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03.16.12

Links 16/3/2012: GNOME 3.4 Beta 2, Cinnamon 1.4

Posted in News Roundup at 4:27 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • 65 Open Source Replacements for Security Software
  • A golden age of open source innovation?

    Open source’s ability to innovate has been challenged many times. But Glyn Moody argues that open source innovation is actually going from strength to strength, creating new opportunities to deliver cheap computing to people corporations would not normally consider.

  • Computer Aided Design the FLOSS way: An Interview with Franz Reiter, lead developer of gCAD3D

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Cranks Firefox to 11
      • Thunderbird 11 has been released! PPA Ubuntu 11.10 & LinuxMint
      • Mozilla struggles with Firefox for Windows 8 Metro development

        Mozilla’s Brian Bondy said the outfit did some preliminary work on getting a basic application working in Metro. However Bondy complained of poor documentation on Microsoft’s part and a general lack of public knowledge, saying, “To get started we read the MSDN whitepaper entitled Developing a Metro style enabled Desktop Browser. This document lacked quite a bit of information though so a lot of registry hacking was needed to get things working. Jim [Mathies] and I documented a lot of this missing information….”

      • Now You Can Chat From Thunderbird

        Thunderbird, the popular email client, has added chat support for future versions. The feature was introduced in the daily builds of Thunderbird. I am running 14.x series on Kubuntu.

      • Silent Updates Are Coming to Firefox in Version 12

        Back in December, we covered a blog post from Ehsan Akhgari, a Firefox engineer, which discussed work on what could eventually become an essential part of delivering silent updates to the Firefox browser. If you’re a Google Chrome user, you may already appreciate the fact that updates to the browser happen in the background, and now, according to a post on the Mozilla Hacks blog, background updates are coming to Firefox. Not every user is going to be happy with the news, though.

  • SaaS

    • Hadoop Training Is Easy to Get, Online or Offline
    • Is the OpenStack Foundation All about Big Money?

      An interesting argument and McKenty knows alot more OpenStack than I do. That said, I think that McKenty is wrong.

      You need to look no farther than the Apache Software Foundation to see how this dual system of money and meritocracy can work. The Apache Software Foundation takes big money from vendors like Microsoft, who yield little influence on development. Development is managed by The Apache Way of meritocracy and it works. The Eclipse Foundation has a similar model that has also worked well.

      So yes, you can have big money and a meritocracy for developers too.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Brand Confusion

      I cannot pinpoint accurately what caused to inflate the whole issue, but it seems that some at Apache OpenOffice (incubating) would like to stress that there are the rightful continuation of the now defunct OpenOffice.org project, to the point of showing outright hostility to LibreOffice. They base their claims upon the following elements:

      * they own the OpenOffice.org domain name
      * they own the trademark of OpenOffice.org
      * they must be the right heirs of OpenOffice.org since the Apache incubating project they’re contributing to was born out of the will of the copyright holder (Oracle) through its donation to the Apache Software Foundation.

    • Update on Apache OpenOffice

      Not too long ago, many, yours truly included, thought that OpenOffice was dead. That opinion was informed by the decision the major Linux distributions made to replace OpenOffice.org, as it was known at that time, with LibreOffice, the new office suite forked from OpenOffice.org by its former contributors.

      If this is all news to you, here is a brief recap of what happened. OpenOffice.org was a Sun Microsystems-sponsored project. It was, then, the most popular office suite, as it was pre-installed on almost all Linux and BSD desktop distributions. Then something happened. And that “something” was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc. by Oracle Corporation.

    • IBM on Licensing OpenOffice.org

      Clearly Heintzman does not get FLOSS. The GPL, for instance is a licence, not a contract, so one it not “contractually obliged to do anything”. One is permitted to copy by a licence from the creators under the conditions laid out by the GPL. OpenOffice.org ships under a mixture of licences for different parts of the code, reflecting its long history and huge number of contributors.

      He never does get around to explaining why IBM chose Apache/ASL licensing except to state that IBM chose it. He certainly does not explain why IBM went with the code contributed to Apache instead of the code forked to LibreOffice and the greater numbers of contributors if they were interested in “community”. OpenOffice.org has yet to make an ASL release while LibreOffice is chugging away making release after release and doing well while OpenOffice.org is still under code review years later.

    • LibreOffice 3.5.1 Is Now Available for Download

  • CMS

    • Drupal, Joomla and WordPress face challenges in Germany

      Last week, I attended CeBIT, the enormous technology trade fair that takes place every March in Hanover, Germany. This year, as I walked through the building devoted to content management and other enterprise technologies, I spied a booth with Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and TYPO3. All except for the latter are well known in the United States, but I was surprised to find that those three are struggling to find market share in Germany.

      I found it remarkable that the three open-source web content management systems that are so popular in the United States were having trouble getting the same level of recognition in Germany.

  • BSD

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • PulseAudio 2.0 Is Set To Be Released Very Soon

      While many Linux desktop enthusiasts still have nightmares concerning the early days of PulseAudio, the developers behind this common open-source audio server are planning to do a major 2.0 release before month’s end.

      PulseAudio has been found in major Linux distributions like Ubuntu going back to 2008, but it was only in September of 2011 that they hit the 1.0 status. Their next major release is now PulseAudio 2.0.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • The Code for America brigade effect

      Have you ever seen results from your community engagement and realized the impact of your efforts? We recently told you about the LocalWiki project and shared some of the results from the Triangle Wiki day event. But then our friends at Code for America took it a step further.

      The co-founders of LocalWiki were in the Code for America offices last week to see how they could build on the success of the Code Across America event. They took the data–633 page edits, 100 maps, and 138 new photos–and amplified it.

    • GCC 4.7 RC2 Released; The State Of C99 Support

      The second release candidate of GCC 4.7 is available today for those wishing to try out this open-source compiler that will be officially released in the coming weeks. Separately, there’s also updated documentation concerning the state of the C99 language support.

    • The Prominent Changes For The GCC 4.7 Compiler

      With GCC 4.7 being released soon, new compiler benchmarks at Phoronix will be published in the coming weeks (beginning next week Monday), but for those wondering what’s different on the feature side, here’s a look.

      Most of the key GCC 4.7 features have already been talked about in a number of different Phoronix articles, but here’s a concise summary of what to expect from this open-source compiler collection.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • A Response from Goldman Sachs

      The following letter to Goldman Sachs’ worldwide clients was issued today by Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein:

      Dear Goldman Client:

      By now, many of you have probably read the regrettable resignation letter published in today’s New York Times by former Goldman executive Greg Smith, explaining why he is leaving the firm after twelve years.

      In the letter, in which he excoriates Goldman and its practices, Mr. Smith comes across as a man of conscience, ideals, and high moral standards. And as you read his words, you no doubt asked yourself this troubling question: how could Goldman have hired such a person?

      At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

03.14.12

Links 14/3/2012: GIMP 2.7.5, Microsoft Has Massive RDP Hole

Posted in News Roundup at 8:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Server

    • Is Ubuntu Beating Red Hat Linux In Enterprise Market?

      Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has once again lit the fuse of another explosive discussion. This time he came out with some data. “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.” Mark then presents us with this chart from w3techs.com.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Kernel 3.2.11 Is Available for Download
    • Samsung Has G2D Driver, Virtual Display For Linux 3.4

      Besides the DRM work already piling up for Linux 3.4, there’s more. The Samsung developers responsible for the Exynos graphics driver have sent in their “-next” pull request, which brings several new features, including the basis of 2D acceleration for this open-source ARM graphics driver. There’s also a virtual display driver that could be used for handling wireless displays.

    • Look at Linux, the operating system that is an universal platform
    • Silicon Motion Has Open-Source Driver, But Fails

      For those that don’t closely follow the various development lists, at the end of February a Silicon Motion developer came to the DRI list announcing he had “a kernel driver for all our graphics chips” that he was looking to mainline. It sounds nice, but in the end it’s a let-down and the most you’ll probably get out of it is a few laughs.

    • The Synaptics Driver That Does Multi-Touch, ClickPads

      Following last weeks release of the new X.Org EvDev input driver that introduces support for multi-touch and smooth scrolling, the updated Synaptics input driver is now available for Linux users. Key features, of course, are multi-touch and ClickPads support.

    • Preview: Sandy Bridge Become Quicker With Linux 3.3, 3.4

      With the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel being imminent and the Linux 3.4 kernel drm-next already offering lots of changes, here are some Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks comparing the Linux 3.2 kernel to a near-final Linux 3.3 kernel and then the drm-next kernel that’s largely a 3.3 kernel but with the DRM driver code that will work its way into Linux 3.4.

    • Linux File System — Analyzing the Fsck Test Results

      The results of our Linux file system fsck testing are in and posted, but the big question remains: What do the results tell us, what do they mean, and is the performance expected? In this article we will take a look at the results, talk to some experts, and sift through the tea leaves for their significance.

  • Applications

    • Using Gimp in George
    • GIMP 2.7.5 (last test before GIMP 2.8) now available!

      This will be the last in the unstable GIMP 2.7 series. GIMP 2.7.5 is considered somehow a beta version for 2.8 or even a release candidate. It has exactly the same features and functionality which 2.8 will have. The devs want to really release in (late?) March. No more real bugs are blocking the release (Michael Natterer and others have fixed them all in the last weeks). The last big missing thing was the lack of support for the PDB paint API which has also been fixed now! So all the important stuff is completed.

    • Mirage Image Viewer: Seeing Is Believing

      I am fond of programs that do not impose standards on me. The Mirage image viewer follows that philosophy. The image editing preferences let me select the default scaling quality, whether or not to auto-save or prompt for action, and the saving quality to apply. But since its focus is on file viewing and not file controlling, Mirage starts with a clean slate.

    • Games

      • Half-Life 2 Benchmarks On Linux Are Imminent

        Pushed publicly yesterday was the test profile to run benchmarks of the popular Half-Life 2 game under Linux. As a result, coming out soon will be benchmarks of Half-Life 2 on Linux with an assortment of graphics cards and drivers.

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Cinnamon 1.4 Released With New Hot Corner Behaviour, More

        Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: it comes with a panel at the bottom by default (optionally, you can use 2 panels or a panel at the top) that supports autohide, panel applets, a classic system tray, GNOME2-like notifications and so on, but using GNOME 3.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • Microsoft closes critical RDP hole in Windows

      Microsoft has released six security bulletins to close a total of seven holes in its products. According to the company, one of the bulletins (MS12-020), rated as critical, addresses two privately reported vulnerabilities in its implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).

      The first of these is a “critical-class” issue in RDP that could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system. Although RDP is disabled by default, many users enable it so they can administer their systems remotely within their organisations or over the internet. All supported versions of Windows from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 are affected.

  • Finance

  • Censorship

    • Rather Than Speaking Out Against Domain Seizures, ICANN Provides A ‘How To’ Manual

      A couple weeks ago, we noted that with all of these questionable domain seizures going on, it was a shame that ICANN wasn’t speaking out against such questionable abuses of the domain system. We thought its silence was a sign of its impotence to actually take a stand. Turns out we may have actually overestimated ICANN’s willingness to stand up for the internet. You see, late last week it put out a “Thought Paper on Domain Seizures and Takedowns.”

    • Fake Political Attack Video Doesn’t Violate Lanham Act–Ron Paul v. Does

      The Doe Defendants registered the alias “NHLiberty4Paul” at YouTube and Twitter and posted a YouTube video attacking Jon Huntsman. The video ends “American Values and Liberty – Vote Ron Paul.” The Does acted without Paul’s permission–so much so that Paul sued them for violations of the Lanham Act and defamation. After filing the lawsuit, Paul sought to unmask the Does.

    • Shielding the Messengers: StubHub Un-Snubbed in Court Victory for Online Speech and Innovation

      Owners of online marketplaces can breathe a little easier this week: on Tuesday, a state-level appeals court issued a decision flatly rejected a dangerous court precedent that threatened not only online auction sites but social networks, message boards, and every other platform for online expression.

  • Privacy

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • KEI Statement on India’s granting of compulsory license to patents on cancer drug sorafenib (NATCO Vs. BAYER)

      The India Controller General Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks has just (March 12, 2012) issued an order granting a compulsory license to patents on the cancer drug sorafenib/Nexavar, in the matter of NATCO Vs. BAYER. A copy of the decision is attached below, and is also available from the government’s web site here: http://ipindia.nic.in/

      KEI filed an affidavit in the case, which is available here. http://keionline.org/node/1359. The Bayer price in India for sorafenib was 69 thousand USD per year. A survey of prices on sorafenib is available here: http://keionline.org/prices/nexavar. Bayer’s main defense of the pricing was its program of discounts to lower income patients, and the fact that CIPLA was selling an infringing product at a lower price (Bayer is suing CIPLA, and asking for damages and injunctions).

    • Author’s Guild Boss On E-Book Price Fixing Allegations: But… But… Brick-And-Mortar!

      No sooner had the Department of Justice announced its plan to investigate Apple and five of the Big Six publishers for e-book price-fixing than a representative of those benefiting most from this (alleged) collusion boldly stepped into the fray. Scott Turow, bestselling author and president of the Author’s Guild, has issued one of the most profoundly self-serving and wrongheaded statements ever to grace the pages of a legacy industry’s website. There’s a ton to unpack here, so let’s get right to it.

    • Belgian rightsholders group wants to charge libraries for READING BOOKS TO KIDS

      I would have never, ever expected to be able to write a The Next Web blog post that involves my local library, but this story is just too crazy to not bring to your attention. It’s not really related to tech, though, so bear with me.

      People with a healthy interest in fundamental freedoms and basic human rights have probably heard about SABAM, the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, which has become one of the global poster children for how outrageously out of touch with reality certain rightsholders groups appear to be.

    • Trademarks

      • Scrolls will be Scrolls

        For us this was never about a trade mark but being able to use Scrolls as the name of our game which we can – Yey.

    • Copyrights

      • Pols fear ‘SOPA backlash’

        In the wake of the Internet blackout that led to the dramatic death of two controversial online piracy bills, a new warning has entered the Hill vernacular: “Don’t get SOPA’d.”

        Lawmakers are tiptoeing around issues that could tick off tech heavyweights such as Google or Amazon. They don’t want a legislative misstep to trigger the same kind of online revolt that killed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate in January.

      • Guess What? Copying Still Isn’t Stealing

        Every time you think we’re done seeing totally ridiculous arguments about file sharing, the old really silly ones pop back up. Musician Logan Lynn has written a pretty silly rant on Huffington Post entitled Guess What? Stealing Is Still Wrong. And, indeed, it is. But nowhere in the article does he actually discuss stealing. He discusses infringement. In silly black and white terms that assumes that every single download is absolutely a lost sale, that no one who downloads ever gives him any money and that his biggest fans are criminals.

      • Richard O’Dwyer case: TVShack creator’s US extradition approved

        Home Secretary Theresa May has approved the extradition to the US of a student accused of copyright infringement.

      • ACTA

Links 14/3/2012: Linux 3.3 Delayed, elementaryOS 0.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • USDA to Serve Kids More “Pink Slime”

      A product made by grinding up connective tissue from cows and beef scraps that used to be made into dog food is too disgusting to serve at McDonald’s, Burger King or Taco Bell, which have all dropped it due to public pressure, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) thinks it’s fine to serve in school lunches. The USDA plans to buy seven million pounds of the “Lean Finely Textured Beef” (LFTB) from Beef Products Inc. (BPI) and serve it to school children this spring.

  • Finance

    • Wall Street’s Broken Windows

      New York City’s police strategy embraced “broken windows.” The police increased the priority with which they responded to even minor offenses that upset the community – “squeegee men,” graffiti, and street prostitution. Reported blue collar crime fell in New York City. It also fell sharply in most other cities, which did not implement “broken windows” programs, but Wilson and the NYPD got the credit and popular fame for the sharp fall in reported blue collar crime in New York City. Wilson became one of the most famous blue collar criminologists in the world.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • Don’t Let the European Parliament Freeze ACTA!

          The European Parliament may be about to side with the Commission in its strategy to stall the ACTA debate, and postpone by one year or two the vote that could kill it once and for all. It is urgent that citizens contact Members of the Parliament to urge them to continue working towards a clear and strong political position, leading to the unavoidable rejection of ACTA, rather than allow these technocratic manœuvres.

        • Gotcha. Commissioner De Gucht in three strikes denial

          European Digital Rights (EDRI) sent a briefing document to the Parliament, and Mr. Kamall relayed an item raised by the organisation to the European Commission by written question. The answer of De Gucht is remarkable on multiple levels. But there is more to it. The footnote issue from the leaked documents was openly discussed by Commission staff during hearings, in fact Luc Devigne argued about it with Canadian Law Professor Michael Geist. The key caveat below is the word mandatory. Again the Commission and Council cover up the negotiations as a result of confidentiality. Here is another video from the stakeholder hearing where Margot from XS4all did a bunny test for the snake on 3strikes.

        • FOX International wants “evidence regime in favor of content provider and rights holder”

03.13.12

Links 13/3/2012: Linux 3.3 RC7, Arch Linux Turns 10

Posted in News Roundup at 4:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Brazil and GNU/Linux

      Not to worry, though. This month, Net Applications shows that other OS had 93.84% but a year ago the share was 94.38%, a decline of 0.5% in spite of the bias. In California, the bias in business is probably 10:1 so a change of -0.5% could be -5% in reality, a serious shift for M$. The monopoly is on a short leash with government and education using GNU/Linux. In Argentina there is an active anti-trust investigation of M$’s practices. It would not take much for business usage to change dramatically if GNU/Linux is allowed to compete fairly. According to the US embassy in Argentina, “42 percent of Argentine firms use Linux on at
      least some of their computers”. Brazil should not be much different.

    • A Linux desktop and tablet user and Windows 8

      I’m a Linux user, but I kind of like Windows XP, and I can get along fine with Windows 7, but Windows 8? Argh!

    • Meet the new Windows 8

      Usually, if you say “linux” people think about a very hard to use OS. But is it true? Is Kubuntu really an OS for developers and nerds? I’m going to present “common people” Kubuntu, saying it’s the new version of Windows 8: let’s see what they think about it without any prejudice. And, since I’m a serious person, I’m filming it.
      By the way: I got the idea because KDE has been awarded as best desktop environment of the year.

    • Q4 2011 Was a Nightmare for M$

      # Philippines saw shipments down 33%.

  • Server

    • What’s the best Linux server for you?

      When it comes to clothes, I’m a normal guy. I just want to walk into a store, grab something that fits, buy it (What, try it on? Are you kidding!?), and head home. Well, that’s what I want to do. I’ve learned over the years that just because something should fit doesn’t mean that it will fit. It’s the same with Linux servers. Sure, they’re all built on the same code base and can run the same applications, but one may fit you perfectly while another may make you look like a clown.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Enesim: A Flexible, Extensible Graphics Framework

      Enesim is said to be similar to the Fog Framework and started out as a research project to optimize the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, but then ended up becoming a project in its own right. The Enesim graphics framework supports vector and raster-based graphics, is considered highly-extensible, supports OpenCL and OpenGL renderers along with a software-based fall-back, and multi-threading support. The SVG renderer for Enesim is also said to be significantly faster than other common SVG libraries.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • Tethered Shooting with digiKam
      • REVIEW: KDE SC 4.8.1

        Just a few days ago I upgraded KDE SC to its latest release, 4.8.1. This first dot release is very interesting in that it incorporates a significant number of fixes to elements as critical as Dolphin and KDE PIM. Now that the first round of polishing is there for KDE SC 4.8, and since I have been using it extensively for weeks, I think it is a good time to put together a review and see where KDE stands as of today. THE GOOD NEWS There are three main areas where KDE SC 4.8 shines: Stability, Performance and New Features.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3: conditional love

        I’ve recently spent a couple of months using Gnome 3 in Fedora and a few weeks using Gnome 2 in Debian Squeeze, Now I’m using Gnome 3 again in Debian Wheezy. Switching from the new to the old and back has given me a good idea of what I like or don’t like in Gnome 3, and what makes life easier or more difficult using it.

        Overall, I much prefer using Gnome 3, which puts me at odds with a lot of people who have written about it. What I love most is the minimalist elegance of layout. Gnome 2 just looks 20th century while Gnome 3 looks 21st.

  • Distributions

    • Arch Linux turns 10 years
    • Arch Linux turns ten years old
    • Arch Turns Ten

      It was a full decade ago that Arch Linux made its public debut. Over the weekend developers and users posted of their early experiences and brought the milestone to the forefront. However, users have been discussing just how to mark this upcoming anniversary for several months on the forum.

    • Vector Linux: Lightning fast throwback to old-school Linux

      The title can be somewhat deceiving. When you think of “Old School” you think of out of date, whimsical technology that most people only look at on occasion. Well, scrap that train of thought when applied to Vector Linux, because Vector is just as useful as nearly any modern platform. That doesn’t mean it’s for everyone — but if you long for the days when your Linux distribution didn’t eat up your resources and an installed OS contained everything you needed to get through the day, then look no further than Vector Linux 7.0 Standard Edition. You’ll wind up with an easy to use, lightweight desktop (Figure A) that is ready to perform like few other distributions.

    • Introducing the Window Maker Live CD

      Paul Seelig announced last evening, March 11th, the immediate availability for download of the Window Maker Live CD 2012-03-11 Linux operating system.

      Window Maker Live CD is a Linux distribution based on Debian Linux and the lightweight Window Maker window manager.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • A look at Sabayon Linux 8

        The Sabayon Linux distribution is a Gentoo-based project which attempts to provide a cutting-edge user experience which “just works”. The project provides several editions, the main ones being the GNOME, KDE, Xfce and Core flavours. Each edition is available in 32-bit and 64-bit builds so the hardest hurdle to cross is figuring out which ISO we want to download. I opted for the Xfce edition which, if you’ve been following my reviews of late, you’ll notice is becoming a bit of a trend. Recently I’ve been finding GNOME 3 too unpleasant and cumbersome to use and, while I enjoy the features of KDE, I’ll be the first to admit it’s a bit on the heavy side. More and more I’m finding Xfce provides my ideal balance of features and performance.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Raspberry Pi USB Microcomputer tries Fedora Remix Distro

          The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that owners who managed to grab its USB microcomputer before supplies depleted can now download and install a recommended Linux distribution.

          The Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix is a distribution from software packages of the Fedora ARM project, with a “small number” of extra packs modified from Fedora versions that Fedora could not include due to licensing problems.

        • Fedora 17 New Security Feature part VII – thumbnail protection.

          John Leyden wrote an interesting article Linux vulnerable to Windows-style autorun exploits, about how security researches had discovered that Linux is potentially vulnerable to a user sticking a USB device or CDRom into a locked machine. The basic idea was that “Nautilus” would execute thumbnail drive code, to display thumbnails icons in the file browsers based on the content on the removable media, even if the machine was locked. If the thumbnail executables were vulnerabile, a cracker could use the code used to process the thumbnail images to kill the screensaver/lock.

    • Debian Family

      • My Debian Squeeze box DOESN’T spring forward

        I’m always wondering about people who forget to spring forward or fall back when daylight saving time begins or ends.

        Now I’m one of them.

        I have a 10 a.m. conference call today, and looking at the clock on my GNOME desktop in Debian Squeeze, my operating system on this laptop since late 2010, I dial into the call.

        There’s nobody there.

        Later I’m working on my test laptop, running DragonFlyBSD, on which I have the ntpd daemon running. It’s an hour ahead.

        Except that it’s not. My Debian laptop is an hour behind.

      • Derivatives

        • SkoleLinux 6.0.4 has been released

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Has Canonical Found the Keys to the Computing Kingdom?

            “My concern is that the evolution acceleration curve for technology, specifically how users interact with the interfaces, is too steep, and Ubuntu starts running the risk of being too clever, too quick,” said Slashdot blogger yagu. “It’s hard to evangelize linux/ubuntu/favorite distro and find out users are too confused to understand and use it because every time they look, it’s different.”

          • Peeking at the Pangolin

            Among the most eagerly anticipated features, the heads-up display, makes its debut in Precise. The HUD is supposed to eventually replace the traditional menu system by guessing the command you want to issue based on the first few letters you type into a search box. In the beta version, you can call up the HUD by hitting the Alt key. In his blog, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth describes HUD as a revolutionary change in the way people will interact with their computers, but the version that comes with the 12.04 beta is a long way from that vision.

            For example, HUD is supposed to be able to search through the available application and system (indicator) menu commands and offer these as you type, but the HUD isn’t as smart as it should be. To adjust the volume settings on your computer, for instance, you ought to be able to type “volume” into the search box, but doing so produces no result whatsoever. To get to that command, you need to type the less intuitive “sound” instead and choose from four options. How this is more efficient than merely clicking on the speaker icon and adjusting the volume on a slider is beyond me. Performance was even quirkier when I tried to use the HUD to find commands in an application. It worked to a limited degree with the image-editing program Gimp, but the search itself seemed slow. To save a file, I typed “save” and the HUD went through 15 options before offering me “File > Save As” whereas I could easily have saved time by using the keyboard shortcut, CTRL-S.

          • HUD Won’t Replace Traditional Menus: Mark Shuttleworth

            When Mark Shuttleworth announced HUD, I had my worries. Unity itself needed a lot of work to be further polished. In a recent interview with Mark at MWC I asked about the worried around HUD and he explained his vision of HUD. So, let me get one thing out of our way ‘HUD is not going to replace the traditional menus’.

          • Unity fixes in newly released Midori 0.4.4

            Christian Dywan, the main developer of the open source WebKit-based browser Midori, has announced the release of the latest version of his project. Midori 0.4.4 has improvements in several areas, including better GTK+ 3 support, improved interaction with Ubuntu’s Unity menubar and other fixes.

          • Ubuntu User Survey: Who’s Behind the Curtain?

            Who runs Ubuntu? Where, why and how? That’s a question lots of people — including probably even Canonical employees — would like to be able to answer better. Toward this end, a survey of general Ubuntu users is underway. Here’s the scoop.

            Last month, Canonical completed a survey of Ubuntu server users that revealed quite a bit of interesting information — from the apparently hobbyist nature of many Ubuntu server deployments to the ways people are and aren’t currently deploying Ubuntu servers in the cloud.

          • New, shiny, Unity 5.6 released!

            Phew! it’s been a long road to release the next unity, but I’m more than happy to finally announce the release of 5.6. Unity components (dee, libunity, bamf, lenses, nux) and unity itself, plus some compiz snapshots (post 0.9.7.0) are part of this release. The packages are currently building on the official builders and should be soon available to you.

            No particular new feature apart from better ibus support are part of it, plus a tons of bug fixes and some miscelleanous improvements: – Daniel van Vungt landed a patch in compiz that enhances its performance for more than 51%! When you test it, I can ensure you feel a real noticeable difference (in particular on older machines, like mine). – The alt tap false positive revealing the HUD is now part of the past. We know this one was annoying people, I can only tell you it’s been technically challenging ;). This has been a rocking combined effort in compiz/unity sides. – the file lens can now find files that were never opened before.

          • Unsettings- A graphical configuration tool for Unity
          • Mark Shuttleworth Weighs In On Ubuntu 12.04
          • Ubuntu For Android Can Disrupt The Enterprise Market

            Ubuntu for Android has become extremely popular among enthusiasts. There was a lot of excitement around Ubuntu for Android during the Mobile World Congress. I was at the booth for coverage and I saw how people were excited about it. Ubuntu for Android, as I understand after talking to Mark Shuttleworth, is much more than yet another prototype. It’s much more than just another Canonical project. It is undoubtedly a Linux geek’s toy, but it is a real business device which, if executed well by Canonical, can disrupt the enterprise market.

          • Interview: Jo-Erlend Schinstad

            Jo-Erlend Schinstad is one of the most active and dedicated members of the Ubuntu community who tries to clear confusion around Ubuntu related issues. He also takes pain in explaining technologies, how it works and how it can be improved. Jo was recently appointed as a member of EMEA and it was a great opportunity to talk to Jo-Erlend about his engagement with the free software community, especially Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 Just Got Faster

            Ubuntu 12.04 is currently in its beta and updates are rolling everyday to remove existing bugs and polish the system for the final release on April 26th. However, today I received almost 100 updates which is huge considering I update my system every few hours (call me paranoid). Notables updates have been made to Compiz and Unity. Most of the updates however are performance improvements rather than visual tweaks. Still, I will try to list them all to the best of my knowledge.

          • Ubuntu disables app logging for privacy

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Security

    • W.H. tries cyber scare demo

      The White House orchestrated a simulated cyberattack on New York City’s power supply during a summer heat wave late Wednesday to illustrate not only potential human and economic casualties, but to tee up support for Senate passage of a sweeping cybersecurity bill.

      During a classified briefing in the Office of Senate Security, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan showed lawmakers how a hacker could breach control systems of the city’s electric system and trigger a ripple effect throughout the population and private sector, according to a source familiar with the scenario.

      “The fact that we could be subject to a catastrophic attack under the right circumstances and we now know some of the things that would help us to protect against such an attack, that’s why it’s important now for the Congress to take this up,” Napolitano said in an interview with POLITICO.

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • US Soldiers Should Avoid Geotagging On Facebook

      It won’t be a surprise to see that even the smartest users behave in the most stupid manner when on Facebook. They give out their location without even realizing what they are doing. It becomes increasingly dangerous when members of US army start giving out their location in different ways.

      A deployed service member’s situational awareness includes the world of social media. If a Soldier uploads a photo taken on his or her smartphone to Facebook, they could broadcast the exact location of their unit, said Steve Warren, deputy G2 for the Maneuver Center of Excellence, or MCoE.

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • MF Global: Mark Melin Interviews Haar And Koutoulas On What Really Happened

      This soft censorship of the financial news by the visual and print media in the States is nothing new. I have spoken to a number of people who find themselves and their viewpoints shut out of the discussions on financial and economic issues in the US. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the area of stock and metals market abuses and their reforms.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Why Did PhRMA Spend $356K on ALEC in Wisconsin?

      The pharmaceutical drug lobby PhRMA gave $356,075 to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “scholarship fund” in 2010, but listed the recipient’s address at a lobbying firm steps away from the Wisconsin State Capitol, rather than ALEC’s Washington, D.C. offices, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service. The PhRMA contribution is leading to calls for greater transparency about how the ALEC scholarship fund operates.

      In its 2010 IRS filings, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, better known as PhRMA, listed a $356,075 contribution to the “ALEC Scholarship Fund.” That fund pays for flights and hotels for state legislators to attend ALEC conferences in places like New Orleans or Florida.

  • Censorship

    • Uncle Sam: If It Ends in .Com, It’s .Seizable

      When U.S. authorities shuttered sports-wagering site Bodog.com last week, it raised eyebrows across the net because the domain name was registered with a Canadian company, ostensibly putting it beyond the reach of the U.S. government. Working around that, the feds went directly to VeriSign, a U.S.-based internet backbone company that has the contract to manage the coveted .com and other “generic” top-level domains.

    • Tell PayPal: Don’t Censor Books

      PayPal, which plays a dominant role in processing online sales, has taken full advantage of the vast and open nature of the Internet for commercial purposes, but is now holding free speech hostage by clamping down on sales of certain types of erotica. As organizations and individuals concerned with intellectual and artistic freedom and a free Internet, we strongly object to PayPal functioning as an enforcer of public morality and inhibiting the right to buy and sell constitutionally protected material.

      Recently, PayPal gave online publishers and booksellers, including BookStrand.com, Smashwords, and eXcessica, an ultimatum: it would close their accounts and refuse to process all payments unless they removed erotic books containing descriptions of rape, incest, and bestiality. The result would severely restrict the public’s access to a wide range of legal material, could drive some companies out of business, and deprive some authors of their livelihood.

  • Civil Rights

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • EU Regulator Shows Operators Restrict Net Access, Deploy Intrusive Technologies

      In January, La Quadrature du Net responded to the BEREC consultation, based on the findings of the RespectMyNet platform. Although these only give a partial account of the situation, the submission presented 144 confirmed reports of breaches to Net neutrality, concerning 44 operators in more than 14 Member States.

    • Dear Parliament: Say no to the Internet Lockdown

      Canada’s politicians are set to make a decision any day, setting the course for copyright and the Internet that will last for years. Please send a message to your MP and the government by filling out the form on the right.

  • DRM

    • Penguin Pointlessly Annoys Readers With USB-Only eBooks

      Reader Jason Alcock alerts us to another example of a company taking a backwards approach to value-added services by putting artificial restrictions on their content. Apparently, while ebooks from the popular publisher Penguin are available to borrow from Kindle libraries, Penguin requires that they only be transferrable by USB, not wireless. This, in turn, means that they cannot be read with the free Kindle apps on platforms like iOS and Android, since USB transfer is only supported on the Kindle device itself.

    • Latest Calibre Update Brings KF8 Support to Linux, OSX

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Trademarks

      • Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. Using Trademark Law To Prevent The Use Of Public Domain Stories

        The public domain is meant to be a source of free culture for all the world to enjoy, mix and derive other works from. Unfortunately, there are many people and organizations in the world that wish to block the use of public domain material. Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (ERB) is one such organization. Founded in 1923, this corporation has been handling all the copyrights and other rights for the works created by the author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Amongst the rights held by the corporation are the rights to the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars characters. What makes this situation somewhat unique is the fact that only a portion of the Tarzan and John Carter books are still covered by copyright in the US. A number of the early works were published prior to 1923 when modern copyright terms of life plus 70 years went into effect. Even though the copyrights of the early works are long expired, ERB has shown that it will block the use of both characters in modern derivative works.

    • Copyrights

03.12.12

Links 12/3/2012: Debian 5.0.10 Released, Skolelinux 6.0.4 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 190
  • Yet another Linux story

    A big task was pending since a very long time in my todo lists. It was installing and trying out Linux. Having heard about many features and praises about Linux and programming on the LAMP stack from a few of my friends and colleagues, I decided to give it a try myself. So I went about learning and researching Linux & LAMP, formatted my hard-drive, created new partitions and installed Ubuntu 11.10 (a variety of Linux that ships with the GNOME desktop environment). The first emotion I then felt was that of regret – Why didn’t I do this earlier? Why was I focused on programming in a closed-source OS environment with bloated software, and a runtime with just two options to code – VB.NET & C#. Being enlightened about the open-source legends and milestones achieved by Linux and the secure way it handles its file-system, I couldn’t help but wonder at its marvel.

  • Linux in Saigon :-)

    I was at the bookstore last Sunday and I found my first Vietnamese language Linux book. Amazing!!!

  • How Linux is changing lives in Zambia
  • The Linux Setup – Keith Milner, Telecom Engineer

    What distribution do you run on your main desktop/laptop?

    I’m currently running Mandriva 2011 on both my desktop and my laptop. Depending on the project I’m on I can either be working at home for extended periods (as I am currently) or on the customer site. I recently spent a few months on a customer site in Malaysia, and in that case my laptop becomes my main system.

    I’ve previously dabbled with Redhat, Suse, Ubuntu and others, but I have generally been very happy with Mandriva. I have always preferred the KDE environment over GNOME. In the early days when KDE2 came out (and I was running Redhat) I used to compile the latest KDE releases to use on my system. These days things are more mission-critical and I prefer to have a supported, packaged system. Whether I change this in the future depends on Mandriva’s future.

    My laptop is actually a triple boot setup, and also has Windows XP on it. I often do a lot of hands-on work on customer’s systems and for this I find Linux simply much more productive and powerful than Windows. The only time I use Windows is when a customer project mandates the use of a particular piece of software. In practice I find this doesn’t happen often, but having WIndows allows me to support this when it does.

  • Linux Certificate Program Targets Newcomers to the OS

    Linux skills are in growing demand in today’s IT hiring landscape, and there are many ways to bolster those skills both online and off.

  • Desktop

    • Welcome to the pre-Post-PC era

      Joe Brockmeier wrote an insightful piece on ReadWrite entitled “What We Lose in a Post-PC World” that starts off with this: “Tim Cook, Ray Ozzie, and a host of others have proclaimed that we’re in a “post-PC world.” Well, not quite yet, but you can see it from here.”

      [...]

      Meanwhile, technology marches on and as evening falls on the pre-Post-PC era — which might be called the post-pre-Post-PC era by purists, opening another argumentative can of worms as a sideshow — Blender developers will actually get an Android version for tablets up and running, just proving the point that you can do it, but ignoring the important question around why you would make software to run on something that’s not built for the job.

    • “This Is Crazy. I Hate It.”
    • Dell Says Several Countries Have Triple-Digit Growth for GNU/Linux

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Intel Xeon E5 Heads to Linux

      Linux server users won’t have to wait long to benefit from the new Intel Xeon E5 processor, announced earlier this week. Hardware vendors and Linux operating system vendors alike are ready to leverage Intel’s latest server chip architecture.

    • The Longterm Linux Kernel Cabal

      How do Linux kernel devs figure out which kernel will be the basis for their enterprise distros?

      The Linux kernel community is made up of lots of different developers working at different companies. But as it turns out, those companies don’t really control their own kernel roadmaps as much as they might think.

    • Linux 3.3-rc7
    • DRM Work Piling Up For The Linux 3.4 Kernel

      While it looks like there’s still another week before the Linux 3.3 kernel will be released and thus marking the merge window for the Linux 3.4 kernel opening, here’s some of the DRM graphics changes you can expect to see merged.

    • Got Privacy? Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Will Help Ensure It.

    • Graphics Stack

      • APITrace 3.0 Brings Graphics Tracing Goodness
      • Intel Preparing GLSL 1.40 Support For Mesa

        GLSL 1.40 is a requirement for OpenGL 3.1, which Intel is now attempting to support in Mesa now that they have OpenGL 3.0 / GLSL 1.30 support for their Intel Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge graphics driver. There’s been talk of possibly having OpenGL 3.1 in place for Mesa 8.1, which will be released this summer, and GLSL 1.40 is part of this.

      • APITrace 3.0 Brings Graphics Tracing Goodness

        APITrace was introduced in April of last year as a way to help graphics driver developers debug the graphics stack. This free software program allows for easy OpenGL API tracing regardless of driver. APITrace 2.0 was then introduced in September to support the latest OpenGL 4.2 specification and to provide other new functionality. Today the program has reached the version 3.0 milestone.

      • Radeon UVD Support Going Through Code Review

        If you have been desiring better video playback support on the open-source ATI/AMD Radeon Linux graphics stack, the days of being frustrated may be limited. There’s some code concerning UVD — the GPU’s Unified Video Decoder engine — that will be going through internal code review at AMD this coming week.

      • What’s Left For LLVMpipe Before OpenGL 3.0

        One of the Gallium3D drivers yet not fully supporting the OpenGL 3.0 specification is the LLVMpipe software rasterizer. However, if you’re curious of what’s left before this CPU-based graphics driver can handle GL3, here’s a list.

      • X.Org’s XDS2012 Will Celebrate 25 Years Of X11

        Some new details have emerged concerning the 2012 X.Org Developers’ Summit, which will take place this September and commemorate 25 years of X11.

        First of all, while it’s not been officially announced on the mailing lists or elsewhere yet, XDS2012 is expected to happen from the 19th to 21st of September. It’s been mentioned on the XDS2012 Wiki page and elsewhere and discussed for weeks, like back at FOSDEM, but I believe Egbert Eich will be sending out the formal announcement soon.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

      • How To Upgrade Kubuntu To KDE 4.8.1
      • KDE 3 got upower support and more
      • Desktop Freezes in 4.8.x

        The source of the problem is the fact that kded is sometimes frozen by one or more of its modules. Plasma NM < 0.9.0 used to do several synchronous calls to networkmanagement module in kded, specially to get the signal strengh of wifi access points and 3G connections. You can imagine how often wifi access points (all access points in range, even the ones you are not connected to) can trigger signal strengh… signals :-/ Yes, every often.

  • Distributions

    • Screw this, I’m going back to Windows!

      No, I’m not. Because I never left, hihihihi. The title is a clickbait…

      [...]

      Looking ahead into the misty future, I can honestly say I do not know which Linux distribution I will be running on my current and new hardware in the coming years, but I definitely know I will be using Windows. That’s the simple reality. No, let me rephrase that. I will be running Windows XP and Windows 7, as Windows 8, if rumors are all true, aims to become the new lead champion in the moronity club. Still.

    • Linux Deepin: Ubuntu-Based Linux Distribution With A Beautiful GNOME Shell Setup

      Linux Deepin is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that uses a highly customized GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment. It was initially created for Chinese users only, but there are now different ISO images for both Chinese and English languages.

    • BackTrack 5 Revolution 2 screen shots
    • A Healthy Front Line of FLOSS: GNU/Linux
    • The Big Board

      I have also excluded three Linux distros that appear on the Distrowatch “Top Ten” list: Arch Linux, Slackware, and CentOS. From what I’ve gathered, Arch Linux and Slackware are better suited to advanced Linux users than to newcomers; and CentOS is primarily for “enterprise” users (those setting up servers). I’ve heard many good things about all three, but they’re probably not distros for the Goodbye, Microsoft audience.

      I’ve included PC-BSD as a representative of the BSD Unix family. While I have not tried it myself, I’m told it’s the “Ubuntu of BSDs” for ease of installation and use, and it is aimed at desktop use rather than servers.

      I mentioned several lightweight distros in late 2009; some have since gone dormant or have been discontinued. (Namely FeatherLinux, SLAX, SaxenOS, BeaFanatIX, U-Lite, Fluxbuntu, and Wolvix.) The only “dormant” distro I’ve included is Damn Small Linux, which, though not updated since 2008, is still popular and useful.

    • Arch Linux Celebrates 10th Birthday

      Arch Linux is 10 years old today. Arch Linux was started by Judd Vinet in March 2002. Judd announced the release of Arch Linux 0.1 (Homer on March 11, 2002).

    • Italian Simplicity: Semplice Linux

      Just a few weeks ago, at the end of 2011, I reviewed a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu with the OpenBox window manager: SalentOS. That distribution was created by an Italian person who lives in Salento, hence the name.

      I am not sure if Italians have some extreme love of OpenBox, but very soon after that, I heard about another OpenBox-based distribution from that country. This time, though, it is based on Debian. To be precise, on the unstable branch of Debian – Sid.

    • New Releases

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon Linux 8 review

        This time around, I’m reviewing Sabayon Linux 8 in its Xfce 64-bit edition. Honestly, I chose the Xfce edition because my USB stick is 2 Gigabytes, and the GNOME and KDE versions are too large to fit. But I can confirm that you can use UNetbootin to install Sabayon onto any laptop that lets you boot from a thumb drive.

        Sabayon is a distribution based on the Gentoo version of Linux. Gentoo is a long-established distribution that is one of the very few using source compilation to provide you with the software you install. While this allows you to customize your system to an unprecedented degree, it also requires the desire and the confidence to do much more “under the hood” work than most distributions expect. One of the aims of Sabayon is to make the initial installation of Gentoo painless, and they succeed in that.

    • Red Hat Family

      • “Open Source” Ideas for Nonprofits

        Open-source technology thrives by letting anybody know how it works and encouraging them to come up with new ideas and to tailor software to their own needs.

        Could your nonprofit work the same way?

        Any organization can, said Rebecca Suehle, a writer and editor at the open-source software company Red Hat, in a session today at the South by Southwest Interactive conferene.

      • interview with Jim Whitehurst

        Q. Tell me about the culture of your company.

        A. Since we were founded in the 1990s on the idea of leveraging broad open-source communities, we naturally adopted that approach in our culture long before the Facebooks of the world even existed. So we’re on the bleeding edge of what so many companies are going to face because of this whole millennial generation coming up. It just does not like this idea of hierarchy.

      • Why Enterprise Linux ?

        Last year I’ve decided to purchase a license of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (self support) to use on my home laptop. For a few years that I had not used Red Hat (or clones) for Desktop. I don’t find expensive at all the 45€’s that Red Hat charges for 1 year license, specially considering that I really don’t have to worry much about security (as the updates flow in quite nicely)…

      • Fedora

    • Debian Family

      • Updated Debian 5.0: 5.0.10 released

        The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

        The alpha and ia64 packages from DSA 1769 are not included in this point release for technical reasons. All other security updates released during the lifetime of “lenny” that have not previously been part of a point release are included in this update.

      • Debian 5.0 Gets Final Update

        The Debian project has announced the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename ‘lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

      • Updated Debian 5.0: 5.0.10 released

        The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 5.0 (codename `lenny’). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the oldstable release,
        along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories were already published separately and are referenced where available.

      • First “Squeeze”-based Debian Edu version released

        Debian Edu (aka “Skolelinux”) is a Debian Pure Blend specifically targeted at schools and educational institutions, and provides a completely configured school network environment out of the box. It covers PXE installation, PXE booting for diskless machines, and setup for a school server, for stationary workstations, and for workstations that can be taken away from the school network. Several educational applications like Celestia, Dr. Geo, GCompris, GeoGebra, Kalzium, KGeography and Solfege are included in the default desktop setup.

      • Debian Edu interview: Nigel Barker

        Inspired by the interview series conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a more international audience.

        While Debian Edu and Skolelinux originated in France and Norway, and have most users in Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions, and am happy to share the response with you. :)

      • Derivatives

        • Skolelinux 6.0.4

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ISO Will Still Fit on a CD
          • Take the Ubuntu User Survey 2012 Now
          • Ubuntu User Survery 2012

            Canonical the company behind Ubuntu has announced the Ubuntu User Survey 2012 Poll. The motive behind the poll is to understand how people discover, use and share Ubuntu. The poll is available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The results of the poll will be shared with the community some time later.

            The poll takes hardly 5 minutes to fill in and basically looks into how you discovered Ubuntu, your use cases, and if whether you would recommend Ubuntu to your friends and others. This poll if answered by many would give answers to questions like the demographic usage of Ubuntu and many other questions. You can find the polls in the links below,

          • Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin Beta Review

            Every six months, we will do a review of the latest version of Ubuntu and see what features/improvement Canonical has added to the popular distro. The next version of Ubuntu – 12.04, Precise Pangolin is now available in beta and this is particularly important since it is the next Long Term Support (LTS) version. As of all LTS version, the emphasis is always on stability over new features experimentation, so it is interesting to see how the 12.04 will perform. Let’s proceed with the review.

          • Medibuntu repositories available for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin | PPA
          • Ubuntu & Linux Hardware Support: Working With OEMs Is Key

            When it comes to improving hardware support for Linux, there are two traditional strategies: The Do-It-Yourself method, by which geeks write their own device drivers, and the Beg-And-Plead approach, or asking OEMs for open-source drivers and hoping they comply. But Canonical seems to be forging a third path by actually cooperating with upstream manufacturers to bring better hardware support to Ubuntu. Here’s how, and what it means for the lives of Linux users everywhere.

          • Ubuntu 12.04 .ISO Will Remain CD Sized

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Netrunner 4.1 Review

              Netrunner is a KUbuntu based LiveDVD distribution running KDE 4.7.4 and is available in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. It takes the best of Kubuntu and adds a bit of their touch to the programs being offered. Netrunner is a distribution based for novice users of Linux.

            • The Kubuntu Commitment

              Though the KDE desktop has a few obvious advantages over Unity, Kubuntu has always played second fiddle (maybe third) to Shuttleworth’s baby, Ubuntu. While the distro has received critcism and praise in equal parts, one thing has never change. Commitment.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Linux and Open-source news overview for week 10-2012
  • LastCalc Is Open Sourced
  • Open that Software

    In a nutshell, Open Source Software aims to ‘liberate’ you of the bonds enforced by proprietary software. These bonds restrict your basic rights of freedom to choose between softwares, freedom to modify current programs etc. For more details, do check out Richard Stallman on Wikipedia (Akash has done a post on him too).

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 11 Stable Released

        Firefox users who cannot wait to update the stable channel of the web browser from version 10 to 11, can download the new version from the official Mozilla ftp server or third party download sites early. Please note that while it is unlikely that the final version will get replaced in last minute, it has happened in the past. It is recommended to wait for the official release announcement if Firefox is running in a productive environment, or if you do not need to have access to the new feature set introduced in the browser right away.

  • CMS

  • Healthcare

    • Skysoft Inc. adopts OpenEMR to move forward with development

      Skysoft Incorporated, and Orlando based IT Services and Software Development firm, has chosen OpenEMR as the platform to move forward with starting in 2012. Skysoft currently develops software prototypes for the United States Department of Veterans Administration. Skysoft is also developing medical prototypes in-house and will begin to integrate the OpenEMR platform with ours.

  • BSD

    • FUSE For FreeBSD Nearing Completion

      Porting FUSE to a FreeBSD kernel module has been a long-time coming. The FreeBSD FUSE kernel module port originally began as a Google Summer of Code project, but it wasn’t successful. In 2011, work on the port was restored via another year with Google Summer of Code, but at the end of the summer the FreeBSD FUSE implementation was still unstable and suffered data corruption issues. Now it seems that FreeBSD FUSE is finally getting hacked into shape and may be committed in the coming days.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

    • Say Hello To Julia, A New LLVM-Based Project

      From the mailing list announcement, “Julia is an open source language for technical computing that strives to be in the same class of productivity as Matlab, R, python+numpy, etc., but targets the performance of C and Fortran. It is due to LLVM that julia has been able to achieve such good performance (in my opinion), with relatively little effort in a short amount of time.”

      Additional information on the Julia project is available from JuliaLang.org. “Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. The library, mostly written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, FFTs, and string processing. More libraries continue to be added over time. Julia programs are organized around defining functions, and overloading them for different combinations of argument types (which can also be user-defined).”

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Standards/Consortia

    • HTML5 roundup: Mozilla and Google aim to level up gaming on the Web

      Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web.

      New standards are making it possible for Web applications to implement 3D graphics, handle input from gamepad peripherals, capture and process audio and video in real-time, display graphical elements in a fullscreen window, and use threading for parallelization. Support for mobile gaming has also gotten a boost from features like device orientation APIs and improved support for handling touchscreen interaction.

Leftovers

  • Microsoft goes on a charm offensive

    SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft has gone into some detail about some of the most obvious changes in the look and feel of the Windows 8 user interface.

    A long Microsoft blog post goes into some detail about the apparently subtle changes that are supposed to speed things up and make things easier to do in Windows 8. We are not convinced.

  • Security

    • Slow Down TSA Lynch Mob: That Naked Scanner Expose Video Is Exaggerated & Old News

      So, while I don’t agree with the TSA’s response to this video in which “Blogger Bob” somewhat angrily snaps back about how important TSA scanning is, I don’t think Corbett’s claims are that convincing and I’m surprised at how much press it’s been generating. Yes, the scanners are probably pointless, and it’s all security theater, but that doesn’t mean we should all stop thinking through the details on videos that potentially show some weaknesses in these machines.

    • Microsoft to patch Windows bug called ‘Holy Grail’ by one researcher

      Microsoft yesterday said it would ship six security updates next week, only one critical, to patch seven vulnerabilities in Windows and a pair of for-developers-only programs.

      This year’s March Patch Tuesday will feature three more updates and three more patches than the same month in 2011, but will fix fewer bugs than the March roster in each of the years 2008-2010, according to records kept by Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • OECD Gives Up the Oil, to the Developing World

      Now that global oil supply is a zero-sum game, in order for the five billion people in the Non-OECD to consume more oil they need a donation from us, here in the OECD. And as you can see, we are “happily” (recession, unemployment, lack of growth) giving up these energy sources as best we can.

  • Finance

    • Scott O’Malia, Commodity Futures Commissioner, Seeks To Upend Wall Street Reform (Updated)

      In a signal that partisan squabbling in the nation’s capital may be reaching new levels of rancor, a key Republican regulator is pursuing an unusual avenue to overturn a Wall Street reform rule issued by his own agency. Scott O’Malia, one of five commissioners who lead the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is asking a powerful White House office that has no actual authority over the CFTC to assess his agency’s work.

      If the Office of Management and Budget were to take O’Malia up on his suggestion, it would radically change the way some federal regulations are written and severely hamper implementation of a host of rules mandated by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

    • The Financial Crisis And Shrek’s Onion Of Fraud

      In the last couple of weeks I’ve been pushing foreclosure fraud. Well, not pushing the fraud but rather arguing that foreclosure is fraud. It has to be. If a mortgage was registered at MERS, then the chain of title was broken. Broken chains mean the bank cannot foreclose. But that was MERS’s business model, and so most mortgages are “infected”. Still, there’s a lot more to it than that.

  • Censorship

    • Tesla libel suit against Top Gear fails again

      Tesla and the company’s lawyers are nothing if not determined. After a judge smacked down the electric vehicle manufacturer’s libel suit against the BBC and Top Gear for comments made about the range of the Tesla Roadster, the automaker rallied with a second, amended lawsuit. It didn’t take long for the the same judge to nix the new case, too, saying the amendment was “not capable of being defamatory at all, or, if it is, it is not capable of being a sufficiently serious defamatory meaning to constitute a real and substantial tort.”

    • Canadians To Prime Minister: Don’t Censor Our Scientists

      One of the most fundamentally insane things about government and politics is the fact that evidence-based policy is frequently not the norm. It should be common sense that you don’t create new laws and regulations without actual evidence that they will work, or even clear evidence on the scope of the problem they aim to solve. But as we know, things don’t really work that way—it’s a lot easier for politicians and legislators to make their push based on emotion and public perception.

    • Free Canada’s scientists to communicate with the public

      A scientist’s duty is to science. Researchers must be able to share their findings, and discuss their published work with peers, journalists and the public in a timely manner.

    • EFF Argues That Automated Bogus DMCA Takedowns Violate The Law And Are Subject To Sanctions

  • DRM

  • Intellectual Monopolies

03.09.12

Links 9/3/2012: Linux Mint 12 LXDE is Out, Nokia Rushes Back to Linux-based Operating System

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Gartner Believes the World Owes Wintel A Living

    Gartner has predicted that 2012 will be another slow year for Wintel but 2013 will be better. They seem to feel ARM and */Linux will have no traction. The same forces that Gartner believes will give Wintel traction will also give */Linux on ARM greater traction. In fact there is nothing preventing */Linux from running on Intel/x86 systems…

  • IBM streams Linux and Windows desktop through USB stick

  • Server

    • NOAA and GNU/Linux Predict the Weather

      All IT should do the same. Look at what IT costs your organization and what performance you get or want to get in the future. GNU/Linux will give whatever performance you want at a lower price for licensing, re-re-reboots, slowing down, pleasing M$ with absurd restrictions in the EULA or authentication, and complexity. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux.

  • Kernel Space

    • Linux Foundation Welcomes Nvidia, 3 Other New Members

      In a brief statement, Nvidia said that its membership in the Linux Foundation will enable it to collaborate better with “the organizations and individuals instrumental in shaping the future of Linux, enabling a great experience for users and developers of Linux.”

    • Kernel Log: Coming in 3.3 (Part 4) – Drivers
    • Fluendo Joins The Linux Foundation

      Fluendo, the leading multimedia software development company and GStreamer expert, announced today that it has joined The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux.

    • Linux creator Torvalds slams OpenSUSE security devs in Google+ rant

      Linux creator Linus Torvalds has posted a vitriolic rant on Google+ hammering the developers of OpenSUSE for “mentally diseased” security measures.

      Requiring users to provide an admin password to make even minor changes like adding a new wireless network or changing the time zone is “moronic and wrong,” according to the open source guru. The furious article was apparently prompted by Torvald’s daughter running into these security issues at school.

    • Greg KH: The 2.6.32 Linux kernel
    • Nvidia’s Embrace of Linux Foundation Highlights Open Source’s Growing Status
    • Lustre User Group Announces Conference Program

    • Graphics Stack

      • TitaniumGL: A Faster Multi-Platform Graphics Driver Architecture?

        After first being introduced on Windows years ago, and then FreeBSD and ReactOS support added last year, this week finally marked the release of TitaniumGL for Linux. TitaniumGL is self-described as a “freeware driver architecture” and carries a goal to support OpenGL on graphics cards with broken, bad, or missing OpenGL hardware drivers. Here are some benchmarks of TitaniumGL compared to NVIDIA’s binary GPU driver and the Mesa/Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer.

      • VMware’s Linux 3D Guest Driver Is Ready

        The vmwgfx DRM kernel driver left the staging area in the Linux 3.2 kernel, marking it as a point ready for stable production use. The Gallium3D user-space driver for VMware became properly christened in Mesa 8.0 along with the new XA State Tracker for 2D acceleration and other changes. The final piece of the accelerated VMware puzzle is now fitted: the xf86-video-vmware 12.0 DDX driver. (Read VMware’s New Graphics Architecture Is Shaping Up.)

      • Linux 3.4 Kernel Will Support Intel Medfield Graphics

        The merge window for the Linux 3.4 kernel will open up this month assuming the latest Linux 3.3 release plans work out. One of the features to look forward to out of Linux 3.4 will be the DRM driver support for Intel Medfield graphics.

  • Applications

  • Distributions

    • Review: MadBox 11.10

      MadBox is an Ubuntu-based Openbox distribution that aims to be user-friendly as well. In essence, it is the successor to #! for the Ubuntu base. Development on MadBox and related applications like ADeskBar seemed to have ceased after version 10.10, but a few months ago (though I only found out about it a few weeks ago) a new version based on Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” was released, coinciding with the unveiling of a new website for the distribution.

    • New Releases

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Government use of Ubuntu

            Governments are making increasingly effective use of Ubuntu in large-scale projects, from big data to little schools. There is growing confidence in open source in government quarters, and growing sophistication in how they engage with it.

            But adopting open source is not just about replacing one kind of part with another. Open source is not just a substitute for shrink-wrapped proprietary software. It’s much more malleable in the hands of industry and users, and you can engage with it very differently as a result. I’m interested in hearing from thought leaders in the civil service on ways they think governments could get much more value with open source, by embracing that flexibility. For example, rather than one-size-fits-all software, why can’t we deliver custom versions of Ubuntu for different regions or countries or even departments and purposes? Could we enable the city government of Frankfurt to order PC’s with the Ubuntu German Edition pre-installed?

            Or could we go further, and enable those governments to participate in the definition and production and certification process? So rather than having to certify exactly the same bits which everyone else is using, they could create a flavour which is still “certified Ubuntu” and fully compatible with the whole Ubuntu ecosystem, can still be ordered pre-installed from global providers like Dell and Lenovo, but has the locally-certified collection of software, customizations, and certifications layered on top?

          • Ubuntu 12.04 to ship with enhanced privacy controls

            Ubuntu 12.04 will ship with new privacy controls for the Zeitgeist event logger. Zeitgeist is the program that runs in the background of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment collecting statistics on how users interact with their computers and offering suggestions based on most-used items and applications using machine-learning techniques.

          • Got Privacy? Ubuntu Linux 12.04 Will Help Ensure It.
          • New stable series for Canonical’s Bazaar version control

            The Bazaar developers have announced version 2.5.0 of the version control system that is used by the Linux Foundation, Ubuntu, the GNU project, Drizzle and many other free software projects to manage their source code. The new version marks the start of a long-term stable series due to be supported until April 2017. Users of previous stable releases of Bazaar are encouraged to upgrade.

          • Three Reasons the Ubuntu Desktop Lags the iPad
          • Five day private cloud deployment promises low stress, high quality

            Canonical, the company behind the Linux-based OS Ubuntu, is promising a private cloud infrastructure deployment service that it says takes exactly five days to complete, costs $9,000 and comes ready for channel resale.

            Canonical delivers the Jumpstart program using OpenStack as the cloud computing architecture in combination with DevOps program Juju, which enables end users to manage expansion more easily over time.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • “Algorithms can have errors”: One man’s quest to purge horrific pictures from his Google results

  • Security

  • Cablegate

  • Finance

    • One More Thing For Governance Day

      The basic argument is that repeat-player investment bankers provide value not by telling brainless executives whether to accept or reject a merger, but by providing intelligent decisionmakers with access and relationships, and relationships come with conflicts.

    • Chris Cook: The Ghost of Enron Past Explains Oil Market Manipulation

      I outlined in a recent post my view that the oil market price has been inflated twice by passive (inflation hedgers) investors, albeit with short term speculative spikes from active (speculators) investors: once from 2005 to June 2008; and again from early 2009 to date. In attempting to ‘hedge inflation’ passive investors perversely ended up actually causing it, and allowed oil producers to manipulate and support the oil market price with fund money to the detriment of oil consumers.

    • Fox Attacks Wages of Working-Class Maids

      Fox Business News recently ran a segment criticizing a collective bargaining agreement struck between workers and management in New York City’s hotel industry. Analysts on the program called the deal “a nightmare,” singling out the provisions raising wages for housekeepers as “shocking.” Fox’s reaction is consistent with its past coverage of worker’s issues, which has portrayed union efforts to secure higher wages and benefits for the working class as an affront to capitalism.

      The agreement between the New York Hotel Trades Council A.F.L.-C.I.O, the union representing workers in New York’s hotel industry, and the Hotel Association of New York, the trade group representing hotel owners, gives housekeepers a 29% raise in their current salary over seven years, giving them a salary of $59,823 by the time the CBA expires.

  • Censorship

    • Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident

      A “human error” carried out by the police resulted in thousands of websites being completely blocked at the DNS level yesterday. Danish visitors to around 8,000 sites including Google and Facebook were informed that the sites were being blocked by the country’s High Tech Crime Unit due to them offering child pornography, a situation which persisted for several hours.

    • Paypal Pressured To Play Morality Cop And Forces Smashwords To Censor Authors
    • Anonymous, Decentralized and Uncensored File-Sharing is Booming

      The file-sharing landscape is slowly adjusting in response to the continued push for more anti-piracy tools, the final Pirate Bay verdict, and the raids and arrests in the Megaupload case. Faced with uncertainty and drastic changes at file-sharing sites, many users are searching for secure, private and uncensored file-sharing clients. Despite the image its name suggests, RetroShare is one such future-proof client.

    • The True Damage Of An Illegitimate DMCA Takedown Goes Much Further Than Simple ‘Inconvenience’

      Whenever an artist finds their own creations removed by a erroneous DMCA takedown notice, defenders of the system are quick to point out that the collateral damage is minimal and, because the supposedly “offending” post/picture/etc. usually returns to its original place, what’s the big deal? It’s just an inconvenience and a small price to pay in order for rightsholders to protect their intellectual property.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • BT and TalkTalk lose challenge against Digital Economy Act

      The government has been given the green light to implement the Digital Economy Act after the final legal challenge by two internet service providers was thrown out at the court of appeal.

      BT and TalkTalk on Tuesday lost their appeal against last year’s judicial review of the government’s controversial anti-piracy legislation on all but one ground.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Electronic Arts, identity thief?

      Identity theft is a huge problem that affects millions of Americans each year. If a crook stole your most personal information and used it to make a buck, you’d be furious.

      And, of course, that’s illegal. But if you are a corporation, you can steal all the identities you want for profit.

    • Trademarks

    • Copyrights

      • As BPI Tries To Block The Pirate Bay From The UK, Dan Bull Explains Why Musicians Should Block BPI

        Dan Bull, the UK-based musician who we’ve written about many times for his consistently awesome songs about the music industry, file sharing, copyright laws and the like has now put together another wonderful song, called Bye Bye BPI.

      • Streetlight Manifesto Proudly Boycotts Itself

        It is and has been for quite some time our position that Victory Records is an artist-hostile, morally corrupt and generally dishonest company, with whom we have had the displeasure of being associated due to a contract that was signed years ago. We’re not writing this today to air grievances, of which there are many; numerous bands’ struggles with Victory are well-documented (and many more are sealed by a court of law), so we figured we’re going to skip the allegations and try to solve the problem, as we see it.

      • Why Search Engines Can’t Just ‘Fix’ Search Results The Way The MPAA/RIAA Want

        It’s become clear in the past year or so that one key “target” in the legacy entertainment industry’s game plan is to force Google to change its search results to have “good sites” rise up and “bad sites” be pushed down. They’ve been putting pressure on search engines for quite some time now, and have even considered suing Google for not giving it the results they want. Late last year, the RIAA even put out a “report card” in which it complained that Google won’t let them program Google’s results for everyone else.

      • German Government Wants Google To Pay To Show News Snippets
      • Justices Won’t Hear Photo Site’s Suit Against Google

        The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal by a nude-photo publisher that alleged Google Inc. was infringing its copyrighted images.

      • RIAA Still Doesn’t Get It: Hopes SOPA Opposition Was A ‘One-Time Experience’

        In a previous post, I looked at the first part of Andrew Keen’s interview with RIAA CEO Cary Sherman. In the second half of the interview, Sherman fields some audience questions collected on Twitter, and his answers further expose the serious problems with his understanding of what’s happening in music, what happened with SOPA, and what’s happening to his industry.

      • Can A Company Be An ‘Author’ For The Purpose Of Copyright?

        The specific case involved horse-racing tables and a dispute between two different horse-racing magazines, with one accusing the other of copyright infringement. Oddly, both magazines seem to admit that the actual data originated from neither magazine, but from the same third party: the Singapore Turf Club. Still, there appears to have been some questions about the layout and design, which could be given some level of copyright protection — but, apparently, only if it were created by “living humans.”

      • Chris Dodd: The Internet Developed Because Of Strict Copyright Enforcement

        His latest discussion on the topic came at the National Association of Attorneys General meeting in Washington DC — a “friendly” audience for Dodd. His discussion starts around the 2 hour, 10 minute mark if you want to fast forward the video. For reasons that are unclear, CSPAN has disabled embedding on this video. Either way, Dodd continues to show off that he has no idea what happened. The specific “panel” that he’s on is (of course) pretty one-sided. It involves him, old friend Rick Cotton from NBC Universal (“just think about the poor corn farmers!”) and then two university officials to talk about how they’re forced to censor the internet because of draconian laws that the MPAA pushed through (where there’s at least a little pushback on the ridiculousness of copyright law, but just barely).

      • INTERVIEW: Seth Godin on Libraries, Literary Agents and the Future of Book Publishing as We Know It

      • ACTA

        • Darrell Issa Posts Text Of ‘Unconstitutional’ ACTA For Open Feedback; Something USTR Never Did
        • Workshop Audience Barred From ‘Demonstrating’ Approval Of Michael Geist’s ACTA Takedown

          Although ACTA has now been referred by the European Commission to the European Court of Justice, it continues its passage through the various committees of the European Parliament, each of which will provide input on the final decision of whether to ratify ACTA or not. The first of these took place last week, when the International Trade (INTA) committee had a preliminary ACTA workshop. This included hearing from external experts, one of whom was Michael Geist, well known to Techdirt readers.

          It will come as no surprise to learn that his ten-minute speech succeeded in distilling the key flaws of ACTA in a highly-accessible way that left the treaty’s supporters desperately trying to undo the damage to their arguments for the rest of the day — and failing.

        • Obama Administration: ACTA Is Binding & Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Heads About TPP

          That’s interesting, because it’s what many people had assumed (and what other signatories to ACTA have been saying), but actually contradicts earlier statements from the USTR suggesting that we can ignore parts of the agreement that we don’t like or which conflict with existing US law. It also means that, as we’ve been warning, ACTA dangerously restricts Congress from passing new laws that could push back on some of the worst aspects of copyright law. Sure, Congress could ignore ACTA, but there would be substantial problems if it were to do so. In other words, ACTA is binding on the US under international law… but not under US law. Of course, international law trumps US law here, so that’s kind of meaningless.

Links 9/3/2012: KDE 4.8.1, New Wine

Posted in News Roundup at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Zanata: Web-Based Translation Manager For Open Source Developer

    If you are a open source software developer or a content writer you can use Zanata to translate your software strings, User interface text/String, software documentation and localized into any languages.

    Zanata is an open-source translation manager that enables a community of translators to work on localising software and documentation using nothing more than a web browser.

  • Netcraft: Open web platforms the winners

    A new survey from Netcraft has Apache, Nginx, and Google’s web servers all up, with Microsoft IIS market share dropping down, raising questions about the health of Microsoft’s related offerings.

    The Netcraft results are always interesting, because there’s always a little something for everyone. Depending on how the data is presented, a given hosted domain could be up, down, or off in the ninth dimension. So, care must be taken when qualifying the survey results.

  • TLWIR 34: Africa Embraces Free Software
  • FTA Community demands TradePub to correct inappropriate use of FTA course books

  • Events

    • CeBIT 2012: At the Open Source Project Lounge

      The Open Source Project Lounge at this year’s CeBIT – taking place in Hannover, Germany until 10 March – is as diverse as ever, with a variety of free and open source (FOSS) projects and organisations being represented by both developers and community members alike. Despite primarily being a commercial show where space is expensive, each year, projects have the opportunity to apply for free booth space, and this year, the Open Source Project Lounge is in the corner of Hall 2. The H had the opportunity to attend this, the world’s largest ICT event, and catch up with a number of the projects’ representatives.

    • Linux Training Opportunities at Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

      The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit is a great time to, well, collaborate. But it’s also a really good opportunity to learn.

      We’re offering three courses at this year’s Collaboration Summit, each in a different area, to help build skills while rubbing elbows with other top kernel developers.

      Advanced Linux Performance Tuning is a deep dive into proven tools and methods used to identify and resolve performance problems, resulting in system that is better optimized for specific workloads. This is particularly for those who write or use applications that have unusual characteristics, that behave differently than kernel performance heuristics anticipate. It is a hands-on course that assume some familiarity with basic performance tools. This course is offered on Monday, April 2nd.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Developers Should Love Mozilla Boot-to-Gecko Phone

        When Mozilla announced the Boot-to-Gecko, all-HTML cell phone last week at Mobile World Congress — along with a plan to partner with Telefonica Digital to build really cheap smart phones running the Mozilla system — I wondered if it was really possible to bring such a cheap phone to market, regardless of the underlying system running the phone.

      • Mozilla Doesn’t Want Pepper for Linux Flash

        A couple week ago, Adobe announced that is was abandoning Flash on Linux to Google. The idea being that Chrome integrates Flash and Google can be the place where Linux users go for Flash.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

  • BSD

  • Project Releases

    • PhoneGap 1.5 Released!
    • Vagrant celebrates its 1.0 stable release

      Exactly two years after its first release, the Vagrant project has announced the first stable version of its open source development environment generation tool. Vagrant 1.0 allows developers to easily set up virtual machines for development and testing purposes using Oracle’s VirtualBox and a single configuration file.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • An Open Source Robotic Surgeon Could Save Your Life

      Could the surgeon who saves your life be a robot? The answer to that could be yes, if the developers of the Raven II robotic surgeon have their way. Raven II comes with a surgical robot featuring two robotic arms, a camera for viewing the operational field, and a surgeon-interface system for remote operation of the robot. “The system is powerful and precise enough to support research on advanced robotic surgery techniques, including online telesurgery,” say U.C. Santa Cruz researchers who helped develop it (shown here). The code for Raven II is open source, and this robot is only one of several open source robots poised to advance healthcare.

  • Programming

    • Alpha release of Python 3.3.0 brings first syntax changes in two years

      The 3.3.0 version of the Python programming language has entered the testing phase with its first alpha release. This version marks the lifting of a two-year moratorium on changes to the language’s syntax. Proposed by Guido van Rossum as Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 3003, the moratorium was designed to enable non-CPython implementations of the language to catch up to the core implementation after the Python 3.0 release.

    • A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python, an interview with author Hans Petter Langtangen

      I am a professor of mathematical modeling at the University of Oslo, but for the last 10 years I have been on 80% leave to work at Simula Research Laboratory, which carries out long-term basic research in ICT. At Simula, my main responsibility is to be the manager of a Norwegian Center of Excellence, named Center for Biomedical Computing. Our aim is to develop mathematical methods and software tools to study biomedical phenomena and thereby help clinicians in improving diagnostics and treatment. I am an active scientist and participate in several of the center’s projects. More information is found on cbc.simula.no.

    • Develop Android apps from within Android using AIDE (video)

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Security

    • GitHub security incident highlights Ruby on Rails problem

      On Sunday morning, 4 March, Egor Homakov exploited a flaw in how the Ruby on Rails web framework handles mass assignments that allowed him to write a posting, delete a posting or push changes into source code on any GitHub project. Homakov had previously created an issue regarding mass assignment security on the rails issue tracker on GitHub; this was closed by the developers saying that it was the application developers’ responsibility to secure their applications. Homakov then decided to demonstrate the issue using the nearest Ruby on Rails application, GitHub.

    • At Pwn2Own Hacker Competition, Google Chrome Gets Punk’d

      Slowly but surely, the Pwn2Own hacker contest has become an important fixture in the world of testing the security of software applications, operating systems and hardware devices. Just prior to last year’s Pwn2Own competition, Apple dropped a series of important updates to its Safari browser and iOS platform, but that didn’t stop Charlie Miller from exploiting a Safari vulnerability to hack into an iPhone’s address book. The results from the 2012 Pwn2Own hacker contest are now in, and one of the major software applications to lose to the hackers this year was Google Chrome.

    • OpenSUSE, Linus’ Daughter, and a Question of Security

      “Nobody likes the idea of having to practically beat their operating system into submission,… but this is the reality with Linux,” asserted Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. “One good idea layered over another good idea added to another good idea sometimes ends up with really bad results. We don’t all want to be ‘protected from ourselves’ by more and more features that assume the user is a dummy. There’s another OS for that.”

  • Censorship

    • All Your Internets Belong to US, Continued: The Bodog.com Case

      Imagine a scenario in which a country enacts a law that bans the sale of asbestos and includes the power to seize the assets of any company selling the product anywhere in the world. The country tests the law by obtaining a court order to seize key assets of a Canadian company, whose operations with hundreds of employees takes a major hit. The Canadian government is outraged, promising to support the company in its efforts to restore its operations.

      That is the opening of my technology law column this week (Toronto Star version, homepage version) which continues by noting this scenario became reality last week, though the product was not asbestos and the Canadian government has yet to respond. The case involves Bodog.com, a Canadian-owned online sports gaming site and the country doing the seizing was the United States. Supporting online gaming operations will undoubtedly make governments somewhat squeamish, but the broader implications of last week’s seizure touch on millions of websites and Internet companies who now find themselves subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

    • Banned Facebook promises Chinese devs GLOBAL glory

  • Civil Rights

    • Vermonters Say: Corporations Are Not People!

      In a presidential primary season marked by the rise of “Super PACs” and an explosion of corporate spending in elections, Vermont voters have raised their voices against special interest money in politics. On Super Tuesday, 63 out of a possible 65 towns in Vermont called on Congress to pass a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C. and to address the issue of corporate personhood and money in politics.

      The 2010 Citizens United decision, which Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders labeled “one of the worst decisions the Supreme Court has ever handed down,” struck down bipartisan clean election laws and declared that Congress could not limit so-called “independent” spending. After Citizens United, the 2010 fall elections were the most expensive in U.S. history, with more spending by outside groups than from the candidates themselves. The 2012 election cycle is on track to be the most expensive yet.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • ACTA

        • ACTA may already be dead

          During last week’s public workshop on ACTA, held in presence of Commissioner Karel De Gucht and moderated by MEP Vital Moreira, chairman of the INTA committee1, the manifest tension made it obvious: the Parliament and the Commission are now afraid of citizens,and of the streets. What we saw during the workshop was a parody of debate, where speakers were either members of the Commission, academics, or among the few of the remaining ACTA proponents (including the chairman of a pro-ACTA lobby2!). Nobody from authors, artists or citizen groups were allowed on the panels, despite La Quadrature’s demand to participate.

        • Danish trade minister and ACTA booster apologise for bogus piracy numbers

          Here’s a clip of a Danish TV show discussing ACTA, which Denmark has fiercely advocated in favor of. It starts with the head of a rightsholder society and the Danish trade minister quoting dodgy statistics about the extent and cost of piracy, and then demonstrates that these statistics are patently false, and finally, brings out those responsible for quoting them and gets them to admit their errors.

03.07.12

Links 7/3/2012: NVIDIA Joins Linux Foundation, Android Easily Beats iOS in the US

Posted in News Roundup at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The Linux Setup, Noah Lorang, 37signals

    Noah’s on my radar because of this post he wrote about how operating systems are becoming irrelevant. The piece points out how Noah was able to effortlessly switch from OS X to Linux. I appreciated the post because it wasn’t about the politics of free and open source software. Instead, he was writing about getting to choose the best tools for the job, an idea that sometimes gets misplaced in our conversations about Linux.

  • The “Linux” Brand

    Part of “Technological Evangelism” according to M$ is to denigrate competitive brands. In the FLOSS world, unfortunately, there is too much of that. One item is the holding down of the “Linux” brand. Two popular examples are Android/Linux and Ubuntu GNU/Linux. S

  • Kernel Space

    • OMAP4 Kernel Vulnerabilities Fixed for Ubuntu 11.04

      Canonical announced on March 6th, in a security notice, that a new Linux OMAP4 kernel update for its Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system is now available, fixing six security vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various developers.

    • LPI announces “Linux Essentials” Program

    • Graphics Stack

      • X.Org Server 1.12 Released With Multi-Touch

        X.Org Server 1.12 is now officially available with X Input 2.2, which is the X Input extension update that formally introduces multi-touch support.

        While the release of X.Org Server 1.12 wasn’t as drawn out as MythTV 0.25, this release is coming about a month late due to Keith Packard, the xorg-server release manager, taking a bicycling trip through New Zealand. However, it’s now available following the revised release plans (and the developers are now hitting targets much better than in the past).

      • AMD Launches Pitcairn GPUs, Open-Source Not There

        Yesterday AMD officially launched the Radeon HD 7800 “Pitcairn” series as the latest hardware in their Southern Islands family to reside between the Radeon HD 7700 series and their flagship Radeon HD 7900 cards. Unfortunately, the open-source support for these latest AMD GPUs remains unavailable.

      • Turning Mesa Into JavaScript For The Web?

        Besides the recent talk about using Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe for Mozilla Firefox, there’s another interesting technical discussion happening now about using Mesa on the web to emulate the full OpenGL API using the WebGL API.

      • Radeon Gallium3D Now Sort Of Works For OpenCL
      • Plugging X.Org GPU Hot-Plugging Into Mainline

        Earlier today was the first round of comments by David Airlie regarding the finishing and up-streaming of his X.Org GPU hot-plugging support. This allows for new GPUs to be dynamically added to a running X.Org Server environment.

        Airlie has been working on the GPU hot-plugging support for a number of months, but recently it’s finally come together. In particular, he’s been playing with the USB-based DisplayLink graphics adapters. David has written a DisplayLink KMS driver to top off DisplayLink’s other code and open-source support. This could also be adapted to work with dynamically hot-plugging/unplugging other graphics processors too.

      • NVIDIA Is Joining The Linux Foundation

        NVIDIA will be joining the Linux Foundation, per an announcement coming out in the morning. But for open-source Linux fans, will this be a reason to rejoice about NVIDIA potentially moving forward with open-source drivers? Don’t break out the champagne quite yet.

      • Nvidia Joins The Linux Foundation
      • A New OpenCL Back-End For LLVM Is Published

        Besides the open-source AMD Radeon support for OpenCL finally taking shape, there’s more good open-source OpenCL news: a newly open-sourced LLVM OpenCL back-end.

        Back in August I wrote about an OpenCL, GLSL back-end for LLVM that may soon open up. The work was the result of a German student writing the LLVM OpenCL back-end as part of his university thesis. OpenCL is generated from LLVM bit-code, similar to how the Emscripten project is generating JavaScript from LLVM bit-code. This work is what’s finally being opened up.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • Nosonja XFCE 2012.02.29 Screenshots

    • New Releases

      • Clonezilla 1.2.12-29
      • IPFire 2.11 – Core Update 57 released
      • CeBIT 2012: Knoppix 7.0 presented

        Speaking at this year’s CeBIT Open Source ForumGerman language link, Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper presented version 7.0 of his popular Live Linux distribution. The new release is a special “CeBIT Edition” which is based on Debian “Wheezy” and uses the 3.2.4 Linux kernel. Available as a LiveDVD, it now uses UTF-8 encoding, and can run on both 32- and 64-bit systems.

      • Knoppix 7.0 release begins now

        The next major version of venerable Live Linux distro Knoppix is slowly making it’s way out the door over the next couple of days, includes some major updates to compatibility and performance

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian GNU/Linux Keeps Getting Stronger

        Look at the steepness of the bug-count for the next release (green curve) at Debian. Even as the count of packages in the repository rises, the rate at which bugs are getting killed in the release-cycle keeps rising. This shows the power of FLOSS. By using a modular layered approach, a thousand people can change the world faster than tens of thousands working in the darkness of M$. It’s beautiful that you can have the benefits of a package manager that keeps all your systems updated for applications as well as the OS at very low cost. I recommend Debian GNU/Linux. It works for you.

      • LLVM’s Clang Is Almost Good Enough For Debian

        Clang, the C/C++ front-end compiler for LLVM, is progressing quite quickly and is capable of building the Debian archives quite well, at least for a majority of the packages and on popular architectures.

        A Debian developer’s side project has been to see how well it would work to re-build the Debian archive (the entire distribution) using LLVM’s Clang C/C++ compiler rather than GCC. Apple has rated LLVM/Clang as being production-ready and it continues to find new uses, especially with the recent LLVM 3.0 release. But how well does LLVM/Clang work for building the massive Debian package-set?

      • Derivatives

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Licensing

    • Inside the ToyBox: An interview with Rob Landley

      A recent controversy about the legal aspects of software licensing put Rob Landley in the middle of an argument, but Landley says his real focus is on code, especially his ToyBox project – a reworking of the concepts of a project he once maintained, the Swiss-army knife of commands that is BusyBox. The H had a chance to talk with him about ToyBox, BusyBox and why he likes to work on these multifunctional monolithic utilities.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Open source helicopters trivialize Europe’s ODF troubles

      While technocrats in Westminster and Brussels cringe over the question of open document formats, the US military is planning a generation of open source helicopters.

      This is not just a generation of helicopters. It is the next generation of US military helicopter. It’ll be built on open standards, and will actively court open source systems suppliers.

      The US Army issued an official request for information on the proposal last week, formally kick-starting a procurement that will make the pedestrian kerfuffle over document formats in civvy street seem, well, pedestrian.

      It has already shone an unforgiving light on the question of royalties – one that has undermined every civil administration that has attempted to implement an open standards policy in Europe.

      Weapons manufacturers and US forces made an unequivocal declaration for royalty-free standards in January through the FACE (Future Airborne Capabilities Environment) Consortium they formed in response to US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s call for a “common aircraft architecture and subsystems”.

      “The FACE Standard is an open, nonproprietary technical specification that is publicly available without restrictive contracts, licensing terms, or royalties,” the Consortium announced from its base at The Open Group, the industry association responsible for the POSIX open Unix specification.

      “In business terms, the open standards specified for FACE mean that programmers are freely able to use them without monetary remuneration or other obligation to the standards owner,” it said.

Leftovers

  • Windows 8 showdown: Face-off on whether Windows still matters
  • “8″ Down and One to Go

  • Security

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • More Free Sludge! Calabasas, California Offers Free Sewage Sludge “Compost”

      Good news! The sewage treatment plant in Calabasas, California has been giving away free sludge! Free sludge, you say? That potent stew of human and industrial sewage sludge laced with flame retardants, endocrine disruptors, pharmaceutical residues, phthalates, industrial solvents, resistant pathogens, and perfluorinated compounds? “Composted” sludge, which can bioaccumulate in plants grown in sludge-contaminated soil? Oh, goodie.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Secret Greece Loan Shows Two Sinners as Client Unravels

      Greece’s secret loan from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was a costly mistake from the start.

      On the day the 2001 deal was struck, the government owed the bank about 600 million euros ($793 million) more than the 2.8 billion euros it borrowed, said Spyros Papanicolaou, who took over the country’s debt-management agency in 2005. By then, the price of the transaction, a derivative that disguised the loan and that Goldman Sachs persuaded Greece not to test with competitors, had almost doubled to 5.1 billion euros, he said.

    • Goldman Sachs: Social Security and Medicare Are ‘Weaker’ Promises Than Debt

      A report released today by Goldman Sachs says that if push comes to shove, the federal government will pay its lenders before it pays Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries. Debt service “should be seen as the top claim on government resources in most cases,” says the Goldman analysis.

  • Civil Rights

    • Mexico Adopts Alarming Surveillance Legislation

      The Mexican legislature today adopted a surveillance legislation that will grant the police warrantless access to real time user location data. The bill was adopted almost unanimously with 315 votes in favor, 6 against, and 7 abstentions. It has been sent to the President for his approval.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Pinterest and copyright: Why you should keep sharing–and keep pinning

        Pinterest is a social site for image sharing around themes that launched in closed beta in March 2010. As the site proceeded through an invite system and finally registration requests, it gained a considerable following and was one of Time’s “50 Best Websites of 2011.” In January 2012, it drove more referral traffic to retailers than YouTube, Google+, and LinkedIn combined and became the fastest site to ever break 10 million unique visitors. As its popularity increases, so have concerns about whether its users aren’t just sharing their favorite things, but engaging one another in the web’s largest copyright infringement platform.

      • ACTA

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