03.16.09

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Fear and loathing in Holland

  With “Linux’s dirty little secret: Uninstall” professional journalism has reached another, unprecedented low. Frequent readers of my blog know I’ve exposed and criticized IT journalists and editors for years. I’m a customer and I expect nothing less than high quality articles of knowledgeable professionals. For this, I’ve always liked German magazines, which I consider to be the best in the world. Nothing simply compares to “iX”, “c’t” or “Linux Magazine”. It’s sound stuff of people who know their thing and are not afraid to research it. I’ve learned a lot of neat things reading their work. Most of the articles are signed with the initials of the writer. These guys take pride in their work and are not out to become pop stars.

  [...]

  It is clear that Mr. ‘newbie’ Ramel has a Windows-centric view on the world. To him, the only way to set up a home network is to use SMB/CIFS, you know that proprietary Microsoft framework that kept Samba developers busy for years until a billion dollar fine from the European Union forced Microsoft to open up. Next time, try NFS and CUPS for a change. BTW, Mr. Ramel hates Apple computers as well. You really have to read his interesting article with all those compelling arguments. His love for Windows XP is.. well, touching.

• Cloudera floats commercial Hadoop distro

  The analogy with Linux is plain enough: They want something akin to the hardened and slow-changing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, not the Fedora development release.

• Cloudera Lands $5 Million in Series A Financing; Unveils Hadoop-centric Distribution

  Last October, Sam introduced us to Cloudera, a company founded by highly-decorated industry veterans hoping to bring Hadoop’s data processing power to a variety of businesses. Though Cloudera came into existence just last summer, it has already closed a $5 million round of Series A funding led by Accel Partners.

• Give a presentation? Use a LiveCD!

  Güindous = esoterism, GNU/Linux = determinism.

  Come on…. think about it… I was able to do the whole thing in 10 minutes…. I left the computer as it was before I had a finger on it…. the other guy? he had to install a whole operating system beforehand in order to see a dhcp service working. Does it even make sense at all?

• What have the black boxes wrought

  Use of Microsoft products and sloppy system maintenance are both pervasive enough that similar incidents are likely happening right now elsewhere, somewhere near you too. The news reports about the Norwegian police force’s IT problems contained one item that was particularly shocking to IT types like me…

• The Linux Stimulus Package

  I expect to see corporate tax breaks for those who:

  1. Implement Green Technology.
  2. Use Open Source Software.
  3. Give Something Back to the Open Source Community.
  4. Continue to Innovate.
  5. Create New Jobs.

  [...]

  What doesn’t stimulate the economy?

  1. Offshore Outsourcing.
  2. Giving More Money to Those Who’ve Wasted it Already.
  3. Providing Tax Breaks to Those Who Aren’t Paying Taxes.
  4. Rewarding Greed.

• Essential Linux tools for the PC technician

  Here are more good reasons why a bootable Linux CD can really save your bacon including indispensable tools you must have.

• Dell Inspiron Mini 12 notebook-not-netbook

  Mainly its a question of storage. While the Mini 9 only came with SSD storage, in either 4, 8 or 16GB flavours, the Mini 12 only comes with an HDD, either 40GB or 80GB, respectively included on the Linux – Ubuntu 8.04 – and Windows XP varieties of the netbook.

• Some personal thoughts about Ubuntu and Linux

  I’m currently using Ubuntu 7.10, I started with 7.04. I have briefly tried also OpenSUSE (with both KDE and Gnome), Fedora, Linux Mint, Xubuntu (the XFCE edition of Ubuntu), Fluxbuntu, Mandriva and I installed almost correctly Slackware (I screwed the network configuration few times and then I got tired and decided that maybe some other time).

• Guest article: Ubuntu Linux on Dell laptops

  The laptop market is flooded with Windows operating systems. As most PCs and Laptops available are pre-built, most open-source customers are getting a hard time in getting a nice and balanced laptop, with pre-installed Linux.

  Dell has come up with a line of laptops offering factory installed Linux along with set of drivers and applications. These laptops are from the Dell’s elite XPS line-up. The two models which come with pre-installed Ubuntu are the Dell XPS M1530n and Dell XPS M1330n.

• Reviewed and rated: the best Linux newsreaders

  Ah, Usenet newsgroups… Online communication and file sharing for the masses, still equal today to what it was before the advent of blogs, instant messaging and P2P networks: a fascinating universe with its own culture, from emoticons to killfiles and Godwin’s law.

• eOn Communications Corp. Reports Operating Results (10-Q)

  eOn Communications Corporation designs develops and markets next-generation Linux-based communications servers and software that integrate and manage voice e-mail and Internet communications for customer contactcenters and general business applications.

• NoMachine and Leostream Collaborate to Deliver Linux Virtual Desktops on Demand

  NoMachine, award-winning provider of remote desktop and application delivery software, and Leostream™ Corporation, a leading developer of virtual hosted desktop software, today announced a partnership that will fully support and integrate NoMachine’s NX protocol into the Leostream Connection Broker. This combined solution will allow enterprises to easily deploy and manage Linux virtual desktops within their IT environments.

• LogMeIn Linux support coming this year

  Hosted computer access and management application LogMeIn is planning to support Linux “this year” in response to growing demand for the platform.

  LogMeIn supports Windows, Mac OS X and the Windows, Symbian and Blackberry mobile operating systems and works by installing a temporary agent on the client device allowing it to be administered via a hosted Web portal.

• Games

  • Linux On The Playstation 3

    The PlayStation 3 is capable of running Linux as well as other operating systems if installed on the console’s hard drive. Because it’s so powerful yet so cheap with Linux installed, it’s actually become somewhat of a favored research tool in academia. Many distributions are compatible with the console, including Yellow Dog Linux, Debian, Fedora 8, Gentoo, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.

  • Wormux 0.8.3 released

    Production cycle for this version was not the usual one (stabilization of development version before official release). In fact, Wormux 0.8.3 corresponds to version 0.8.2 enhanced with some backports of the modifications done on the development version.

• Linux Foundation

  • Linux gains social networking hub

    The Linux Foundation has taken over hosting and content for the linux.com domain from SourceForge Inc with the aim of producing a dynamic web 2.0 site that is high on collaboration and utility. Potential ideas touted so far include a Linux AppStore, Digg-like news aggregation and location-based support.

  • Linux.com to Bring “Social Web” To Linux Geeks?

    If you care about Linux in anyway, you probably heard that The Linux Foundation has bought Linux.com from Sourceforge. The domain is in the forefront in representing Linux and it’s community, and The Linux Foundation has promised us to bring newer and fresher ideas to a domain that is used to give us Linux related articles only.

  • The seven best Linux Foundation contest videos

    The winning designer will get a free trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation Japan Linux Symposium in October 2009. The Linux Foundation doesn’t have the money for a major, or for that matter even a minor, television advertising campaign. But, at the very least, the winning ad will get some news and online exposure for both the winner and Linux.

• Weekly

  • Weekly Distribution Release Roundup for March 9-15

    Time for our weekly distro release roundup. We have another slew of Ubuntu-based alpha releases and numerous other new distro releases.

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 37

  • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 133

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #133 for the week March 8th – March 14th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Jaunty Jackalope Alpha 6 released, Ubuntu Testing Day: Notify-OSD, MOTU Council News, Hug Day: March 19th, Ubuntu Florida Rocks Florida Linux Show, gmail filters for bug email, Inside Launchpad AJAX sprint, Ubuntu Forums Beginners Team, Ubuntu Forums Interview: Connor Imes, Canonical QA Desktop Automation Sprint, Ubuntu Women project status, Ubuntu Drupal 6.2.0 released, Ubuntu Podcast #21, Server Team Meeting Minutes, US Teams Meeting Minutes, and much, much more!

  • FLOSS Weekly 60: BOINC

    Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte

    BOINC, The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, a middleware system for volunteer grid computing.

• Distributions

  • Linux Review 11: Arch Linux

    After 11 successful looks at Linux, I think I may have found my favorite…

    Arch Linux is a Linux distribution striving to Keep it simple. My opinions on this? Its great. Arch is lightweight and you can do anything in relation to Desktop Managers and configuration. I installed it on my Eee PC 904HA, and had similar results to Fedora. Sound from the headphone output is full of static, but I think that might be a hardware problem. Wireless basically worked out of box. Even with the core install, essentials to a laptop configuration were working. I went from there, installing and configuring X.org, GDM, Gnome, XFCE, and getting programs like Firefox, Pidgin, and OpenOffice.org. What I got out of doing this all by hand was a fast, slim system with only the essentials.

    [...]

    Arch is a nice Linux distribution. It is lightweight and fast. It works great, once you have it configured properly. It gives you flexibility. You only download things you need. I have to say, with all of these things together in one distribution, it is my favorite. I have to give it a 5/5. I think this will be my distribution of choice for a while. Until something similar to arch comes along with a better mixture of performance and features, Arch will be my favorite. For now, I will stop distribution hopping and stay with Arch.

  • Popularity VS Usability

    I am just waiting to find the ones that aren’t. There are a lot of Distros out there, and quite a few “popular” ones.

    When I find the “popular’ ones that don’t sacrifice usability for popularity , I promise to feature them prominently here.

    Some come close. Some come very close, in that some do many things to inhibit usability and others only sacrifice a few.

    PCLinuxOS comes to mind as very very close, as close as a Mandriva base can get to it anyway.

  • PCLinuxOS 2009.1 – a worthy successor

    It’s been two years now since Texstar and his Ripper Gang released their most successful distro. The 2007 made it to the number one spot on Distrowatch, and although it is based on a rolling model and shouldn’t need a new distribution release, the connotation with the number 2007 made newcomers skip that ‘old’ distro in favor of newer ones. So it was time to release a rejuvenated PCLinuxOS.

• Red Hat

  • Red Hat and Cisco Deliver Enterprise Linux and Virtualization for New Unified Computing Solution

    Red Hat and Cisco will collaborate to deliver joint global sales and services as well as customer engagement, and to develop deployment and enablement tools for customers.

• Ubuntu

  • Qimo does it right

    For now I give a wholehearted, giant, cartoon-sized thumbs-up to Qimo, for keeping very small computer users happy, and keeping some otherwise outdated machines in circulation. And for giving me an idea or two of what to do with this K6-2.

  • Interesting New Features in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

    I took a look at the Alpha6 and these are the noticible differences to 8.10.

    New login screen

• Devices/Embedded

  • SheevaPlug: the NSLU2 killer

    I received a SheevaPlug this week, an intriguing device that packs incredible power and functionality into a tiny package. As many of you know, I’ve been doing a lot of work on Debian for the Linksys NSLU2 in the last few years. The NSLU2 is a key reason why ARM has become the third most popular architecture in Debian (after 32 and 64 bit x86), and I believe a main reason is that the NSLU2 is so incredibly cheap. At a price under $100, most people don’t think too long and simply buy a device and do something cool with it.

  • Linux on a Gumstick — A Tour of the Gumstix Overo

    When I first came across Gumstix, my jaw dropped. Gumstix are fully functional computer motherboards, the size of a gumstick or smaller, that run Linux. The latest in the Gumstix line, the Overo Earth, pushes the boundaries of ultra small computers — and kicks some serious butt doing it.

    [...]

    The Overo comes with the Enlightenment Window Manager. Attach a mouse, and you now have a Linux box for your TV.

  • Actel Announces SoftConsole Version 2.2 – Free Embedded Software Development Environment

    Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) today announced the availability of SoftConsole version 2.2, the next-generation free development environment for embedded design.

  • SYSGO celebrates 10th anniversary of ELinOS™ Industrial Grade Linux with new 5.0 major release

    SYSGO, leading supplier of software solutions for the world’s most demanding safety and security applications, announces the release of ELinOS 5.0, the most widely used embedded Linux commercial product in Europe for 10 years. This new major version of Industrial Grade Linux brings to Linux developers a large range of new functionality and improvements such as a new version of the Eclipse™-based IDE CODEO, new kernel 2.6.27 support, more than 2000 precompiled applications and libraries, and the just released support of Adobe Flash Lite.

  • Embedded Linux distro rolls in verticals

    Wind River is shipping version 3.0 of its commercial embedded Linux distribution, which now integrates vertical distributions, including networking. Wind River Linux 3.0 upgrades to kernel 2.6.27 and GCC 4.3, speeds boot-time, adds 250 applications, upgrades real-time and multi-core support, and launches a Kernel-based Virtualization Machine (KVM), says the company.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • First look: hands-on with the Kogan Agora Netbook Pro

      Kogan has chosen to release the Agora Netbook Pro with gOS, which is based on the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. It comes with Google applications, as well as OpenOffice, Skype and Pidgin (an instant messaging program). It’s very easy to use and installing more applications will also be easy once you get online.

      [...]

      From what we’ve seen, the Kogan Agora Netbook Pro is destined to be one of the best value 10.2in netbooks on the market. If you want to spend even less than the $539 asking price for the Pro,

    • Ubuntu Linux 9.04 ported to Nokia’s Internet Tablets

      The Nokia Internet Tablet (NOK) can use a number of operating systems from Windows to Cupcake, but if you are bored with them, you could always try out Ubuntu Linux 9.04. This new OS is now ready to port over to Nokia’s N8×0 family of handhelds, the N800 and N810.

Free Software/Open Source

• 50 Successful Open Source Projects That Are Changing Medicine

  Open source healthcare is forging forward quickly on the Internet. But, fast developments often produce many failures. But, many medicinal open source projects that have gained success development. This success shows that open source alone is not the solitary factor in development. Instead, look to great management, public relations, marketing and a sound program that stands up under the scrutiny of a growing number of peer users and, often, patients.

• Selling open source to the powers-that-be

  And thereafter there would be a snowball effect – more take up would mean that there was a demand for more people who were familiar with open source software which would, in turn, lead to the need for more development to cater to future needs.

• March 2009 Web Server Survey

  In the March 2009 survey, we received responses from 224,749,695 sites. This has brought the total up by more than 9 million sites, with QQ and Microsoft making the most significant contributions. Apache remains in the lead with a total of 104 million sites, while Microsoft-IIS’s gain of 3.3 million sites (mostly consisting of new Windows Live blogs) brings its total up to 66 million.

  After storming into the survey last month, this month sees QQ gain a further 8.9 million sites. QQ now hosts nearly 29 million Qzone sites under the qzone.qq.com domain, all of which are served by its own QZHTTP server. Little is known about this server, although people have noticed a similarity that suggests QZHTTP may be a customised version of thttpd.

• FSF/GNU

  • Stallman: Free software Is Not About Saving Money

    Companies turning to open source in the recession should know that free software is about much more, according to the GNU founder

    Companies that turn to free or open source software during the downturn to save money may miss the whole point of non-proprietary code, according to free software advocate Richard Stallman.

• Releases

  • GTK+ 2.16.0 arrives

    The GTK+ Project team have released version 2.16.0 of GTK+, which includes some new functionality and several changes. GTK+ (GNU Image Manipulation Program Toolkit +), part of the GNU Project, was originally developed for GIMP and is now used to build the GNOME desktop.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 3.1(soon 3.5) beta 3 released

    As with the last Firefox 3.1 beta, there’s improvements to the private browsing mode, the performance has increased, pages render faster, pages with JavaScript code run much faster, with the new Tracemonkey engine.

  • Mozilla Survey: What makes a good developer platform?

    The survey contains a total of seven questions. The Mozilla team want to know which platforms developers have previously developed applications for and which platforms are the best in terms of community, documentation and ease of use. They also want to know what can be done to help potential extension developers to create the “Next Great Extension.”

• OpenOffice.org

  • Countdown to 50 million

    Those of you who keep an eye on the OpenOffice.org downloads counter on the Marketing Planet will have noticed it creeping towards the 50 million mark (my guess is that it will reach the magic number early in the week beginning 23rd March). This is an extraordinary number of downloads since OpenOffice.org 3.0 was launched last October – and it only measures one of the channels from which users obtain OpenOffice.org (see the FAQ for more details).

  • Cross Compiling OOo for ARM

    some of you may have noticed that ARM is en vogue, though analysts deeply disagree over it’s chances e.g. in the netbook market.

• Licensing

  • Get Things Done With Thinking Rock

    source app for implementing the GTD system. Licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), it works on Linux, Windows, and Mac — perfect if you run different operating systems at work and home.

  • Google Opens JaikuEngine, Fanning the Flames of Open Micro-Blogging

    ReadWriteWeb directs our attention to an announcement posted on Jaiku’s Jaikido blog stating that Jaiku is now running on Google’s App Engine, and that its code base, now known as JaikuEngine, has been open sourced under the Apache license 2.0.

  • Jaiku to become JaikuEngine

    The Jaiku developers have announced that Jaiku is now being served from the Google App Engine, which is the first step at making it “a federated, open source microblogging platform.” The customisable platform is a part of Google and is maintained by volunteer Google engineers in their spare time.

• Programming

  • Get a Dose of Semantics: Open Source Contributors Wanted for EU Project

    The EU-funded IKS Project invites FOSS companies and projects to take part in building a software stack for knowledge management that is Open Source.

    IKS is funded with 6.5 million Euros by the European Union and 2 million Euros are being invested by the consortium partners which makes up for an overall budget of 8.5 millions. The project will run for 4 years.

Leftovers

• Bandwidth and Service Limits Proposed to Curb Illegal Downloads

  The paper stresses that the DRA wouldn’t just be setup to tackle illegal broadband ISP file sharing (P2P), it would also be a vision for facilitating a change of approach as to how content is provided, packaged and sold to consumers. That means things such as helping legal music download channels to flourish alongside ISPs.

  Sadly the more complicated issues, such as how you can reliably and accurately identify illegal downloader’s on mass without being caught out by fake, redirected and or spoofed IPs and encryption isn’t really touched on.

• Copyrights

  • Creative Destruction and Copyright

    the newspaper industry is in the same death spiral as the recording industry, without the lawbreaking that’s commonly blamed for the recording industry’s troubles. And it seems to me that this poses a philosophical challenge to DeLong’s theory that the problem is a lack of respect for “property rights.” The decline of the newspapers is clearly a story of technological progress producing increased competition and entrepreneurship—precisely the sort of thing libertarians normally celebrate. The news business has gotten far more competitive over the last decade, and we’re now seeing a normal shake-out where the least efficient firms go out of business.

    I think the fact that this is happening in an industry without a piracy problem should give us second thoughts about blaming the decline of other copyright industries on BitTorrent. The newspaper example suggests that even if we could completely shut down peer-to-peer networks, we should still expect the recording industry to decline over time as consumers gravitate toward more efficient and convenient sources of music. Piracy obviously accelerates the process, but the underlying problem is simply this: the recording industry’s core competence, pressing 1s and 0s on plastic disks and shipping them to retail stores, is rapidly becoming pointless, just as the newspaper industry’s core competence of pressing ink on newsprint and dropping them on doorsteps is becoming obsolete. Not surprisingly, when a technology becomes obsolete, firms who specialize in exploiting that technology go out of business.

  • Terry McBride: Songs Are Not Copyright. Songs Are Emotions

    Last year we wrote about a fascinating interview with Terry McBride, the CEO of Nettwerk Music, a Canadian record label that has proven to be quite innovative with its business models (and quite successful).

    [...]

    This is the blame game and it’s missing the point. The ISPs haven’t “gotten away with murder.” They’ve simply put in place a reasonable business model based on fundamental economics — and there’s nothing stopping plenty of others in the music business from doing the same. Demanding those who have figured out how to make money share with those who haven’t isn’t the answer either. There are business models that work just fine for those creating the music that don’t require demanding anyone else share their profits. You just focus on coming up with real scarcities that give people or companies real reasons to buy and there are tons of business models that work.

  • If Your Business Model Revolves Around Taking Some Feature Away From People, You’re Doing It Wrong

    I’m always amazed when companies think that they can take features away from users and then charge more for re-accessing those features. Taking features away from people to charge them for them almost never works. It just pisses off people who quickly go looking for alternatives.