• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

FotoInsight’s New Photo Paper Book Makes Book Bulge Disappear

Europe’s most popular photo book software is now also available for Linux and Mac OS.

There is Hope

I got out the laptop, booted up, the normal startup drum-beat played… and their son, who is certainly not more than 10 years old, glanced over and casually said “Oh, you have Ubuntu?”.

There is hope. Somewhere along the line, that wonderful boy has not been blindly indoctrinated to the Microsoft juggernaut. Hallelujah!

Desktop

• Let Their Eyes Be Opened…

  A place powered by Linux.

  There’s not a lot to tell about the process…a lot of heavy labor, younger knees than mine crawling under tables to connect cat 5 to the adjoining sockets…testing, adjusting, testing, replacing, testing…and ultimately…

  Success.

• Beware the Experts

  The Linux kernel and GNU utilities make a fantastic base to several distributions which serve many different purposes, desktops, servers, appliances, netbooks, firewalls, and several specialized tools for dedicated roles such as recovery, backup and diagnostics to name only a very few. Choosing the right tool for the right job may seem intimidating, yet a little research, experimentation and experience (or the experience of others) will often lead to the correct choice. Using the wrong tool for the job and then boviating about it helps no one and in the end may just show ignorance.

• Free At Last! Linux in the House!

  At $21.00 at the magazine rack, it is cheap insurance and quite frankly cheap in software terms. You can actually resurrect an older machine with Linux and really get your money’s worth out of it!

Server

• Fujitsu and Asianux to Deliver Advanced Linux-based Server Products

  Fujitsu, a leading provider of IT-based business solutions for the global marketplace, and Asianux Corporation Ltd., a leading Linux vendor, announced they will jointly deliver advanced Linux server products.

• Linux Software RAID – A Belt and a Pair of Suspenders

  There is an old phrase about wearing a belt and a pair of suspenders if you want to make sure your pants stay up (why haven’t plumbers figured that out?). The point of the phrase is that if you want to be sure that your plans will happen you should have a backup plan as well. In the case of file systems this is literally the truth. If you want to make sure you don’t lose any data, do backups as well as provide some other form of data protection. That something else for data protection is RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks).

• Making The Case For Free Software

  The company’s mission, according to its still operational web site, was to “build the world’s most energy-efficient computers.” According to press reports around the time of the company’s closure, SiCortex was unable to close on a new round of venture capital funding and simply ran out of money.

  For open source advocates, the most valuable aspect of SiCortex’s property is the “PathScale compiler suite,” which according to a blog post from Bergstrom at www.codestream.com, is “one of the highest performance compilers in the industry.” A compiler is software that translates source code, the computer language written by people, into language a computer understands. Specifically, the PathScale compiler helped software programmers develop and deploy software applications.

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation updates Kernel Development study

• Who writes Linux: Big Business

  The Linux Foundation has just released a new report on who writes Linux (PDF), and guess what? Linux isn’t written by lonely nerds hiding out in their parents’ basements. It’s written by people working for major companies — many of them businesses that you probably don’t associate with Linux.

• Linux: More contributors, more code

  The report reveals how it is coding the changes in the kernel and what companies are sponsoring the programmers who are making the changes – if any. And what is immediately clear is that Linux is much bigger than its namesake and creator, Linus Torvalds.

• Report: Linux developer base up 10 percent since 2008

  With over 1,000 developers actively working on the Linux kernel, representing some 200 different corporations, Linux is an exceptional example of the power of open-source communities, and also speaks to the value of groups like the Linux Foundation that help to shepherd it.

• KMS, GEM Comes To Linux Mobile Phone

  The Neo FreeRunner that was developed by the OpenMoko project and manufactured by FIC, now has kernel mode-setting support and GPU memory management via the Graphics Execution Manager. The Neo FreeRunner smart-phone has a S-Media Glamo 3362 graphics accelerator and an independent developer decided to write the necessary kernel DRM, libdrm, and xf86-video-glamo DDX driver to introduce this support.

• Linux dev community growing, 5 patches accepted every hour

  A new report published by the Linux Foundation provides insight into the growth of the Linux kernel development community. It reveals that the entire code base has grown by 2.7 million lines over the past year while an average of 5.45 patches are accepted every hour.

Applications

• Add Emerald for slick window decorations

  As stated earlier, Emerald is a theme-able window decorator. But Emerald takes window decorating one step further by also allowing for full-composite window decorations. By adding composite to the decoration Emerald can include such features as transparency and drop shadow. And Emerald does this without taking any more of a hit on your resources than a normal window manager. That is, assuming you have the hardware that supports compositing. The main issue is that your graphics chip must support 3D/Direct Rendering. If your hardware can support that, your hardware will work with Emerald. You will also need to have Compiz installed (this article will assume you have Compiz up and running).

• Convenient Linux terminal access with Yakuake

  Yakuake is a boon to anyone who uses the terminal frequently. After using this handy tool for a while you will wonder what you ever did without it!

• How to make Conky play nicely with KDE 4.3

• Pidgin 2.6.0–It’s About Time

  Well, by now most people probably realize that we’ve released Pidgin 2.6.0. It feels like this has been in the works forever, particularly these last couple weeks.

• OpenShot — Video Editing Made Simple

  Desktop Linux isn’t necessarily the first platform you’d think of going to for video editing. Despite that, there are several great projects that offer video editing functionality; things like PiTiVi, Cinelerra and Kino to name just a few.

• Get Cooking With These Open Source Recipe Management Apps

  Gourmet Recipe Manager – Collect and organize recipes with this software, then use it to automatically generate shopping lists from the menus you select. Gourmet Recipe Manager also tracks nutritional information, import recipes from other apps, and exports in several different formats.

K Desktop Environment

• PySide Brings LGPL Qt to Python

  The PySide team is pleased to announce the first public release of PySide: Python for Qt. PySide is a project providing an LGPL’d set of Python bindings for the Qt framework.

• digiKam digest – 2009-08-16

Distributions

• The Road to Beta 1 of 5.0

  I don’t know if everyone has seen this yet, but Shake0 has produced an awesome Sabayon 5.0 promo video. Be sure to check it out. I would love to see an artwork package that evolved around it.

• Linux Got Game!

  Depending upon your preferences, Supergamer Supreme can be totally awesome. It can be run from the live DVD with almost as good performance as when installed. Perhaps you don’t mind booting back and forth between systems, and as such the Firefox, MPlayer, and GIMP versions may not matter all that much. Even if you prefer to avoid lots of booting, are the older versions even an issue for you? Despite the drawbacks, Supergamer Supreme is still the best gaming distro available.

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora 12 Alpha To Bring Many Linux Desktop Improvements

    The first development release for Fedora 12 (codenamed Constantine), Alpha 1, was supposed to be released this week. However, Red Hat has pushed back its release to next week Tuesday. While there is this seven-day delay, an Alpha 1 RC1 ISO spin is available and we decided to provide a very early and brief look at the Fedora 12 release.

  • Campaign to get more folks to use Fedora

    I’ll keep the blog updated with the other steps that we take. If there are any changes needed in the poster (as per guidelines etc that I could have missed), please comment or email me at “ankursinha AT fedoraproject DOT org” . I still have 4-5 days to put these up.

  • FUDCon Toronto 2009.

    Today we announced FUDCon Toronto 2009, our North American event for this year. FUDCon, as always, is free and open for everyone to attend. This year some excellent contributors in Toronto stepped up to deliver a great location and some logistical support that will help us put on an awesome event.

  • Red Hat Compares Itself To Facebook or Wikipedia

    It’s a “dot” version upgrade, but it’s an important one. Details will be forthcoming on Sept. 1, but what can be revealed here is that RHEL 5.4 will include new virtualization capabilities that will enable the operating system to become, in effect, its own hypervisor within a data center structure.

  • Hilti Standardizes Global Mission-Critical Systems On Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SAP Solutions

    Hilti Corporation has migrated its critical systems running SAP applications, including SAP Business Suite, SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) and the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, from Tru64 UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS).

  • CentOS users remain faithful despite developer shakeup

    Plankers concurred. “The good thing is that because CentOS is just a re-labeled Red Hat Enterprise Linux it’s pretty easy to move to Red Hat’s offerings if CentOS goes under. I don’t think there’s any need to worry now, though.”

• Debian Family

  • New Ubuntu Installer Coming Soon

    Canonical is working hard these days to redesign the Ubuntu installer (also known as Ubiquity) into something a little more in tune with our times. We’ve already told you in our latest report on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Alpha 4 that Ubiquity has now a “Quit” button during all the installation steps, so you can quit the installer at any time. Moreover, the time zone selection items have been changed a little to reflect the region/zone only, and not the city.

  • Karmic Boot/GDM/Login Screen – Updated Design

    The GDM/Login Screen for Karmic Koala has received a slight update since my last post.

Devices/Embedded

• Garmin’s new nuvi 1690 and 1860: specs and more

  The Garmin Nuvi 1860 has a 4.8 inch WVGA display, a Linux Operating System, built in WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, along with this it has lane assist, a traffic receiver and text-to-speech.

• Drone takes wing with Linux PCs onboard

  Parvus Corporation has announced a successful test flight for the Aurora Excalibur, an unmanned attack drone using two Linux-based DuraCOR 820 embedded PCs. Offering autonomous vehicle management and flight control, the Excalibur allows operators to focus on mission objectives, according to the company.

• Fanless industrial PC has PCI slot

  Nexcom has introduced a fanless PC that runs Linux on Intel Celeron or Pentium CPUs. The NISE 3100e includes a PCI expansion slot, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, four serial ports, and CompactFlash or hard disk storage, the company says.

• Linux and my search for the perfect MP3 player

  I’m a huge music fan. I pretty much have music playing all the time, in some form. As such, I like my MP3 player. Like many music lovers, I became enamored with the concept of having my entire music library at my fingertips at any time, so the MP3 player as a concept really appealed to me when they began to appear with larger capacities several years ago.

• Phones

  • Spotify comes to Android

    A SPOTIFY CLIENT called Droidify has been released for the Android mobile phone operating system. But it’s not from the eponymous music streaming company.

  • ARM11 MID runs Android

    SMiT says the MID-560 includes the typical Android Linux/Java software stack, including a WebKit based browser and a Gmail client, stored on 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of available flash storage. There’s also a microSD expansion slot, the company adds.

• Sub-notebooks

  • First Look: Jolicloud Alpha 2c

    Bottom line, Jolicloud deserves all the attention that it’s getting right now. We don’t feel that the social component in its current state will be a very useful addition, but if the developers extend it so that it integrates with the desktop synchronization functions and other social networking websites it may just become a central feature. The all-around optimizations make this operating system a real alternative for netbook owners, as they work wonders even for those rather old first-generation devices that are already starting to appear as pieces of computer history to us.

  • Netbook runs Ubuntu

    Denver-based System76 is selling a netbook that includes preinstalled Ubuntu 9.04. The Starling includes a 10-inch display, the usual Intel Atom N270 CPU, a 160GB hard disk drive, and a six-cell battery, the company says.

  • Which netbook OS is right for you?

    Under Linux you can easily find and install new products. You don’t need to go searching for them yourself. Similarly, you can update every application as well as Linux itself from the one software update menu. Linux has no need for the multitude of “program x is going to check for updates now” run-on-startup memory wasters that plagues Microsoft Windows.

    Another reason you ought to consider Linux is its greater security. There is absolutely no need to run anti-virus software on Linux. It’s far more resistant to Internet nasties. Some Windows advocates will defend Microsoft’s vulnerabilities as a result of mass popularity making it a bigger target.

  • New Dell-ARM combo poised to take on Wintel netbooks?

    Dell takes on Microsoft’s assertion that Linux suffers from higher return rates on netbooks. The hardware vendor is exploring the possibility of building ARM-based smartbooks with Linux preinstalled.

Open Source Software: More Reasons It Is More Secure

That is why I’m so happy to see a new series of videos on Youtube by IngresCorp. These are short clips that deliver easy to understand messages.

OpenSourceWorld Report

Last week I took the 20-minute BART ride from the East Bay over to Moscone West in San Francisco to visit what was once known as LinuxWorld and is now OpenSourceWorld, Next Generation Data Center, and CloudWorld all rolled into one event. Like many others, having been to previous LinuxWorlds, I was curious to see how this re-branding and grouping of events would pan out. LinuxWorld had been getting quite the panning (no pun intended) over the last five years or so, so could the new event cut the mustard and reel back in its once committed group of sightseers?

MySQL

• Drizzle for Christmas – year-end-prediction for MySQL fork

  A production ready version of the MySQL fork Drizzle could be ready by the end of this year.

• Understanding the MySQL forks

  I put together the following diagram to explain what the origin of the current MySQL forks and deltas looks like…

Wikia

• Wikia up 20%+ in July – 6.5 million US uniques

  My view of Wikia is that we’re spreading the growth of free culture out of purely academic/research and pushing the boundaries of what is possible in new media and free licensing. Exciting stuff to see it really resonate with people…

  At the office they are celebrating with a trampoline!

• Wow, coming on the heels of the great news I got yesterday about our Comscore numbers…

Licensing

• Does Copyright Matter? Or, is the End of Dual-Licensing Near?

  Linux, by contrast, is such a maze of copyrights that there have been threads on whether relicensing would be even theoretically possible given the fact that some of the original copyright holders were deceased. Unlike MySQL – or, as Anderson points out, EveryBlock – the copyrights to the code that makes up Linux is held in commons, such that no single entity – not even the majority holder, Linus – can make exclusive use of it. SuSE, for example, can’t introduce its own proprietary extensions to differentiate itself from Red Hat. Oracle can’t introduce a compatibility layer that only works with its distribution of the kernel. And so on. The rights enjoyed by one are the rights enjoyed by all, because the copyright doesn’t belong to any single party.

• 7-Zip 9.06 Beta

  7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio and is open source software. Most of the source code is under the GNU LGPL license.

• The Software Freedom Law Show: Episode 0×14: Considerations on GPL Business Models

  Bradley and Karen discuss a few different types of for-profit business models that are common around codebases licensed under the GPL.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Interception law reforms come under attack

  But Nic Suzor, an associate law lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology and board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA), said the proposed amendments are “far too broad” and “pretty scary” when it came to the privacy of internet users in Australia.

• Is A Blogger Strike The Best Way To Fight Back Against Laws Designed To Quiet Bloggers?

  If anything it would seem to do the opposite. By silencing themselves, and not talking about the issues, it keeps those issues out of the discussion for whatever period of time. Instead of silencing, why not do what the bloggers do best and talk about the problems of the law so that many more people are aware of them?

Intellectual Monopolies

• Sirius XM Passes RIAA Tax On To Consumers

  Not quite sure how I missed this earlier (update: oops, turns out we didn’t miss it — so consider this an encore presentation), but Bret alerts us to the news that with the ever increasing royalty rates pushed by the RIAA in the form of its “spin-off” Sound Exchange, and codified by the Copyright Royalty Board (for whom I still do not understand how anyone can justify its existence), that Sirius XM has simply added a $2 RIAA tax to everyone’s monthly bills to help pay for the new performance royalties. Yup, because the RIAA and its members haven’t been able to come up with a business model that works

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The Curse of the Living Windows

Fortunately, I had spent the last few months learning enough about Linux to begin my run for freedom from Windows already, so Ubuntu 9.04 was running smoothly on one of my two computers by the time DSL came to town. I knew that all I needed or wanted from an ISP was a connection to the internet — any other services were of no interest.

Of course, since this was a Windows ISP, there was nothing in their literature that suggested how to carry out the actual connection process other than “install the program from the CD, we will assimilate your computer and do the rest.” I’ve learned to expect that, having endured the Driver Dramas of winmodem/linmodem on dialup, but since this is ADSL, I did need to find the magic numbers like IP address, subnet mask, gateway, and DNS server. That meant I had to call Technical Support.

Linux vendor revenue $1 billion by 2012? Or is it $49 billion+ ?

Red Hat’s CEO Jim Whitehurst has said that it is his goal to advance Red Hat to be the first open source vendor to hit $1 billion in revenues. Red Hat is well on its way, but Red Hat is now making an increasing amount of its revenues from JBoss middleware running on Linux.

Storage Basics: Clustered File Systems

Generally speaking, shared disk setups have a single point of failure: the storage system. This is not always true, however, as “shared disk” is a confusing term with today’s technology. SANs, NAS appliances and commodity hardware running Linux can all replicate the underlying disks in real time to another storage node, which provides a simulated shared disk environment. Since the underlying block devices are replicated, the nodes have access to the same data and both run a clustered file system, but this replication breaks the traditional shared disk definition.

Applications

• Bordeaux 1.8.2 for Linux Released

  Supported Applications/Games:

  * Microsoft Office 2007
  * Microsoft Office 2003
  * Microsoft Office 2000
  * Microsoft Office 97
  * Microsoft Office Visio 2003
  * Microsoft Office Project 2003
  * Adobe Photoshop 6
  * Adobe Image Ready 3
  * Adobe Photoshop 7
  * Adobe Image Ready 7
  * Adobe Photoshop CS
  * Adobe Photoshop CS2
  * Microsoft Internet Explorer 6
  * Steam and Steam based Games
  * Apple QuickTime 6.5.2 Player
  * IrfaView 4.25 (Image files only)
  * Winetricks support

• A Quick and Easy Guide to KDE KIO slaves

  Here are some other useful KIO slaves:

  * tar:/, zip:/, gzip:/, bzip:/, bzip2:/ all allow you to navigate into archives like they are folders.
  * fonts:/ shows installed fonts
  * cgi:/ runs cgi programs without a webserver
  * finger:/ provides information about a host name where “finger” is enabled.
  * settings:/ is similar to applications:/ providing an alternative method of accessing system settings.
  * smb:/ accesses and browses Samba shares. This is also available through remote:/
  * sftp:/ is a secure file transfer over SSH.
  * desktop:/ shows the files inside the desktop folder.
  * trash:/ shows the contents of the trash can.

• Open source Dreamweaver alternatives

  We did show you before how to install dreamweaver on Linux using wine , and as we believe that there are good open source alternative for this product , we will try to show you bellow some of the open source Dreamweaver alternatives for Linux.

Distributions

• Rpath to Foresight Linux: Change to Fedora!

  In order for Foresight Linux to follow development trends more quickly, Michael Johnson (the founder of rPath and former head of Fedora) has proposed switching from rPath Linux to Fedora.

Devices/Embedded

• Does Dell’s Primordial Smartphone Have an Android Inside?

  This followed China Mobile’s announcement in Beijing on Monday of its new mobile app store.

  “We are developing devices for China Mobile, but we haven’t named them yet,” Dell spokesperson Matt Paretta told LinuxInsider.

Korona Brings KDE 4.3 To OpenSolaris

While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps. Fortunately, for KDE fans, there is now the Korona distribution, which brings KDE 4.3 as the default desktop environment to an OpenSolaris stack.

Firefox

• Mindcraft 2.0: Firefox Comes of Age

  When Firefox had only a few percent market share, it could be dismissed as a minority browser for a few enthusiasts. Now that it holds over 50% in some countries, particularly in Europe, it can’t be written off so easily. The fact that Microsoft has paid for these reports shows that Firefox has come of age as a serious rival to Internet Explorer that might even wrench the browser crown from the latter’s grasp in the not-too-distant future.

• Calling All Volunteers – Mozilla Service Week needs YOU!

  Mozilla Service Week is coming up in just one month – September 14 to 21, 2009! The driving force behind service week is our strong belief that everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a great experience when they’re online. You can have a hand in helping organizations and people all over the world experience the joy of using the Web too!

Business

• Open-Xchange Plans First Partner Summit

  Sounds promising. But for Open-Xchange to broaden its appeal, the company will need to effectively position itself against Microsoft’s emerging Business Productivity Online Suite (which includes Exchange Online) plus a range of successful Exchange SaaS specialists — including Azaleos, Intermedia, and mindSHIFT’s groupSPARK business.

Government

• Digital Britain: Less a Policy, More a Typo

  While the digital revolution thunders along at a giddy rate in the real world, UK politicians prove to be all mouth and no trousers. Despite the rhetoric of making Britain a leader in digital content, the reality is the government just doesn’t understand that this isn’t business as usual, and that something has changed fundamentally, and requires a fundamentally different approach, not just some fine-tuning of old ideas.

• HU: “Hungary should set up a open source competence centre”

  The Hungarian government should create an open source competence centre, writes the Hungarian Information Society (ITTK), a pressure group, in its annual report, published on 7 May.

  The group urges the government to increase its awareness of this type of software. “The government should is advised to make ODF an official standard in all branches of government.”

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Venezuela adopts censorship

  Venezuela has adopted a law censoring all newsmedia, prohibiting publication of anything that could encourage hatred or aggression, or even “indiscipline”, among children. It also prohibits anything that “deforms the language” or attacks “healthy values, good customs or public health”.

• Comcast Fights FCC Net Neutrality Order

  The case is important because other broadband ISPs have privately feared the FCC order could hold jurisdiction over them as well.

ID Cards

• How 10 digits will end privacy as we know it

  A study of 1990 U.S. Census data revealed that 87 percent of the people in the United States were uniquely identifiable with just three pieces of information (PDF): five-digit ZIP code, gender, and date of birth. Internet surfers today spew considerably more information than that.

• DNA Database Doomed: It Works Too Well

  This is something I’ve been saying (without proof, admittedly) for a while: the UK’s insane DNA database is doomed not because it doesn’t work well, but because it works *too* well in a sense – in that it lets you frame anybody with perfect efficiency…

Intellectual Monopolies

• Since When Is Sharing So Bad?

  Jerry Leichter writes “We’re all taught to share as kids, and sharing is a fundamental aspect of human societies. But sharing is also “anti-market” – at least as many sellers see it. I have something – a piece of music, a lawnmower – that you need. If I share with you, we both come out ahead – but if instead you buy one for yourself, the seller and manufacturer comes out ahead…”

• Myth Debunking: Fans Just Want Everything For Free

  This is a myth. It’s a popular myth, and I’m quite sure that Sheffner and lots of folks on both sides of the debate think its entirely accurate. But it’s a myth. The nature of a good economic transaction is one in which both parties are better off after the exchange. That means the people “paying” don’t mind paying. They’re happy to pay because they believe that what they have received is better than the cost it took to acquire it. But basic economics plays into the situation here: if the same thing can be made available by others in a better way, it’s only natural for people to ask why they should have to pay.

• Police banned from listening to the radio

  POLICE officers in Hampshire have been banned from listening to the radio in their offices because they’re breaking the law.

  [...]

  Dep Chief Con Cole broke the news to staff in an email after other forces, in particular Wiltshire, were approached by the Performing Right Society who demand a ‘substantial’ licence fee for public broadcasts.

• P2P Banned In Antarctica?

  We know that there’s been an ongoing effort by entertainment industry lobbyists to convince politicians (and others) that file sharing and P2P apps are somehow to blame for stupid government staffers accidentally leaking files via those programs. Apparently the propaganda campaign has worked in at least one area: employees of the United States Antarctic Program (USAP) were sent an alert that they need to stop using all P2P programs.

• The Pain in Spain Falls Mainly in the Plan

  in January 2010, Spain will take over the Presidency of the European Community. Spanish Government has already announced that one of their flagships will be reinforcing the control of the Internet and criminalizing the sharing culture in the digital environment. The consequences of those decisions will be noticed in the rest of the world.

  This is the first I’ve heard of this: bad news if true. Anyone have any more details?

• Radiohead Leak Their New Track To BitTorrent

  During the last few days a new Radiohead song was mysteriously released onto the Internet. The track is called “These Are My Twisted Words” and until today it was unclear where it had come from. Now, thanks to a post on the band’s blog, it seems the boys could’ve had it planned all along, as they are now linking to the song on Mininova.

• Of Mephistopheles and Poodles

  I was always under the impression that Lord Mandelson was dark, Machiavellian and very sharp; apparently not:

  Lord Mandelson launched a crackdown on internet piracy just days after meeting a leading Hollywood critic of illegal file sharing.