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08.03.12

Links 3/8/2012: Linux 3.6 RC1, KDE 4.9 in Chakra

Posted in News Roundup at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Desktop

    • Dreaming a Little Dream of the Ideal Linux Distro

      “It is hard to say what an ideal distro looks like because there are many important niches,” noted Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. “What I need as a software developer for my laptop is very different than what I’d want to deploy my software to.” For his development laptop, he prefers Fedora. “On the server, though, I would prefer to deploy to a more conservative distro, like Debian Stable or Scientific Linux.”

    • Commodore 64 at 30: the specs compared

      The Commodore 64 turns 30 this month. How does it compare to modern computers?

  • Kernel Space

    • Another round of Leapocalypse

      Some Linux sever administrators found out that time was not on their side yesterday, when an errant signal from some Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers broadcast a new leap second that adversely affected many servers unprepared for the change.

    • Bogus leap second disrupts Linux systems

      During the night of 31 July to 1 August, various servers that provide time information via NTP (Network Time Protocol) incorrectly announced that clients should apply a leap second. On Tuesday evening, Marco Marongiu pointed to this issue on one of the NTP project’s mailing lists. Now, reports from users whose systems applied a leap second at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – 2am CET – can be found in places such as a Mythtv forum, on Twitter, on Google+ and on the NTP project’s mailing lists.

    • Kernel Log: Development of Linux 3.6 under way

      The kernel developers have added the VFIO userspace driver framework and a hybrid standby option to Linux 3.6. The 64-bit ARM code will be called “arm64″ after all. The widely used software collection util-linux has been extended to include a range of new tools.

    • New Linux kernels bring performance improvements

      Kernel 3.0.39, recently released, and kernel 3.2.25, coming soon, include not only smaller changes and enhancements but also a long list of performance optimisations. This marks a change in the strategy for maintaining older kernel versions; previously, these kinds of adjustments generally weren’t made to stable and long-term kernels to avoid introducing bugs.

    • Linux 3.6-rc1

    • Graphics Stack

      • Xi Graphics’ Proprietary X Server, Drivers Have Faded Away

        Xi Graphics, the company that once developed proprietary X Servers and graphics drivers for Linux and UNIX platforms, has faded away.

        Going back to the early 90′s there was Xi Graphics Inc that specialized in creating high-performance X Servers and graphics drivers for Linux/UNIX. Their proprietary Accelerated-X product was compliant against X11R6.4 and was licensed to a range of major companies, universities, and individuals for its features and performance. They also developed their own in-house graphics drivers for different hardware (namely early ATI hardware), which they claimed to be the fastest.

        Among the advertised features for their products was hardware-accelerated support for multiple displays / stretched displays, support for IBM AIX, SPARC support, and “Our ATI graphics support has been the fastest on UNIX/Linux for years. No kidding.”

      • Intel Continues Gaining Ground For Linux Graphics

        Following the success of Ivy Bridge and their continued open-source contributions, Intel graphics continue to gain market-share on the Linux desktop.

        Last month I mentioned Intel Winning Over NVIDIA For Linux Enthusiasts. The trends cite the publicly-available OpenBenchmarking.org data, which largely reflects the latest happenings of Linux enthusiasts.

        The auto-generated statistics for the month of July are now available and they continue to reflect Intel’s growing market-share when it comes to Linux graphics use.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

  • Distributions

    • WattOS R5: Not Ideal, But Still Nice

      I heard about this OS from couple of my readers, who left the comment on the blog posts. They mentioned this OS as the extreme light one.

    • Does Archlinux need a new slogan?

      Last week Archlinux released the install media 2012.07.15. In a post on the website they told us that the most noticeable change was the fact they no longer ship their installer, the Arch Installation Framework (AIF), with it. This means, that after downloading the ISO, you will have to perform all the installation steps manually. Or, to put it in their own words, “This means a menu driven installer is no longer available and we rely more on documentation to guide new users.”

    • Vine 6.1 Screenshots (07/31/2012)
    • I always come back to Zorin OS

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Continues Strong On The PandaBoard ES

            Back in June I showed how Ubuntu 12.10 was continuing to improve the ARM Linux performance and since then showed that on TI OMAP4 hardware Ubuntu is faster than Fedora, while today I have more benchmarks to share. Up now are the latest PandaBoard ES benchmarks from a more recent Ubuntu 12.10 development build for the ARMv7 Cortex-A9 dual-core development board.

          • Ubuntu Accomplishments: Building Maturity

            Progress on Ubuntu Accomplishments has been moving apace. For those of you who have not been keeping score, we released 0.1 earlier this year which provided a first cut of the core system working. We then followed up with our 0.2 release which brought many refinements to the system based upon user feedback and the increased level of testing by our 600+ users. In September 2012 we plan on shipping our 0.3 release, and our goals are very clear for this release: quality, visibility, and growth.

          • The Endeavour Desktop

            Space-based desktops have a special place in my heart, and this shot of space shuttle Endeavour shadowed by the Earth below it is a great one. Flickr user Michael Farquhar used this photo as the bedrock for his customized Ubuntu desktop. It’s gorgeous when you sit down, not at all distracting when it’s time to work, and well-placed widgets keep informative data around the sides of the screen.

          • New Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Concept Looks Amazing

            After introducing last week a very nice video that presented an amazing mockup of the Unity interface for Ubuntu OS, we’re now proud to announce today, August 2nd, another nice concept that looks simply marvelous.

            First of all, be aware that the above mockup of Ubuntu’s Unity interface is unofficial, created by an Ubuntu user, and it has nothing to do with Canonical.

          • Gumstix Waysmall Silverlode is a tiny PC with Ubuntu Linux

            *

            The Gumstix Waysmall Silverlode is a tiny, low power computer designed for commercial or industrial applications. But under the hood it’s running a version of Ubuntu Linux optimized by Linaro to run on ARM-based processors. So it could also theoretically find use as an inexpensive desktop computer or media center PC.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Bodhi Linux RaspBerry Pi Beta

      As for changes, this release is now utilizing Terminology as it’s default terminal emulator and PCManFM file browser has been replaced with the native EFM (Enlightenment File Manager). The issues our first image had with networking and flash drives should also be resolved with this release. Also worth noting is that the AppCenter is now configured to work by default in the Midori web browser – but the synaptic interface runs fairly slow on the Pi hardware.

    • Phones

      • Take That, Touchpad: No Open WebOS Support For You

        Open webOS is marching toward its first release, but it won’t have many products to run on, because previous webOS devices will not be supported. The reason for that circumstance is the fact that the new operating system is based on the Linux 3.3 kernel and requires SoC support. In HP’s words:

        “For Open webOS we are aiming for support on future hardware platforms where SoC’s support Linux 3.3+ kernel and where open source replacements for proprietary components are integrated. Existing devices cannot be supported because of those many proprietary components, including graphics, networking and lack of drivers for a modern kernel (but of course, there is the Community Edition for those interested in improving the TouchPad).”

      • Open WebOS: No (official) support for existing devices
      • Open WebOS Releases Core Apps; Reveals Touchpad Won’t Be Supported 44

      • Android

        • Google Cracks Down on Deceptive Android Apps

          Google sent out an email to its developer community with news that Google Play is undergoing policy changes to crack down on shady behavior in the Android market.

        • HTC Evo 3D, EVO Design 4G Gets Android 4.0

          Sprint has started pushing Android 4.0 OTA upgrade for HTC Evo 3D, EVO Design 4G. This upgrade brings Google Chrome browser, Face Unlock and other features synonym to Android 4.0. Some enhancements include:

        • DROID RAZR HD Appears in All Its Glory Thanks to Another Forum Leak

          One day after the international RAZR HD appeared over at XDA, the U.S. version, better known as the DROID RAZR HD, has appeared via Droid Forums. We now have a confirmation on the name, thanks to a picture of the phone’s About screen – not that we were questioning it to begin with, since Motorola employees gave that up long ago. We also get a look at the backside, which is full-on kevlar, and in my opinion, much more appealing than the backside that we saw on the international version.

          If you thought for a second that this wasn’t coming to Verizon, the 4G LTE logo on the backside along with “Verizon” being mentioned in the system version should help ease your mind there. On-screen navigation keys are present. The “HD” in the name clearly means the resolution of the device, so we will likely see a similar 720p Colorboost display to the one included in the Atrix HD.

        • Canalys Researchers Report Strong Android Smartphone Numbers

          Market researchers at Canalys have published their final Q2 2012 country-level shipment estimates for smartphones, and the news is all good for Android. The firm reported that 158 million smartphones were shipped globally in the second quarter, and 100 million of those were Android phones. Android has a whopping 68.1 percent of the global market–nothing to sneeze at. Meanwhile, smartphone shipments in China are on a tear.

        • Android 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ hits 0.8 percent market share
        • Ice Cream Sandwich now on 16 percent of Android phones
        • HP releases more Open webOS code, including System Manager and core apps

Free Software/Open Source

  • Open source NAC system PacketFence 3.5 released

    PacketFence is an unobtrusive solution that works with equipment from many vendors (wired or wireless) such as Cisco, Aruba, ExtremeNetworks, Juniper Networks, Nortel/Avaya, Hewlett-Packard, Meru Networks, Foundry/Brocade, Enterasys, Accton/Edge-corE/SMC, 3Com, D-Link, Intel, Dell, Aerohive, Motorola and many more.

  • An “Open Source” Cargo Container Building – The Epic Creative Co-Op

    The Woodlands/Houston, TX (August 1, 2012) – Imagine applying the concept of Open Source Software – where the code is published and made available to other programmers free of charge – to architecture. That is just what one Houston based multimedia development company did with a new commercial structure using upcycled cargo containers and recycled building materials. Every step of their 18 month building process is chronicled online and available for others to learn from.

  • ViewCast Supports Linux Open Source Community

    ViewCast Corporation is supporting the open source community through its partnership with KernelLabs, a coalition of like-minded Linux software engineers whose primary goal is to improve the Linux platform for audio / video applications.

    ViewCast is working with KernelLabs in the development of Linux drivers for all of its latest Osprey video capture cards. Most recently, Linux drivers for the Osprey 260e, 460e and 820e capture cards were made available through the KernelLabs website. The drivers will be submitted to the next Linux kernel and then available directly in the Linux distribution thereafter.

  • Rent A Chaos Monkey From Netflix

    Video rental company Netflix has used its extensive consumption of the Amazon Web Services cloud to give something back to the open source community. The company’s Chaos Monkey system was developed to ensure that its operations were capable of self-healing (or at least continuing to run) should instances in the AWS cloud fail. This month sees the firm open source its code.

    The firm’s Cory Bennett and Ariel Tseitlin have written on the Netflix techblog explaining that over the last year, “Chaos Monkey has terminated over 65,000 instances running in our production and testing environments. Most of the time nobody notices, but we continue to find surprises caused by Chaos Monkey, which allows us to isolate and resolve them so they don’t happen again.”

  • Open Source Intelligence Presentation featured at Hacker Halted – Hacking Conference, Miami, Florida in October of 2012
  • Adobe releases open Source Sans Pro font

    Working every day in an open-source environment, there’s always one area where open-source aesthetics fall down compared to the Windows and Mac ecosystems: professionally produced fonts.

  • Keyhole Software Releases Open Source khsSherpa Framework for HTML5 Development

    Leawood, KS, August 03, 2012 –(PR.com)– Software Consulting Firm Keyhole Software has announced the release of version 1.1.4 of the khsSherpa framework. khsSherpa, an open source JSON endpoint framework for Mobile and HTML5 support, now boasts RESTful Service URL Mappings. Version 1.1.4 is publicly available in the Maven Public Central Repository and gitHub.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Latest Browser Share Data Shows Very Slight Decline for Google Chrome

        It’s no secret that Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox–both open source browsers–have been locked in a neck-and-neck market share battle for some time now. The two browsers are on rapid release cycles, and are now tending to leapfrog each other for market share in small increments each month. Now that August is here, NetApplications is out with its updated browser share data for July, which shows that Firefox maintains a tiny share lead over Chrome, and that Chrome actually declined slightly in share during the month. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer retains more than half of the browser market.

      • Google Wants Chrome 21 to See You

        When Marc Andreeson created the first web browser, it was all about users simply viewing static web pages. A lot has changed over the years in the web browser world, and now with the latest Google Chrome 21 browser there is a host of new two-way interactivity options. The new features in Chrome 21 change the way that users look at browsers and the way that browsers look at us.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • CMS

    • Drupal 7.15 Released

      The Drupal team have announced a new release of Drupal, Drupal 7.15. This is a bug fix release only and no new features or security patches have been added in this release. Upgrading to this release is strongly recommended by the Drupal team. Upgrade instructions can be found on this page.

  • Healthcare

  • Public Services/Government

    • Open Forum Europe: ‘Widespread discrimination in IT procurement’

      ‘Use of discriminatory technical specifications is a widespread practice within the EU’, says Open Forum Europe (OFE), an organisation advocating the use of open standards and open source.

      The group examined 585 invitations to tender, published in March, April and May this year by public administrations looking for computer software products. OFE found that almost 1 in 5 of these, procurement rules are broken (17 per cent).

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Three California Democrats Team Up with Monsanto

      In California, the battle over Proposition 37, which would require the labeling of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food products, is heating up. In late July, pro-labeling groups obtained a flier sent out by a group opposed to the proposition containing the endorsements of three Democratic California Assemblymembers, even though the Democratic Party of California (and over 90 percent of consumers) supports GMO labeling.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Super Rich Holding $21 Trillion Overseas To Avoid Taxation

      At a time when the gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us is reaching historic heights across the globe, at least $21 trillion (with a “t”) in unreported private financial wealth was recently discovered sitting in secret tax havens.

      While it can be difficult to imagine sums so large, consider this: the $21 trillion alone is the amount of the U.S. and Japanese economies combined. That reflects only financial wealth, and not the holdings and investments of this monied elite in mansions, yachts, private jets, etc. According to a recent reports by the Tax Justice Network, “The Price of Offshore Revisited” and “Inequality: You Don’t Know The Half of It,” this staggering disparity is only growing worse.

  • Civil Rights

    • Media, ACLU to argue against censorship at Guantánamo

      The chief war court judge has agreed to let media and civil liberties lawyers argue for openness at the start of a pre-trial hearing at Guantánamo in the death-penalty case of five alleged conspirators in the Sept. 11 attacks.

      A consortium of 14 media groups, including The Miami Herald, and the American Civil Liberties Union separately filed motions protesting protective orders that shield the public from access to secret information in the case.

08.02.12

Links 2/8/2012: Raspberry Pi Has Android 4.0, Google Chrome 21

Posted in News Roundup at 2:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • MATE 1.4 Released, PPA Available

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop

      • ZaReason’s Valta X79

        I was recently contacted by Earl Malmrose of ZaReason, who wanted to know if I’d like to review ZaReason’s new Linux-based desktop computer, built around the new Intel 6-Core processor and quad channel memory. I told him I’d be thrilled to review it, and asked if he’d also include a snappy ATI video card so I really could push the system to the limit using one of my favorite side hobbies, namely cryptocurrencies.

        I start with a review of the system itself and finish with a bit of fun—I run the numbers and see what sort of CPU and GPU-hashing power I can get from it. Whether you think cryptocurrencies are a brilliant take on alternative economics or a dumb idea that wastes electricity, I can assure you no one knows how to overclock hardware quite like a Bitcoin miner. (I don’t actually overclock this system, since I’m sure ZaReason would like it back in full working order, but I push it to the max with stock settings.)

  • Distributions

    • Zorin OS 6 Core: fresh blood

      Changing the operating system on your computer is not like flipping a switch. It is a cultural change, too.

      Different operating systems give you different degrees of freedom, different degrees of access to knowledge of “what is inside”. And, what is more important for a non-technical user, they give you different user interfaces.

      Windows users are used to having a panel at the bottom of the screen, window control elements at the right side of the window, the Windows Start button and so on. If you see something like the modern design of the Unity interface, nothing is the same as Windows. It’s a steep learning curve, isn’t it?

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat CEO Likes CentOS Linux – Oracle Linux, Not So Much

        Red Hat makes its money from selling support subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Mostly the same bits are available entirely for free by way of the community led CentOS project that clones RHEL.

        I recently chatted with Red Hat CEO about CentOS and the long story short is he’s good with CentOS.

        Having CentOS out there is a good thing. It broadens our community. There are people that don’t need the things that we have in subscription and it’s great that there is an offering build off the same code base.

      • Red Hat: Big Hires, Big Virtualized Storage Push Into Cloud

        Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is making multiple strategic hires that will deepen the open source company’s work with channel partners across Linux, virtualization, storage, cloud platforms and JBoss Middleware. The evidence surfaced when The VAR Guy met Red Hat North America Channel Chief Roger Egan at CompTIA Breakaway this week. Here are the exclusive details.

        First up, Egan’s role is evolving. Going forward he’ll have more of a strategic role — focusing on how Red Hat’s partner program must serve a range of company types: Resellers, VARs, integrators, cloud and telecom service providers, OEMs (like Dell, HP and IBM) and ISVs (independent service providers). The VAR Guy believes Egan still reports into Red Hat Global Channel Chief Mark Enzweiler.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Install HandBrake 0.9.8 In Ubuntu

            HandBrake is an open-source, cross-platform multi-threaded video transcoder for Mac, Linux and Windows. You can use it to convert to and from different media formats. The availability of presets make the conversion easier even for novice users. Just select the media device to which you want the video to be transcode to and HandBrake will manage the rest.

          • Ubuntu Developer Summit Schedule Announced
          • Ubuntu Developer Summit Sponsorship Now Open

            The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 13.04 release.

            The next UDS takes place at Bella Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark from the 29th Oct – 1st Nov. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint Discontinues Gnome 2 Repositories

              With the arrival of Gnome 3, Gnome 2 was discontinued in most major distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSuse, Arch Linux etc. However, a few distros like Debian, Gentoo are still using the old desktop while Linux Mint maintained a separate repository called gnome2-frozen for older gnome builds. However, soon they will discontinue that as well.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Amadeus Invites Third-Party Developers to Use Source Code
  • Internet NZ sponsoring Open Source awards

    Internet NZ
    The organisers of the New Zealand Open Source Awards are pleased to announce that Internet New Zealand has been confirmed as a Platinum sponsor of the event which will be held in Wellington in November.

    Internet New Zealand Chief Executive Vikram Kumar says the organisation is proud to be supporting the Open Source Awards, noting that the vision of a free and uncaptureable Internet depends in large measure on open source software.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

  • SaaS

  • Project Releases

    • Pygmyfoto 1.0 Released

      Version 1.0 of Pygmyfoto, a no-frills application for publishing a photo roll on the web, is now available on GitHub. The first stable release features a handful of new features and improvements added since the latest beta version of the application. The older 1.2.3 version of jQuery bundled with the beta release has been replaced with jQuery 1.7.2. The jQuery lightBox plugin has been replaced with the Lightbox2 plugin. The pygmyfoto.py script features improved handling of EXIF metadata. Pygmyfoto now integrates the +1 button which can be used to share the published photos on Google+.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Giant robots and open source

      I know why you’re excited this week … you’ve seen the “Kuratas”, a 13 foot tall, 9,900-pound robot you can ride in at speeds of up to 6 miles per hour and which is equipped with a water bottle cannon and Gatling guns that can fire 6,000 BBs per minute (the operator can fire the armaments just by smiling … no, really, watch the video).

      The Kuratas robot, built by Japanese artist Kogoro Kurata and marketed by Suidobashi Heavy Industry, can be controlled by the onboard operator, a remote control device, or a smartphone and runs V-Sido, a “next generation robot OS”.

Leftovers

  • Security

    • NVIDIA Linux Driver Hack Gives You Root Access

      NVIDIA’s had a past few weeks with Linus Torvalds having harsh words for NVIDIA, the downing of their forums, and now a NVIDIA driver exploit being revealed that gives normal users the rights to super-user privileges.

08.01.12

Links 1/8/2012: KDE Releases 4.9, Wine 1.5.10, MATE 1.4

Posted in News Roundup at 5:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Top Three: Peppermint, Mint and Arch Linux Get Updates
  • July 2012 Issue of Linux Journal: Linux Means Business
  • Linux is not a “second string” operating system
  • Bogus leap second disrupts Linux systems

    uring the night of 31 July to 1 August, various servers that provide time information via NTP (Network Time Protocol) incorrectly announced that clients should apply a leap second. On Tuesday evening, Marco Marongiu pointed to this issue on one of the NTP project’s mailing lists. Now, reports from users whose systems applied a leap second at 00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – 2am CET – can be found in places such as a Mythtv forum, on Twitter, on Google+ and on the NTP project’s mailing lists.

  • Desktop

    • Could this be the year of the Linux desktop?

      In the 21 years or so since its inception, Linux has gained some amazing enthusiast street cred, but failed time and again to enter the mainstream. This year, however, may afford it an opportunity it’s never had before: to gain the momentum necessary to join the big boys in the operating system world. If that happens, Linux devotees the world over — from users to developers to even Linus Torvalds himself — may have Microsoft and Windows 8 to thank.

    • Will Windows 8 really push more people towards Linux?

      So what does this all have to do with Linux you might ask? Well, Gabe Newell of Valve, has come out stating that his company is porting its Steam software for use on Linux and he is hoping that they will have over 2,500 games available to be playable on the Linux OS. Now while most of us are not able to play games at work, this type of exposure for Linux should do nothing but help the open source community. But again, even though his feelings are that Windows 8 will be a huge failure, we have to keep in mind that when Sony released the Playstation 3, he came out and spoke about the difficulties of working with Sony’s device, a stance that he seems to recently have gone back on.

    • Nigeria: The Linux-Based Dell Xps 13 Ultrabook Could Rival Macbook Air

      Linux-based operating system has proven to be more reliable and rugged for day-to-day activity especially security purposes, when placed at par with other operating system.

      The Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution with the defining component – Linux kernel is generally seen by hackers as tough to crack.

    • Apple’s Retina MacBook Pro Causes Linux Woes

      I had ordered the Apple MacBook Pro 2012 model with Retina Display after being tempted by its impressive 2880 x 1800 display and other attractive features. Unfortunately, when Linux is running bare metal on the hardware it’s not running too good at the moment. My full review of the Retina MacBook Pro with Linux will come in early August, but there’s a few tid-bits to share now for those tempted shoppers.

  • Server

    • System Administration of the IBM Watson Supercomputer

      System administrators at the USENIX LISA 2011 conference (LISA is a great system administration conference, by the way) in Boston in December got to hear Michael Perrone’s presentation “What Is Watson?”

      Michael Perrone is the Manager of Multicore Computing from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. The entire presentation (slides, video and MP3) is available on the USENIX Web site, and if you really want to understand how Watson works under the hood, take an hour to listen to Michael’s talk (and the sysadmin Q&A at the end).

  • Kernel Space

    • VFIO Driver Merged Into Linux 3.6 Kernel
    • Linux Kernel 3.4.7 Is Available for Download

      Greg Kroah-Hartman announced a few hours ago, July 30th, the immediate availability for download of the seventh maintenance release for the stable Linux 3.4 kernel series.

    • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Alan Cox

      In this week’s 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile, we talk to Alan Cox. We learn how he originally got involved in Linux and why it remains important to him. He also gives us a bit of music education.

    • KLANG: A New Linux Audio System For The Kernel

      A developer has begun working on a new audio sub-system for the Linux kernel, which he is referring to as KLANG, the Kernel Level Audio Next Generation. KLANG was conceived after the developer became frustrated by ALSA, OSS4, and PulseAudio.

    • Presented by Digi-Key’s Continuing Education Center: Linux Kernel Debugging
    • Linux Foundation Adds Antelink, Calxeda and Reaktor as New Members
    • Linux Foundation welcomes three new members
    • ViewCast Supports Linux Open Source Community through Partnership With KernelLabs
    • Massive power regression going 3.4 to 3.5
    • Linux 3.5 Kernel Power Regression Spotted

      Following yesterday’s news of a massive power regression within the Linux 3.5 kernel, James Bottomley has uncovered the kernel commit causing excessive power usage.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Linux Isn’t Alone With OpenGL Driver Issues

        While the open-source Linux graphics drivers may not be up to scratch with the proprietary Linux graphics drivers from NVIDIA and AMD in terms of features, power efficiency, and performance, Linux isn’t the only operating system with less than desirable OpenGL drivers. I’ve been surprised by the OpenGL issues under OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” with the Retina MacBook Pro.

      • AMD Open-Source S.I. Botched, Hope For The Future

        We’re now going into eight months since the AMD Radeon HD 7000 series “Southern Islands” graphics cards first launched. In that time the Catalyst Linux support has been stable and fine, but the open-source driver support is still unusable.

        There has been the DRM/KMS support already for the Southern Island GPUs within the mainline kernel, so there is kernel mode-setting support, but not much more. There is the new RadeonSI Gallium3D driver to provide the user-space 3D/OpenGL driver support, but that isn’t yet in a working state. Getting RadeonSI up and running is the main blocker right now for usable Radeon HD 7000 series open-source support. There isn’t even 2D acceleration support yet since its using GLAMOR and so first the 3D code-paths must actually work.

      • Intel Driver Integrates BRW Assembler

        The xf86-video-intel driver has picked up thousands of lines of new code today with the integration of a BRW assembler in order to compile shader programs on the fly and to remove inefficiencies and mistakes from current Intel shaders.

      • Intel Ivy Bridge Is Okay On Linux Power Usage

        With talk of a massive power regression in the recently released Linux 3.5 kernel, yesterday I began benchmarking some different systems with varying versions of the Linux kernel looking for any new kernel power regressions on different hardware.

      • RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver Can Now Handle Gears

        It turns out that minutes after writing AMD Open-Source S.I. Botched, Hope For The Future, a number of “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver commits landed in mainline Mesa.

      • NVIDIA 304.30 Supports FXAA, X Server 1.13, K10

        The NVIDIA 304.30 Linux graphics driver is available this Monday afternoon. There’s several exciting changes to this latest NVIDIA Linux driver for the 304 series that’s still in beta.

        The 304.30 beta comes less than a month after the first hefty NVIDIA 304 Linux driver beta that brought DKMS installer support, RandR improvements, and much more. However, due to the hacking of NvNews, the NvNews Linux forums being eliminated, and NVIDIA not yet putting up their own Linux forums (their developers are certainly welcome here too), this is a rather quiet release. The NVIDIA 304.30 Linux driver isn’t also yet mentioned on NVIDIA.com until later in the week, but Hardy Doelfel of the NVIDIA Linux team was kind enough to write in about today’s driver release.

      • Wayland’s Weston Gets Output Configuration File

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • MATE 1.4 desktop improves Caja file manager

      The MATE development team has released version 1.4 of its desktop environment, adding support for sharing files via Bluetooth and further improving the Caja file manager. This update to the fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME now allows users to open bookmarks in the Caja side pane using the enter and space keys, and, in the file conflict dialogue, a button to show the differences between files has been added; the toggle button for the text-based location bar has been restored.

    • MATE 1.4: The GNOME 2 Desktop Clone Gets a Key Update

      Fans of Linux in general and Linux Mint in particular are no doubt already familiar with MATE, the GNOME 2-like desktop that was first included in Linux Mint 12 as an alternative for users wary of GNOME 3.

    • LMDE’s “gnome2-frozen” repository discontinued

      In the latest Update Pack to Linux Mint Debian (UP4) released in March, MATE 1.2 and Cinnamon 1.4 were made available as well as an option called “gnome2-frozen” which allowed users to stick to Gnome 2 and skip the Update Pack altogether.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Back to … KDE‽

        Now this is one of the things that you wouldn’t expect — Years after I left KDE behind me, today I’m back using it.. and honestly I feel again at home. I guess the whole backend changes that got through KDE4 were a bit too harsh for me at the time, and I could feel the rough edges. But after staying with GNOME2, XFCE, then Cinnamon.. this seems to be the best fit for me at this point.

        Why did I decide to try this again? Well, even if it doesn’t happen that often, Cinnamon tends to crash from time to time, and that’s obnoxious when you’re working on something. Then there is another matter, which is that I’m using a second external monitor together with my laptop, as I’m doing network diagrams and other things on my dayjob, and for whatever reason the lockscreen provided by gnome-screensaver no longer works reliably: sometimes the second display is kept running, other times it doesn’t resume at all and I have to type blindly (with the risk that I’m actually typing my password on a different application), and so on so forth.

      • KDE Release 4.9 – in memory of Claire Lotion

    • GNOME Desktop

      • The Future Of GNOME: Very Optimistic?

        Following the controversial information this weekend about some viewing GNOME as fading into abyss and losing relevance on the desktop, Christian Schaller has shared his views on the future of GNOME. In general he is very optimistic about the future of GNOME.

      • GNOME developers set ambitious goals at GUADEC

        In a talk given at the annual GUADEC developer conference, GNOME developers Xan López and Juan José Sánchez have set ambitious goals for the open source desktop project proposing the release of GNOME 3.12 as GNOME 4.0 in March 2014 and the creation touch enabled versions of GNOME for mobile devices.

      • An Awesome GUADEC and a Bright Future

        This year’s GUADEC was one of the best that I have ever attended. I have never seen the GNOME community so energised. New contributors were more visible than ever before, and all of them were fantastically enthusiastic and motivated. It is always a wonderful experience to see newcomers be inspired by our community. Our outreach efforts are more successful than ever.

  • Distributions

    • ProxLinux 2.2 Screenshots (07/30/2012)
    • 5 Linux Distros focused on computer security

      Today I’ll present you 5 Linux distribution focused on computer security, in this list I’ve not put 2 distro I’ve already talked about: Backtrack and Damn Vulnerable Linux.

      The 5 Linux distribution are: DEFT (Digital Evidence & Forensic Toolkit), QubesOs, Pentoo, Lightweight Portable Security and CAINE.

    • Ubuntu, RHEL, SUSE, Amazon Linux On The Amazon EC2 Cloud

      After providing benchmarks last week of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on different Amazon EC2 instance types, up today are more benchmarks from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Rather than just tossing out a lot of Amazon EC2 numbers of the different instance types to judge their performance, this article offers benchmarks of different Linux distributions on the same cloud. Tested here are Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Amazon Linux AMI 2012.03, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

    • SolusOS: A New Linux Distro with a Focus on the Familiar

      There’s been no end in sight to the controversy over Linux desktop environments, and with new contenders including Unity, GNOME 3, and Cinnamon–to name just a few–users now face more choices than ever before.

    • Look what Stella brought to CentOS 6.3

      There is a new Linux distribution released almost every week, sometimes, even every day. The latest is one called Stella, and the first version is Stella 6.3. Stella is a desktop-focused remix of CentOS, and Stella 6.3 is based on CentOS 6.3.

      If you are familiar with CentOS, you know that out of the box, it is not really designed as a desktop distribution. Stella changes all that, as it is primarily aimed at desktop users, while retaining the core enterprise features and capabilities of CentOS.

    • CentOS gets a desktop remix with Stella 6.3

      Programs bundled with Stella include Firefox and Thunderbird ESR 10.0.6, the Pidgin IM client, version 2.6.9 of the GIMP image editor, LibreOffice 3.4.5 and the Transmission BitTorrent client. Stella includes additional third-party repositories such as Fedora’s Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) and the ELRepo RPM repository for Enterprise Linux packages. Two repositories – nux-dextop and nux-libreoffice – contain the additional desktop components, applications and the LibreOffice productivity suite that have been added to Stella.

    • New Releases

      • Pentoo 2012.0 Defcon Release
      • Pentoo 2012 Beta Has Been Released

        The Pentoo Team has announced last evening, July 30th, the public Beta release of the Pentoo 2012 operating system based on Gentoo Linux.

        Pentoo 2012 Beta comes after three years of hard work to bring you all the latest and greatest tools for your daily penetration testing tasks.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS: A surprise addition to our family computers

        We have 5 computers in our household. My dad, my wife, and I have a laptop each, and my mom uses a desktop that sits in my parents’ bedroom. There is also a laptop that sits connected to our living room television. With the exception of this computer, we run Linux on all our computers. My mom and my wife use Kubuntu on their computers, while my dad and I have ArchLinux/KDE. The day before yesterday I realized that I hadn’t run updates on my dad’s laptop in a while so in haste, I issue the following at the terminal:

    • Red Hat Family

      • Stella GNU/Linux 6.3 Is Based on CentOS 6.3

        The developers behind the Stella Linux operating system have announced last evening, July 30th, that version 6.3 of the Stella distribution is now available for download.

        Stella 6.3 follows the release of CentOS 6.3, an open source clone of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating system, and includes all the cool new stuff found in RHEL 6.3.

      • Leeyo Software’s RevPro Revenue Management and Automation Software Achieves Oracle Database Ready, Oracle WebLogic Ready and Oracle Linux Ready Status
      • Scientific Linux 6.3 RC1 Comes With LibreOffice

        Pat Riehecky announced last evening, July 30th, that the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming Scientific Linux 6.3 operating system is now available for download and testing.

        Scientific Linux 6.3 RC1 comes with the LibreOffice office suite, which replaced the depricated OpenOffice.org application. Moreover, various packages were updated in this release, including yum-conf, OpenAFS 1.6.1, rpmfusion-free-release 6.1, yum-conf-rpmfusion 0.1, gtk2-immodules 2.18.9, gtk2-immodule-xim 2.18.9, ibus-gtk 1.3.4, procps 3.2.8 , and pacemaker 1.1.7.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 to get MATE desktop, Samba 4 and ownCloud

          A Fedora developer has proposed adding the packages for the MATE Desktop Environment – a fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME – into the repositories for Fedora 18, which is due for release in early November. The proposal was approved at yesterday’s meeting of Fedora’s Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). This is, however, conditional on the developers involved merging the desktop components into Fedora’s package repositories on time, otherwise the MATE desktop will have to wait for a future Fedora version. Since Fedora’s rules allow new packages to be added to the update repositories, MATE – which has come to the fore primarily through Linux Mint – could find its way into all currently maintained Fedora versions.

        • Fedora 18 To Get MATE Desktop, Samba 4, Etc
        • Fedora Gets MATE and New Server

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – July 30th, 2012
      • Debian 8.0 Will Be Known as Jessie

        The Debian Release Team, through Adam D. Barratt, announced a few days ago on their mailing list that the next major release of the Debian operating system will be named Jessie.

      • Debian’s new draft trademark policy

        If you’ve ever stumbled upon http://www.debian.org/trademark , you might be aware that, as a project, we’ve been working on a proper trademark policy since quite a while.

        I’m happy to attach a first complete draft of such a policy, and I’m looking for comment on it.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Mid-2012: Arch Linux vs. Slackware vs. Ubuntu vs. Fedora

            At the request of many Phoronix readers following the release of updated Arch Linux media, here are some new Arch Linux benchmarks. However, this is not just Arch vs. Ubuntu, but rather a larger Linux distribution performance comparison. In this article are benchmark results from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, CentOS 6.2, Fedora 17, Slackware 14.0 Beta, and Arch Linux.

          • What Is Ubuntu’s Target Audience?

            We started an Open Discussion section on Muktware, where readers can suggest topics for discussion (the idea is to use these discussions as base to create stories ). The second topic was about the target audience of Ubuntu. The OP (original poster) wrote about his own dilemma to pin-point the core market of Ubuntu, which generated some heat. I think that’s an important topic for various reasons. I, being a FOSS/Ubuntu advocate, often come across the same question as the OP was asking. What is the target audience of Ubuntu?

          • Ubuntu 13.04 Planning To Happen In Copenhagen

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Long-Term Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce

              If you’ve read my very recent review of Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” Xfce, you’ll know how pleased I was with it. Given that my latest long-term review of Kubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” just ended, I needed something new, so this was going to be it. Follow the jump to see what this is like over the course of 7-10 days.

            • Video Review: Linux Mint 13 Xfce

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Netflix Releases Chaos Monkey Into the Wild

    Netflix has released its Chaos Monkey tool to open source. Chaos Monkey is a testing utility that randomly shuts down virtual machine instances across large systems, ensuring that system is built with a great degree of resilience. Chaos Monkey’s is built in Amazon Web Service’s system, but its design is flexible enough for it to be used with cloud providers other than Amazon and with other instance groupings, Netflix said.

  • Netflix Does Its Tech Homework
  • Open source Chaos Monkey brings order to cloud
  • Netflix uncages Chaos Monkey disaster testing system

    Netflix has released Chaos Monkey, which it uses internally to test the resiliency of its Amazon Web Services cloud computing architecture, making available for free one of the tools the video streaming company uses to keep its massive cloud computing architecture running.

  • Open Source Asterisk Leader Kevin Fleming Leaving Project

    The first time I spoke with Kevin Fleming, was back in 2006 about a new collaboration that Asterisk built at the time with Zimbra. I had spoke with Mark Spencer, the founder of Asterisk many times before, but Fleming was the ‘new’ guy, taking on a leadership role in the open source Asterisk VoIP project.

  • Inktank’s Ceph: An Open Source Storage Solution for the Enterprise

    Launched in May, Inktank is one of the newest companies to enter the still very new open source cloud computing industry. But it’s got a great head start as the enterprise support arm of the Ceph storage system. The one-time doctoral thesis of founder Sage Weil, Ceph has been incubating as an open source project with L.A.-based web hosting company DreamHost over the last eight years.

    “The founders and the community realized that in order for companies to adopt Ceph and use it, it needed to have commercial support available,” said Ross Turk, VP of community at Inktank. “The technology created a necessity for the company, instead of a company creating technology to make money.”

  • Open source gift from Netflix rains chaos in your cloud
  • Defcon: Will Open Source Divashark Unseat Wireshark for CTP?

    We all love open source Wireshark for packet capture right?

    Apparently, that isn’t always the case. Researcher Robert Deaton took the stage at Defcon to announce a new open source effort that could one day possibly unseat Wireshark.

    Deaton said that every team at the Defcon CTP (Capture the Packet) contest uses Wireshark. That said he argued that in his view it’s the wrong tool for the job.

  • Azavea and Temple University’s Center for Security and Crime Science Announce the Release of ACS Alchemist, an Open Source Software Tool to Access Census Data

    Azavea, an award winning geospatial analysis (GIS) software development company and the Center for Security and Crime Science at Temple University announce the release of ACS Alchemist, an open source tool that enables the extraction of up to 100 variables of the American Community Survey (ACS). The data is extracted directly into a format convenient for display on maps or for use in advanced spatial analysis and modeling. The source code for ACS Alchemist is being released under the GNU General Public License and is available for download at: https://github.com/azavea/acs-alchemist.

  • Azul’s Zing JVM free for open source developer testing

    Azul Systems has announced a new programme for open source developers that will allow them to use its Zing JVM for development, qualification and testing of their open source applications. Zing JVM, which runs on commodity x86 servers, is a heavily optimised Java virtual machine with a high performance, pauseless garbage collection system.

  • The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache Deltacloud(tm) v1.0

  • Web Browsers

    • 12 ways web browsers differentiate themselves

      So it’s simply a matter of choosing your preferred application for this task… and this is a decision often influenced by pre-installed options on a user’s preferred choice of hardware and therefore platform.

      If you don’t get on with Internet Explorer, then there’s always Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox — and even Flock, Maxthon, Deepnet Explorer and Phaseout 5.

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • An Easy Guide to Getting Going with the Thunderbird Email Client

        As we reported in early July, Mozilla has pulled back on further development of its long-standing Thunderbird email platform, despite the fact that it has more than 20 million users. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has a blog post up about the topic.

  • SaaS

    • Linux lessons for Hadoop doubters

      While Hadoop is all the rage in the technology media today, it has barely scratched the surface of enterprise adoption. In fact, if anything, we are still only on the first few steps of the Big Data marathon, a race that Hadoop seems set to win despite its many shortcomings.

    • OpenStack lands on Rackspace’s cloud as the open-source fightback begins

      Rackspace switched on its OpenStack-powered cloud on Tuesday, making the end of a two-year journey and the beginning of the long struggle for relevance to the cloud-enabled enterprise.

      The availability of OpenStack-backed Cloud Databases, Cloud Servers and a Control Panel for US customers (a UK launch is slated for the 15 August), gives developers access to a range of rentable infrastructure based on the open-source OpenStack system.

    • Rackspace launches OpenStack portfolio

      The company’s OpenStack era launches with a portfolio of cloud services. Current customers can migrate over time.

    • ownCloud Releases Mobile Apps for Andoid, iOS

      If one of the major selling points of the cloud is that it makes data available from anywhere at anytime, it’s only natural for users to expect to be able to access it from mobile devices as well as traditional PCs. For users of ownCloud, the open source data-sharing platform, that’s now easier than ever thanks to the release of ownCloud apps for Android and iOS. Here’s the scoop and what it means for the open source channel.

      The apps, which run on Android devices, iPhones and iPads, allow users to interact fully with data stored in an ownCloud-based infrastructure. Besides browsing and downloading files, they can also upload, delete and modify data. Here’s a look at the software in action:

  • Databases

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice skips to 3.6.0 release candidate 4

      The LibreOffice developers have made LibreOffice 3.6.0 RC4, the latest pre-release version of the office suite, available, after having to skip a release candidate. The last release candidate was RC2, and examining the release notes shows that RC3 wasn’t published. This was because the LibreOffice Windows build system failed and broke a number of Windows builds, making them unrunnable; a problem which was picked up by the LibreOffice Q&A teams before publication.

    • Interview With InstallFree Nexus With LibreOffice Team

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Berlin in August: Free Software at Campus Party

      From August 21. to 26. there is Campus Party in Berlin. I was asked beforeif I can make suggestions for good speakers from the Free Software community.That is what I did. So beside the already announced keynote speakers like Jon “maddog” Hall, MarkSurman (Mozilla Foundation), and Rainey Reitman (EFF) to following talks will take place in the Free Software track…N

  • Public Services/Government

    • CONNECT posts open source HIE software patch

      The folks behind CONNECT, based on feedback from community members going through ONC onboarding, have made version 3.3.1 available.

      CONNECT essentially uses National Health Information Exchange (NwHIN) standards and protocols for secure health information exchange. ONC issued the latest full release, that being 3.3, on March 16 of this year, with improved performance, usability, and higher exchange volume features.

      Describing this week’s 3.3.1 release as a patch, the group explained that it carries two main features. The first, which was a request from the Social Security Administration, enables users to tap both PurposeOfUse and PurposeForUse, dependent on the end-point, whereas CONNECT 3.3 supported one or the other.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Forget empowerment—aim for exhilaration

      There is no doubt that there is tremendous goodwill, not to mention countless exciting experiments, when it comes to making the world of work more deeply human—designed to promote more freedom, equity, and engagement, and passion. Why, then, can those words sound so cheap and drained of their juice when we hear them repeated over and over by leaders of all stripes? Probably because they’re spoken so much more often than they’re ever enacted.

      That’s why it’s so very refreshing to spend time with a leader who is relentlessly inventive and impressively effective as a champion of the fullest expression of humanity at work. We aim too low, says Ricardo Semler, the irrepressible force behind Brazil’s Semco Group. “We constantly talk about passion—serving customers passionately, filling in forms passionately—but what if we created the conditions for people to feel exhilaration, to get involved to the point they shout ‘yes!’ and give each other high fives because they did if their way and it worked?” What if, instead of assuming passion will just show up when we invoke it, we focused on designing organizations to unleash human flourishing?

    • PhantomLink Provides Open-Source Alarm Monitoring Solution
    • Movim: The New Open-Source Social Network

      Movim is the latest in decentralised social networks to hit the scene, the most well-known being Diaspora. It’s entirely open-source code, built using PHP, SQL, HTML5 and CSS. The main sentiment behind the project is that you should be the one who has control over your data.

    • Open Data

      • OpenStreetMap study shows around 192,000 active users

        Fewer than half of all registered OpenStreetMap (OSM) users have contributed to the open source project’s mapping data according to a new study by researchers at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Of the mapping platform’s 500,000 registered members, approximately 38% had contributed data at least once. The study, which examined activity of registered OSM users up to December 2011, found that more than 24,000 users (about 5% of the total) had contributed at least 1,000 edited nodes.

      • Codebender – coding for Arduino in the cloud

        The Arduino has come to define the hands-on microcontroller, for education and for practical applications. But the associated software tools are very much tied to the traditional desktop. Codebender is hoping to change that by taking Arduino development into the cloud while keeping it open source.

  • Programming

    • PathScale Working On DogFood, A New Dev IDE

      PathScale is working on a new project that is internally dubbed “DogFood”, it’s a new integrated development environment (IDE) based upon Qt Creator but with a greater focus on C++ and other new development concepts.

      In response to Nokia shutting down their Brisbane office and getting rid of those developers where several key Qt components are developed, C. Bergström shared that PathScale is hiring.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • How HTML5 Video Works

      It doesn’t have to be that way. Scott Davis, founder of ThirstyHead, a training and consulting company, argued at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) that HTML5 Video is ready to go today.

      Davis opened by saying that, unlike closed video standards, HTML5 video can play on a wide variety of devices – everything from smartphones to HDTVs. It achieves this by not supporting any single video format or container. With this multiple-choice approach, HTML5 makes a “standard” by defining a standard way to embed video in webpages using the video element.

Leftovers

  • SAP works with Sencha on HTML5 apps

    IT WORLD CANADA CURATED Developers can use Sencha’s Touch 2 framework to build applications that can be deployed on the Web or offered through an app store

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Days Supply of Global Grains Stocks 1960-2012
    • Monsanto’s Quiet Coup: Will Congress Limit Scope and Time for GMO Reviews?

      After a series of court defeats over the past few years, Monsanto and friends are trying to use Congress to make an end-run around the courts and current law. Lawsuits brought by opponents of genetically engineered (GE) crops resulted in the temporary removal of two products — Roundup Ready Alfalfa and Roundup Ready Sugarbeets — from the market. If the biotechnology industry and the legislators they support have their way, future GE crops will not suffer the same fate.

      Genetically engineered crops are plants that have had genes from other species inserted into their DNA. “Roundup Ready”crops like alfalfa and sugarbeets fall in a class of GE crops called “herbicide tolerant” crops, which are engineered to survive exposure to Monsanto’s bestselling herbicide Roundup. Farmers spray their entire fields with Roundup, killing only the weeds. Monsanto profits by selling both the seeds and increased quantities of Roundup herbicide.

    • Fighting GMO Labeling in California is Food Lobby’s “Highest Priority”

      n case you had any doubt that California’s Prop 37 — which would require labeling of food containing genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) — is a significant threat to industry, a top food lobby has now made it perfectly clear.

      In a recent speech to the American Soybean Association (most soy grown in the U.S. is genetically modified), Grocery Manufacturers Association President Pamela Bailey said that defeating the initiative “is the single-highest priority for GMA this year.”

  • Security

  • Finance

    • The War against the Regulatory Cops on the Bank Beat

      The Wall Street Journal has long led the struggle against freer more efficient markets. Whatever its rhetoric, its policies favor crony capitalism. The latest example is the July 23, 2012 article: by Francesco Guerrera entitled “Too Many Cops on the Bank Beat.”

      He begins the article with this question, which foreshadows the alternate reality the article inhabits. Bank examiners are not nannies and bankers are not children. The metaphor demonstrates the author’s lack of seriousness.

    • Mirabile Dictu! ECB Chief Draghi Being Investigated for Membership in the Group of Thirty

      It’s easy for Americans to labor under the delusion that other parts of the the world have less obvious forms of corruption or its milder form, conflict of interest, than our revolving door system (one of my favorites was when the NY Fed staffer tasked to overseeing AIG left….to AIG).

      And ex banking, that actually is true in most advanced economies. But as a reminder of how backs get scratched in Europe, we have Mario Draghi. The former head of the Bank of Italy, now ECB chairman, was responsible for European operations for Goldman from 2002 to 2005, and predictably has no memory of the currency swaps deal that enabled Greece to camouflage the size of its budget deficit. The new contretemps involves his membership in the Group of Thirty (aka G30), which despite its grand claims, is a bank lobbying group, even as he is serving as the head of the ECB. An alert reader pointed me to the story in Der Spiegel (German version only) and Google translate does a serviceable job.

  • Civil Rights

    • Extremism normalized

      Isn’t it amazing that the first sentence there (“I respect the vice president”) can precede the next one (“He and I had strong disagreements as to whether we should torture people or not”) without any notice or controversy? I realize insincere expressions of respect are rote ritualism among American political elites, but still, McCain’s statement amounts to this pronouncement: Dick Cheney authorized torture — he is a torturer — and I respect him. How can that be an acceptable sentiment to express? Of course, it’s even more notable that political officials whom everyone knows authorized torture are walking around free, respected and prosperous, completely shielded from all criminal accountability. “Torture” has been permanently transformed from an unspeakable taboo into a garden-variety political controversy, where it shall long remain.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

07.31.12

Links 31/7/2012: Richard Stallman Remarks on Valve for GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 8:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Black Hat Defcon: Can you hack a Linux Powered SOHO Router with DLNA?

    Security researcher Zachary Cutlip (my pic left) took the stage at both Black Hat and Defcon conferences this weekend.

    His talk was about doing SQL Injection on MIPS Powered SOHO routers – and in particular he aimed at the Linux powered Netgear WNDR3700.

    After sitting through an hour of this guy’s presentation at Black Hat (I didn’t bother to see it a second time at Defcon) the answer is:

  • Linux Desktops Dominate at Black Hat

    There are some people that don’t believe the Linux Desktop is relevant.

    I’m not one of them, and apparently neither are hordes of security professionals that were at the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas (including me).

    The show itself doesn’t calculate who uses what..but Aruba Networks (they have a Linux powered set of wireless routers) does measure.

    For desktop OS users of the Wi-Fi network, the top desktop OS was…

  • Kernel Space

    • Ext4 vs. Btrfs: Why We’re Making The Switch [Linux]

      Quite honestly, one of the last things people look at is which file system is being used. Windows and Mac OS X users have even less reason to look, because they really have only one choice for their system – NTFS and HFS+, respectively. Linux, on the other hand, has plenty of different file system options, with the current default being ext4.

      However, there’s been another push to change the file system to something called btrfs. But what makes btrfs better, and when will we see distributions making the change?

    • Linux Foundation Adds Antelink, Calxeda and Reaktor as New Members

      The Linux Foundation announced that Antelink, Calxeda and Reaktor have joined the organization supporting the growth and adoption of Linux.

      The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting Linux, has announced that three new companies are joining the organization: Antelink, Calxeda and Reaktor.

    • Talk Of A “Massive Power Regression” In Linux 3.5

      For at least some hardware, it looks like the Linux 3.5 kernel has regressed and is burning through noticeably more power than its predecessor.

      Over the weekend a new mailing list thread began that was entitled “Massive power regression going 3.4->3.5″ pertaining to a power problem in this most recent Linux kernel release. This just wasn’t a random user complaining of a “massive power regression” but James Bottomley, a Linux kernel developer veteran.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel Ivy Bridge Performance Drops In Mesa 8.1

        In recent days there have been updated Mesa 8.1 development benchmarks put out looking at the R600 Gallium3D, R300 Gallium3D, and Nouveau Gallium3D open-source drivers. Those results for the different drivers show that Mesa 8.1 is generally faster than the current Mesa 8.0 stable series, but that does not appear to be the case for Intel at the moment. It looks like there are some active regressions that are lowering the Intel Ivy Bridge graphics performance with their Mesa 8.1-devel driver.

      • Freedreno Driver Gets Working Shader Assembler

  • Applications

    • TorqueBox 2.10 comes with new leadership and JDK workarounds

      The TorqueBox project’s leader, Bob McWhirter, has stepped down from leading the development of the platform designed to run Ruby on Rails applications on JBoss’s Application Server. McWhirter has led the project for the past four years, but has now become “Director of Polyglot for JBoss”, a role that gives him more responsibilities within Red Hat. His place will be taken by Ben Browning, an existing core contributor to the project; Browning is said to have been unofficially driving the project for the last few months and “now – it’s just official”.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • Richard M Stallman: Steam Is Good For GNU/Linux
      • Valve, Linux and the Windows 8 ‘Catastrophe’
      • Microsoft Windows 8 Games: Software Developer War or Empty Words?
      • Richard Stallman pours cold water on Steam

        While many open sourcers have welcomed the news that the games company Steam might be making thousands of games available for Linux, Free Software Guru Richard Stallman is not impressed.

        Writing from his bog, Stallman said that while the availability of popular nonfree programs on GNU/Linux can boost adoption of the system, it may not bring enough freedom.

        He said that nonfree games were unethical because they deny freedom to their users. So if users want freedom the only way they can do that is to only have free software on their computer.

      • GNU founder Stallman calls DRM’d Steam for Linux games “unethical”

        Valve recently announced plans to bring its Steam game distribution service to the Linux platform. The company has also ported its Source game engine and the popular title Left 4 Dead 2. In a recent interview, Valve’s Gabe Newell said that the move was partly influenced by concerns about the increasingly closed nature of the Windows platform.

        The Linux desktop has historically been ignored by major commercial software developers due to the relatively small audience and technical issues like fragmentation. Steam’s arrival on Linux has largely been welcomed by Linux enthusiasts who recognize it as a big step towards legitimizing the Linux desktop as a consumer platform.

  • Desktop Environments

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME’s Future: Open Source Desktop Interface In Doubt?

        GNOME, the project responsible for what has been one of the open-source world’s most popular desktop interfaces for well over a decade, is teetering on the edge of crisis mode. At least, that’s what one developer suggests in a recent personal blog post ominously titled “starting into the abyss.” Does GNOME, despite its rich and influential past, really face such a dismal future? Here are some thoughts.

        Personally, I’d be pretty sad to see the GNOME project die. I haven’t used the desktop environment on a daily basis since development on GNOME 2.x ended in favor of GNOME Shell, but I grew up as a Linux user with GNOME. The open-source ecosystem just wouldn’t feel the same if I knew I no longer had the option of running GNOME software.

      • Gnome-Schedule – GNOME scheduler for automatic tasks

        Gnome-schedule is a graphical user interface that leverages the power of vixie-cron, dcron and at to manage your crontab file and provide an easy way to schedule tasks on your computer. It supports recurrent (periodical) tasks and tasks that happen only once in the future. It is written in Python using pygtk, and has been developed, tested and packaged for various Linux distributions.

      • Is GNOME “Staring into the abyss?”

        A leading GNOME developer thinks the once popular Linux/Unix desktop interface has lost its way.

      • GNOME in Trouble Again (or Still)?

        We knew that a certain segment of the Linux population was still unhappy with GNOME, but I thought most of issues were behind us; that most have adapted or moved on. But apparently, a wave of articles today suggests otherwise. Of course, an insider’s blog post set off this campfire.

      • Staring Into The Abyss: Some Thoughts

        Last week Benjamin Otte shared some thoughts about GNOME that were pretty stark. It gathered some steam and hit Slashdot and this all happened the week GUADEC was taking place in A Coruña. I wasn’t at GUADEC :-( but I can imagine there was some fervent discussion about the blog entry.

        The gist of Benjamin’s blog was that people are leaving GNOME, that the project is understaffed, and arguably the reason for this is that GNOME has lost its direction and Red Hat have overtaken the project as the primary contributor-base. Of course I am summarizing, but check out the original post if you feel I am not representing Benjamin’s views fairly.

  • Distributions

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • HTC bites the bullet, closes South Korean office

          Fighting sluggish sales numbers and competing in a locally-dominated smartphone market, HTC has closed its South Korean office doors.

        • ZTE Flash headed to Sprint with 4.5-inch IPS 720p display and 12.6MP camera

          ZTE recently announced the Grand X for Europe and the Asia Pacific in the third quarter, but it looks like they have something else up their sleeve for the U.S. in the 4th quarter. The ZTE Flash will debut on Sprint this October and it sports some pretty decent specs such as a 4.5-inch IPS 720p (1280 x 720) display, a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 12.6MP rear camera, 1MP front facing camera, 8GB of internal storage, microSDXC slot, 1780mAh battery, Bluetooth 4.0, LTE, Gorilla Glass, and Android 4.0.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Do I Still Like My Nexus 7 After A Week? Nexus 7 Review

        Google’s Nexus 7 is all the rage. The tablet is so popular that Google ran out of stock and the orders are on halt for a while. The tablet is getting praise even from staunch Apple fans like MG Seigler. The most notable praise came from none other than the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, who is a great critic and seems to have a hold of what a user wants.

      • Nexus 7 (16GB) Now Available At Google Play
      • Samsung Working On Bigger Tablet With Retina Display

        Many Samsung fans always wondered that despite being the world’s #1 display manufacturer and lead supplier of Apple’s retina display why is Samsung now offering the same high resolution display for its phones or tablets. Well, Samsung Galaxy Nexus and S3 do have an extremely high resolution display but tablets are still a different animal. It seems Samsung is working on a high resolution tablet with a bit bigger screen size.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Six misconceptions about open source software

    In information technology (IT) and software development fields, there are a few fairly common misconceptions about the use of open source software. These misconceptions were debunked in a discussion at POSSE RIT 2012, and we’d like to share (and spread) that conversation.

  • Open source won

    I heard the comments a few times at the 14th OSCON: The conference has lost its edge. The comments resonated with my own experience — a shift in demeanor, a more purposeful, optimistic attitude, less itching for a fight. Yes, the conference has lost its edge, it doesn’t need one anymore.

    Open source won. It’s not that an enemy has been vanquished or that proprietary software is dead, there’s not much regarding adopting open source to argue about anymore. After more than a decade of the low-cost, lean startup culture successfully developing on open source tools, it’s clearly a legitimate, mainstream option for technology tools and innovation.

  • Free open-source software: My take on its inexorable rise

    As we all know, Android has Linux at the heart of it, with a litigious Java platform, which means that it is the powerhouse driving the adoption of free software — although many would argue that it’s not really free.

    From my own very small web design corner of the universe I can see the inexorable rise of free software. Of my last eight contract roles, four of them were working on either the WordPress or Drupal content management systems.

  • ZoneAlarm: Defining the Difference Between Freeware and Free Software

    The other day, when my friend’s laptop spit-up a warning from ZoneAlarm that she was no longer protected, I stood over her shoulder and instructed her to update the firewall. The warning was basically a scare tactic, of course. Without the update she would still be protected, just as protected as she had been the day before. She just wouldn’t have any new whiz-bang features included in the update, nor would she be able to take advantage of any new security enhancements.

    We ran the default install. This was Windows, so there had to be a reboot. After that, we opened the browser to find that the homepage had been reset to a ZoneAlarm themed Google search page. We had not opted-in to any such change; the ZoneAlarm folks had just taken it on themselves to hijack Firefox’s revenue, which I didn’t think cricket.

  • Events

    • Texas Linux Fest is This Week – Win a Free Pass

      Texas Linux Fest begins this Friday, August 3rd, and there’s still plenty of time to register. Or, you can enter to win one of five free passes. You have until 3pm tomorrow, July 31 to enter, so hurry! We’ll post the winners tomorrow afternoon, so you’ll still have time to register if you don’t win.

    • Google I/O Keynote and Session Videos Are Available Now

      Throughout its existence, Google has been very dedicated to enlisting developers all around the world to embrace its projects and become contributors. And, the company’s Google I/O conference remains its biggest annual event focused on outreach to developers. Google recently held the I/O 2012 conference, and ever since then has been steadily posting videos of keynote addresses and complete videos of the sessions. Some of these are very much worth watching–even if you’re not a developer.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • On Software obsolescence

        Recently the Mozilla Foundation announced a new orientation for their email client, Thunderbird. It caused quite a bit of discussion, and we, at the Document Foundation, received quite a lot of public and private feedback on this mostly in the form of: “Now that Mozilla is getting rid of Thunderbird, The Document Foundation should take on its maintenance and development”. Much of this crazy rumor has ended being disproved by Mozilla itself and what seems to be going on is that Mozilla will in fact enable a real community-led development style on Thunderbird (contrary to the development model of Firefox) but has to intention of dumping it anywhere. That didn’t stop the rumor to spread anyway and this article by Brian Profitt caught my eye: “Will Open Source Office Suites go the way of Thunderbird?”.

  • SaaS

    • OpenStack: Allegation of ‘abusive’ conversation under investigation

      Days after opening its nomination process for Individual Member elections, the OpenStack Foundation is investigating allegations that an executive within one of the Foundation’s corporate member companies may have pressured an Individual Member candidate to withdraw her nomination for a board position.

  • Databases

    • Oracle releases MySQL migration tools for SQL Server, Windows users

      As it prepares to release its Windows-enhanced MySQL 5.6 database, Oracle announced late last week a number of downloadable migration tools to ease the process of converting from Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL, including data conversion, Excel and Windows installer tools.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Business

    • Open source model disrupts the commercial drone business

      The do-it-yourself (DIY), open-source drone movement is turning into a real business that could disrupt the commercial and military drone industry. It’s another case of how exploiting the curiosity of hackers can turn into a commercial opportunity.

      That’s the view of Chris Anderson (pictured), editor of Wired magazine and a drone hobbyist and businessman on the side. He spoke about this DIY trend and his own efforts to lead it in a talk at the Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas today.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF Bulletins are on the way
    • FSFE working on better legal protection for free software

      The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has voiced concerns about what could happen to source code distributed under free software licences if the company providing the software goes bankrupt and enters insolvency proceedings. Especially in Germany, the current rules in this area of law are not well explored. Speaking to The H’s associates at heise open, Matthias Kirschner, who coordinates German matters for the foundation, explained that a bankruptcy court in Germany could currently rescind the free software licence and all rights granted by it after the fact.

Leftovers

  • NBC: We Have No Clue Who Tim Berners-Lee Is, But Without Our Commentary, You Wouldn’t Understand The Olympics

    First of all, seriously? Tape delay to the West Coast? You lock down coverage in order to take advantage of prime time and try to pass it off as some sort of “value added” service. Pay no mind to all the twittering and live blogging willing to fill in the gaps, while you do some sort of production magic behind the scenes. Live events don’t need windows and real life shouldn’t need **spoiler** warnings.

    Even worse is the fact that the opening ceremonies weren’t even streamed live on the internet, where time and distance aren’t factors. And you know it, too, because your official Twitter accounts were posting updates live, giving Americans the dusty old feeling that they’re listening to a local broadcaster read off the ticker feed from a title match. So close, but so far.

  • Hardware

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs’s Devastating Interest Rate Swaps

      The banks brought us the financial crisis which resulted in zero interest rates. Now the banks are improperly benefiting from those rates through contracts they made with cities BEFORE they blew up the financial system.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Proposals for the reform of copyright and related culture and media policy

        Now that the ACTA treaty has been rejected by the European Parliament, a period opens during which it will be possible to push for a new regulatory and policy framework adapted to the digital era. Many citizens and MEPs support the idea of reforming copyright in order to make possible for all to draw the benefits of the digital environment, engage into creative and expressive activities and share in their results. In the coming months and years, the key questions will be: What are the real challenges that this reform should address? How can we address them?

      • Leaked RIAA Report: SOPA/PIPA “Ineffective Tool” Against Music Piracy

        Contrary to the endless lobbying and subsequent defending of the now-dead SOPA and PIPA frameworks, a leaked report shows that earlier this year the RIAA’s Deputy General Counsel admitted that the legislation was “not likely to have been effective tool” for dealing with music piracy. All efforts are now being put behind the “six strikes” plan – but could disconnections for repeat infringers still be on the agenda?

        “These illicit sites are among the culprits behind the music industry’s more than 50 percent decline in revenues during the last decade, resulting in 15,000 layoffs and fewer resources to invest in new bands,” wrote RIAA CEO Cary Sherman in a New York Times piece last year.

07.30.12

Links 30/7/2012: Wine 1.5.9, Warsow 1.0 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • This Week in Linux

    Another week has come and gone and much more has happened than what I can cover in my regularly scheduled slots. So, let’s have a look at some of the other developments this week in Linux. The Ubuntu family got a new developmental release, Zorin OS continues to get rave reviews, and Bodhi Linux 2.0 was released.

  • Chrome OS Linux 2.1.1145 Is Powered by Cinnamon 1.4

    The Chrome OS developers announced today, July 27th, the immediate availability for download of the Chrome OS 2.1.1145 Live CD Linux operating system, which brings a lot of fresh software.

  • Five ways to skip Windows 8

    I’ve been working with Windows 8 for months. Even after Microsoft dished out the release candidate to application developers, I’m still finding Windows 8 to be the worst Windows version to date.

    Yes, worse than Vista, worse than Windows Millennium Edition (Me), and the only reason I’m not saying its worse than Windows Bob, is that Bob was just a user interface for Windows 95 and NT and not an operating system in and of itself.

    Now, though even some of Microsoft strongest fans are beginning to back off from praising Windows 8.

    [...]

    2: Go with desktop Linux

    I’ve been telling you for ages that desktop Linux works great. It’s far more secure than Windows will ever be, and is more stable to boot. I’m not going to repeat myself here. I will say, though, that Mint 13 is a really great Linux desktop that any XP user will quickly feel at home using. I’ll also point out that anyone — and I mean anyone — can use Ubuntu Unity. I can also point out that Valve is bringing its Steam gaming platform to desktop Linux.

    Finally, I’ll add that you can buy PCs with pre-installed Linux from many smaller vendors and that Dell is recommitting to the Linux desktop. Dell has just released new high-end laptops with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will soon be releasing a developer’s Ubuntu laptop.

  • Fresh eyes on Linux

    On July 16, game publisher Valve created Steam’d Penguins and formally announced their entry into development and promotion of the gaming scene for Linux.

    For years there have been feverish rumours of such a move based on job postings which explicitly asked for Linux experience in the job description.

    Without trying to play down the importance of the announcement and the excitement generated in the Linux community, there are still many unanswered questions about whether the games will be native ports or bundling of emulators, how open source friendly the underlying distribution platform Steam will be and which flagship titles will make the Linux leap.

    As a long-time Linux user but not really much of a gamer, I applauded Valve for looking at my operating system of choice more seriously and building a Linux capability even if I am not in their intended audience.
    Advertisement

    Linux has lately had a flurry of indie games released for it which has made the community richer and widened the audience which in turn helps break some of our more insular perceptions.

  • How to pick a new Linux distribution

    You might not have noticed, but there’s more than one Linux distribution out there. In fact, there are hundreds, and the list is growing weekly.

    Okay, you probably did notice, but the fact remains that the free software world is, primarily, one of choice, and that means developers can – and often do – scratch their own itches.

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 210

  • Desktop

    • Impending Windows 8 ‘catastrophe’ behind $3bn game maker’s shift to Linux

      Computer game platform maker Valve is to port its Steam gaming and distribution platform to Ubuntu Linux in a move intended to protect the company from the impending “catastrophe” of Windows 8.

    • From Windows to Linux In No Time

      There are countless users of Microsoft’s Windows operating system who become Linux users each year–an important part of the engine that drives the popularity of Linux. In some cases, these migrating users want to escape the malware storm that afflicts the Windows ecosystem; in some cases they want to run Linux alongside Windows (a dual-OS strategy that has its advantages); and in some cases they want to use specific applications that are available for Linux.

    • The Linux-based Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook Could Rival MacBook Air

      Linux-based operating system has proven to be more reliable and rugged for day-to-day activity especially security purposes, when placed at par with other operating system.

  • Kernel Space

    • Ask a Kernel Maintainer

      I’ve been writing an occasional “Ask a kernel maintainer” column on the lwn.net weekly kernel page. It’s been a while since I last wrote one, so I figured it’s time to start it up again.

    • VIA Releases ROM, Bootloader And Kernel For Android PC
    • Linux 3.6 Kernel Adds EFI Handover Protocol

      The in-development Linux 3.6 kernel introduces an EFI handover protocol, which will ultimately lead to faster boot-ups and simpler EFI boot-loaders.

      Right now EFI boot-loaders and the EFI boot stub in the Linux kernel carry the same initialization code to setup an EFI machine for booting the kernel. However, with this EFI handover protocol support, this redundant code could be eliminated. Intel and others want to have the initialization and booting of the kernel just within the kernel’s EFI boot stuff than also copied within the boot-loader.

    • VMware Has VMCI Ready For The Linux Kernel

      VMware is preparing to push VMCI support into the mainline Linux kernel.

      Back in May I mentioned VMware was working on the Virtual Machine Communication Interface for Linux and back then their kernel patches were in a “Request For Comments” state. The patches have been revised and now VMware is lining up the VMCI support to enter the mainline kernel, hopefully for the Linux 3.6 kernel.

    • Intel Rewrites TurboStat Plus IVB CPU Idle Support

      Another one of the pulls going into the Linux 3.6 kernel this week is the ACPI and power management updates courtesy of Intel. The two prominent changes for this next Linux kernel release is a rewrite of the “turbostat” tool and the “intel_idle” CPU idle driver now supports Ivy Bridge processors.

    • Testing Intel Sandy Bridge LLC Cache Controls
    • EXT4 Updates Go Into The Linux 3.6 Kernel
    • Oracle Rewrites Linux ZCache Compression Code

      Seth Jennings of IBM proposed that ZCache be moved out of the Linux kernel’s staging area and be accepted officially into the mainline tree. However, that proposal is being criticized by an Oracle engineers as they have evidently “completely rewritten zcache” and will share it soon but still doesn’t see a reason for the memory compression code to leave staging.

      On Friday was the kernel message by Jennings that proposes zcache to leave the kernel’s staging area, with the email being accompanied by four patches to make that happen. His justification for the code leaving staging is that “Based on the level of activity and contributions we’re seeing from a diverse set of people and interests, I think zcache has matured to the point where it makes sense to promote this out of staging.”

    • AHCI vs. IDE Linux Performance Benchmarks

      Hitting OpenBenchmarking.org this weekend are some interesting benchmarks comparing performance of AHCI vs. IDE modes under Linux from an AMD Fusion system.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa Support For OpenGL Core Contexts

        There was exciting OpenGL 3/4 news yesterday for Mesa when it came to early but yet-to-be-merged support for OpenGL geometry shaders, but that’s not all the new Mesa GL news this week. Patches were also published to provide support for OpenGL Core contexts for OpenGL 3.1 and newer.

      • Intel Mesa Driver Ups Counter-Strike Performance

        A patch to mainline Mesa yesterday from Intel has resulted in a ~7% performance boost for Sandy Bridge “GT2″ graphics when running the video stress test for Valve’s Counter-Strike: Source.

      • Another Intel Linux Graphics Driver Release

        Intel has released a new open-source X.Org driver for their Intel graphics since it was only just discovered that the Ivy Bridge GT1 “HD 2500″ graphics were busted.

        Just days after releasing xf86-video-intel 2.20.1, which came just a week after the big 2.20 release, Chris Wilson has released a third update. The xf86-video-intel 2.20.2 driver takes care of a critical Intel Ivy Bridge issue while also packing more SNA acceleration architecture improvements.

      • VMware Has VMCI Ready For The Linux Kernel
      • R300 Gallium3D Driver In Mixed State For Mesa 8.1
      • Mesa Support For OpenGL Geometry Shaders
      • Intel SNA Performance Continues To Be Compelling

        Due to the extreme pace at which Chris Wilson has been releasing SNA architecture updates for Intel’s open-source X.Org driver, here are another set of benchmarks of Intel Sandy Bridge HD 3000 graphics when comparing UXA and SNA using yesterday’s Git code following the xf86-video-intel 2.20.2 driver release.

      • AMD Releases ACPI Header For Open-Source GPU Driver

        For those that didn’t notice, this week AMD released a new header that defines the AMD ACPI interface used for laptops, PowerXpress, and chipset-specific functionality.

        This new header defines four ACPI control methods used by AMD graphics hardware and then related functionality to them. The four AMD ACPI methods are ATIF, ATPX, ATRM, and ATCS.

      • Haiku Looks To Leverage More Of Mesa

        Haiku OS, the open-source operating system that’s a re-implementation of BeOS, is continuing to look at leveraging more of Mesa for its 3D/OpenGL rendering.

      • One Week To SIGGRAPH OpenGL Announcements
      • GLAMOR 0.5 To Advance 2D Over OpenGL

        With the Radeon driver now supporting GLAMOR acceleration — it works for all hardware, but for Radeon HD 7000 series and newer its the only way of 2D HW acceleration — this 2D-over-OpenGL architecture became more interesting.

      • Freedreno Driver Gets Working Shader Assembler

        Freedreno, the reverse-engineered open-source Qualcomm Snapdragon graphics driver, continues to advance. The latest accomplishment of the Freedreno Linux driver is that it now has its own working shader assembler, which means Freedreno can now work without any binary blob dependence.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Chrome OS Linux 2.1.1145 Is Powered by Cinnamon 1.4

      The Chrome OS developers announced today, July 27th, the immediate availability for download of the Chrome OS 2.1.1145 Live CD Linux operating system, which brings a lot of fresh software.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Results from the Kolab Sprint in Berlin

        This week members of the Kolab Community met in Berlin for some very productive face to face work on the upcoming release of Kolab 3.0 alpha. Developers from ownCloud, Roundcube, KDE, Cyrus IMAP, Fedora, and of course Kolab sat together for one week, discussed, hacked and celebrated. Employees of Kolab Systems used the opportunity to meet with several business partners and a usability expert provided same valuable input that will be used to make Kolab clients more user friendly.

      • EPUB Support Coming Soon To Calligra Words

        Calligra Words, a KDE word-processing software, will soon support EPUB formats. This support will make it possible for the user to create high quality and portable ebooks compatible with PCs, netbooks, tablets and mobile devices.

      • QML Support for Window Decorations

        Implementing a new window decoration for KWin is not the easiest thing to do. While the API has hardly changed since early 3.x releases it is not very Qt like and requires a strong understanding of how the window decoration in KWin works. To design a window decoration you basically have three options which come with KWin…

      • Get Bleeding Edge KDE Software In Fedora

        If you use Fedora and are a great fan of KDE, you can enable the KDE unstable repository to have latest and bleeding edge KDE software.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • staring into the abyss

        I suppose I can’t just leave my last post standing there as-is. I’ll start by listing a bunch of things I consider facts about the GNOME project. I don’t want to talk about solutions here, I just want to list them, because I don’t think they are common knowledge. People certainly don’t seem to talk about them a lot.

      • GNOME 4.0, GNOME OS Coming In 2014 & Other Crazy Plans

        While some GNOME developers and users see the once fledging desktop environment fading into abyss, other GNOME developers see nothing but GNOME getting better with the best yet to come. It’s been called for this week from GUADEC that GNOME 4.0 to be released in March of 2014 along with GNOME OS. That’s not all of their ambitious plans but they think they can gain a 20% market-share by 2020 and they also have some other plans on their agenda.

      • GNOME implodes – again

        From time to time, the GNOME Desktop Project blows up, with one developer or another indulging in soul-searching and realising that the project lacks direction. Or people. Or something else.

      • An opinion on the future of GNOME

        According to some within the GNOME team, the team and the GNOME product are falling apart. By alienating the people that were loyal dedicated users they have begun a downward spiral into the abyss. What was once a respectable, reputable product now a garbage salad that no one wants and no-one uses.

        Many projects are reacting to GTK3 with proverbial “meh” including Inkscape, Mozilla, GIMP, and LibreOffice. GNOME is bleeding developers, and it is being dropped like an anchor from multiple distributions.

      • Marvel-ize your Gnome Shell Theme!

        This is a simple guide on how you can hack your Gnome Shell (just a bit!) and make one unique theme just for you.

        I used Adwaita as base because everyone has this (but you can do this in every theme), and I also used some Marvel images that you can replace with anything you like.

      • yorba, a modern Gnome company!

        Some days ago I had posted about the new upcoming Gnome mail application and a reader let a comment about Geary. What is Geary? A mail client app, written in Vala which seems to share many common design goals with Gnome Mail.

  • Distributions

    • AntiX 12: Most complete lightweight Linux distro I have seen!

      Linux never ceases to amaze me – particularly the light-weight distros aimed for low powered PCs! There are so many options and depending on your need and suitability you can pick and choose which one to use. Plus, it brings your old machine back to life without compromising on the security and with the state-of-the-art applications! You can’t ever think of that with any other operating system, for sure.

    • Puppy Arcade – Good idea but needs an update

      Before I start I’d like to say this is not supposed to be an in depth review of Puppy Arcade. It is a post which explains what Puppy Arcade is and how I think it can be improved.

    • A Full LuninuX Experience!

      Another Ubuntu-based distribution featuring a customised Gnome 3 desktop with Gnome Shell has been released today and it is time for another distro review here on worldofgnome.org.

    • LuninuX 12 Screenshots (07/27/2012)

    • New Releases

    • Red Hat Family

      • Slideshow: Take a tour of new Red Hat office tower

        Our Red Hat tour guide turns on a light in a corner conference room – onto walls that are, not surprisingly, colored red.

        “You can’t appreciate it yet,” Craig Yost, senior director of global facilities and real estate says, “but when we’ve opened all the floors, you’ll see something.”

      • 3 Software Stocks To Buy, 1 To Ignore

        Within the software industry, Red Hat specializes in open source software solutions and applications. It is one of the less known mid-cap firms in the space, but has gained respect as a momentum play. As data demand takes off against rising consumer interest and emerging market growth, Red Hat will continue to be a prime beneficiary. Over the last 5 years going through the Great Recession, the stock more than doubled – appreciating by 133.7%. But, at this point, I don’t believe the fundamentals and earnings power is not enough to justify the valuation.

      • Red Hat’s Top 4 Priorities for 2013: Cloud, Virtualization, And…

        What are Red Hat‘s top four priorities for its fiscal year 2013? Sure, driving adoption of key technologies (virtualization, cloud and storage) is one top priority. But what are the other “big three” focus areas? And where do channel partners fit into the Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) conversation? Here are some clues, plus questions The VAR Guy will ask Channel Chief Roger Egan during CompTIA Breakaway (July 30-Aug. 2) in Las Vegas.

      • CowboyNeal Reviews Oracle Linux

        If you’re already perfectly happy with your RHEL or CentOS Linux install, Oracle Linux is a hard sell, even at the price of free. After toying about with the system, I’d say it’s at least worth a hard look. As it is, you get the benefits of CentOS or Scientific Linux, with Oracle’s own stuff bolted on, and their enhancements, even minus Ksplice, make a compelling argument to use Oracle Linux. If you are setting up a machine to use Oracle’s database software, Oracle Linux is the best choice, since it’s been designed to support Oracle DB, and is the same Linux that Oracle uses in-house. While Oracle’s premier support contract is cheaper than the RHEL alternative, the actual cost of switching from RHEL to Oracle in a given case may not be. While this release is a good first step for Oracle, more options, like free Ksplice Uptrack, or even a Ksplice Uptrack subscription, would make it an easier sell.

    • Debian Family

      • Bits from the nippy Release Team

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • What’s new with Ubuntu?

            One of Linux’s most popular distros, Ubuntu, will be getting some new UI and web integration with its latest LTS (Long Term Support) version, Ubuntu 12.20.

            In a recent presentation at Oscon 2012, founder Mark Shuttleworth said that Linux now comes pre-installed on five percent of PCs globally.

            With regards to the next version, 12.10, Shuttleworth mentioned that the next iteration would offer font, search and menu innovations.

          • A Game-Changing Proposal: Ubuntu for students.

            There’s this thing about students: they take technology for granted. It’s nothing too disheartening, except for the tech-savvy ones who seem that technology is more than a commodity. The 21st century endowed us a new way to access information, and to do so, it shouldn’t be just endlessly chatting with a friend through facebook or ceaselessly playing games on the iphone, hungry for more. Insatiable appetite is a byproduct of the consumer world. Why not change that?

            Today, during lunch, I had the honor of meeting David Montes, a senior and the school’s computer guru, to talk about something quite drastic. Two days ago, I had a facebook chat with him about the idea of Ubuntu running on all the systems within the school, from student cart laptops to the school administration servers. Although we saw some implications, we reached a stunning conclusion, that it actually should be done if we want to take learning about computers to a whole new and exciting level.

          • Ubuntu App Developer Showdown Likely To Be Repeated

            Ubuntu App Developer Showdown is an online event hosted by Canonical where new developers learn about creating apps with Ubuntu technologies and get a chance to host them in Ubuntu Software Center.

            This year, the event ran full three weeks, at the end of which developers submitted 140 applications. The event is accompanied by video tutorials and interactive Google+ hangouts where developers can ask and interact with lead Ubuntu devs and get their doubts cleared.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 Has Firefox 15 and Unity 6

            Softpedia is the first to announce today, July 26th, that the third Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system is now available for download. As usual, we’ve grabbed a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 12.10 development.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 Screenshots (07/26/2012)
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Concept Mockup Video

            Britt Yazel posted a couple of days ago on the unity-design team mailing list an interesting link to a YouTube video showing a mockup of Unity in Ubuntu 12.10. The video was originally posted on February, but it is a very good example of how Unity should be.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 stable release arrives

              Alongside the launch of a new web site, the developers at the Bodhi Linux project have published the second major release of their minimal Linux distribution with an Enlightenment-based desktop. As previously described by lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of version 2.0 of Bodhi Linux was not to “introduce ground breaking new features” to the distribution, but rather to smoothly transition to a new version of its underlying operating system.

            • Xubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 Screenshot Tour
            • Lubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 Screenshot Tour

              Canonical published yesterday, July 26th, the third and last Alpha release of the upcoming Lubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.

              Lubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 comes with a new version of the session manager, a new version of PCManFM, xfce4-notifyd replaced notification-daemon for default notification system, added Catfish searching utility, and updated the artwork (including the wallpaper and GTK themes).

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Nexus 7? Wait: Google’s Motorola Xoom + Jelly Bean is coming soon

        Google launched Android 4.1 on the Asus-developed (but Google branded) Nexus 7 in part to reassure OEMs that they will be treated equally in the aftermath of its Motorola Mobility purchase. Maybe Google really did spend $12 plus billion for the Motorola patents, but users are still awaiting the more full featured iPad2 killer from Google. Will it be Jelly Bean on Motorola’s Xoom?.

      • Lenovo plans clip-on physical keyboard for tablets

        Tablet owners have so far had to opt for keyboard docks to take their typing physical. However, that may be about to change after recently published Lenovo patents revealed an interesting clip-on.

      • Casio announces V-T500-GE and V-T500E Tough Business Tablets

        Casio announced today the release of the V-T500-GE and V-T500E business tablets. Based on a product concept of Smart and Tough, these new tablets offer rugged, dependable performance and a full range of features to suit various work styles. The new Casio tablets run Android 4.0 and are equipped with an OMAP4460 1.5 GHz dual cores CPU. The V-T500-GE and V-T500-E are equipped with a large 10.1-inch screen with LED backlight for outstanding readability. The 10.1-inch screen offers excellent readability indoors and out, and offer multi-finger touch control as well as digitizer pen input (sold separately) for ease of use. The new tablets deliver tough, robust security, coming with an NFC Reader/Writer that can authenticate user login using a non-contact IC card, and they have a Secure Access Module (SAM) slot for applications where even higher security is required.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Can open source save HP?

    You seldom hear about it, but Hewlett-Packard has long been a supporter of open source. The company contributes to the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and has hired several people who were formerly leaders of the Debian Project, including the redoubtable Bdale Garbee. HP also participates in many smaller projects and invests plenty of effort in governance and community activities. Despite its work engaging the community and ensuring HP printers are usable from Linux, open source seems to have made little impact on HP’s software portfolio (alas, poor WebOS).

  • Google opens code for building interactive experiences in physical spaces

    Google has released a new software framework that aims to give programmers the ability to create interactive experiences in physical spaces. It could potentially be used to build interactive art installations or games that involve physical interaction.

  • Obsidian joins Open Virtualisation Alliance

    Obsidian Systems has further entrenched its position as a leading provider of enterprise open source in southern Africa by joining the Open Virtualisation Alliance (OVA), a global collection of platform and system providers dedicated to promoting open virtualisation as an alternative to proprietary solutions.

  • VMware buys Nicira: Open-source threat or cloudy opportunity?
  • Open source middleware and SOA help FAA distribute weather data

    Though its work is somewhat behind the scenes, most travelers know they depend on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ensure safe air travel. In the past, the organization has often scrabbled with technology and change. In fact, many of its systems have a lot of mileage on them and are difficult to modernize.

  • Call For Participation

    Do you contribute to open source? A great way to get started is to attend a conference, and there are four fine choices available to you this August-October.

  • Look Beyond Commercial Software, Asahi Technologies Provides Open Source Integration Services for Small and Medium Size Businesses
  • Open Source: Incredible Apps For Every OS

    As the resident open source zealot, I thought it might be nice to have a quick rundown of some of the best apps that are free, open source, and cross-platform available to our readers. Experienced users may find fault with me for leaving out their favorite app, but hopefully they will agree that the ones I’ve picked here are deserving of recognition. I especially hope this is useful to those that are unaware of the existence of these applications due to the long shadows cast by the proprietary icons of their respective categories. If you feel I did miss an important app, please let us know in the comments and share your favorites with everyone.

  • Exercising a Little Open Source Prudence

    IT organizations today are more dependent on open source code than ever; they’re just not always sure where it came from, whether they can legally use it or how secure it is.

  • Google hands developers keys to enliven interactive rooms

    Google this week announced it is opening code for building interactive experiences in physical spaces. The Monday posting on its open-source blog site, which carries news about its open source projects, announced the release of Interactive Spaces. As such, Google has a special invitation for developers: “Make a room come alive,” using this framework for creating interactive spaces. The release is described as a new API and runtime that allows developers to build interactive applications for physical spaces.

  • RIP Sparrow: Components of the beloved mail client are open sourced for personal use only

  • Events

    • My Top Five Sessions at the CloudOpen Conference
    • Mydala opts for open source

      When the deal aggregator Mydala was planning its portal, CTO Ashish Bhatnagar was convinced that the business was likely to take off in a big way and that they would be reaching a scale where, in a day, they would be catering to nearly 8 mn subscribers and running over 1.5 lakh deals across 93 cities.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Firefox Addons Cross 3 Billion Downloads

        Mozilla Firefox is everyone’s favorite browser because of its large collection of add-ons. These add-ons allow you to customize your browser the way you like. You can change personas, themes and more to make your browser stand out from others. And there are some tools like Adblock and NoScript that make your browsing safer and ad free.

      • Firefox Add-ons Cross More Than 3 Billion Downloads!

        We are excited to announce that we just crossed more than 3 billion downloads* of Firefox Add-ons! That’s almost half of the world’s population and more than the number of people on the Internet today.

  • SaaS

    • CIOs Increasingly Bullish on the Cloud, Survey Finds

      It’s easy enough to find rosy predictions for the cloud from the vendors of related products and services, but when CIOs speak out in favor of the technology, it’s hard not to sit up and take notice.

      Such, in fact, is just what came out of a recent survey of IT executives from Host Analytics and Dimensional Research.

      Whereas a few years ago we were still hearing considerable concern from CIOs on a number of fronts — security and control perhaps foremost among them — this new research suggests that these executives are increasingly optimistic about cloud computing’s many benefits.

    • Cisco Touts Its Cloudy Open Future – Will VMware Do The Same?

  • Education

    • AdaCamp DC: A learning environment for women in open source
    • Monoculture in Education

      I was browsing this morning and came upon an advertisement for system administrator for a small northern Canadian school division. I was surprised to see that there was not a single mention of a GNU/Linux product involved, not even on servers. They were locked in securely to the Wintel world, even in their virtual machines.

      I have worked in places like that a decade ago, but thought them totally obsolete by now. Even the most staid organizations see that GNU/Linux has its place, particularly in servers. I was working in one such place and was encouraged to give a presentation to all the IT people about rolling out a GNU/Linux server in each school. That was 2004. Eight years later, to still find M$-only shops still exist is surprising.

  • Business

  • Funding

    • Lunatics is now Crowd-Funding for a Pilot Episode

      If you’ve been following my column for the last year or two, you already know that “Lunatics” is the free-culture animated science-fiction series that we are creating with free-software applications like Blender, Synfig, Audacity, Inkscape, Gimp, and Krita. We are finally crowd-funding for our pilot episode “No Children in Space” on Kickstarter. If we get funded, this will be a major step forward for free-culture and free-software in the media industry. Come check it out, tell everybody you know, and/or get a copy on DVD or other cool stuff from the project!

    • Open-Source Startup Meteor Gets $11.2M from Andreessen Horowitz

      Meteor Development Group (MDG) raises $11.2 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and others to fund development around the open-source Meteor Web app development platform.

      Meteor Development Group (MDG), the company behind the Meteor open-source project, which produces a platform for building software applications, has announced $11.2 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz.

    • Money can’t buy open-source love… only code can

      Money can’t buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community.

      Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it “will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings.”

      Is that so? Who knew all you needed for an open-source community was $11.2m in venture funding?

    • Open-Source Startup Meteor Gets $11.2M from Andreessen Horowitz

  • Public Services/Government

    • Hungarian city of Miskolc: “Saving €3,000 per user per year on licenses”

      In 2009, under the leadership of the vice-mayor, the administration of the city of Miskolc in Hungary started a transition to open source software and open standards. The primary goals were to reduce costs and find alternative solutions for IT services.

      At the start, under the control of service provider Open SKM (in Hungarian), there were no project-like qualities attached to this transition: it had no roadmap, no stages and no milestones.

      According to Dr. János Kovács, head of the Miskolc IT department, the plan also included some bad ideas, like converting document formats from .doc and .xls to .odt and .ods, respectively, as part of the move from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. The original plan was to process as many as 600,000 existing documents to free the city from its data lock-in. However, important questions concerning the rationale and cost of this conversion were not considered.

    • DISA must make forge.mil live up to its potential

      When the Defense Information Systems Agency made forge.mil operational in 2009, it appeared a revolutionary step forward in Defense Department adoption of open source software.

      The site would be a repository for code and an online gathering point for a collaborative community of defense open source coders, DISA officials said at the time.

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • OAuth 2.0 standard editor quits, takes name off spec

      The lead author and editor of the OAuth 2.0 network authorization standard has stepped down from his role, withdrawn his name from the specification, and quit the working group, describing the current version of the spec as “the biggest professional disappointment of my career.”

Leftovers

  • Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

    Facts from these data that please me are

    * that other OS has a proper share and no more,
    * FireFox, a FLOSS web-browser rules, even though I am partial to Chrome,
    * there are a lot of comments per post, thanks to readers, and
    * Internet Exploder has a tiny share, probably still more than a tool of anti-competition deserves.

  • Security

  • Finance

    • Randy Wray: Why We’re Screwed

      As the Global Financial Crisis rumbles along in its fifth year, we read the latest revelations of bankster fraud, the LIBOR scandal. This follows the muni bond fixing scam detailed a couple of weeks ago, as well as the J.P. Morgan trading fiasco and the Corzine-MF Global collapse and any number of other scandals in recent months. In every case it was traders run amuck, fixing “markets” to make an easy buck at someone’s expense. In times like these, I always recall Robert Sherrill’s 1990 statement about the S&L crisis that “thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about.”

      After 1990 we removed what was left of financial regulations following the flurry of deregulation of the early 1980s that had freed the thrifts so that they could self-destruct. And we are shocked, SHOCKED!, that thieves took over the financial system.

    • Fed Governor Speaks Out For Stronger Rules

      A powerful new voice for financial reform emerged this week – Sarah Bloom Raskin, a governor of the Federal Reserve System. In a speech on Tuesday, she laid out a clear and compelling vision for why the financial system should focus on providing old-fashioned but essential intermediation between savers and borrowers in the nonfinancial sector.

      Sadly, she also explained that she is a dissenting voice within the Board of Governors on an essential piece of financial reform, the Volcker Rule. Her colleagues, according to Ms. Raskin, supported a proposed rule that is weaker, i.e., more favorable to the banks; she voted against it in October.

      At least on this dimension, financial reform is not fully on track.

  • DRM

    • Guide to DRM-free Living gets a big update!

      We’ve just finished a major update of the Guide to DRM-free Living with dozens of new places to get ebooks, movies, and music without DRM and a page of worst-offenders. There have been some exciting developments in the realm of DRM opposition on ebooks, like Tor/Forge dropping DRM on ebooks, and we wanted to spruce up the guide to reflect all the progress that’s been made. The suggested additions came from the LibrePlanet Wiki where you can submit new items for the guide for us to review. With so many new additions, we’ve also had to reorganize the guide into more sections that should make it easy to find what you need.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Creative Commons CEO reflects on YouTube’s remixable library

        How many of you have utilized the four million Creative Commons videos on YouTube? Cathy Casserly, CEO of Creative Commons, recently shared a guest post on YouTube’s blog, reflecting on the first year of YouTube’s Creative Commons video library. According to Casserly, this library is larger than any other in the world.

      • Digital Economy Act Consultation Response

        Last week I wrote about the extremely short consultation period for aspects of implementing the Digital Economy Act. Time is running out – the consultation closes tomorrow at 5pm, so I urge you to submit something soon. It doesn’t have to be very long. Here, for example, is what I am sending – short, but maybe not so sweet….

07.27.12

Links 27/7/2012: Linux 3.6 Plans, Bodhi 2.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 9:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • The GUI Bloat Effect

    Something dawned on me just yesterday. When using a slim and clean-lined theme or skin on GUI based software, the user can be easily convinced that the system is actually running faster and much lighter on resources. Or at least that’s how I see it. It is a psychological case, whether this affects only a small percentage of users or is within our nature to believe so, I am unsure. Read on and let me explain.

    The thought came about yesterday when I updated VLC Media Player on my Linux system. I was not only starting to get bored with the default GTK interface used by VLC, but it also doesn’t fit into my IceWM theme. It sort of looks out of place, considering VLC is an application that is open almost all of the time. So I checked out some VLC skins. I decided to install the hx_milky skin.

  • The Writing on the Wall: GNU/Linux Has Arrived

    I have believed, with good reason, that GNU/Linux has “arrived” just about everywhere in IT except in some business desktops and gaming for some time. Certainly, no one needs that other OS to do everything.

    I have been dismissive of gaming as a barrier to GNU/Linux but spotted it as one of three evidences that GNU/Linux has arrived:“Valve has decided to support GNU/Linux with its Steam platform to hedge its bets in case Windows 8 fails”. It used to be that some would do nothing by taking a risk on anything else but now some see that other OS as a risk to the business.

  • OS WARS: Nexus 7 JB 4.1 – iOS 6 – Mountain Lion 10.8 – Windows 8 – Linux

    There’s the word of Linux too, with Linux.com showcasing the “The 2012 top 7 best Linux distributions for you”, where the desktop Linux winner isn’t Ubuntu, but Linux Mint 13, just released in two versions, Linux Mint 13 “Maya” on last Saturday on the 21st of July, and the “KDE” version released on Monday the 23rd.

    There’s also the aforementioned Ubuntu Linux distribution, www.ubuntu.com with the 12.04 LTS (long term support) release having arrived on April 26 2012, and the 12.10 release due on the 18th of October 2012, 8 days before Microsoft releases Windows 8 to GA or “general availability” on retail computers, for online download and through retail boxed purchase.

  • Server

    • Oracle’s file converter holes endanger many server services

      Strictly speaking it is not a single hole, but fourteen holes in the parsing of certain types of tile. The affected file formats are .VSD, .WSD, .JP2, .DOC, .SXD, .LWP, .PCX, .SXI, .DPT, .PDF, .SAM, .ODG and .CDR. A program that opens a specially crafted file with the Oracle libraries is fundamentally compromised. A range of server services are affected, including anti-virus scanners like McAfee GroupShield, but also specific desktop applications that need to handle different file types, such as the Guidance EnCase Forensic toolkit.

  • Kernel Space

    • The Linux Talent Draft is On

      While the NFL season prepares to get underway there is an ongoing, intensive draft for Linux talent taking place right now.

      We hear this from companies large and small, universities from all over the world and from the Linux kernel community, but we also know demand is high for Linux professionals based on our Linux Jobs Report issued this year (produced in partnership with Dice.com). Eighty-one percent of the hiring managers surveyed for the report said that hiring Linux talent this year is a priority. Sixty-three percent are seeking more Linux professionals relative to other hires. But 85 percent said finding Linux talent is difficult.

    • CloudOpen Q&A: SUSE’s Michael Miller on Why Linux is the Natural OS for the Cloud

      In the latest of our LinuxCon and CloudOpen keynote Q&A series we talk to SUSE’s Vice President of Global Alliances Michael Miller. Miller will be talking in his keynote at the events about how service-oriented clouds are bridging the divide between IT and lines of businesses. He also hinted twice during our conversatoin about a big announcement coming.

    • VIA Puts Out Some Linux Kernel, Boot Loader Code

      Earlier this year VIA launched a $49 Android PC and now finally they are releasing the source-code to its boot-loader and kernel.

      VIA still isn’t engaging in anything in terms of open-source graphics following their failed strategy, but at least when it comes to VIA’s APC Android PC, they have now opened up a bit more.

    • Btrfs Filesystem In Linux 3.6 Kernel Has Big Changes

      The Btrfs file-system update for the Linux 3.6 kernel is “a large btrfs update” with new features introduced to this next-generation file-system.

    • Stable kernel 3.2.24

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Coming Soon : Sync Stats, Ratings And More With Amarok

        Amarok has the ability to connect with Last.FM and submit your tracks listened, recommend you music, show your top artists and more. Soon Amarok will be able to sync your stats and ratings as well. Say you listen music from a number of devices, your iPod, phone, PC etc. Now all of them are connected with Last.FM. As the music gets scrobbled, Amarok will submit your ratings (stars), the last played time, track added time etc to Last.FM. So next time you listen music from any other device which supports StatsSyncing, you will be able to get data submitted via Amarok (eg stars, labels, last played date etc) on that device as well!

      • KDE Social Feed Out Online

        KDE is becoming more social and developers are working to include Internet and social network sites right into the KDE desktop. A student developer, Marty, has created an KDE plasma widget as his GSoc project, which allows you to interact with Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca from your KDE desktop.

      • The Qt-based Tea Text Editor: Managing Image and Text Files in One Application

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Flickr your Gnome with Frogr!

        Flickr is maybe the most popular image hosting website in the world, helping millions of users to manage their photos online, and to easily share them on any of the widely used social networks.

        Frogr is a smart and very useful little application that allows you the easier pre-set and upload of your photographs on Flickr straight from your Gnome desktop!

      • Reglue Finds Solus in Gnome3/Unity Wreckage

        The Reglue project was, as many were, caught off guard when both Gnome and Canonical simultaneously lost their minds. With their eyes solidly focused on the mobile market, each moved swiftly to develop an environment that would be both friendly and useful on tablets and phones.

  • Distributions

    • Did Zorin OS Ultimate save me money? You bet it did.

      We have been using Zorin OS since version 3.0 in our business and on our personal computers. I purchased several copies of Ultimate to support Zorin and because of the value added software on the Ultimate DVD. The look changer and splash screen themer are what I call value added. Also, the fact that we can configure our wireless without a wired connection has changed the way we use Linux.

      If the Zorin Team can think of “value added” programs to add to the Zorin DVD, I am convinced they will sell more DVD’s and that would help fund Zorin OS.

    • New Releases

      • LuninuX 12.00
      • Clonezilla 1.2.13-11
      • Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 Released
      • Bodhi 2.0 released!

        Bodhi Linux is proud to present it’s second major release! Bodhi Linux 2.0 is now available for download!

      • Bodhi Linux 2.00 Released

        Jeff Hoogland has announced the release of Bodhi Linux version 2.00. This stable release comes after two months of hard work and bug fixing, followed by a Bodhi Linux 2.00 Release Candidate.

      • Bodhi Linux 2.0.0 stable release arrives

        Alongside the launch of a new web site, the developers at the Bodhi Linux project have published the second major release of their minimal Linux distribution with an Enlightenment-based desktop. As previously described by lead developer Jeff Hoogland, the goal of version 2.0 of Bodhi Linux was not to “introduce ground breaking new features” to the distribution, but rather to smoothly transition to a new version of its underlying operating system.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Mandriva SA at FISL 13

        Mandriva will be present at 13th FISL (International Free Software Forum – Brazil), taking place July 25th-28th in Events Center of PUCRS, Porto Alegre. FISL is the most important meeting of the Free Software Communities of Latin America and their 13 years of history have seen many creative and innovative people who encouraged, and believe in the strenght of free software, inside and outside Brazil.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Hardened on the move

        Gentoo Hardened is thriving and going forward. For those that don’t exactly know what Gentoo Hardened is – it is a Gentoo project dedicated to bring Gentoo in a shape ready for highly secure, high stability production server environments. This is what we live by, and why we do what we do. To accomplish this goal, we use a great community of developers & users that work on several subprojects: the implementation of kernel hardening features such as grSecurity, memory-based protection schemes such as PaX, toolchain updates to harden against buffer overflows and memory attacks, mandatory access control schemes such as SELinux and RSBAC.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat Is Overvalued

        Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) is a growth stock that provides a variant of the Linux operating system family, which is formally known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. (If you haven’t heard of Linux, take your IT guy or IT gal out for a cup of coffee.) Unfortunately, Red Hat trades at very high valuation multiples. When compared to its peers, it is readily apparent that investors should stay away from RHT shares at current price levels, even after considering growth projections. RHT high price multiples should dissuade investors from buying at current prices until its valuations descend closer to those of its peers.

      • Red Hat’s Top 4 Priorities for 2013: Cloud, Virtualization, And…

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Gives Away Raspberry Pi, OLPC For Free

          Fedora is one of the most successful community driven open-source project. Its community is most active, helpful, skilled and diverse. You will find people helping in forums, writing documentation in wiki, maintaining the website, doing artwork, packaging software, coding and more.

        • Fedora rewards contributors with Summer of Fun

          Get a Raspberry Pi for contributing to Fedora this Summer, along with other open hardware in the Summer of Hardware and Fun

    • Debian Family

      • My Debian Saga

        I want preface this blog post by stating I am a Debian Linux fan. I think when set up properly, Debian can be almost unbreakable. It can run light and fast and cool, but first you have to get it installed.

        I’ve installed numerous Debian forks and had few if any issues with them, distributions like SolusOS, Linux Mint debian, SalineOS, and Mepis. All were very solid Linux distributions and relatively easy to install. Not so with vanilla Debian.

        My goal was to install Debian to a 16 gig usb stick, essentially installing Debian to an external hard drive. To start with, Debian is not as easy to find and download as say, Ubuntu. You don’t go to the home page and click on the “install” button, you have to search through directories to find what you need. I began with what should have been the easiest way, the Debian Live page and Stable release. I downloaded the KDE image and burned it to a usb stick with Unetbootin and booted up the operating system. So far so good, I had a wired Internet connection that was working and the KDE desktop looked good. So I click on “install”.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Unity On Fedora

            I was delighted to read the news of Unity entering Fedora. Although many associate Unity with Ubuntu, we would like to encourage the wider adoption of Unity in other Linux distributions and projects. Unity is a desktop that is designed to provide a unified experience not only on your desktop for GNOME, KDE and other apps, but also across different devices and screens.

            With Unity getting more eyeballs from Fedora and other distributions, we would like to welcome you folks into the upstream community. If you would like to participate in programming, design, testing, support or other ways of contributing, you are more than welcome! You can find out more here and feel free to post questions of how to participate to the Unity development mailing list or the Unity design mailing list. You can also join our IRC channel at #ubuntu-unity on freenode.

          • Canonical Calls For Volunteers For Ubuntu Accomplishments
          • Help Test Webapps For Ubuntu
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 Released

            The third alpha release in the Ubuntu 12.10 development cycle has been made available for download.

          • Introducing Ubuntu Radio Lens for Unity
          • VirtualBox: Creating Backups & Clones Of Running Virtual Machines (No Downtime) With LVM Snapshots
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 unifies user menus

            The Ubuntu developers have released the third alpha of Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”, the final release of which is scheduled for 18 October. This development release includes several changes over Alpha 2, which was released a month ago. These changes include a reworked session menu, improvements to the update manager and removal of the third party driver installation tool. Upstream changes to the Nautilus file manager have caused theming issues with the default Ubuntu theme, but the developers expect to have these fixed by the time the first beta release of 12.10 arrives at the beginning of September.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • 5 things about FOSS Linux virtualization you may not know

    In January I attended the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo. In addition to speaking and running the Ubuntu booth, I had an opportunity to talk to other sysadmins about everything from selection of distribution to the latest in configuration management tools and virtualization technology.

    I ended up in a conversation with a fellow sysadmin who was using a proprietary virtualization technology on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Not only did he have surprising misconceptions about the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) virtualization tools available, he assumed that some of the features he was paying extra for (or not, as the case may be) wouldn’t be in the FOSS versions of the software available.

  • Parse Shows Off Anypic, The Open Source Instagram Clone That Took 30 Minutes To Build

    It took Instagram a good amount of time to build a mobile photo-sharing app that could scale to 50 million users — and its efforts were obviously recognized by others when it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion earlier this year. But Parse, the startup that launched out of Y Combinator last summer and provides backend-as-a-service tools for mobile app developers, says that making such services should not take so much time and money anymore, because Parse’s tools make it much easier and faster to build really scalable mobile apps.

  • Apache OpenMeetings

    We are happy to announce Version 2.0 of Apache OpenMeetings Incubating!

  • Don’t buy that security software!

    Open source doesn’t have to mean free of cost, but thanks to the generosity of open source developers many thousands of great applications are free. Why spend money when you don’t have to? Though if you like and depend on an app, nothing says thanks like clicking the “Donate” button.

  • Why Open-Source Principles Are a Recipe For Innovation

    Two weeks ago, Amy Clark wrote that an open-source model can — and should — be applied to scientific research in the pharmaceutical industry. Using insights from Ashoka Fellow Stephen Friend, she showed that open-source science would eliminate redundant efforts and fast-track lifesaving drugs.

  • Events

    • Interview With O’Reilly Open Source Award Winner Elizabeth Krumbach

      During LinuxCon this year one of the lead Linux kernel developers, Alan Cox, pointed at the challenge the community is facing in terms of gender gap. Unlike other areas where women are in leadership positions open source is an exception. So, we are starting an interview series on Muktware ‘Woman Force In Open Source’ where we will feature one female developer/executive every week. We are starting this series with Elizabeth Krumbach, the winner of the O’Reilly Open Source Award.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla’s Mobile OS Seen in the Wild

        Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. We’ve previously covered the company’s Boot to Gecko platform — an open, web-centric operating environment centered on the Gecko rendering engine — which is part of the effort. And since February, Mozilla’s mobile operating system has moved ahead rapidly. Now, there are new pictures emerging of what some are calling “Firefox OS.”

  • SaaS

    • Top Open Source Cloud Headlines Week of July 23

      This week’s top open source cloud news features VMware’s acquisition of Nicira; a Q&A with Citrix’s Mark Hinkle; the pros and cons of open source cloud platforms for IT managers; and insider news that Nebula has enticed some Rackspace developers away.

  • Databases

    • Oracle Releases Migration Tool For Microsoft SQL Server To MySQL

      Microsoft SQL users will now be able to migrate data from proprietary MS SQL databases to free MySQL databases, thanks to the new migration tool unveiled by Oracle. By switching to a free and open-source RDBMS, companies and individuals will be able to easily save ownership costs by 90%.

  • Funding

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Student With Diabetes Forced To Decide Between Health Care Or Going To College

      A Massachusetts college student with diabetes is facing a tough situation: Either she stops going to college full-time to qualify for the insurance she’s currently using, or she opts for help from the state that isn’t going to give her the quality of life she’s used to. So what’s a student trying to get ahead in life to do — try to get an education on a part-time basis or get along without the insulin pump that helps her treat her diabetes?

      Katie’s had diabetes since she was 9, reports CBS Boston, and her mom has been grateful to qualify for MassHealth. That coverage has allowed Katie to use an insulin pump to regulate her blood sugar, something that at $1,000 a month, her single mother couldn’t afford otherwise.

  • Finance

    • Into the Bailout Buzz Saw

      Thus the collision course was set between Mr. Barofsky and a crew of complacent, bank-friendly Treasury officials. He soon discovered that the department’s natural stance of marching in lock step with the banks meant that he had to question its policies and programs repeatedly to ensure that taxpayers weren’t at risk for fraud and abuse.

      “The suspicions that the system is rigged in favor of the largest banks and their elites, so they play by their own set of rules to the disfavor of the taxpayers who funded their bailout, are true,” Mr. Barofsky said in an interview last week. “It really happened. These suspicions are valid.”

      To be sure, Mr. Barofsky and his team were up against a powerful status quo. And that meant that they ran into plenty of brick walls.

      “Bailout” covers a lot of ground, running through attempts of the inspector general’s office to ensure that additional rescue programs suggested by the Treasury had safeguards in place to avoid conflicts of interest, collusion and fraud. One battle involved the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to get troubled mortgages off banks’ balance sheets by encouraging private investors to buy them using mostly taxpayer dollars. When the inspector general’s office recommended ways to protect against fraud and to fix other flaws in the program, Mr. Barofsky writes, the Treasury rejected the suggestions, maintaining that they would gut the programs and reduce participation.

    • Sandy Weill, In Stunning Reversal, Tells CNBC It’s Time To Break Up The Banks

      n a stunning reversal, a former big bank CEO who crusaded for policies that helped create the so-called “too-big-to-fail” banks now says we need to break up the banks.

  • Privacy

07.26.12

Links 26/7/2012: Serious Sam 3 for GNU/Linux, Rekonq Reaches 1.0

Posted in News Roundup at 1:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Flemish voting machines to run on Linux operating system

    The new voting machines to be used by the government of Flanders, Belgium, will use the Linux open source operating system, according to a report by Binnenband, a magazine targeting Flanders’ public administrations.

  • Let’s talk: how to help your team share more with Linux-based communication tools

    Communication and collaboration are crucial to business success; and can be improved when supported by Open Source enterprise unified communications and collaboration platforms. No matter where they are, teams and individuals can work together closely with tools like Linux-based instant messaging, email, document and knowledge management systems and mobile applications. Employees can improve their productivity and performance within teams or between departments.

  • Murchison radio astronomers to get Linux cluster
  • TLWIR Special: Three Signs That GNU/Linux Has Arrived

    Three recent news items provided evidence that the age of GNU/Linux on the desktop is arriving. The years of GNU/Linux languishing on the pc desktop are finally drawing to a close. Here are the three news items:

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

    • TI Releases Linux Kernel Support For “Keystone”

      Texas Instruments has published their initial Linux kernel patches for providing support for their forthcoming Keystone platform, which is an interesting ARM-based platform dealing with many-core SoCs using Cortex-A15s.

    • DRM Drivers On Linux 3.6 Kernel Aren’t Too Fun
    • Apple OS X Mountain Lion vs. Linux

      As far as why Apple OS X Mountain Lion is being mentioned today on Phoronix is just to say that new OS X Mountain Lion vs. Linux benchmarks will be available on Phoronix in the near future. From earlier this year using development versions there were preview benchmarks of OS X Mountain Lion vs. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but new benchmarks from multiple Macs will be done in the near future for a more in-depth Phoronix comparison.

    • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Paul Mundt

      In this week’s 30 Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks profile, we talk to Paul Mundt, who works on the SuperH architecture and core parts of the AMR-based SH/R-mobile platforms. He shares a variety of stories from his nearly 20 years of experience working on the kernel, including one that proves collaboration never sleeps, even when you do during an inter-contentinetal flight.

    • 5 Best New Features of the Linux 3.5 Kernel Release
    • Linux 3.5 Boosts Ext4 Filesystem

      For many Linux distributions, the Ext4 filesystem is the default choice, following the decade-long legacy of Ext2 and Ext3. While Ext4 provides a higher degree of performance and reliability in comparison with its predecessors, it has trailed other fileystems. Both Oracle’s ZFS, used in Solaris, as well as Btrfs, which is part of the Linux kernel, have gone a step further than the Ext filesystem family with integrity checks. In the Linux 3.5 kernel a feature called metadata checksum has been added to help narrow the filesystem integrity gap.

    • RIP Andre Hedrick: The engineer who kept the PC open

      ndre Hedrick, a principal engineer and operating system architect at Cisco Systems and a Linux kernel contributor, has died. He leaves behind a wife, four young children and many friends.

    • Linus Torvalds holds ‘ultimate authority’ on Linux

      Below you can view a nice video explaining the mechanics of how Linux is actually built from a real world software application development perspective.

      The video explains that 10,000 patches go into each new release of Linux, but that after each submission has been checked over by a senior level Linux developer or “maintainer”, when the maintainer finishes his or her review they will pass it on to Linus Torvalds himself how holds “ultimate authority” on Linux before each new kernel can be released.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Radeon Driver Commit Activity Is On The Decline

        After delivering development statistics on the Nouveau driver and the Intel driver, here’s some numbers looking at the development pace of the xf86-video-ati X.Org driver for Radeon graphics cards.

        The Git stats on xf86-video-ati go back to 14 November 2003 with there being 2,970 Git commits in this time from 151 developers. The current size of xf86-video-ati is 64,148 lines of code spread across 83 files.

      • VIA’s OpenChrome 0.3.0: “A Major Step Forward”

        The xf86-video-openchrome DDX driver has been updated today with a version 0.3.0. Xavier Bachelot from the OpenChrome camp describes this release as “a major step forward for the openchrome X.org driver.”

      • RadeonSI Gallium3D Gets New State Handling

        AMD pushed a load of commits this morning into the mainline Mesa Git repository that provide a new state handling implementation for the Radeon HD 7000 series “RadeonSI” Gallium3D driver.

      • Intel Releases 12.07 Linux Graphics Package

        Like usual, the Intel Linux graphics package isn’t some new software component release, but rather it’s just what Intel recommends their customers and Linux distributions use for appropriate versions of the upstream Linux components to deploy when running Intel integrated graphics.

      • Wayland 1.0 With Weston Is Near: v0.95 Is Released

        Version 0.95 for Wayland/Weston marks the point of maintaining protocol and client API stability. They will attempt not to break any Wayland clients or toolkits written against this 0.95 protocol/API. The interfaces aren’t completely frozen until the 1.0 release in the near future, but they will to resist breaking things and use appropriate versioning.

      • Radeon Driver Commit Activity Is On The Decline

        After delivering development statistics on the Nouveau driver and the Intel driver, here’s some numbers looking at the development pace of the xf86-video-ati X.Org driver for Radeon graphics cards.

        The Git stats on xf86-video-ati go back to 14 November 2003 with there being 2,970 Git commits in this time from 151 developers. The current size of xf86-video-ati is 64,148 lines of code spread across 83 files.

      • Mesa 8.1 Will Offer Some Speed Improvements For Nouveau
      • Binary Driver Blobs Aren’t Yet Ready For Wayland
      • Intel SNA vs. UXA On Ivy Bridge
      • Intel updates its open source Linux drivers

        Intel’s developers have released version 12.07 of the open source Intel graphics package for Linux systems. The package includes the new X Server drivers for Intel cards as well as several other components that have been tested with these drivers.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Linux Mint 13 KDE Review

        The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 13 KDE. This is an important release for KDE and Linux Mint users as it brings the latest and greatest technologies from KDE and Ubuntu.

      • KDE’s Rekonq browser turns 1.0

        KDE developer Jonathan Riddell has announced that the Rekonq web browser has now reached version 1.0 and is available to download. Rekonq is a QtWebKit-based alternative to the more feature-rich Konqueror browser for the KDE desktop; it uses the WebKit rendering engine and aims to be faster, lightweight and simpler to use.

      • Akademy: Freedom and the internet

        Mathias Klang opened this year’s Akademy with a keynote look at freedom and the internet. It was something of a cautionary tale that outlined the promises that technology brings, while noting that the dangers are often being overlooked. Klang comes from an academic and legal background—he is currently a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Göteborg in Sweden—which gives him something of a different perspective on technology issues.

        Klang’s talk was titled “Expressions in Code and Freedom”, but he came up with a different title the night before the talk: The TiVo-ization of everyday life. That title is “silly”, but it does reflect some of the dangers he sees. He noted that he is not a programmer, but is surrounded by them, and they “put up with my stupidity”. His background in the law means that he “likes reading licenses” and thinks everyone should. His current research is looking into social media, particularly in the area of control by the providers.

      • Qt 5.0 Beta Likely Coming In Early August

        After facing some delays, the Qt 5.0 Beta will likely be published in early August.

        In response to questions raised on the Qt development list, Marius Storm-Olsen of Nokia has shared that the Qt 5.0 beta is likely to come next month. “We are pushing as hard as we can to make it happen asap, but with all the vacations happening in Europe right now I think it will happen in early August.”

      • [Development] Latest stable Qt5 code
      • Project Neon provides daily builds of KDE modules

        The KDE project has announced Project Neon, an effort to provide daily builds of KDE modules for Kubuntu. The aim of this is to give developers and testers the ability to easily install cutting edge builds of programs from the KDE Software Collection without the risk of creating problems in their working KDE desktop environment.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME Committed to Accessibility

        Accessibility is overlooked by many people because they think that it doesn’t affect them. But as Jonathan Snook points out, “accessibility is a spectrum. On one end, there are those with severe cognitive and/or physical disabilities; on the other end… well, what is the other end? People who wear glasses, or are color-blind? What about those who choose to use the keyboard instead of a mouse? Where does one draw the line?” Over time, almost all of us will require assistance of some kind to be able to make full use of our computers and devices.

  • Distributions

    • LPinguy 12.04.1 Screenshots (07/24/2012)
    • Bridge Linux 2012 Xfce Review

      Here is another wonderfully simplified way for less advanced users to get a taste of Arch Linux. This time I will be looking at the powerful but less-known Bridge Linux distribution.

    • Arch Linux 2012.07.15 drops AIF

      Arch Linux developer Pierre Schmitz has announced the availability of a new installation image for the project’s flexible Linux distribution, the first updated install media since August of last year. Arch Linux 2012.07.15 is a snapshot of the rolling-release operating system for new installations that includes several changes and the 3.4.4 Linux kernel.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon 9 KDE review

        Sabayon 9 is the latest edition of Sabayon, a multi-purpose distribution based on Gentoo Linux. It is a rolling distribution, which means that existing users do not have to reinstall to get the latest edition. The simple act of installing updates and upgrading the kernel gives those users the latest and greatest edition.

    • Red Hat Family

      • German Manufacturing Firm Modernizes IT Systems with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

        Red Hat, Inc. [...] the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Ferrotec, a global market leader in technologies based on the magnetic liquid Ferrofluid that is used in multi-phase motors, dampers for shaft ends and transformer cooling, has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization at the core of its infrastructure. Through this Red Hat technology combination, Ferrotec is increasing scalability, flexibility and performance while lowering operating costs.

      • Analysis: Nimsoft, Red Hat Collaboration Sets Stage for Mixed Virtualization, Clouds
        [print article]

        Nimsoft is expanding the reach of its Nimsoft Monitor, adding support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

        In specific, Nimsoft Monitor for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization streamlines administration for IT using virtualized environments from multiple vendors, Steve Smith, Nimsoft’s senior principal manager for product marketing, told IDN. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is an open source virtualization management solution for servers and desktops.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora Shows Contributors Some Love

          Fedora (and probably Red Hat) really really appreciate the contribution community developers bring to the popular Linux distribution. So much so, they want to give out some presents – 220 presents to be exact. Since that isn’t enough to go around, contributors will be randomly chosen from a sweepstakes pool.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu Accomplishments: Call For Volunteers

            As some of you will be aware, we have working on a project called Ubuntu Accomplishments in recent months. We are making good progress with the project and are working to our 0.3 release. The goals of this release will be:

            * Assure quality and stability in the platform.
            * Provide the ability to publish your accomplishments online.
            * Expand our range of accomplishments.
            * Expand and improve the documentation for our accomplishments.
            * Provide a greater breadth of translations coverage.

          • FiberCloud Adds Ubuntu to its Supported Open Source Operating Systems
          • Amazon EC2 Benchmarks With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

            …here are new benchmarks highlighting Amazon’s public cloud computing platform using all of the major instance types.

          • Help PC Pro write its Linux distro Labs

            In the past couple of years, we’ve seen huge interest in the reviews we’ve published of the different versions of Ubuntu. The popular free operating system has a massive following, and rightly so. It’s a fully fledged operating system, complete with office software and a host of useful tools and utilities. And Ubuntu, which has now reached version 12.04, is now a usable, mature operating system.

            But what of the rest of the Linux landscape? There’s a whole selection of other desktop distributions, or “distros” to give them their collective name, and the choice ranges from simple, lightweight distros designed to run on older hardware to more fully featured operating systems such as Linux Mint and openSUSE. How good are they? Can they challenge the usability of Ubuntu?

          • Foundation introduces software

            While introducing the Ubuntu Linux software — a free open source software (FOSS) — at the University of Fiji on Saturday, Software Foundation Fiji founder Prof Rohitesh Chandra said the new system was readily available at no cost.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 13 KDE released: But does it live up to expectations?

              Hot on the heels of its Xfce build, the final release of Linux Mint 13 KDE is now available for download. This is an iteration that a lot of people have been anxiously awaiting, because it combines a lot of good things in a single package.

            • Peppermint OS Three Review

              Peppermint OS Three, released yesterday picks up from where it left off in version two of this great lightweight distribution. It is based on an Ubuntu 12.04 variant, called LUbuntu which is geared towards the lightweight end of things. Peppermint OS Three is using Openbox as its desktop environment.

            • Bodhi Linux

              Along my quest to find a Linux distro to call home I stumbled across quite a gem – Bodhi Linux. It has to be said that is one of the less popular distributions but, it is by far the most fun!

              Originally an Ubuntu varient I think this one in particular has grown very well on its own. The only noticeable thing that it relates to ubuntu with its the package manager.

            • Xfce edition of Linux Mint 13 released

              The Linux Mint developers have released the Xfce version of their latest release, Linux Mint 13 “Maya”, with version 4.10 of the lightweight desktop environment. The Linux Mint team describes the Xfce environment as user friendly and good looking, and recommends it for systems with constrained resources. As with the other editions of Linux Mint 13, the Xfce version is based on Ubuntu 12.04.

            • Review: Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya” KDE

              About a week ago, I reviewed the Xfce edition of Linux Mint 13 LTS “Maya”. While I was quite pleased with how that turned out, I held off on going ahead and installing it because I wanted to try the KDE edition as well. Now that is here, so I’m reviewing it.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Arduino Leonardo released

      The long awaited Arduino Leonardo is now finally available in commercial quantities. It contains a 16 MHz Atmega32U4, which also takes care of USB communication with the host. On the Arduino Uno, a separate chip is required to take care of this. The simpler layout and smaller number of components means that the Leonardo is around £3 cheaper than the Uno. It is available with or without headers for the shields.

    • Microchip Giant ARM Reports Q2 Earnings: Sales £136M, Net Profit £39.4M, EPS Of £3.58; ‘Record Order Backlog’

      ARM Holdings — supplier of microchips for Apple’s iPhone and iPad products, Samsung’s Galaxy line and soon technology for Microsoft’s Windows 8 devices — continues to report strong results while riding the wireless device boom and expanding to newer areas. The company reported Q2 earnings (ended June 30) of £135.5 million ($213 million), beating analyst estimates of $206 million. Net profit was up by 48 percent, to £39.4 million compared to £26.6 million for the same quarter a year ago.

    • Hardware Hacks: Pi in the sky and Linux on the MK802

      Hardware Hacks is the section on The H that collects stories about the wide range of uses of open source in the rapidly expanding area of open hardware. Find out about interesting projects, re-purposing of devices and the creation of a new generation of deeply open systems. In this edition, Raspberry Pi in the sky, Linux distros for the MK802, Chromium on Pi and cheaper ARM quad core boards.

    • Smartenit Adds the Sweetness of Linux Home Automation to Raspberry Pi Making it HomAidPi à la mode

      There is nothing as tasty as homemade raspberry pie in the summer, and the ice cream on top makes it even more delicious, especially when it’s free. Smartenit®, a home and building automation solutions provider, has added the popular Raspberry Pi® board to their repertoire of Linux platforms that run its XML-socket based automation package. The firmware enables the RPi to become a fully-featured and sophisticated automation gateway that manages large home/building automation networks based on ZigBee®, INSTEON® and X10® protocols. “HomAidPi” in a Raspbian equipped RPi plus one of several USB automation interfaces available from Smartenit and other suppliers, provide access to a large ecosystem of automation devices that include lighting, HVAC, irrigation, appliance control, energy management, water management to name a few.

    • Phones

      • Enyo’s Out of Beta – but Will Devs Give it Love?

        Enyo 2 was rewritten from the ground up to enable cross-platform development, supporting mobile and desktop browsers from iOS to IE8. However, its focus is on mobile devices. “Enyo is a good JavaScript/HTML 5 framework,” said Sam Abadir, chief technology officer at appMobi.

      • HP’s Enyo 2 Open-Source WebOS Offshoot Exits Beta
      • Enyo 2 HP open source app is more than webOS
      • HP’s open source Enyo 2 app framework goes gold, not just for webOS anymore

        Uptake of Enyo 2 in the web development community will be an important metric to watch over the coming months; the team says that its vision of a “web-centric future [...] won’t come to pass overnight,” but the final code drop is an important checkpoint nonetheless.

      • Android

        • Android apps for the London 2012 Olympic Games
        • Apple Slides Further on Walmart’s Best-selling Tablets
        • XBMC coming to Android soon

          XBMC Media Center is a very popular free and open source cross platform media player application that is developed by the XBMC Foundation. Being an open source application, XBMC media center software is available for multiple operating-systems and hardware platforms. The latest version features a 10-foot user interface that can be used with televisions and controlled using remote control. What makes XMBC unique is that it lets its users to play and view videos, music, podcasts, and other digital media files of various formats from local and network storage media and the internet right out of the box.
          It has been a popular alternative to Windows Media Centre and likes, and now the popular platform is finally going to be available for Android. Previously, there were applications like XBMC remote on the Android Play Store which could control the desktop software, just like the VLC remote app, but this is not just a remote application, nor is it a stripped down “mobile” version of the actual application. It is the real deal, and it promises to deliver the exact same experience that users enjoy with XBMC on a TV set top box, a computer, or any device on which XBMC is available.

        • Encrypted calling app RedPhone goes open source on Android

          Have you ever heard that mysterious click, or burst of static on a phone call and wondered if someone was listening in? Obsessing over such things might be a sign of a larger issue, but if you want to be sure no one is spying on you, there is always RedPhone for Android. Whisper Systems released an official app a while back, but now the product is going open source.

        • This week: Apple vs. Android

          Innovation and litigation meet again this week and next when Apple squares off in courts around the world with rivals Samsung and Motorola. With over a 60 percent market share in mobile device litigation, will Apple, the company that wanted you to “Think Different”, prevail? So far, the results have been mixed.

          Apple lost its patent case against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet in the U.K. while the same tablet was blocked for sale in the U.S. by a preliminary injunction. Apple has been ordered to run ads in the U.K. stating Samsung did not copy the iPad. The Galaxy Tab patent case in the U.S. is set for trial starting July 30 in California.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Linus Torvalds Loves Google Nexus 7

        Linus Torvalds posted a review about his newly bought tablet, Google Nexus 7, and it seems he is quite satisfied with it. Linus finds Nexus 7 ‘So far: very positive’, as he writes on his Google+ page.. Linus finds Nexus 7 ‘So far: very positive’, as he writes on his Google+ page. He also is not bothered about the fact that the tablet has only a front facing camera – “It’s probably fine enough for some video conferencing, but since that’s not my thing let’s just say “whatever”.”

      • Why a 32GB Nexus 7 is almost inevitable

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Telcos Deny Trying To Turn FCC’s Open Network Diagnostics Into A Closed, Proprietary Affair

  • Security

    • Mac malware Crisis as Apple lets slip its Mountain Lion
    • Black Hat: Wintel Flaw Remained Unpatched For Six Years

      Unknown to tens of millions of users, a hidden security vulnerability has been lurking on many Intel-based Windows PCs for the past six years.

      The vulnerability was found by researcher Rafal Wojtczuk from security firm Bromium. Wojtczuk announced his findings at the Black Hat security conference here in Las Vegas. According to Wojtczuk, the vulnerability he re-discovered was actually first exposed and patched six years ago, albeit only on Linux systems.

      The vulnerability involves the unsafe use of an Intel CPU instruction called ‘sysret’. The risk is that if left unpatched, an attacker could have executed a user-to-kernel privilege escalation attack. In such an attack, the attacker could potential get system access and then execute arbitrary code.

    • NSA open source database draws Senate’s wrath

      Lawmakers are questioning in a recently introduced bill whether a massive National Security Agency database modeled on Google’s BigTable is in conflict with a government policy preventing federal agencies from building their own software when they have access to commercial alternatives, reports Wired.

  • Finance

    • Goldman Sachs, Bain Seek Dismissal of Bid-Rigging Lawsuit

      Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) (GS), Bain Capital Partners LLC and Carlyle Group LP (CG) (CG) urged a federal judge to dismiss an investor lawsuit accusing the largest investment banks and private-equity firms of conspiring to rig bids on leveraged buyouts.

      The financial companies were among the defendants seeking summary judgment from U.S. District Judge Edward Harrington in the five-year-old class-action, or group lawsuit, according to court filings yesterday in Boston.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Karl Rove’s American Crossroads Turns the “War on Women” on Obama

      Karl Rove’s American Crossroads is hoping to help the GOP regain ground among women, particularly Latina women. According to a Gallup poll President Barack Obama has a 48 point advantage among Latino voters, while a CNN poll finds that women voters back Obama over Romney by a 16 point margin. Now Rove’s Super PAC is trying to make inroads with these voters, releasing an online ad that attempts to turn the “War on Women” charge on Obama. The Super PAC is testing the video in focus groups, with an eye toward potentially creating a 30-second TV ad, according to CNN.

  • Privacy

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Time to Fight for Net Neutrality in the EU

      Net neutrality is one of those areas that most people are vaguely in favour of, without giving it much thought. Governments take advantage of this to make sympathetic noises while doing precisely nothing to preserve it. For example, following a UK consultation on net neutrality two years ago, Ofcom came out with a very wishy-washy statement that basically said we think net neutrality is a jolly good idea but we won’t actually do anything to protect it.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • SOPA/PIPA Wakes Up Internet Giants To Realize They Need To Be More Engaged In DC

        Earlier today it was announced that a new industry trade association representing large internet companies, called The Internet Association, is going to be launching this fall, with Google, Amazon, eBay and Facebook as the charter members. Part of the thinking behind this group stemmed from the realization of how little influence various internet companies had in DC when SOPA/PIPA came along last year — and a concerted effort to change that.

07.25.12

Links 25/7/2012: Dell Has Red Hat Enterprise Linux Loaded

Posted in News Roundup at 7:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Seven Expectations of Linux Users

    Claiming that Linux users are different reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that “the rich are different from you and I” and Ernest Hemingway’s alleged reply, “Yes, they have more money.”

    After all, computer users are computer users. A few geeks may argue over the differences in operating systems, but aren’t average users more interested in simply getting work done?

    Superficially, yes. But operating systems and applications are far from neutral. Behind the code and the interfaces are assumptions about how users should use an application and what they want and expect from an application – even about the relationship between users and an application and its builders.

    Use an operating system long enough, and the assumptions behind it start to shape your expectations — so much so that another operating system may seem hostile and bizarre.

    You can hear the differences any time Linux users mingle with Windows and Mac users. The three groups have very different ideas about their relationship to their software, and communication is regularly confounded by differences in expectations.

    So what do Linux users expect from their operating system of choice? I can think of at least seven replies:

  • Desktop

  • Server

  • Kernel Space

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Introducing Project Neon KVM

        Project Neon provides daily builds of KDE modules for Kubuntu. It is an easy way to get the latest code without having to build the entire KDE-SVN tree and maintain the checkout. Project Neon is unstable, but it installs alongside stable packages. It is suitable for contributors such as new developers, translators, usability designers, documenters, promoters, and bug triagers. With Project Neon, people can experiment freely without risk to a working KDE environment.

        Project Neon is especially useful for reporting bugs. With its daily builds, bugs can be reported in the most timely manner. The more time that elapses between when a bug is introduced and when it is reported, the more difficult it gets to find it and fix it. With Project Neon, a bug can be reported on the same day that it is introduced.

      • Searching for Search in KDE

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Reglue Finds Solus in Gnome3/Unity Wreckage

        The Reglue project was, as many were, caught off guard when both Gnome and Canonical simultaneously lost their minds. With their eyes solidly focused on the mobile market, each moved swiftly to develop an environment that would be both friendly and useful on tablets and phones.

      • Making GTK3 themes – Part 2: The gtk.css and gtk-widgets.css files

        This is the second post from the “Making GTK3 themes”series. The first post can be found here.

        We will name our theme as “Dream”. So create a directory named “Dream” under “~/.themes” and then create another directory named “gtk-3.0″ under “~/.themes/Dream/gtk-3.0″. All the files we create will be inside this directory.

  • Distributions

    • Arch Linux Install Media Updated For July 2012

      For those that haven’t heard yet, the Arch Linux 2012.07.15 install media is available as a major installer update for this popular rolling-release Linux distribution.

    • Peppermint Three Screenshots (07/24/2012)
    • Peppermint Three Released, Cloud Based Free Linux OS

      Peppermint is a distro based on Linux Mint and Lubuntu. But unlike other distros that use offline desktop apps, Peppermint focuses on cloud services for applications. Peppermint three is based on Lubuntu 12.04, an LTS release which will be supported with security updates for a period of five years.

    • New Releases

      • VortexBox 2.1 released today

        It’s been a while since we had a release. This release is a roll-up of a lot of features and fixes we have been working on since the last release. It’s been over 6 months since 2.0 was released so there are a lot of new features and fixes in this version. This release includes Logitech Media Server 7.7.2. Backups now support more than 2.2TB drives. This is great for 3TB+ VortexBoxes. We have the latest Fedora kernel with upgraded audio drives. The new ALSA drives now have better support for USB audio devices. We are now using ALBUMARTIST instead of BAND tag in the FLAC to mp3 mirroring.

      • Slackware 14.0 Beta Features Xfce 4.10

        After months of development, Slackware 14.0 reaches Beta status on July 22nd, as announced by its developer, Patrick Volkerding.

        Among lots of interesting features, the Slackware 14.0 Beta operating system comes with the ultimate Xfce 4.10 desktop environment.

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Gooseberry – An alternative to Raspberry Pi

      Gooseberry is another alternative to Raspberry Pi, and according to the manufacturers it is three times faster than its rival. This new berry comes with a new ARM A10 processor running at 1GHz stock frequency, while there is enough headroom for overclocking up to 1.5 GHz. Also, it has twice the RAM of Raspberry Pi, meaning 512MB for this board. As for its power consumption, Gooseberry board consumes on average 4 watts of power when in use. When idle consumes 3.5 watts of power and when on standby consumes 2.3 watts of power.

    • Four Young Programmers Coded 48 Hours To Raise Donations For The Raspberry Pi Foundation

      Four young programmers, Ben, Luke, Ryan and Edward, aged between twelve and sixteen coded 48 hours in Python. The result was a game and more than 500 pounds raised for the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

    • Phones

      • Another one bites the dust, and goes open source

        According to an old saying, when the going gets tough, the tough gets going. That, however, does not seem to apply in the proprietary software business, because as we have seen over the years, whenever a proprietary software vendor falls on tough financial times, it closes shop and releases its products under an open source license.

        HP did it with webOS, which is now called Open webOS. OpenOffice.org is not a very good example, but it went from one open source license to another after the sponsoring proprietary software vendor pissed off core developers. OpenOffice.org is now known as Apache OpenOffice. I am sure you know how that story unfolded. And, then, there is the most recent case of Mandriva SA

      • Android

        • Vizio Co-Star: Is Google TV finally going Prime-Time?

          I wanted to like Google TV. Who wouldn’t want to be able to watch Internet video, normal television, and use their HDTV as the world’s biggest Web browser. There was just one problem. The various Google TV implementations, such as the Logitech Revue, never worked well. It looks to me though like the soon to be released Vizio Co-Star may finally fulfill at least some of Google TV’s promise.

        • Motorola XT926 (DROID RAZR HD) Cruises Through FCC With Verizon Radios and NFC

          A Motorola device with model number XT926 attached to it, cruised through the FCC today. As we know thanks to a variety of Moto employees who posted both pictures and benchmarks from the device to public sites over the last few months, this should be the DROID RAZR HD. According to this FCC filing, it was tested for Verizon’s 3G (CDMA 800/1900) and LTE networks. It also packs GSM and WCDMA radios, so there is a good chance that this phone will end up with global roaming capabilities. As you can see from the picture above, an NFC chip is included as well.

        • Apple, Android Battle for Enterprise App Market Share

          Apple’s strength in the enterprise was attributed to several factors, including the success of the company’s best-selling iPad tablet.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Linus Torvalds reviews, loves, the Google Nexus 7

        Linus Torvalds, Linux’s inventor, software developer extraordinary, and, now, tablet reviewer! On Google+, Torvalds reviewed his Nexus 7 tablet and like ZDNet reviewers such as James Kendrick, he loved it.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Refining Due Diligence for Enterprise Open Source

    There are differences in how you evaluate open source applications, and it behooves security organizations to think through those differences and plan accordingly. Why does it matter? Because those differences can sometimes gate or slow down the adoption of a perfectly serviceable tool — like if you have inflexible corporate software acquisition policies that mandate non-applicable steps.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Silent Updates Appear to Boost Firefox 14′s Uptake

        Many dedicated users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser have been wrestling with the new silent updates, which upgrade and modify the browser automatically, rather than at users’ discretion. The silent updates have been quite controversial. They are in place and going strong with Firefox 14, and there are signs that they are helping with adoption of that version of the browser. At the same time, some users find them very intrusive.

        For a long time, Firefox had no silent updates. The Mozilla team reported earlier this year that the browser would begin to have them, and it was clear that doing so was an effort to compete more closely with Google Chrome, which has offered silent updates for years.

      • Customize Firefox to Show Support for Your Country

  • SaaS

    • Citrix’s Hinkle Proposes Linux Model for an Open Source Cloud

      But the project has seen more community contributions in the last 90 days than it did in the last two years it’s been open source, he said. CloudStack has also seen a nice uptick in adoption from a wide range of companies that includes cloud hosting providers, social gaming companies and research labs, among others.

  • CMS

    • Blogging Software

      I have been using WordPress for years and it works but by now I would expect a mature product. Instead we still have “features” like displaying newest comments at the tops of pages unavailable. Really. I thought this was a bug because there is an option in the Dashboard/Settings/Discussion settings for newest first but it does not work. When I reported this to WordPress.com I was informed to get help from WordPress.org where I see this has been a problem for years and no solution exists except to install plugins that may or may not work depending on “theme” and editing PHP. Apparently, WP is not amenable to fixing. I tried two different plugins and could not get it straightened out. My son may look at the PHP to figure out what’s wrong. I even turned off caching to no avail.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Benchmarking GCC 4.2 Through GCC 4.8 On AMD & Intel Hardware

      Here are benchmarks of all major GNU Compiler Collection releases from GCC 4.2.4 through the latest GCC 4.8 development build. Benchmarking was of the seven GCC compiler releases from an Intel Core i7 “Clarksfield” system and an AMD Opteron “Shanghai” workstation.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Join the M revolution – M and R programming languages

      Developers who take a first peek at the M language may get a quick impression that it is strange and alien. Here is the good news: If you have used R, or have friends who know R, then you are in good company and can learn M in a much shorter time. Moreover, you can combine M with R to get a powerful with an excellent statistical package.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Former McDonald’s Honchos Take On Sustainable Cuisine

      I had come to the artisanally fed vale of Facebook and Tesla to sample the first fruits of Lyfe Kitchen, a soon-to-be-chain of restaurants that might just shift the calculus of American cuisine. At Lyfe Kitchen (the name is an acronym for Love Your Food Everyday), all the cookies shall be dairy-free, all the beef from grass-fed, humanely raised cows. At Lyfe Kitchen there shall be no butter, no cream, no white sugar, no white flour, no high-fructose corn syrup, no GMOs, no trans fats, no additives, and no need for alarm: There will still be plenty of burgers, not to mention manifold kegs of organic beer and carafes of biodynamic wine. None of this would seem surprising if we were talking about one or 10 or even 20 outposts nationwide. But Lyfe’s ambition is to open hundreds of restaurants around the country, in the span of just five years.

  • Finance

    • Titanic banks hit Libor ‘berg

      At one time, calling the large multinational banks a “cartel” branded you as a conspiracy theorist. Today the banking giants are being called that and worse, not just in the major media but in court documents intended to prove the allegations as facts.

      Charges include racketeering (organized crime under the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO), antitrust violations, wire fraud, bid-rigging, and price-fixing. Damning charges have already been proven, and major damages and penalties assessed. Conspiracy theory has become established fact.

  • Civil Rights

    • Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Great Charter, Its Fate, and Ours

      This week the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit against CIA Director David Petraeus, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and two top special operations forces commanders for “violating the Constitution and international law” in the drone assassination of three American citizens in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman (though no one claims he had anything whatsoever to do with terror campaigns). The suit is based on the Constitution’s promise of “due process” (“[N]or shall any person… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”), which to the untutored eye of this non-lawyer clearly seems to involve “law.” Attorney General Eric Holder evidently thinks otherwise and has explained his reasoning when it comes to the right of the Obama administration to order such deaths: “The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process.” If you’re not inside the National Security Complex, it may be just a tad hard to grasp how “due process” could mean a secret process of review in the White House presided over by a president with a “kill list” (whose legal justification, laid out by the Justice Department, cannot be made public). And yet that is, as far as we can tell, indeed the claim.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Non-answer to BEREC’s Consultation: We need Net Neutrality Law!

      La Quadrature du Net publishes its non-answer to the EU body of telecoms regulators’ (BEREC) consultation on Net Neutrality. It is not time for yet-another consultation on the EU Commission’s failed “wait-and-see” policy aimed at letting telecom operators take control of the Internet by discriminating communications. The only way to protect a free Internet as well as freedoms and innovation online is to clearly enact and protect Net Neutrality in EU law.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Leaked Report Reveals Music Industry’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy

        A confidential internal report of the music industry outfit IFPI has been inadvertently made available online by the group itself. Penned by their Head of Internet Anti-piracy Operations, the report details the global strategy for the major recording labels of IFPI. Issues covered include everything from torrent sites to cyberlockers, what behavior IFPI expects of Internet service providers, the effectiveness of site blocking, and how pirates are accessing unreleased music from industry sources.

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