many different types of media.
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Government
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Defense Ministry won this year’s Open-Source Award for its extensive use of open-source systems in its offices.
Initiated by the Communications and Information Technology Ministry, the Research and Technology Ministry and the Administrative Reforms Ministry, in conjunction with the Indonesian Open-Source Association, the award is aimed at promoting the use of free, open source software using the Linux operating system, among government offices.
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I am stunned by the simplicity and truth of that observation. Every day lots of new names are added to the global DNS, and most of them belong to scammers, spammers, e-criminals, and speculators. The DNS industry has a lot of highly capable and competitive registrars and registries who have made it possible to reserve or create a new name in just seconds, and to create millions of them per day. Domains are cheap, domains are plentiful, and as a result most of them are dreck or worse.
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This is about Intel paying Dell and other OEMs a “discount” to ignore AMD CPUs. The report to the court likely is about the prices paid. In the absence of sales of AMD CPUs it is hard to demonstrate that consumers/customers paid too much but what of the lack of choice? Combined with Moore’s Law it is hard to prove that Intel’s prices were “too high” or “higher than they would have been” without the discounts. This is silly when you consider the size of the bribes in $billions. If Intel’s prices were not too high, how did Intel imagine they could recoup the payments? Increased volume? Supply and demand do work.
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The European Union was today accused of “turning a blind eye” as countries across Europe carried out a wave of expulsions and introduced new legislation targeting the Roma.
Human rights groups criticised the EU for failing to address the real issues driving Europe’s largest ethnic minority to migrate in the first place and for choosing not to upbraid countries for breaking both domestic and EU laws in their treatment of them.
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In the peaceful and prosperous Namibian capital of Windhoek, small Chinese businesses have been ruffling feathers.
The trouble began in February when members of the Windhoek chamber of commerce complained that an invasion of Chinese corner shops, hairdressers, restaurants and traders was forcing out local businesses.
“There has been rapid growth in the number of small-scale retailing outlets throughout the country, offering low-quality products and replacing long-existing locally-owned businesses,” the chamber announced, lobbying the government to protect Namibian businesses from such energetic Chinese competition.
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Science
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Bill Gates has described bio-hacking (deathhacking?) as the logical successor to computer hacking. More importantly though, Silicon Valley people are – by and large – massive overachievers. Company founders in their teens, rich by the time they’re 30, angel investors by 31, charitable foundation at 40. No wonder these people want to go on forever: just imagine what they could achieve by the time they’re 1030!
And so the research goes on, millions more dollars are poured in to deathhacking startups by rich-mortal-and-terrified benefactors, dozens more books are published on the subject and every day countless startup founders jump into their Teslas and speed to their “doctors” to pick up the latest batch of pills that they hope will keep them around until someone figures this shit out. And why not?
Here’s why not.
A few months ago I finished writing my book about living in hotels – a second memoir by the age of thirty, which is unwarranted by any measure. My deadline was January 1st, but I finally scraped past the finish line somewhere around the start of March. The truth is, I didn’t need the extra time: I’d already had a year to write the thing, and much of that time was spent dicking around in the name of “additional research”, most of which never made it into the final manuscript. But it’s generally accepted that authors never make their deadlines, and my publisher gladly gave me the 90 days grace I claimed I needed to complete the task.
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Basically, it’s not clear how large a system you need to support human civilization. We don’t know how to build biospheres from scratch yet, and indeed there’s worryingly little research being done on the topic (which may become a screamingly important priority in another half century, if the most pessimistic climate change projections are accurate). We can make a rough back-of-the-envelope guess at the size of human population it takes — given abundant raw materials and a favourable biosphere — to maintain a technological civilization; it’s many orders of magnitude larger than the proponents of Heinlein’s nostrum that “specialization is for insects” may be comfortable with.
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British rights campaigners have launched a bid to take defence officials to court over the alleged involvement of the country’s soldiers in the shooting of Afghan civilians, a report said Monday.
Tens of thousands of classified US military files published last week by whistleblower website WikiLeaks documented unusual civilian shootings in Afghanistan involving two British army units, said the Guardian newspaper.
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Afghan defence minister Abdul Rahim Wardak has played down the fallout from the Wikileaks scandal, saying the information released was “not a big surprise”.
“Actually for us Afghans, and especially some of us dealing with intelligence, we knew it all along,” he said during a visit to Malaysia on Monday.
“For us it was not a big surprise because we were sharing intelligence. We were aware of the size of the activities and support of the Taliban,” he said.
“It is good now that everyone knows about it.”
The WikiLeaks website released more than 90,000 classified US military files dating from the Afghan war between 2004 and 2009, a period when tens of thousands of US and NATO troops ran into increasing Taliban resistance.
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Environment/Wildlife
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Fossil fuels are the backbone of economies worldwide, so governments spend a lot to support them. A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance says altogether governments spent between $43 anf $46 billion on renewable energy and biofuels last year, not including indirect support, such as subsidies to corn farmers that help ethanol production. Direct subsidies of fossil fuels came to $557 billion, the report says.
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The largest wildlife census of its kind conducted in Chernobyl has revealed that mammals are declining in the exclusion zone surrounding the nuclear power plant.
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The BP catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, with its tragic loss of life and devastating impact on the Gulf Coast economy, has brought the risk and high cost of oil development to the public’s attention. Predictably a round of oil industry executives have testified before Congress offering countless apologies and empty assurances that such an incident will never happen again. But this is the fourth major oil spill in 33 years on North America.
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Bob Dudley, who was named this week to replace BP’s much maligned chief executive Tony Hayward, announced that the company was appointing a former head of the US federal emergency management agency, James Lee Witt, to help recover from the disaster. BP intends to attempt a “static kill” to permanently plug the well with cement on Tuesday.
Although he told reporters that BP remained fully committed to a long-term restoration of the tarnished environment, Dudley told reporters in Mississippi that it was “not too soon for a scale-back” in clean-up efforts: “You probably don’t need to see so many hazmat [protective] suits on the beaches.”
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There’s hardly a family in the Gulf region that does not have a member involved in the oil industry. My father was a tugboat captain who handled barges of crude oil for the sprawling refineries, my brother sells oilfield equipment and technology, my nephew captains offshore supply vessels, my great-nephew operates a giant crane currently picking Katrina-smashed equipment from the Gulf floor. Cousins manage oil leases.
So, even though I am not an oil worker, the industry is part of my environment, my history, and when I saw images of the April Deepwater Horizon explosion and fire, I thought at once, “Wait a minute. Something’s wrong. That rig is state-of-the-art, the size of a small factory, loaded with technology that rivals the space programme in complexity. Why is the fire so enormous?” And later, when the labyrinth of pipes and valves keeled over in a rumbling, hissing nimbus of flame, I was astounded, thinking, “Why didn’t the blowout preventer shut down the well?” And days later, when it was revealed that the device was not functioning, a dark spill began to spread in my soul, a burgeoning realisation that nothing could stop a runaway well 5,000ft below the Gulf’s surface. Nothing.
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Finance
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Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says he thinks the economy is having a modest recovery, but right now there’s a “pause” in that recovery, so it feels like a “quasi-recession.”
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ACROSS the United States, thousands of federally financed stimulus projects are under way, aimed at bolstering the economy and putting people to work. The results so far have not been spectacular.
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IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.
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IS it a blinding statement of the obvious to say that trust in the world’s banks has suffered lately? Indeed, just when you think you’re ready to move past the steady drumbeat of disconcerting revelations, something else crops up to test your faith.
[...]
Here’s yet another data point: the recent conclusion of a lawsuit filed by a unit of Grupo Televisa, the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, against its longtime lender, JPMorgan Chase.
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Sam and Charles Wyly have long cultivated an image as active philanthropists, funneling millions of dollars to arts groups, colleges, literacy programs and animal shelters.
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Before the recession, the number of people with a FICO score of less than 600 was under 15%.
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Thousands of Britons heading to Greece for their summer holiday last night risked becoming caught up in the chaos of a nationwide strike by protesting truck drivers that is threatening fuel, food and medical shortages across the country.
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The US recovery appears to be faltering after a slowdown in consumer spending dampened growth and fuelled fears of a double dip recession.
President Barack Obama’s hopes of a strong showing in November’s congressional elections took a blow as official figures revealed that the US economy grew at an annualised rate of 2.4% in the second quarter compared with 3.7% in the first three months of the year.
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The protests were prompted by a government announcement that monthly minimum wages for the country’s millions of garment workers would rise by about 80%. Union leaders say the raise is inadequate and does not match the high cost of living.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn’t sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested.
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A security researcher involved with the Wikileaks Web site was detained by U.S. agents at the border for three hours and questioned about the controversial whistleblower project as he entered the country on Thursday to attend a hacker conference, sources said on Saturday.
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The Protection of Information Bill not only threatens the work of journalists, but also undermines the ability of parliamentarians and elected officials to hold the state to account, Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes told Parliament on Thursday.
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Dilmurat Perhat, who lives in the UK, said his younger brother Dilshat, 29, was jailed in Xinjiang last week after a one-day trial. Two other men who ran websites were jailed for three and 10 years respectively, he added.
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The planned law has already provoked an outcry among journalists. It spawned this video, “no alla legge bavaglio” (No to the gag law). And it also prompted a “black-out” by the Italian press on 8 July organised by the press union, FNSI.
One of its members, Olivier Basille, said: “This is not just an attempt to gag bloggers and actually all journalists, but more widely it is about stopping the investigation of corruption and organised crime.”
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Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM
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Nleash will forcefully remove both the downgrade protection and the installed 2.1 OS, allowing the user to reinstall any desired older version. For instance, OS 1.1 can be installed in order to run third-party C and assembly software through Ndless 1.0 (which supports only OS 1.1).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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In 2007 Radiohead sent a shockwave through the music industry by allowing fans to download their new ‘self-released’ album ‘In Rainbows’ for whatever price they wanted to pay, including nothing. Fast-forward three years and the RIAA and IFPI are sending takedown notices to people who share that album online. What happened?
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Six months ago Aussie ISP iiNet celebrated following its legal victory against the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft. Now the pair are back in Federal Court for the appeal, where AFACT hopes to show that iiNet acted illegally when it refused to take action against customers who file-shared movies and TV shows using BitTorrent.
Google Chrome, Japan
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08.01.10
Posted in News Roundup at 1:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Applications
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This project is part of the work at Carnegie Mellon University’s speech group aimed at advancing the state of Speech Synthesis.
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Instructionals
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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A key element of mind map is tree which layouts shapes with text. I decided tree may be usefull not only for mind mapping, but for some other things. So I started working on TreeShape plugin. Plugin makes it possible to layout any KOffice shapes in tree structure and manage it.
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It seems as though there are as many Linux distributions as there are letters in the alphabet with which to name them. Certainly, there is a flavor to satisfy almost any palate. It wasn’t always this way, however. How did it happen? Why hasn’t the Linux world just standardized on a single distribution?
The beginning of the Linux distribution really started with Richard Stallman and his fledgling Free Software Foundation in the early 1980s. The GNU operating system was being developed, intending to re-implement a UNIX-like operating system as free software. Although many GNU tools enjoyed wide use, the project suffered various setbacks and delays in its hunt for a kernel. There was a lack of cooperation from some at Berkeley with using the BSD kernel, and there were licensing issues with Mach (Carnegie-Mellon University’s microkernel). Before these issues were resolved and the GNU Project was able to make headway building its own kernel, Hurd (another free kernel) became available for use.
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Reviews
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Sabayon on the whole is a very usable system. Not as slick as some of the bigger boys but certainly capable of handling itself in a scrap. Media support is a bit patchy but good enough and XBMC pulls it out of the bag and gives it a purpose and some edge.
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Killer Feature: Hard to find one really. Mepis is solid and the DVD runs nicely but the not wanting to boot from the hard drive aspect worries me that if it doesn’t work for me then its likely to not work somewhere else. Several nice touches like gadgets and widgets on the desktop but nothing that really stands out.
Final verdict on Mepis is that its …OK. It works for some and not others and has made me appreciate what KDE has to offer in terms of built in software. Not blown away but it looks nice and does most tasks reasonably well.
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Arch Linux looks promising. The installation is easy, the documentation is helpful, and the package manager interface is simple.
[...]
In summary, the helpfulness of the Arch docs is directly proportional to the brokenness of Arch packages. To me, Arch is yet another distribution inferior to Ubuntu.
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PCLinuxOS/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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So far it has been a smooth ride except for one annoying problem. I am not able to shut down my laptop.
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Mandriva enjoys the support of many mirrors for their repositories and the closest one to my location helped me achieve awesome speeds, beyond 10 MB/s. Sadly, there were quite a lot of times when that mirror didn’t work at all. As a simple workaround, you can always change the mirror to a more reliable one from Software Manager → Options → Media Manager → File → Add a specific media mirror.
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Verdict on Mandriva is that its the best non-Debian based system I have tried in these tests. Its got all the right ingredients to keep most people happy other than some support for DVDs or an easy way of getting them to work without hours of fiddling and downloading codecs.
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Debian Family
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth has apologised “unreservedly to all offended” for his “poor choice of language” during LinuxCon 2009 during which a comment made by the Ubuntu founder was deemed to be sexist by many members of the Linux community
The redress, given in the comment section of his blog, states: – “I apologize unreservedly to all offended by my poor choice of language on that or other occasion.”
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That’s right, Full Circle issue 39 is out! We’ve got a review of the iRobot iPad Android tablet, talk about virtualizing Fedora, virtual memory, new interviews, and more! (Oh, and we seem to have the recurring theme of ’13′ in our articles.)
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Flavours and Variants
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Over the past week I’ve been testing out a free operating system designed for netbooks called Jolicloud . I downloaded the installer from their website, went through a few prompts and within about 30 minutes it was up and running. The best part is, I was able to keep Windows on my netbook too. After installation, a prompt appears when I first turn my computer on asking me if I want to load Windows or Jolicloud. This made me feel safe, knowing that I could always go back to Windows if things didn’t work out.
The first thing I noticed was the simplicity. There’s very little clutter on the screen. The interface is similar to what you see on an iPhone, there are pages of app icons. You can click the “Add” button in the upper left corner to find more applications to add to your netbook. It’s almost like the App Store on an iPhone. Jolicloud is based off Linux so it runs pretty smooth and there are about 700 applications available for Jolicloud. This includes office applications that support Microsoft Office files, video players, music organizers, etc.
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Kubuntu 10.10 has finally got its application menu integration ready. The application menu, also called “Global Menu” is not same as the one found in UNE 10.10, but it is using the same infrastructure.
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Pinguy OS is a remastered Ubuntu with a lot of useful default applications – great for those who don’t like to do a lot of tweaking and want an OS that “just works”. Pinguy OS doesn’t rebrand Ubuntu, so you’ll have the same Plymouth theme, the Ubuntu logo for the menu and so on.
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Open source is at once a type of software licensing, a community model, an ideology, and a social movement. As a movement aiming not only to promote open source software within the software development community, but also to change the attitudes of commercial users, it can benefit from lessons learned by earlier social movements.
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Open source theory and practice is inherently interdisciplinary. Viewing the challenges faced by open source communities, businesses, and contributors through the lenses of different disciplines can yield novel solutions. This article reviews select lessons from the diverse fields of fashion, gaming, and scientometrics. It examines the way these other industries have addressed issues that are of relevance to the open source community and suggests ways to put these lessons to good use.
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Oracle
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BSD
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GhostBSD 1.5 is based on the FreeBSD live CD however because this release is a little larger it comes on as a live DVD. As of this release GhostBSD is completely installable by issuing a list of commands and pc-sysinstall. A file with instructions for installing GhostBSD appear on the desktop. Although this install method is a little bit tough to complete, Eric Turgeonhas stated “Now for the next 6 mount I gonna work on a graphic installer for 2.0.” You can find more in the official release announcement. Please keep in mind you can buy Free-BSD and PC-BSD in our cart.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Open source has been in the media for quite some time whether directly or indirectly. With ACTA leak and the ASCAP letter two big news items that affects open source, we decided to sit down with the Free Software Foundation and talk about these and other things related to the open source movement.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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It is almost “criminally irresponsible” to hoard academic knowledge in the digital age, according to a Canadian specialist in the field.
Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, also said that open educational resources (OERs) could help to reassert the academy’s role as a “leader and guardian of free and open enquiry”.
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As a closing thought, if we think of academic journals in the OA debate as oil in the climate change debate, we are only going to have less and less access to them as time goes on. Academic libraries cannot afford to subscribe to them all, and that is only going to get worse. In the same way that in 50, 100, 150 years time (whatever it may be) we will have no oil-based fuel to put in our cars, in 10, 15, 20 years time you may be even less likely than you are now to reach your desired audience by simply relying on the subscription base of a given journal. Rather than waiting to see if this happens, why not do something about it now?
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The Times Higher ran a piece on ceviche cooking edupunk Brian Lamb’s keynote at the recent JISC OER event in London. Brian makes his usual good points, but it was some of the comments that were revealing.
In particular, one that states “We should also have ‘open access’ at Tesco: I should just be able to take from their shelves what I want without paying.”
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Programming
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Rakudo Star is a useful and usable subset of Perl 6 you can use right now. It does not implement the complete Perl 6.0 specification, and it’s by no means the final release: it contains bugs and misfeatures, and it’s had very little optimization work for speed or memory.
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There’s a new mystery on the web today. In an otherwise boring video about “Google Lookup in Google Docs,” the search giant appears to have inadvertently revealed a new Google Docs product called “Punch.” So what on Earth is it?
The blog Google Operating System (which spotted the feature) has its guess: “Maybe Google Punch is a free-form document that lets you combine data from other documents, spreadsheets, presentations and forms.” ReadWriteWeb expands on that a bit for a similar guess: “Perhaps a Punch is a mix of functions and content intended for collaboration, more than for posting publishing like Google Pages is.” Both sound plausible, but we have another guess.
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Arm, the UK’s largest technology company by market value, declined to raise its full-year outlook in spite of beating market expectations with its first-half results.
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Science
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Queensland is allowing fundamentalist Christians to teach religious instruction classes in the public schools — and, as we might have predicted, they are teaching nonsense.
Firefox 4 Beta 2 – Web Tech Preview
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