• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux Is Reaching New Heights in Enterprises, Study Finds

Global economic woes may continue to dampen spending forecasts for IT departments around the world, but that isn’t stopping large companies from adding more Linux servers to their operations.

Linux Foundation Report Shows Growing Linux Adoption Rates in the Enterprise

The latest report shows a 40% decrease in technical issues cited among respondents since the 2010 report. “Twenty-two percent fewer respondents cite perception by management as an issue, and 10% fewer say there are no issues at all impeding the success of Linux,” the report says. Further, more than two-thirds of respondents consider Linux to be a more secure operating system over the alternatives.

Server

• TomHenderson
  10 Indispensable NOC Tools for Linux and BSD

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • X.org screensaver bypass found

  • NSA releases security-enhanced Android

    The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) released a security-enhanced version of Android based on the hardened SE Linux, featuring stricter access control policies. SE Android restricts the system resources available to an Android app regardless of user permissions, blocking malware such as the “GingerBreak” exploit at six different steps during execution, says the NSA.

Applications

• Poor Mans GoogleEarth

  In my last blog, I mentioned that I had gone in and made changes to our thin client build to accommodate running NX sessions along with local RDP. We had another thin client project scheduled for 30-45 days in the future and because I was already in the code it was the best choice to just finish it and roll out all features at the same time.

• Proprietary

  • Is Steam Finally Coming to Linux?

    A job posting from Valve has sparked new speculation that the developer might be bringing their popular Steam service and library of Source engine games to Linux.

    The listing, for a Senior Software Engineer, states that one of the position’s responsibilities will be to “port Windows-based games to the Linux platform.” As Valve’s games are exclusively available through their Steam storefront, the logical conclusion is that Valve is planning to bring the entire service to Linux at some point in the near future.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Setting up a talking clock easily in Linux

  • DIY: Quick and easy Samba print server setup

  • fuk the kit you will love

  • Beginning Linux – Part III

    Now you’ve got Ubuntu installed and running, you’ll have probably noticed there are one or two things missing. Things like MP3 playback and decoding, support for certain audio formats, Microsoft fonts, Java runtime playback, Adobe Flash, and the ability to play (and rip) DVDs.

    The reason this stuff’s missed out from the default install is that it’s either proprietary — meaning the source code is controlled by a third party and you have to agree to their terms and conditions in order to use it — or it’s subject to copyright restrictions, or, in some countries (notably the US), there may be legal issues surrounding its use. (You can find more about this stuff here.)

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 4.9 to Get a New Widgets Explorer

    As you might have heard, KDE is, more or less, getting a whole new rewrite again. Some folks may read (or write) that with dread given how the last rewrite went for users there for a while. However, perhaps we should take a look at some of the good things instead. One that’s come to light recently is a brand new widgets explorer.

  • Calligra Words style selection combo

Distributions

• Gentoo Family

  • Interview with Milan Kazarka

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Review: Fuduntu 2012.1

      Fuduntu used to be based on Fedora, but then several months ago the lead developer announced that it would fork and maintain an independent codebase. This would serve two purposes: one would be to provide stable rolling releases, and the other would be to maintain GNOME 2 as long as possible. Indeed, Fuduntu uses not MATE, but good old GNOME 2.32.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Review: Aptosid (Install and First Impressions)

      I’ve installed Debian here and there on different computers in the last seven or so years that I’ve been using Linux. I almost ended up being a Debian person, but the Fedora book at the bookstore was more comprehensive, so I was set along the Red Hat path. On the one hand, I’ve often envied Debian both for its ease up upgrades and for its stability. On the other hand, I like having the latest stuff. KDE 4.8 is about to come out and I’ll be restless for the next few months before it makes its way into Fedora. So Debian’s never quite been for me. I’ve heard a lot about Aptosid (formerly Sidux) which turns Sid (the unstable repo) into a usable distro. Of course, Ubuntu does this along with a little extra polish, so I figured I’d see what Aptosid’s up to.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Do Fewer Spinoffs Signal a Waning in Ubuntu’s Popularity?

        Even if you don’t run Linux, chances are good you’ve heard of Ubuntu. You’re probably also familiar with its official cousins: Kubuntu, Xubuntu and the like. But there’s another subset of the Ubuntu ecosystem that gets less play — namely, the medley of unofficial spinoffs built by third parties. Although little discussed, the trends surrounding these distributions that hide in Ubuntu’s shadow reveal a lot about the open source channel more broadly.

      • Unity’s Dash to Ditch Giant Shortcuts

        Not a fan of the 8 giant shortcuts in the Unity Dash? Ubuntu 12.04 might just present you with something different…

      • Full Circle Podcast Episode 28 A Year in Comedy

      • Development Update

      • Ubuntu 12.04 May Get Rid of Useless Dash Shortcuts

        I have been using Unity since they day it came out with alpha of Ubuntu 11.04. One thing I never understood was the purpose of those 8 giant shortcuts in the Dash. I wrote about it in my first review. I still don’t know and have never used any of those 8 shortcuts. I wanted to get rid of them and put something more useful. It seems Ubuntu 12.04 will fix that too. As we reported earlier that with 12.04 we may get some more customization of Unity, the chances are that we may also get rid of those 8 icons and be replaced with something more useful.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • NSA Releases SE Android With Better Sandboxing, Access-Control Policies

Cyborg lawyer demands software source

Lawyer Karen Sandler’s heart condition means she needs a pacemaker-defibrillator to avoid sudden death, so she has one simple question: what software does it run?

Open Source Still The Biggest Enterprise Software Threat

Cloud is not the biggest threat to enterprise software companies like Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT) and SAP (SAP).

Still don’t think open source hurts commercial software? Guess again

Databases

• Learn Open Source Database Tools from Stanford for Free

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• New LibreOffice Ubuntu versions

  LibreOffice 1:3.4.5-0ubuntu1 has just been uploaded to oneiric-proposed too to be SRUed (it is exactly the same as the ppa version, except for the changed version).

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Can you help the FSF get colocated hosting?

  If you know a Boston-area company or institution that could offer us colocated hosting and bandwidth, we could use your help!

Public Services/Government

• Q&A: NASA’s Sean Herron and William Eshagh on code.nasa.gov

  On Jan. 4, NASA added to its growing collection of open.nasa.gov websites with the launch of code.nasa.gov. The site aims to be a “community hub” by providing access to current NASA open source projects, information on

  its open source release process and a forthcoming forum for project collaboration.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Access/Content

  • FLOSS Body of Knowledge

    As courses, certificates, and curricula are created, it’s valuable to bring together people who are working to develop and deliver this material into a community where we can jointly define a central body of knowledge related to free, libre, and open source software. That goal has led me to take the first step toward creating this body of knowledge, termed FLOSSBOK. The initial outline, intentionally very brief, can be found on our FLOSS Competency Center site.

• Open Hardware

  • Open-Source Robot to Perform Surgery

    A new surgical robot called the Raven—originally developed by the army for battlefield surgery—is light and relatively inexpensive. It also runs Linux, an open-source software, so that different medical institutions can adapt the machine to different ends while sharing advances they find along the way. Harvard wants to use the machine to operate on a beating heart by compensating for the heart’s motion. Scientists at Berkeley will try teaching the robot to operate autonomously by mimicking surgeons.

How important is virtualization to commercial UNIX customers?

Finance

• Bank of America Hopes to Improve its Image

  With its stock scraping bottom at just over $6.00 a share, its image reeling from a failed attempt to to stick its customers with a $5.00 per month debit card fee, and accusations of thousands of fraudulent foreclosures, Bank of America is undertaking another effort to improve its image. Heading up the makeover attempt is Anne M. Finucane, BofA’s Global Strategy and Marketing Officer. Ms. Finucane knows better than most the depths of the trouble BofA is in.

• Returning to Simplicity

  The modern world depends on economic growth to function properly. And throughout the living memory of every human on earth today, technology has continually developed to extract more and more raw material from the environment to power that growth.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • How Timbaland Got Away With “Copyright Theft”

    So basically, if you’re a famous American, in a contract with a big American record company like the Universal Music Group, you’re entitled to copyright protection, but if you’re a little guy from Finland who writes chiptunes, you’re just a “freakin’ jerk” that American’s can plagiarise from with complete impunity.

  • SOPA backer reassures his troops: “Facts will overcome fears”

  • SOPA Protests: Results And Aftermath

  • SOPA a controversy against the Open Source world

  • SOPA protest by the numbers: 162M pageviews, 7 million signatures

  • Politicians Backing Off From SOPA And PIPA

    The big website blackout is paying off with a total of 18 U.S. senators publicly their withdrawing support of the controversial Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the last 24 hours. Let’s name some these belatedly good men who have finally come to their senses; Theres’s Sen. Marco Rubio (Rep, Florida) Lee Terry (Rep-Nebraska) and Ben Quayle (Dan’s boy, Rep, Arizona) Sen. Kelly Ayotte (Rep-NH), Sen. Marco Rubio (Rep-FL), Sen. Roy Blunt (Rep-MO), Sen. John Boozman (Rep-and Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD). Has someone been telling these guys that they’ll be censoring themselves as well with this act?

    Rubio puled out as a co-sponsor of PIPA in the Senate, while Terry and Quayle said they were pulling their names from the companion House bill, SOPA. In a posting on his Facebook page, Rubio noted that after the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed its bill last year, he had “heard legitimate concerns about the impact the bill could have on access to the Internet and about a potentially unreasonable expansion of the federal government’s power to impact the Internet.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Sony Reader and Linux

I read a lot while travelling. So, to lighten my load, my wife gave me a Sony Reader for Christmas. I knew that it ranks tolerably well on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Guide to E-book Privacy, and it was reputed to work with Linux. And it does, but it takes some figuring out.

The Sony Reader connects to the PC through a standard USB cable. The first time I tried to connect reader, it wasn’t automatically detected. I don’t know why; perhaps I did things in the wrong sequence. I had to manually mount the devices. Yes, devices. The Reader appeared in my device list as three devices. Two are the reader, I think the third is for the add-in memory card (which I don’t have inserted).

Linux should be like a window

In the nascent surge of mobile convergence, we now have a choice of four major desktops for Linux: GNOME 3, Ubuntu Unity, KDE 4 and Linux Mint’s Cinnamon. There are huge, complex and mind-numbingly technical advances in all of this technology. But all I want is for my window still to work the way I want.

Big Business, Big Linux

According to new report by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users,” in a lousy IT economy Linux is still growing by leaps and bounds.

How fast it is growing? The report states, “Eighty-four percent of respondents report that their organizations have expanded Linux usage in the last 12 months, with 82% planning on continuing that expansion into the year ahead. The 5-year outlook indicates an even longer-term commitment to the platform among 79.8% of Linux users surveyed, who say the use of Linux in their company or organization will increase relative to other operating systems during this time period.”

Linux Adopton Trends 2012: A Closer Look

These names represent just a handful of the thousands of large companies using Linux today. As early adopters of Linux (some having used the OS well over a decade) with some of the most technically advanced challenges to overcome in their business environments, companies such as these can give us important insight as to how Linux is being used and where it’s growing.

That is why we started surveying large companies using Linux in 2010 and why today’s new report, “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users,” sheds light on what we can expect from enterprises, both large and small, that are using Linux. We hope this research can help inform the industry, our members and us as we prioritize our work for a New Year.

Desktop

• Is the Linux Desktop actually growing?

  I use a Linux desktop. According to Google Analytics, 12% of the visitors to my various technology Web sites use Linux. Nevertheless, I know that on the traditional desktop, the vast majority of ordinary users are running Windows, and don’t even get me started on “The Year of the Linux Desktop.” It’s not going to happen. But, and this is interesting, it appears that there is a slight upward trend in desktop Linux use.

• Infographic: Linux lovers love big data

  For anyone thinking the big data trend is a flash in the pan, there’s some new evidence to the contrary. A hefty 75 percent of IT pros and developers responding to a new Linux Foundation survey have their eyes firmly on this big data phenomenon.

• Linux Adoption Grows on Big Data, Cloud, Virtualization: Survey

  A new Linux Foundation survey on enterprise adoption of Linux indicates that growth in Linux usage is being driven by factors such as big data, cloud computing and virtualization, among others.

Server

• Report: Open Source Application Servers Are More Prevalent Than You Think

  According to research from app monitoring firm New Relic, open source Java application servers own a serious chunk of overall application server usage. In fact, InfoWorld notes that New Relic’s data illustrates that the open source solutions are hindering commercial software alternatives. New Relic surveyed a series of enterprises regarding their Java application servers, with respondents ranging from big businesses to online merchants. Here are the numbers the survey turned up.

• Linux gains share on enterprise servers — and desktops, too

  Linux has vaulted to 1.4 percent worldwide desktop market share from 0.97 percent in July, according to Net Applications. Meanwhile, a new Linux Foundation survey on enterprise adoption of Linux indicates that 84 percent of organizations currently using the open source operating system have expanded their deployments over the last year. Meanwhile,

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 246 – The Shape of Chestnuts to Come

• FreeNAS

Kernel Space

• Intel NVM Express Driver For Linux 3.3 Kernel

  Linus Torvalds has been called upon to pull the NVM Express driver into the Linux 3.3 mainline kernel.

  The NVM Express driver has been around for the better part of the year now since the specification was announced, but it looks now like it’s finally ready to enter the mainline Linux 3.3 kernel.

• Linux Foundation Expects More Enterprise Gains in 2012

  The Linux Foundation is sharing the results of their latest invitation-only survey of enterprise Linux users. Their last such survey, in August 2010, revealed Linux was gaining popularity in enterprise computing. It should come as no real surprise that the latest survey shows more of the same.

  A lot has happened since late 2010, and the Linux Foundation survey reflects that. In “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” we find that a substantial number of enterprise users “expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it.” Less than half of respondents are planning to use Windows to handle their “Big Data” requirements.

• The Linux Foundation Releases Enterprise Linux User Report

  World’s largest enterprises will add more Linux to support cloud computing, “Big Data” – all at the expense of Windows and Unix

  SAN FRANCISCO, January 19, 2012 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the immediate release of its latest report “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users,” which shares new data representing Linux’s dominant role in supporting cloud computing, “Big Data” and new, “greenfield” deployments.

• Graphics Stack

  • An Easy But Serious Screensaver Security Problem In X.Org

    I’ve been alerted this afternoon that there’s an outstanding security vulnerability within the current X.Org Server that’s receiving little attention. This active vulnerability could allow anyone with physical access to your system to easily bypass the desktop’s screen lock regardless of your desktop environment.

  • Wayland Action Items You Can Start On

    Tiago Vignatti, one of the active developers at Intel who’s dedicated to the Wayland team, has shared some active TODO list items that for those wishing to contribute can easily jump on.

    Vignatti wrote a post on his personal blog entitled starting on Wayland development. Tiago shares that while the Wayland protocol is not yet complete, there’s a number of items on their growing TODO list that could be accomplished by new contributors even without much graphics or X.Org/Wayland experience.

  • Radeon Gallium3D: A Half-Decade Behind Catalyst?

    What happens when you pull out some vintage computer hardware and run the latest Linux software as well as go back and run some of the oldest software available? Well, in the case of systems with antiquated R300-era ATI Radeon graphics, you are left with a downward slope in performance. Not only is the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver not always performing as well as an ancient Catalyst driver, but also the power consumption of the latest Linux code remains on an incline.

Applications

• Second installment: Outlining with nano

  nano, the old stand-by, low-resource console editor, is probably most often used for quickly editing computer configuration files. It seems also sometimes to be used by programmers for writing programs or editing code. Some of us non-programmers can think of other uses it might serve, such as writing documents or creating outlines. This article will discuss some of the uses I’ve tried to make of it and some ideas I have for further deploying it.

• Bitwig Studio: A Professional Music Creation Software (DAW) Comes to Linux

  Bitwig is an international music software company based in Berlin. The company was founded in 2009 by a team of music enthusiasts with extensive experience in the music technology industry and a strong vision about new cutting-edge methods of music production, live performance and collaboration.

  The team includes many veterans who worked on Ableton Live, a popular software for professional music creation.

  Bitwig has now released Bitwig Studio, a multi-platform professional music-creation system and Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for production, performance and DJing and unlike Ableton Live, it will have a Linux version.

• What Are The Best 10 Linux Desktop Apps?

  This weekend, I’m going to be spending some time at the Southeast Linux Expo (SCALE) and presenting at the Linux Beginner Training. I’m doing the Desktops and Applications presentation, which includes demos of Linux desktop apps. As I was prepping for the talk, I needed to decide which apps to focus on for a audience new(ish) to Linux.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Install a Preview of Ubuntu TV

  • Fix Ubuntu Sound With Module Assistant

  • Use alsamixer to turn off the annoying, loud beep (aka system bell) in Debian Squeeze when you shutdown or restart

  • Use Minitube To Watch YouTube Videos On Your Desktop (Linux Mint 11)

  • SSH: The VPN No One Remembers

  • Deprecated Linux networking commands and their replacements

  • New To Linux: Part 2 – Getting Started With Ubuntu 11.10

  • Nmap : The Pentester’s One Step Shop to Network Domination

  • Securing Your ISPConfig 3 Installation With A Free Class1 SSL Certificate From StartSSL

  • The Meaning of dot slash for Running an Executable in Linux

  • Securing Your ISPConfig 3 Installation With A Free Class1 SSL Certificate From StartSSL

  • Qemu-kvm 1.0 & Spice-protocol 0.10.1 & Spice-Gtk 0.8 USB Redirection on Ubuntu Precise

  • The Linux Command Line: a Complete Introduction

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 6.2 x86_64 With nginx [ISPConfig 3]

• Games

  • Ninjas and Brooms, Indie Game ‘Dustforce’ Coming Soon to Linux

    Indie platformer Dustforce developed by Hitbox Team was recently released on Steam. The game was much awaited by Indie game fans since it was first previewed because of its unique visuals and gameplay style.

  • Let’s Play: The Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion

    Welcome to another Let’s Play. I tell you: this was really huge. I haven’t too much time to update this blog, so for this Let’s Play i worked more than a week (for about 1 hour a day). Anyway, Oblivion is the fourth episode of “The Elder Scrolls” saga. It has been just released the fifth episode called “Skyrim”, and it seems it works well too (see LinuxGameCast blog by Venn Stone for more infos). Maybe this is one of the best RPG ever created, with wonderful landscapes, astonishing textures, a really deep main plot, a huge map and a lot of secondary missions. So ladies and gentlemen, welcome to “Let’s Play: The Elder Scrolls IV – Oblivion”!!!

  • Annex: Conquer the World

  • Postal and Postal 2 For Linux Now Available on Desura

    Updated Linux versions of Postal and Postal 2 has been released on Desura. Postal 2 (first person shooter) by Running With Scissors has been banned in many countries in past because of extreme graphic violence but enjoys quite a dedicated fan following.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma QML documentation

    Just a brief heads up. As you know, from now on the recomended way to write plasmoids will be using QML only, and using the new components api for common widgets such as buttons, sliders etc.

    What’s cool about this API is that is as compatible as possible with Symbian and Harmattan(N9/N950), so porting to and from those platforms just became a tad easier (That’s especially important in the perspective of Plasma Active).

  • KDE Plasma Desktop Activities

    The idea of activities have only recently been introduced with the release of KDE 4. The KDE desktop is set up so all virtual desktops use the same activity and look the same, but this can be changed. Widgets will appear on all workspaces, along with icons, panels and other items. You can use activities to create a completely different work environment on each workspace. Each activity can even have its own name and function, this is great if you prefer to separate your work and play. You can use activities to add a different desktop wallpaper for each workspace, or to separate your widgets based on function.

  • Digia’s Qt Commercial Still Carrying Large Patch Delta

    In 2011 when talking about Digia putting out new Qt Commercial releases with over one hundred changes compared to what’s found in the open-source/community Qt repository, many Phoronix readers were upset by this large delta. Digia is still putting out new Qt Commercial releases that carry large differences to the upstream open-source releases, but they’ve offered up the patches for mainline integration.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Shell 3.2.2 Released

    Owen Taylor announced last night, January 18th, the immediate availability for download and upgrade of the GNOME Shell 3.2.2 user interface for the GNOME 3 desktop environment.

    GNOME Shell 3.2.2 is a maintenance release and it comes with over 15 changes, as well as lots of updated translations.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat guns for VMware with RHEV 3.0

    Red Hat has built a $1bn company, more or less, predicated on the idea that open source Linux is cheaper than Windows or Unix and that open source Java application servers are cheaper than commercial alternatives like WebLogic and WebSphere.

    For two years now, Red Hat has been trying to convince the world that it has a chance to take on x86 server virtualization juggernaut VMware, to little avail. But with the advent of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, and a future upgrade planned later this year, Red Hat has a much better chance of denting VMware.

  • Red Hat slams Web legislation

    Open source software-maker Red Hat took to its blog Wednesday to speak out against controversial legislation meant to prevent online piracy.

    Red Hat and other critics of the Stop Online Piracy and the Protect IP acts, known as SOPA and PIPA, claim that the legislation would censor the Internet and throttleinnovative American businesses.

  • Red Hat Turns to Linux for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3

  • CloudLinux Announces Support for Atomia

    “Now, Atomia customers can easily upgrade their operating system to CloudLinux OS greatly enhancing the security and efficiency of their shared hosting businesses,” said Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO. “Better control over computing resources leads to a better overall customer experience and results in lower churn.”

  • Red Hat EV3 launches with all-Linux stack

    Announced on Wednesday, RHEV3 adds a self-service portal for provisioning virtual machines, access via RESTful API, the ability to store data locally on client machines and, via integration with the company’s private cloud management product CloudForms, a limited ability to manage hypervisors from other vendors.

  • Red Hat releases third version of its Enterprise Virtualisation platform

    As before, the RHEV hypervisor, which is only a few hundred megabytes in size, virtualises using KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and integrates many RHEL core components – however, the new RHEV uses components from the current RHEL version 6.2 rather than RHEL series 5. Consequently, the new RHEV-V offers many improvements that have been available in RHEL 6 for some time – for example, guest systems can now access up to 64 virtual CPU cores and up to 2 TB of working memory. Technologies such as vhost-net, Transparent Huge Pages (THP), x2apic and KSM (Kernel Shared Memory) are designed to improve performance and increase efficiency.

  • Fedora

    • Thinkfan for Fedora Share/Bookmark

      Here it is the first release of Thinkfan, a simple and lightweight fan control program, for Fedora. As a thinkpad user so it’s obvious what my interest is, but developer assures now can manage other computers fan too.

• Debian Family

  • All Hail Debian, King of the Web Server World

    “For all the grief people have given Debian over time for how ‘outdated’ the packages in Debian stable have been, Debian is certainly my choice for any type of Linux-based server,” said Hyperlogos blogger Martin Espinoza. “I flirted with Ubuntu Server for a while, but Ubuntu suffers from an excess of dependencies.”

  • Derivatives

    • m23 12.1 rock is available!

      The new year has only just begun – and already, a new m23 version with many new features and (of course) some corrections is available! Among the highlights, you will find the “m23 remote administration service”, the reactivation of openSUSE and Debian Lenny, the migration to new mirrors, support for arbitrary file systems and extended package manager settings (e.g. LibreOffice from Debian backports) in the package sources lists and a Java applet for accessing the “m23 VirtualBox OSE Console” directly from the m23 interface.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Do Fewer Spinoffs Signal a Waning in Ubuntu’s Popularity?

        Even if you don’t run Linux, chances are good you’ve heard of Ubuntu. You’re probably also familiar with its official cousins: Kubuntu, Xubuntu and the like. But there’s another subset of the Ubuntu ecosystem that gets less play — namely, the medley of unofficial spinoffs built by third parties. Although little discussed, the trends surrounding these distributions that hide in Ubuntu’s shadow reveal a lot about the open source channel more broadly.

        According to DistroWatch, there are 118 Linux distributions based on Ubuntu. These include both the official variants like Kubuntu and a wide range of lesser known spins created by community members. It’s this latter group, comprised mostly of operating systems that are not so well-known, that I’m interested in here.

      • School Leverages Sun Hardware, Switches to LTSP Thin Clients

        The School of Computer Science at the University of Windsor deployed their first network of diskless thin clients in August of 1987. Since then, the CS school has progressed through three operating systems, four thin client devices, and seven Sun server configurations. In the summer of 2011, UWindsor switched from Solaris and Sun Ray clients to Ubuntu and LTSP Thin Clients.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Meet Bodhi’s Bulky Brother: Bloathi

          If Bodhi Linux was a little too minimal, then perhaps Bodhi’s beefy brother Bloathi Linux will fill the bill. Jeff Hoogland posted today of a new community spin of Bodhi that comes with ” a slew of pre-installed software.”

          Bloathi retains the Enlightenment desktop environment and comes with lots of themes and several hardware profiles. These are setup upon reaching the desktop through a pop-up configuration. The hard drive installer icon normally found on the desktop doesn’t show up in a lot of themes, so check in the file manager under Desktop.

        • Step-by-Step Vinux 3.2.1 Install Guide

        • Bloathi Linux

          Bodhi Linux is mainly built around two things – the Enlightenment desktop and a minimalistic approach to software. Even with these goals stated we still have users (and review writers) that complain about the lack of pre-installed software Bodhi comes with by default.

Devices/Embedded

• Welcome to the world of open source domotics

  Ubuntu on your TV and Android running your refrigerator. Glyn Moody looks at some of the developments announced at the recent Consumer Electronic Show and explains how Linux is the natural choice for intelligent appliances.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Why Android might just kill GNU/Linux. Quickly.

      I write this article exactly 24 hours after receiving my Galaxy Tab 10.1. It’s something I’ve been wanting for a long time. I had to wait for the dispute between Apple and Samsung to settle (Samsung actually lost on millions of dollars worth of sales thanks to software patents, but that’s another story). After all that, I came to the realisation that we are in front of a forking path. On one side there is the death of GNU/Linux as we know it. On the other side, there is a new exciting world where free software is still relevant. I am not writing this just to be “sensational”: here is why.

    • Epic 4G and Epic 4G Touch have new kernel source available, look for OTAs soon

      Both the Samsung Epic 4G and the Samsung Epic 4G Touch have new kernel source up at Samsung’s open source portal. The Original Epic 4G has the kernel and other open-source bits for update version EL30 ready to download, and the Epic 4G Touch has the same for version EL29.

    • Google gets $3.65 billion in annual Android ad revenue, Oracle claims

      Oracle is claiming Google makes $3.65 billion a year in mobile advertising from Android, basing its estimate on Google’s own boast of 700,000 daily activations for Android devices. Oracle made the new claim to encourage a favorable settlement in its lawsuit against Google, which is finally scheduled to go to trial in March.

    • Motorola Opens Pre-Order for Wi-Fi only XYBoard

    • Focus Group Reveals Casio 4G LTE Quad-core Phone, Clam Shell Devices, and New Phone Protection Tech

      A reader of DL was fortunate enough to spend some time in a focus group within the last couple of days and came away with a spec list for a Casio phone that may actually interest some of you. There were other devices on display including a set of clam shells, but we will get to those in a minute. Remember, that our reader is going off of pure memory here, as focus groups almost never allow you to bring in a phone (for obvious reasons). He also mentioned that most of the phones were headed to Verizon.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Cheap Tabloid Tricks: The Truth About Linux, Open Source And The Media

    Linux and open source technology should be a good news story for everyone. However, the way these topics are presented in the media often leaves enthusiasts unhappy. There is a widespread belief that open source alternatives are neglected in favour of commercial products; that coverage often distorts the facts and exaggerates conflict rather than offering insight; and that the right-wing bias of much Australian media dooms the open source community to being dismissed as a kook minority led by some cult figure from Scandinavia whose name no-one can pronounce. The reality is more complex, as reality usually is.

  • Each Kindle Fire generating more than $100 in additional revenue for Amazon

92 Open Source Apps That Replace Everyday Software

Where are they now?

Years ago, the short-lived Maximum Linux magazine ran a graphic showing Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman, and Linus Torvalds wearing the gang colors of open source. Naturally, Stallman protested in the next issue that he was an advocate of free software, not open source, but the point is that, back then, it was easy to point out the leaders of free and open source software (FOSS) in a way that would be impossible today. And I can’t help thinking that’s a healthy sign.

I was reminded of how much things have changed when I read about Bruce Perens’ keynote at linux.conf.au this week. If the Maximum Linux graphic had added a fourth or fifth figure, that figure would probably have Perens. But now? Although I was peripherally aware of him giving the occasional talk, his influence had faded. I doubt that many newcomers to the community would be even aware of his involvement in the early days of FOSS).

Making the most of open-source software

THE digital industry has gone through a big change in the last couple of years. Funding used to stretch high and wide which meant there was a lot of money available for software projects.

Two years down the line and the game has changed completely – companies now have to be more sensible about how they use their resources to avoid passing their costs on to clients.

One of the largest non-productive costs to a web development agency is the cost of their bespoke content management system (CMS).

Open source software vendors turn eyes to channel

Open source software vendors 10gen and Talend have both turned their attention to the channel this week, announcing their intentions to start recruiting resellers in the UK as part of a strategy to up their growth rates and find new ways to generate cashflow from communities of non-paying users.

10gen is behind a database package called MongoDB, which has found a ready audience among internet firms that need to take a mroe flexible approach to their data management. It counts social start-ups including Foursquare and Craigslist among its customers and claims to have around 100,000 downloads a month as a free product

Ada Initiative To Help Women In Open Technology And Culture

Why SOPA and PIPA are bad for open source

The widespread internet blackout yesterday in protest at unbalanced legislation being rushed through the US Congress was dramatic and notable. I did have some questions though on why it was important to the open source community. The way the laws have been framed by their proponents makes them look as if they are all about file sharing and specifically music and video sharing. However, the problem with them is they create badly-bounded new powers that are likely to exploited in ways that fall outside the frame.

Events

• Linux.conf.au 2012: FreedomBox’s privacy

  Open software isn’t just a programming- and software-licensing methodology; it’s also a political philosophy and a revolutionary movement — something made clear by Linux projects like FreedomBox.

• Linux.conf.au 2012: three threats and a balloon

  Perens created the Open Source Definition and was founder or co-founder of projects including the Open Source Initiative and the Linux Standard Base, to name just two.

  In his keynote address to the Linux.conf.au 2012 conference in Ballarat yesterday he delivered a blunt warning.

• Focus Group Open Source: Open Data, Rome 25 January 2012

Web Browsers

• Epiphany 3.3.4 Released With New Menu And Toolbar, More

  Epiphany 3.3.4 has been released today with many user interface changes which bring it closer to the mockups we’ve seen about a month ago.

  The new version features a much cleaner, unified user interface that’s optimized to offer the user as much vertical space as possible. The old-style menu and statusbar have been removed, being replaced with a menu integrated into the top GNOME Shell bar (that will be used by the whole GNOME application stack: Music, Documents, etc.), a new “super menu” and a Nautilus-like floating statusbar.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla demos MediaStream Processing, audio mixing in Firefox

    Mozilla is drafting a proposal for a new Web standard called MediaStream Processing that introduces JavaScript APIs for manipulating audio and video streams in real time. The specification is still at an early stage of development, but Mozilla has already started working on an implementation for testing purposes.

    Mozilla’s Robert O’Callahan, the author of the MediaStream Processing API proposal draft, released experimental Firefox builds that include MediaStream Processing support. He has also published a set of demos (note: you need to run the experimental build to see the demos) that illustrate some of the functionality defined by the specification.

SaaS

• OpenNebula Releases OpenNebula 3.2 for Data Center Virtualization and Private Cloud Computing

  The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the release of a new stable version of its widely deployed open-source management platform for enterprise data center virtualization. OpenNebula3.2 is the first stable distribution produced by OpenNebula’s new release cycle aimed at faster delivery of new features and innovations to the community, based on their requirements and feedback, while also increasing technical quality.

• OpenNebula 3.2 adds out-of-the-box VMware support

  The developers of OpenNebula, the “open source cloud computing toolkit”, have announced version 3.2 of the software which adds support for Xen and KVM and out-of-the-box support for VMware including live migration, image and network management and automatic contextualisation (setting of parameters based on the host and other rules).

• OpenStack, collaboration and competition

• Piston ships new cloud OS based on OpenStack

  Piston Enterprise OS, or (pentOS) is a hardware agnostic OpenStack Linux distribution that utilizes the company’s Null-Tier architecture, combining storage, compute and networking on individual nodes to deliver high scalability at lower cost. This allows customers to “scale a high availability private cloud one server at a time,” the company announced Wednesday.

Databases

• 451 Research MySQL/NoSQL/NewSQL survey

Education

• Designing aesthetically pleasing Moodle courses

  When you’re working online and you access a text heavy web-page that scrolls for 5 pages, what is your initial reaction? To most of us, a text-heavy page filled with a long list of resources and activities is not inviting or enticing. The same is true for students and online courses. But with a little sleight of hand, plus use of the right resource formats and labels, you can design an aesthetically pleasing online course and avoid the long scrolling webpage syndrome.

Business

• GroundWork Seeks to Grow MSP Relationships

Funding

• Nexenta raises $21 million in funding

  Nexenta has announced that it has received $21 million in Series C funding led by Menlo Ventures, along with Sierra Ventures and Razor’s Edge Ventures. The enterprise storage specialist says that the current round of funding will be used to sustain its growth and global expansion, and to scale its support; the California-based company previously received funding from Javelin Venture Partners and TransLink Capital.

BSD

• DragonFlyBSD: Desktop is not a target

  This operating system is a community supported distribution, initially forked from FreeBSD 4.8.
  The current release of DragonFlyBSD is 2.10.1 and it was announced in April 2011.
  There are 3 downloading options available for this stable release of DragonFlyBSD: CD, USB and GUI. I downloaded the last one, which offers to have a GUI on top of the operating system itself. The distribution comes as a 1.2 Gb bz2 archive which packs an .img file of 3.7 Gb. Basically, this saves you some time during the downloading. But, then you need to unpack the file on your local drive before using it. Generally speaking, this is not an issue since most modern archivers, both Windows- and Linux-based, support bz2 format.

Project Releases

• Rhythmbox 2.95 has been released!

  Rhythmbox 2.95 has been released, this release is considered as final transition of Rhythmbox to GTK +3, the new release also is compatible with Gnome3.

Public Services/Government

• NASA looks to lower open source licensing barriers

  The recent launch of code.nasa.gov is providing better access to NASA sourced and funded projects, but William Eshagh of the NASA open government team says some forthcoming open-source licensing changes will make it more participatory.

• Call to use open source

  Though open source developers approve free distribution of software, they are serious about their use in commercial products and solutions. “They may not restrict their source code or its usage, but they nonetheless would like licensing terms to be respected,” said Palamida CEO Mark Tolliver.

  With nearly 70 terabyte of code being indexed –against which most of the available open source software can be checked– Palamida’s solution mitigates risk of copyright infringement.

Openness/Sharing

• Big Switch Open Sources OpenFlow Controller

  Floodlight, an Apache-licensed open-source OpenFlow Controller, was released recently by networking startup Big Switch Networks , as part of its commitment to the open source community around Software-Defined Networking (SDN).

  Headquartered in Palo Alto, Big Switch Networks was founded in 2010 to bring virtualization and cloud innovation to enterprise networks using OpenFlow-based SDN. The OpenFlow standard was developed at Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley, and allows users to manage network equipment using software that can run on servers that communicate with switches, rather than directly on the switch or router.

• Open Access/Content

  • The benefits of a transparent publishing calendar

    Why would an editor let go of publishing power and give the master calendar over to a group of trusted people? That sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But we did it. And it works. And this is another example of the power of open source.

    At the beginning of July, we opened the opensource.com publishing calendar to all the moderators. It started with a prototype that quickly evolved and grew in popularity. Sharing what was scheduled for publishing and articles in the works was the first step in being more transparent between the different community moderators.

• Open Hardware

  • Raven, the Open-Source Surgical Robot, Takes Flight in Santa Cruz

    A multidisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Washington and the University of California, Santa Cruz, have developed a surgical robot, called Raven 2, for use as an open-source surgical robotics research platform. Seven units of the Raven 2 will be made available to researchers at Harvard; Johns Hopkins; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; University of California, Berkeley; and the University of California, Los Angeles, while the remaining two systems will remain at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of Washington.

Programming

• 6 Useful Graphical Git Client for Linux

  While git has been around for some time, it is only recently that I used it for collaboration with a co-worker. For those who are not aware, git is a distributed version control system with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities. It is a great tool for developers to collaborate without losing their sanity.

• Will teaching children basic programming skills have a political impact?

  I was emailed by the BBC last week and asked to comment for the PM programme about suggestions that the British Government may add basic programming skills to the national curriculum, and whether this would have a political impact on society in terms of how we interact with technology. Here’s my answer.

• ActiveState Stackato Adds OpenStack, Linux KVM, and Citrix XenServer Support

  ActiveState Software Inc. said its newest version of ActiveState Stackato, the infrastructure-agnostic, multilingual private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution, has expanded the support its private PaaS support to OpenStack, Linux KVM, and Citrix XenServer, and improves the user experience (UX) of its Management Console.

• Zend Server 5.6: Mac Developers Get a New Tool for Rapid Web Application Development Using PHP

M$ Disturbs an Ant-hill

So far it seems no OEM is considering an exclusive relationship with M$. The monopoly is not there. Further, OEMs who do put out a few models of ARMed PCs with “8″ may be wasting their money. Same with retailers. At best, it seems quite possible retailers may stock shelves with “8″ only to find consumers don’t want it just as they didn’t want “Phoney 7″. M$’s scheme may backfire in that they will be shipping “8″ on machines that will not sell. That is not a sustainable business model.

x86PC Has Peaked. Here’s Proof.

One picture is worth millions of words. Here’s a site that has plotted sales/shipments of various platforms of personal computing over the decades. The PC has obviously peaked while new technology climbs like a scalded cat. It’s also clear that the new technology is just getting started… and Android/Linux is overtaking whatever Apple puts out.

Censorship

• Ron Paul Campaign Sues To Stop Unauthorized Web Videos

  In an unusual move, the campaign team for Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul has filed a trademark and defamation lawsuit against for-now anonymous individuals who uploaded unauthorized attack videos.

  The videos in question bear the name “NHLiberty4Paul” and malign former candidate Jon Huntsman’s religion and ties to China. The Paul campaign has disavowed the videos.

  “This is a classic case of dirty politics resulting from the unlawful use in commerce of an underhanded and deceptive advertisement designed to tarnish plaintiff’s reputation,” reads the complaint (posted below) which was filed yesterday in San Francisco federal court.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Supreme Court upholds copyright law

    The Supreme Court upheld a law Wednesday that extended U.S. copyright protection to books, musical compositions and other works by foreign artists that had been available without paying royalties.

    The justices said in a 6-2 decision Wednesday that Congress acted within its power to give protection to works that had been in the public domain. The law’s challengers complained that community orchestras, academics and others who rely on works that are available for free have effectively been priced out of performing “Peter and the Wolf” and other pieces that had been mainstays of their repertoires.

  • How SOPA and PIPA Affect US Websites and Companies

    Khan Academy has provided a very helpful video, “SOPA and PIPA : What SOPA and PIPA are at face value and what they could end up enabling”, explaining how SOPA and PIPA would work. It gives the lie to those supporters of the bills who claim it is targeting *only* foreign and illegal sites. Khan Academy, the famous non-profit educational site, shows how this “shoot-first, ask-questions-later” legislation could affect YouTube, Facebook or CNN, any site with user-generated content.

    I hope journalists and members of Congress in particular will view the video, because he goes through the wording of the proposed bills, bit by bit. It’s the best I’ve seen, by far. And for the rest of us, if we see journalists making mistakes in covering this story, why not let them know about this resource in a friendly way?

  • Supremes cite “settled law” to unconsitutionally extend copyright

    The Supreme Court has found Congress can extend copyright protection to works that had previously been in the public domain link here. The decision was 6-2 with one recusal. The story is covered here and here, but focus should be on the two dissenters who held that Congress had exceeded its authority when judged by the constitutional provision that copyright was justified when it served “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”

  • EXCLUSIVE: Hollywood Moguls Stopping Obama Donations Because Of President’s Piracy Stand: “Not Give A Dime Anymore”

  • SOPA Activism Moves Republicans More Than Democrats

  • Inside the Cell Phone File Sharing Networks of Western Africa (Q+A)

    Digital filesharing doesn’t need the internet. This is the case at least in Western Africa and other parts of the developing world, where computers aren’t yet consumer goods for most and, even if they were, web access isn’t exactly New York City. Lovers of music still get it done, however, sharing files between knockoff cell phones via bluetooth connections and accumulating song collections in memory cards and bitrates that would probably make most in our lossless world laugh. It’s created a music culture that’s uniquely underground, an awesome anything-goes world of No Limit-style rap marrying Megaman-synth workouts, strange new techno-folks, and various other things so far untaggable.

  • Confessions Of A Hollywood Professional: Why I Can’t Support the Stop Online Piracy Act (UPDATED)

  • SOPA, PIPA Are Threatening Innovation And Economic Growth: Red Hat

  • RIAA Takes MPAA’s Condescending Response To Protests Up A Notch

    The MPAA and the RIAA have never been good about doing any kind of communication with “the public.” They’re just not set up for that kind of thing. They communicate with elected officials and with the press. And that’s about the extent of it. Of course, in this situation, where the public is actually paying attention to them… all they’re doing is showing off their true colors: condescending, entitled, spoiled brats who are seriously pissed off they’re not getting their way. Boo-freaking-hoo.

  • Anti SOPA/PIPA Protest: How it happened and what you can do

  • What does Wikipedia blackout hope to accomplish?

    As the fracas over the proposed federal anti-privacy legislation known as SOPA heats up this week, the open-source encyclopedia website, Wikipedia, says it will shut down for 24 hours, beginning midnight Tuesday to protest what the website warns is a threat to free speech.

    Instead of its usual homepage, users who navigate to the English-language Wikipedia Wednesday will find directions for reaching local members of Congress to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a statement Monday, he hopes this “will melt phone systems in Washington.”

  • Denial: MPAA Pretends That No Big Sites Have Joined SOPA/PIPA Protests

    Living in what can only be described as pure denial, the MPAA announced today that the SOPA/PIPA protests “failed to enlist big sites.” Honestly, there’s really not much more to say about that. Google. Wikipedia. Facebook. Amazon. Craigslist. All participating. Let’s just stare in wonder at the MPAA’s hubris and ability to deny reality.

  • Supreme Court Chooses SOPA/PIPA Protest Day To Give A Giant Middle Finger To The Public Domain

  • US Chamber Of Commerce Appears To Argue That SOPA & PIPA Apply To NO Websites At All

  • SOPA/PIPA blackout

    We are putting up a black interstitial about SOPA/PIPA for the next 24hrs or so. If you click away from it, you’ll get a cookie stored so you won’t see it again in the same browser, but what follows is my reasons for doing it.

  • Senator Ron Wyden To The Internet: Thank You For Speaking Up… But We’re Not Done Yet

    You may have heard that today’s been quite a day online and in Congress, concerning SOPA and PIPA. Senator Ron Wyden — the first politician in Congress to take a direct stand against these bills at the very beginning, and who was brushed off by the opposition — has now offered up what can be reasonably described as a thank you letter to the internet for speaking out on this important issue, and making it clear to many in Congress that this is not an issue that everyone takes lightly.

  • Did the SOPA blackout work? (And was it really a blackout?)

    Yesterday I posted screenshots of 127 websites that “blacked out” to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation before the US Congress. Another site I came across reported that 7,000 sites had gone black. There was no citation, but I believe it if you include every blog that WordPress enabled to automatically go black and if you count all of those sites I posted screenshots of as “blacking out.

  • Yet More Collateral Damage From SOPA/PIPA: Activism Through Satire

    Greenpeace certainly isn’t alone in deploying mockery online to needle companies about the things they’d rather keep quiet: it’s particularly effective for smaller groups that can’t afford expensive, conventional campaigns. But such satire frequently depends upon using authentic elements from the marketing materials of the organizations they tackle. The extremely broad framing of SOPA/PIPA means that the large, well-lawyered enterprises of the world will have powerful new weapons for suppressing this kind of protest by claiming that their intellectual property is being harmed as a result.

  • Best Congressional Response To SOPA Yet? Rep. Bruce Braley Takes To *CENSORED* To Explain His *CENSORED*

    Lots of folks in Congress have been speaking out about SOPA and PIPA today — and what’s fascinating is how many of them are actually using key internet innovations to do so. Most of the comments we’ve seen were first made on Twitter and Facebook. But the best response (and by best, we mean funniest) response we’ve seen today comes from Rep. Bruce Braley from Iowa. Y

  • A Gallery Of The SOPA Blackout Protest Screens.

  • 8 Million People Looked Up Their Elected Officials’ Contact Info During Wikipedia Blackout

  • Jon Stewart Promises To Study Up On SOPA

  • A note on bravery

    A lot of people have been posting on twitter or sending me email thanking me for bravery in opposing SOPA. That’s a very very kind sentiment, and I really do appreciate it!

  • Traditional peer review in science faces challenges

    Thomas Lin writes at length about the scientific process, peer review of results, and publication of scientific papers link here.

    The concern remains that the results of research financed by the public’s taxes are not available free. The science establishment turns out of be conservative, however, and is sticking to the tradition of time consuming peer review and publication in the established journals. The results are still appropriated by the journals and published at great expense but considerable profit and public access is correspondingly limited.

  • Stop Censorship of the Internet!

    Thousands of websites across America have gone dark today in protest of supposed anti-piracy bills in Congress.

    I first noticed when I went to MichaelMoore.com to see how he was covering the Wisconsin protests, but his site was black with an eerie image of a mouse-controlled light that revealed the message “This site has gone dark today in protest of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate… We need to kill these bills to protect our right to free speech, privacy and prosperity.”

  • Stop Online Piracy Act Markup to Resume in February

  • Father of the web backs SOPA protests

    Tim Berners-Lee says US government plan to censor the internet violates human rights.

    The father of the web has added his voice to the global chorus of outrage at US Government plans to censor the internet, saying its plans are undemocratic and violate human rights.

  • SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy

    Earlier this month, I detailed at some length why claims about the purported economic harms of piracy, offered by supporters of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT-IP Act (PIPA), ought to be treated with much more skepticism than they generally get from journalists and policymakers. My own view is that this ought to be rather secondary to the policy discussion: SOPA and PIPA would be ineffective mechanisms for addressing the problem, and a terrible idea for many other reasons, even if the numbers were exactly right. No matter how bad last season’s crops were, witch burnings are a poor policy response. Fortunately, legislators finally seem to be cottoning on to this: SOPA now appears to be on ice for the time being, and PIPA’s own sponsors are having second thoughts about mucking with the Internet’s Domain Name System.

  • LibreOffice and XBMC Join SOPA Strike

    Earlier today, January 18th, we’ve announced that the openSUSE and Fedora projects decided to protest against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) through their websites.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• HP Vayu Set Top Box Aka Vayu Internet Device (VInD) – Internet TV In India

  HP Vayu is the Tata Nano of Internet to Indians. Given the prices of Desktop PCs, Laptops & tablets in India; it’s no wonder that many Indians prefer to access Internet via mobile devices. Broadband penetration is rapidly growing and with Government taking initiatives with cheap ‘Aakash’ tablets, we surely know that Indians are going to adopt internet faster than ever before. HP India Labs has come up with an innovative device called Vayu Internet Device aka VInD. This mass Internet access device allows people to connect to the Internet using television sets and perform the basic operations using TV’s remote control.

• HP readies Linux IP set-top computer for India

Server

• Linux DRBD saves you from costly SAN deployments

  To configure services for high availability in a data center, shared storage is normally required, which typically means administrators will purchase expensive storage area network (SAN) devices. But there is an alternative in the form of the Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD) — a free software component that is available for the Linux operating system. In this tip, you’ll learn why DRBD can save administrators the expense of deploying a SAN and how to set it up.

Kernel Space

• Stable kernel 3.1.10

  Stable kernel 3.1.10 has been released with a pile of important fixes. “This is the LAST release of the 3.1 kernel series, please move to the 3.2 kernel series at this time. Again, 3.1.y is end-of-life.”

• Adaptive Tickless Linux Kernel Support Status

  Back in 2007 (the Linux 2.6.21 days) the mainline Linux kernel received tickless idle support. With the system idling, the timer tick no longer needlessly goes off with the “NOHZ” feature. Being worked on since last year is now adaptive tickless support, which extends the tickless functionality to non-idle cases.

• Graphics Stack

  • XAA In X.Org Has Finally Met Its Executioner

    The XAA 2D acceleration architecture is finally set to be stripped out of X.Org Server 1.13 and upstream open-source X.Org drivers.

    The old and crusty XAA, the XFree86 Acceleration Architecture, is finally set to be laid to rest as X.Org developers cheer on its death. XAA has been around since, well, the XFree86 days (1996 with the XFree86 3.3 release to be exact while it was re-written in XFree86 4.0).

  • Intel Sandy Bridge Shines With Mesa 8.0

    Now that the Nouveau, Radeon, and LLVMpipe graphics drivers have been tested under Mesa 8.0, what is left? The Intel DRI driver, of course! The open-source Sandy Bridge Linux graphics support is shining with Mesa 8.0 thanks to OpenGL 3.0 support and measurable performance improvements. Intel Ivy Bridge is also ready to run under Linux.

  • Wayland’s Window Stacking & Raising Design

    Besides tool-kit advancements, other happenings in the world of Wayland this week pertain to coming up with a suitable window stacking and raising design for this next-generation display server.

Applications

• Comparing BlueGriffon and Bluefish: Which Open Source Web Editor is Right For You?

  Two major open source Web editors made releases in recent weeks: Bluefish and BlueGriffon. Despite the similarity in names (not to mention the fact that both are designed to edit HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), the projects could hardly be less alike. Bluefish takes a programmer’s approach, while BlueGriffon is designed to provide as close to a WYSIWYG-design experience as is possible. Which one best suits your needs can depend heavily on the details of your content.

• Get Ready For VLC Media Player 2.0

  VLC is one of the most popular third party media players. If you check the download stats on portals such as Softpedia or Betanews, you will notice that it is always listed in one of the top spots. That’s not because of the player’s pretty name but the functionality it provides. VLC plays nearly every media format out of the box, without codec hunting and installation. There are other players, like the excellent SMplayer that offer that functionality as well, but none managed to reach the popularity of VLC.

• LiVES: A Rich Video Editor With Layer Upon Layer of Features

  Even though LiVES is a powerful video editing app with a deep set of features, it’s still approachable enough that an amateur can use it without getting lost in complex menus. It can be used by both film editing newbies and video pros alike. It’s about as complex — or simple — as you want it to be.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How To Set Up Multi-Master Replication Using Tungsten And MySQL-Proxy For MySQL High Availability On Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS

  • Simple Xymon Monitors Hosts, Services, and Network

  • Install Fail2Ban to curb brute-force attacks

  • Linux for Window systems administrators, Part 1: Managing and monitoring the extended file system

  • dnsmap 3.0 – Find Subdomains by Brute-Forcing

  • Bait Your Users with the Simple Phishing Toolkit

  • ALICE and friends. Artificial Intelligence Reloaded

  • How to compile and install Takeoff Launcher on Linux Mint 12 KDE

  • 10+ Useful Commands for Linux Users

• Games

  • Another Unigine-Based Linux Game Soon To Alpha

    From the bits of information that is out there now, Relics of Annorath is described by its developers as “MMORPG which plays in a medieval/post-modern ambience. It provides a complex economic system, which is also reflected on the profession system of the individual characters. Relics of Annorath provides as much freedom to the player as possible, this covers a dynamic changing world with a complex guild, faction and political system that can change nearly everything in the player experience.”

Distributions

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Linux 12.0 reviewed: Linux For The Toughies

    Gentoo Linux 12.0 LiveDVD was released recently. We were the first ones to announce the release of Gentoo. Although not as popular as Ubuntu , this Linux distro is good enough for those who want to learn more about their system’s functionality and GNU/Linux. It uses Portage package manager which is also used by Chrome OS and Chromium OS.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Inc Breaks Above 200-Day Moving Average – Bullish for RHT

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Enters Market with Backing of Strong ISV Ecosystem

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced strong partner support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 from its ISV partner ecosystem. In line with the general availability of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 portfolio today, Red Hat introduces its ecosystem of industry-leading vendors that have integrated their applications with the 3.0 product through its APIs.

  • Red Hat weighs in on Internet regulations

    This is in protest to anti-piracy legislation being considered in the U.S. Congress and has already had a substantial impact.

  • openSUSE and Fedora Protest Against SOPA

    Today, January 18th, the openSUSE and Fedora websites are on strike against SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act).

    While the Fedora Project website only displays a text saying “The Fedora Project does not promote internet censorship. Help stop SOPA and PIPA.”, the openSUSE website is already redirecting to http://sopastrike.com/strike.

  • Red Hat’s 3.0 platform deemed a turning point for KVM, cloud aims

    Red Hat took a major step forward today in its goal to establish the open source kernel-based VM hypervisor as a leading virtualization platform for desktops and servers and a core component of its cloud computing strategy — the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0.

  • Uttam Energy Tech Builds Highly Secured IT Environment with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Uttam Energy Tech, a leading design and manufacturing company in India, has implemented Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to build its virtualized infrastructure for both servers and desktops. Uttam Energy Tech is utilizing both the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 platform as well as the Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 Beta, with plans to migrate all of its systems to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 upon general availability.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Canonical backtracks on deleting Oracle’s Sun Java

        Canonical has announced that it has decided not to push empty versions of the Oracle’s Sun Java JDK packages into their partner repositories for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, 10.10 and 11.04. The company will now only remove the packages from the repository. The original plan announced in December 2011 would have seen the empty packages downloaded by users’ systems as part of the software update process, deleting any installation of the Oracle binary release of Sun Java and leaving only OpenJDK as an option.

      • Canonical Removes Java from Ubuntu on February 16

        As announced last month, Canonical is preparing to remove the Sun JDK (Java Development Kit) packages from the software repositories, starting with February 16th, 2012, affecting Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 11.04.

      • The Classic, Retro Workspace

        Lifehacker reader Tyler Brainerd uses an Ikea feet and shelf trick to raise his two Samsung monitors above the restored Marantz receiver and pull-out box. He’s got an HP Touchpad, runs Ubuntu, writes in Moleskine notebooks, and that’s his old rotary phone turned into a VOIP handset for his PC we told you about previously. Click through to his Flickr set for more shots and notes on his workspace.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Bodhi Linux ARM Beta Release for Genesi Smartbook

          Much to my fiancée’s dismay my little Genesi Smartbook has been occupying much of my time of the late. In fact, just six days ago I posted about how to get an early build of a Bodhi ARM file system for the Smartbook.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Samsung backpedals on bada/Tizen OS merger plans

  • Android

    • Quad-Core HTC Edge Receives a Name Change

      We were not privy to the motivation behind the name change, although we suspect it had something to do with Edge/Endeavor being fully detailed so far ahead of its planned launch (likely a Mobile World Congress debut next month). Like any B2C organization, HTC wants to build up some buzz for its products prior to their introduction, but not so far ahead of time that its ability to operate in secrecy is hindered.

    • Oracle claims Android activations make Google $10 million in annual revenue each day

    • Sony’s 2012 launch schedule leaks: 12 Android smartphones coming this year!

      After it finally split up with Ericsson and started announcing and unveiling exclusive Sony branded gadgets, the Japanese multinational electronics giant seems to have big plans for 2012.

      Sony is preparing the release of no less than 12 Android-powered smartphones during the course of this year, according to a leak picked up by the guys at gsmarena.com just a couple of hours ago. While this piece of information is far from being official, the list looks pretty legit and makes us think it’s trustworthy.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • LG’s Honeycomb tablet features 4G LTE and an HD display

    LG announced its first tablet equipped with LTE 4G capability, heading first to Korea. Running Android 3.2 on a dual-core, 1.5GHz processor, the Optimus Pad LTE has an 8.9-inch, 1280 x 720-pixel display, an SD slot, plus both eight- and two-megapixel cameras — and it’s just 0.37 inches thick, says the company.

Freedom for the masses: plug servers from FreedomBox

Proprietary social media platforms are used heavily even by those attending a conference meant for free and open source software users and Bdale Garbee used this fact to kick off his talk on FreedomBox at the 13th Australian national Linux conference in Ballarat today.

Events

• Awesome! High-Altitude Balloon Launch At Linux.conf.au In Ballarat

  What’s better than launching a high-altitude balloon into space from Adelaide 20 times? Doing it live from Linux.conf.au in Ballarat. Check out our exclusive video and learn more about the Project Horus team after the jump, including their plans to launch an Internode Node Pony into space.

Web Browsers

• Linux Web Browser Round-Up

  When I sit here in front of my desktop and look at my Debian Menu for “Internet”, I see a myriad of icons. But not just a myriad of icons for all kinds of applications, but also a myriad of icons for web browsers. As Linux users, we really are rewarded with having so much choice when it comes to web browsers.

  In this round-up, I will give you a brief look at the current web browser line-up for Linux users. This is not a review of web browsers, but rather a quick look to let you know what is out there available in the world of Linux for todays web user.

  You’ll find all the usual ones, ie. Firefox, but you’ll also perhaps find one that you may not have known existed. And you might even decide to give your own system a new browser for you to try. Because as you’ll see in todays quick round-up, not all browsers are equal. And they all provide something neat to offer a Linux web user.

• Epiphany marches on

  Previously in this space we saw how the bright future of Epiphany looked like, and vague promises about incremental steps towards it were done. A month later, Epiphany 3.3.4 is out there, so let’s see how well we’ve done.

SaaS

• Proposed New Cloud Standard Could Give Amazon Serious Competition

  In the cloud computing arena, one of the biggest debates in 2011 surrounded cloud “lock-in,” as many businesses and organizations are demanding increased portability of cloud applications between platforms, and increasingly pursuing open source solutions. Now, some of the biggest hitters on the technology scene are backing a proposed specification to do away with lock-in issues. The OASIS Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) Technical Committee has produced the specification, and it’s already backed by IBM, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, NetApp, Red Hat, and SAP.

• Enterprise Hadoop: Big data processing made easier

  It’s been a big year for Apache Hadoop, the open source project that helps you split your workload among a rack of computers. The buzzword is now well known to your boss but still just a vague and hazy concept for your boss’s boss. That puts it in the sweet spot when there’s plenty of room for experimentation. The list of companies using Hadoop in production work grows longer each day, and it probably won’t be long before “Hadoop cluster” takes over the role that the words “crazy supercomputer” used to play in thriller movies. The next version of the WOPR is bound to run Hadoop.

Databases

• Amazon Takes Another Pass at NoSQL with DynamoDB

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Download and Test LibreOffice 3.5.0 Beta 3

Business

• 10 Open Source Shopping Carts to Run Your Ecommerce Business

  More and more companies have turned to the Web to transact business. And, of course, if you are going to sell on the Web, the right shopping cart can mean the difference between red and black ink. When shopping for your own ecommerce shopping cart software the most important aspect to consider is how well the cart software meets your business objectives. An ecommerce shopping cart has to be customizable to fit your business needs and branding, be flexible enough to scale as your business grows, be secure and support industry standards and provide solid integrate with payment gateways.

• Semi-Open Source

  • 10 Open Source Shopping Carts to Run Your Ecommerce Business

    More and more companies have turned to the Web to transact business. And, of course, if you are going to sell on the Web, the right shopping cart can mean the difference between red and black ink. When shopping for your own ecommerce shopping cart software the most important aspect to consider is how well the cart software meets your business objectives. An ecommerce shopping cart has to be customizable to fit your business needs and branding, be flexible enough to scale as your business grows, be secure and support industry standards and provide solid integrate with payment gateways.

    Open source shopping cart software is an attractive option. Storeowners might look to open source ecommerce software because it will typically deliver the features and tools to manage a product catalog on a website without the hefty licensing fees that come with proprietary or off-the-shelf packages.

Public Services/Government

• NASA’s Open Source Software Initiative Lifts Off

  The NASA Open Government Initiative has launched a new website to expand and explore the agency’s open source software development. Open source development is all about giving the public access to view and improve software source code. NASA uses open source code for it’s projects and missions.

  In 2009, the White House issued the Open Government Directive, which requires federal agencies to take specific steps to become more transparent. NASA’s Open Government Plan has been recognized as one of the best. “We believe tomorrow’s space and science systems will be built in the open, and that code.nasa.gov will play a big part in getting us there,” said William Eshagh, NASA Open Government co-lead on the project at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

• NASA Clears the Runway for Open Source Software

  The NASA Open Government Initiative has launched a new website to expand the agency’s open source software development.

Openness/Sharing

• Record and visualize your own data with this open source creative toolset

  The concept of visualizing data has caught a lot of eyes in recent years, especially the fitness sector. Simply considering the amount of popularity that revolved around Jawbone’s Up (despite the fact that the product didn’t work), shows the potential of recording and visualizing activities.

  What’s most impressive is that many of the opportunities related to data visualization have yet to be realized, but don’t worry, the open source community is on it.

• WikiHouse’s DIY kits are the open-source way to build a house

  This article was taken from the February 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired’s articles in print before they’re posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Programming

• Google Code-in 2011-2012 wraps up

  Google has announced that its 2011-2012 Google Code-in program has now concluded. Over the course of eight weeks, more than 540 high school students participated in the contest, which had them complete various tasks for 18 open source projects, including the GNOME and KDE projects, as well as openSUSE, FreeBSD and Perl.

Standards/Consortia

• From CES: Will HTML5 Threaten the Closed World of the App Store?

  This year I was struck by the shifting nature of software ecosystems. On one hand you had Steve Ballmer and Steven Elop repeating over and over how Microsoft and Nokia will be the “third ecosystem” to Apple and Android’s already successful ones. I find it ironic that what Ballmer means when he says he wants “to build the strong third ecosystem in the smartphone market” is that Microsoft and Nokia really want to be well, Microsoft and Nokia again. Except this time in third place. We all know that the rise and hold of Microsoft’s desktop domination was driven not by technology superiority but by the “ecosystem,” the availability of applications and peripherals supporting that operating system (OS), and only that OS. Microsoft and Nokia would like to return to that world with their mobile platforms. As Elop said, “We believe the industry has shifted form a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems.”

Finance

• Goldman Sachs forced to reveal pay of top London staff

  Ahead of the full-year results from Goldman Sachs on Wednesday it is worth taking a look at what the Wall Street firm paid its top flight staff in London in 2010. For the first time it has been forced to disclose, under EU rules, how it pays so-called “code staff” – those who are judged to be responsible for taking or managing risks – in its UK-based operations.

• The Invisible Hand Behind Bonuses on Wall Street

  When asked about his job at cocktail parties, Alan Johnson has a curiosity-piquing line.

  “You know those big paydays on Wall Street?” he says, typically waiting a beat to deliver the punch line. “I have something to do with them.”

  Mr. Johnson, a consultant who speaks with a light twang from his native Alabama, has never worked for a bank. Nor will his company, Johnson Associates, pay million-dollar bonuses to any of its 12 employees this year. But as one of the nation’s foremost financial compensation specialists, Mr. Johnson is among a small group of behind-the-scenes information brokers who help determine how Wall Street firms distribute billions of dollars to their workers.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • SOPA/PIPA Could Have Huge Impact on Enterprise IT

  • Wikipedia blackout begins vs. SOPA

  • What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying About SOPA/PIPA

    The SOPA/PIPA blackout today by Wikipedia, Mozilla, WordPress.com and many other sites is (I hope) drawing attention to proposed legislation that is considered a threat to “Internet freedom.” That’s fine, admirable, and (with any luck) will be effective at curbing SOPA/PIPA for at least another legislative season. The backgrounders I’ve read so far by Wikipedia and others explain pretty well why SOPA/PIPA shouldn’t pass. What they don’t say is that SOPA/PIPA are business as usual, and the protest is a last-ditch effort necessary because the legislative system and mainstream media are fundamentally broken.

    The blackout and other protests today are the result of a long, sustained, full-court press against legislation that’s being pushed through despite widespread opposition. Yet, Lamar Smith and many other members of the U.S. House and Senate have been plowing ahead full-steam. Why? Yes, in part because they’re well-funded by the entertainment industry, and it wants the bill passed, but also because they think they can.

  • OSI Opposes SOPA and PIPA

    The Open Source Initiative Board joined many other civil society organizations as co-signatories of an open letter expressing concern about SOPA and PIPA.

  • SOPA/PIPA – Who To Talk To in Texas

  • Top Open Source Sites Protesting SOPA, PIPA

    There are many open source communities which are protesting the anti-freedom bill SOPA and its ‘Little Boy’ cousin PIPA via their websites. Here are the top 5 open source communities protesting SOPA and PIPA.

  • The First Internet Strike in History a Success

    The Washington Post reports that Rep. Darrell Issa of California, who opposed SOPA/PIPA, has put out a statement saying, “The voice of the Internet community has been heard,” and that there will be no vote in the House on the bills so detested by the entire technical and Internet communities.

  • SOPA/PIPA: How to stop fear

    A communications medium that, at the default setting, provides free and open communication between connected people anywhere on the planet. Instantaneously.

    Today’s protests of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it’s Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), are stark reminders that we, as a people, can get carried away with our fears and go too far to protect what we believe to be more important.

  • Mozilla, Firefox join anti-SOPA strike

    Mozilla, the open-source organization responsible for Firefox, joined other major technology companies today to protest anti-piracy legislation by blackening the browser’s home page.

  • First One Down: Rep. Lee Terry Removes His Name As A SOPA Co-Sponsor

    We were wondering when our elected officials would start realizing just how toxic SOPA and PIPA have become. It appears it’s happening today, along with the online protests. Rep. Lee Terry, from Nebraska — who just last week expressed some concerns about the bill at CES, but still appeared committed to it — has announced that he’s removing his name as a co-sponsor of the bill, becoming the first US Representative to do so. Over in the Senate, Senator Jerry Moran did so way back in June — and has since become a leading voice against PIPA. Terry’s spokesperson claimed that after listening to some of the complaints, he realized that the bill just has too many problems, and could cause more harm than good — especially for the open internet. Good for him. Now… who’s next?

  • Anti-SOPA/PIPA Protest Songs

  • Senator Marco Rubio Dropping His Co-Sponsorship Of PIPA

  • More Senators Dropping Off As Co-Sponsors Of PIPA

  • Disney Refused Invitation From Senator Feinstein To Meet With Tech Companies Over PIPA/SOPA

    We’ve been pointing out for months that the entertainment industry — who more or less wrote SOPA & PIPA — has done everything it can to deny both the tech industry and consumers any seat at the table. Many of us have asked to take part, or suggested that the backers of SOPA & PIPA open up the process — as Senator Wyden and Rep. Issa did with their OPEN Act — allowing the public to comment on it, suggest specific changes, and actually have a real debate on the bill, rather than handling it all in the back room. Multiple times, MPAA boss Chris Dodd has suggested that Hollywood is more than happy to sit down with folks in Silicon Valley to talk over the issues related to the bill — though, when a bunch of us offered to do just that, somehow Dodd wasn’t so welcoming.

  • Andy Samberg, Neil Gaiman, Trent Reznor, Aziz Ansari, Adam Savage & More Tell Congress: Don’t Pass PIPA Or SOPA In Our Names

  • Protest Via Plugin: Facebook Users Bring The Fight To Lamar Smith’s Website

  • Black Wednesday

    No, it’s sadly not a day for shopping. Today, some of the most visited websites are dark to raise awareness of two bills now making their way through the U.S. Congress. The bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), pose such a great threat to all of us who use, enjoy, and make a living on the Internet that they have united a formidable front from the likes of internet giants such as Google and Wikipedia. Social sites like Reddit that would be devastated by this sort of legislation are getting in on the black out, as well as those who help build the software that powers the Internet like WordPress.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux should copy Apple on user rapport

The Linux operating system and other open software projects are under threat because they’ve failed to develop the sympathy for users manifested by companies such as Apple, according to luminary Bruce Perens.

Perens created the Open Source Definition and was founder or co-founder of projects including the Open Source Initiative and the Linux Standard Base, to name just two.

In his keynote address to the Linux.conf.au (LCA) 2012 conference in Ballarat yesterday he delivered a blunt warning.

Desktop

• The Ben NanoNote – The World’s Smallest Linux Laptop?

  Measuring at less than 100mm wide and 17mm thick with a dinky 3″ screen, the Ben NanoNote might just be the world’s smallest Linux laptop for the traditional definition of the word.

Kernel Space

• Linux for the ‘Longterm

  The Linux 3.0.y kernel has been deemed to be the new longterm kernel support release. Kernel Developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has pledged to maintain the 3.0.y branch for at least the next two years. The first Linux 3.0 kernel was released in July 2011. Since then, it has been updated 17 times, with the most recent release being the 3.0.17 kernel that Kroah-Hartman released on January 12.

• Are Your Linux Skills Right for HPC Jobs?

  Do you have what it takes for that Linux job with an HPC vendor you’ve got your eye on? Brent Welch, the director of software architecture at Panasas, talks about the role Linux plays in HPC at Panasas and the in-demand technical skills supercomputing suppliers need from job applicants.

  Last year, Panasas, a provider of high performance parallel storage solutions for technical applications and big data workloads, moved into new corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and expanded its team by more than 50 percent in areas such as engineering and sales. Panasas hasn’t been the only supercomputing-focused company growing and hiring recently. In fact, high performance computing (HPC) vendors across the industry are hiring, but they are running up against a shortage of skilled talent.

• Btrfs In Linux 3.3 Brings Reworked Balance Code

  On the same day as talking about Microsoft’s new Resilient File System, the pull request for Btrfs in the Linux 3.3 kernel was sent in and subsequently pulled. This file-system update does bring a few notable changes.

  Btrfs with Google Snappy compression support didn’t make it for Linux 3.3 (it was a last-minute request and there’s at least LZO and Gzip file-system compression already available), but there are some notable changes. However, the 3.3 changes also aren’t as noticeable as the beefy Btrfs changes found in Linux 3.2.

Applications

• Video editing with Kdenlive: Might be the sweet spot

• Teach Yourself with Anki: Open Source Flashcards on Linux

  Prepping for a Linux certification exam? Helping the kids with schoolwork? No matter what the subject is, Anki can help you commit it to memory. The flexible open source study system is based around the flashcard concept, but with support for audio, video, and more, and the program can adapt to your learning style.

  Using Anki, you can make your own custom decks of “flashcards” for any subject: arithmetic, foreign languages, the state bar exam, obscure Perl syntax — you name it. The card format is flexible, supporting multimedia, text, and even embedded LaTeX for complex equations. The study tool allows you to fully configure your sessions, including optional time limits, slowly or quickly adding new cards to the set you review, and altering the order in which material is presented.

• Photography software for Linux

  The standard image management software on Linux machine is F-soft (a play in the word f- stop) it is the default photo management software for the Gnome desktop. For KDE the default photo management software is Dig cam, Tagging, Categorization, color codes and making folder and management of large collections of photos is prime work for F-Spot. Tagging feature has much variation. Apply top from across different categories use filters across multiple tags. Rate individual and multiple photos. Filter by both tags and ratings you can search and extract the EXIF data embedded in an image.

• Phosphor: a terminal for the Hipster generation

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Improve Linux System Efficiency with Control Groups

  • Scripting KVM with Python, Part 2: Add a GUI to manage KVM with libvirt and Python

  • 8 themes for Cinnamon desktop and how to install them

  • Migrate from Plesk to cPanel via command line

  • Install Oracle Java (JDK) 7 in Ubuntu via PPA Repository

  • Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 16 (LAMP)

  • Manage your bandwidth with Trickle

  • Record your linux desktop with recordmydesktop

  • Install, uninstall and manage programs in FreeBSD

  • PkgClip: Does your pacman cache need a trim?

  • How to automatically insert photographs in LaTeX files

  • How to install Takeoff Launcher on Fedora 16 KDE

  • New developments in the color management world

• Games

  • Some RPGs on Linux

    Pure role-playing games on Linux are surprisingly few and far between! At least, if you stick to the repositories, it sure seems that way. I also looked at the Linux Game Tome, but even though 189 games are listed as “Roleplaying”, many are roguelikes or MMORPGs. Quite a few of what remain are either shareware or just not very complete.

    One place to find more commercial RPGs is the cross-platform Desura gaming client. It’s free to install and sign up for, but the games range in price from $2.99 to $22.99 or more. It looks like 26 roleplaying games are currently available. I have played a few hours of the demo for Eschalon, Book 1 (a few years ago) and it’s quite good. Another website that features role-playing games is the Linux Game Database.

  • A Hate Story

    Back in the 25th century, Earth launched a generation ship into deep space, with the goal of establishing the first interstellar colony. It dropped out of contact and disappeared, never reaching its destination.

    Thousands of years later, it has finally been found.

Desktop Environments

• Oxygen-gtk3 1.0 is out

  The first release of KDE’s Oxygen widget theme, ported to GTK 3.X applications, has been uploaded to kde ftp servers on Tuesday January 17 2012 and is available for download here. It is called oxygen-gtk3.

  This release is still experimental, notably due to the small amount of GTK 3 applications it has been tested on. Still, since snapshots of the running git repository were already being circulated around for some time, we deemed it appropriate to release the current code, if only because it would make book-keeping and bug tracking easier. Also, we expect rapid progress as bug reports are being filled by users.

Distributions

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Delays Bankruptcy Decision

    In a short post today Jean-Manuel Croset said that recent events have lead the failing company to postpone any final decisions for a week. Earlier this month a letter to shareholders stated that Mandriva would have to close its doors by January 16 without an influx of capital.

    January 16 came and went without word while anxious users paced the floors over at the Mandriva Forums. Then earlier today Croset published his post. Unfortunately, it’s a little short on detail.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 248

      • Improving Battery Life in Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS

        art of my focus this cycle is to see where we can make power saving improvements for Ubuntu Precise 12.04 LTS. There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence of specific machines or power saving features behaving poorly over the past few cycles. So, armed with a 6.5 digit precision multimeter from Fluke I’ve been measuring the power consumption on various laptops in different test scenarios to try and answer some outstanding questions:

        * Is it safe to enable Matthew Garrett’s PCIe ASPM fix?
        * Are the power savings suggested by PowerTop useful and can we reliably enabled any of these in pm-utils?
        * How accurate are the ACPI battery readings to estimate power consumption?
        * Do the existing pm-utils power.d scripts still make sense?
        * Which is better for power saving: i386, i386-pae or amd64?
        * How much power does the laptop backlight really use?
        * Does halving the mouse input rate really save that much more power?
        * Should we re-enable Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM)?
        * Are there any misbehaving applications that are consuming too much power?
        * What are the root causes of HDD wake-ups
        * Which applications and daemons are creating unnecessary wake events?
        * How much does the MSR_IA32_ENERGY_PERF_BIAS save us?

      • Flavours and Variants

        • ZevenOS – Does it recapture the flavor of BeOS?

          BeOS was a much loved and highly advanced desktop operating system that ceased active development in 2001. ZevenOS is a Ubuntu 11.10 based system (with a bit of help from Xubuntu) that attempts to recapture some of the BeOS look and feel.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-ready multitouch PC has huge 65-inch screen, quad-core CPU

  Ideum announced a “multitouch wall” that responds to as many as 32 simultaneous touches and will support Linux in March. The MT65 Presenter has a 65-inch screen with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution, a 2.2GHz Core i7-2720QM processor, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD (solid state disk), and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card, according to the company.

• Pushing the Limits of Price on Small Cheap Computers

  A system suitable for embedded, educational and R&D applications has been developed based on ARM and minimal hardware (no PSU) for $15, about the price of a box of copy-paper. The idea is to have a complete stack from circuit-board layout, CPU and OS completely open and produced by cooperation with Free Software proponents and Chinese hardware design and production.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Woz admits Android does things better than iPhone

      Although he still carries the iPhone 4S as his main handset, Steve concedes that Android is making serious headway over Apple.

    • Motorola DROID 3 Now $99

      With the announcement of the Motorola Droid 4 Verizon’s looking to push its predecessor off of store shelves and quickly. They’re now offering the 3G-only Motorola DROID 3 for just $99. It’s a decent deal for a great phone if you don’t care for 4G.

Who can afford Open Source?

The reason why I asked Francesco permission to publish his outburst is to stimulate the whole FOSS community to share thoughts and experiences on this topic, to find out how general the problem he signals is in 2012. Personally, I still remember hearing, during a Linux Day in Rome almost ten years ago, somebody commenting a talk about the FOSS used in, and developed by, the Bank of Italy asking to himself: “so, in order to develop FOSS you must belong to a big organization?”

What do you think? Do you agree with Francesco? What is your experience in similar cases? How general is Francesco’s conclusion? Besides, do you too, think that current FOSS products for schol management lack usability?

LCA2012: Bruce Perens Says Open Source Needs To Do More

Wearing a suit when the rest of the 500-strong lecture theatre were dressed in shorts, jandals, and old conference T Shirts, Bruce Perens introduced himself by announcing his clothes as a lesson: Linux needs to be more outward facing.

Open source needed to save democracy

Open-source software developers face greater risks today than they ever have, to the point where the constraints inherent in proprietary software now represent a risk to democracy, according to one of the movement’s leading figures.

Tilde-D Detection Focuses on Coding Anomalies

An open-source tool from the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security hunts for Duqu using telltale signs left behind by the Tilde-D creation toolkit.

Digital Delights – THe French, Open Source And Five Strips

SourceDelight: The Droid Comic Viewer for Android systems that reads CBR & CBZ files has gone “open source” after its millionth download, to improve the software.

Web Browsers

• Pushing the 3D Boundaries in WebKit with CSS 3D and Three.js

  Sometimes, you need to see what a technology can do before you can fully appreciate it. Take, for instance, CSS 3D and Three.js. It’s one thing to hear about doing 3D elements for Web sites, and another to see them integrated into a well-designed site. Take, for example, Steven Wittens’ Acko.net redesign.

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla slows pace of Firefox 9 upgrades

    Mozilla dramatically slowed the update pace of Firefox 9, the browser it shipped late last month.

Databases

• Making the transition from RDBMS to Hadoop

  If your organization seems to be a good fit for Hadoop, you can download the open source software that comprises the data framework and try it out with relative ease.

BSD

• Linux lovers should try FreeBSD for stable systems

  Say the words “free and open source operating system”, and Linux is probably what springs to most people’s minds.

  What many don’t even realise, however, is that there’s another free and open source operating system out there that’s also based on Unix and that’s also widely used on servers around the world. It’s called FreeBSD, and a brand new version of the software was just released on Thursday.

Public Services/Government

• With Code.Nasa.Gov, Agency Steps Up Hunt for Its Open-Source Software Projects

  The Kepler space observatory slowly trails further and further behind the Earth as it orbits the Sun, scanning a sliver of the galaxy in search of Earth-like planets. A specially designed telescope, 0.95 meters in diameter, the Kepler instrument, per NASA, “stares at the same star field for the entire mission and continuously and simultaneously monitors the brightnesses of more than 100,000 stars for the life of the mission—3.5 or more years.”

Openness/Sharing

• Successful start for Hydrological Open Source Community

  The HYPE Open Source Community is now open to anyone interested in hydrology, for cooperative code development. The community was successfully launched recently.

Programming

• Featured projects, January 16

Google to Murdoch- This is just nonsense

Well, Google has fired back and called the accusations “nonsense.”

“This is just nonsense,” wrote a Google spokeswoman. “Last year we took down 5 million infringing Web pages from our search results and invested more than $60 million in the fight against bad ads…We fight pirates and counterfeiters every day.”

Myths and Realities of IT

Security

• Apache Tomcat developers advise updates to avoid DoS

  The Apache Tomcat developers are advising users of the 7.0.x, 6.0.x and 5.5.x branches of the Java servlet and JSP container to update to the latest released versions 7.0.23, 6.0.35 and 5.5.35. Recent investigations revealed inefficiencies in how large numbers of parameters and parameter values were handled by Tomcat.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Commission seizes power to adopt certain measures blink-blink

  I have no idea what that is about, but it seems important. And in fact it is, the amendments concern “delegated acts”, where the Commission could take regulatory action without prior consultation of the legislator. We really should really look up Article 270 of the Lisbon Treaty regime…

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Lamar Smith & Bosses Call Wikipedia Blackout As Stunt

  • Wikipedia blackout tries to show SOPA is “unconstitutional’ and ‘dangerous’

  • Tell the EU regulator about your Internet restrictions!

  • This Site Has Been Shut Down Due To Possible Copyright Infringement

  • Who, besides Wikipedia, is going dark and why

    There is nothing wrong with your Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. The reason you won’t be able to use Wikipedia, Reddit, or numerous other Web sites on January 18th is that these Web sites have decided to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA).

  • Wikipedia, Other Sites to Protest Anti-Piracy Bills with Blackouts

    Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is warning students to do their online research before midnight Wednesday when the world’s largest online encyclopedia will block access to its English language site for 24 hours. Wikipedia’s worldwide blackout to its English-language site is part of a larger online protest against the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts being considered by Congress.

  • Google to join Wednesday’s anti-SOPA protest

    Google will join Wednesday’s anti-SOPA and anti–PROTECT IP Act (aka PIPA) protest by noting its opposition to the bills on its home page.

    “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the internet,” a Google spokeswoman told The Reg in an email. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page.”

  • January 18 captured: A SOPA blackout gallery

    I’ll be updating this post throughout the day with more images of sites that have joined the SOPA blackout. Leave a comment with any site you’d like to be added to the gallery, which will remain here after the blackout is over.

  • Google Goes Big With Its SOPA/PIPA Protests; Blacks Out Logo

  • Why Canadians Should Participate in the SOPA/PIPA Protest

    Some of the Internet’s leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

  • Black Wednesday: In Protest of SOPA, Darken the Web

  • SOPA protest swells as Google, Scribd, and WordPress join

    “Like many businesses, entrepreneurs and web users, we oppose these bills because there are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet,” a Google spokesman told Ars. “So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our US home page.”

  • U.S. movie piracy claims mostly fiction

    In recent weeks, Canadians have been subjected to a steady stream of reports asserting that Canada has become the world’s leading source of movie piracy. Pointing to the prevalence of illegal camcording – a practice that involves videotaping a movie directly off the screen in a theatre and transferring the copy on to DVDs for commercial sale – the major Hollywood studios are threatening to delay the Canadian distribution of their top movies.

  • The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)

    Tomorrow, a number of very high profile websites will go dark in protest of the proposed U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act. Though the White House has since made it clear that the President will not support the bill, the fact that it was proposed at all is an indicator of the threat the Internet faces. And, according to this post from Michele Neylon, SOPA may not be quite dead yet.

  • ACTA

    • FFII note on the Legal Service’s Opinion on ACTA

      We welcome the decision to release the European Parliament legal service’s opinion on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). We have compared the legal service’s opinion with multiple academic opinions on ACTA and some civil society analyses.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Quarterly LQ [Linux Questions] Zero Reply Drive

One of the main goals of LQ is to help members get questions about Linux answered. One way we help facilitate this is with the “Zero Reply” functionality, which allows you to easily find threads with no replies.

Desktop

• Free Windows Tool Offers a One-Stop Shop for Linux

  Windows users have many reasons for wanting to download and check out the Linux operating system, whether it’s to get a more secure environment to use for online banking, for example, or to get a full-blown Windows replacement.

Server

• Marist College Beefs Up HPC with IBM z114 Hybrid Mainframe

  Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY is expanding its high-performance computing capabilities with a new hybrid computing system from IBM for AIX and Linux applications.

Kernel Space

• Microsoft’s ReFS File-System: Competitor To Btrfs?

  Microsoft has released extensive details on their next-generation ReFS file-system to be introduced with Windows Server 8. How though does the file-system compare to Btrfs and the Linux file-systems?

  Unlike Microsoft’s exFAT file-system that’s designed just for flash memory cards and external storage mediums, ReFS is designed to be a real successor to Microsoft’s aging NTFS file-system that’s been widespread since the Windows 2000/XP days. ReFS is short for a Resilient File System and will be introduced as a production-ready file-system with Windows Server 8. The non-server Windows 8 won’t have ReFS support, but per typical Microsoft fashion, will come to the consumer operating system variants at a later date.

• Intel Has 50 Patches For ACPI/Power In Linux 3.3

  The fun for the Linux 3.3 kernel merge window is not over quite yet; Intel this morning published 50 patches for integration into this next Linux kernel that affect ACPI and power management, primarily around ACPI 5.0 support for the Linux kernel.

• Graphics Stack

  • VA-API Video Acceleration On Intel Medfield

    It turns out that Intel’s recently-launched Medfield SoC for tablets and smart-phones will support VA-API for video acceleration.

  • Cogl, Clutter, Cogland Get It On With Wayland

    With the next GNOME 3.4 development release due out on Wednesday, several GNOME3 packages are being checked-in for release. In this latest round of updates, Clutter and Cogl have both been updated again to take better advantage of the Wayland Display Server.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Manual disk partitioning guide for Linux Mint 12 KDE

  • How to send patches via git-send-email

  • How to make a VoIP calls (the right way)

  • A Bash Shell Script to Update Firefox Nightly

  • How To: Add Gmail to the Message Menu in Ubuntu 11.04 & 11.10 (Unity)

  • How to take screenshots in VirtualBox – Tutorial

  • Install Quick Access on Linux Mint 12 KDE or any KDE installation

• Games

  • Linux Games: No Gravity

    No Gravity (classic) is a space arcade game with 5 game modes and it has very nice graphics, it is inspired by Wing Commander, a famous game of a few years ago that made ​​history for the space shooter.

Desktop Environments

• The Fragmentation of the Linux Desktop

  As recently as a year ago, the Linux desktop was easy to describe. GNOME and KDE dominated, both offered an ecosystem of applications, and neither much different from Windows and OS X in their goals or design. Xfce was a distant third, with other desktop environments trailing even further behind.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • WIP: Plasma Active Handbook

    The Book is written in Docbook 4.5 (XML) and uses XSLT/FO for producing the book. The book started in german, so the most is done in the german part of the book. Today i’ve added all Topics from the german book to the english one. This Plasma Active Documentation is created and driven by open-slx.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Decrappify GNOME3 Powermanagement

    GNOME3 has actually become quite usable, but I was really annoiyed by the inability to disable actions on “critical low battery” (Additionally, there is no way to define what “critical low battery” is and with a big battery I assume this might well mean that you cannot use the machine anymore even though there is half an hour of juice left). Add to that bnc#738782 which leaves my screen unlocked after suspend and I decided it was time to use someting sane — like xfce4-power-manager — instead.

  • MATE Desktop

    The other day on the #opensuse-gnome IRC channel there was a debate about the MATE Desktop and openSUSE. While I like GNOME3, I still feel more comfortable with GNOME2 and this “MATE Desktop” is somehow interesting. Mariusz Fik, a Polish contributor for openSUSE is most likely taking the lead on this project, for which I’ve decided to give some help with the packaging.

Distributions

• Aligning Linux Distributions with Presidential Hopefuls

  Most politicians probably don’t use Linux. After all, some of them have barely figured out computers at all. But since the American presidential campaigning season is once again upon us, I’ve been wondering to myself lately: If the candidates did run Linux, which distribution would they choose? At the risk of offending various groups of people, here are my answers, for better or for worse.

  To be clear, and to temper some of the passionately loathsome comments that a post like this might inspire, I’ll preface these thoughts with an assurance that they are not intended as an endorsement of any candidate, party or ideology. Personally, I’d like to resurrect Rousseau’s state of nature, if only I thought it could endure. And there would be no Linux there, since everyone would be running around the forest. But that’s neither here nor there.

• BackBox Linux 2.01 review – turning heads in the pen testing scene

  A relative newcomer to the forensic and penetration testing live CD scene, Italian project BackBox is already turning heads as it hits version 2.01. Gareth Halfacree explains why…

• ArtistX 1.2 Released

  After nearly ten years of development and more than ten versions, the ArtistX 1.2 multimedia studio on a DVD is finally released. It’s an Ubuntu 11.10-based live DVD that turns a common computer into a full multimedia production studio.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Is Ubuntu trying to act like Google?

        But Ubuntu the brand, and Canonical as a company, is seriously confusing to me. What exactly is it there for, outside of being the backing for the Ubuntu distro? Apparently they provide some sort of “enterprise consulting” and training. Apparently you can also buy support from Canonical as a regular consumer (just found this out on their website) for just over $100 (American). And of course there’s the deal with Dell (and others?) to act as an OEM for a few computer models. So they do have a business, but I don’t see how they have a profitable one.

Devices/Embedded

• We’re auctioning ten beta Raspberry Pis!

• Phones

  • Android

    • INSIDE Secure Introduces Open NFC Stack for Google Android 4.0

      “The Ice Cream Sandwich release brings even greater NFC functionality to the Android operating system, and INSIDE is making our latest version of Open NFC available to give connectivity chip vendors, smartphone and tablet manufacturers and software developers a head start in achieving NFC hardware independence,” said Charles Walton, COO for INSIDE Secure. “Once again, INSIDE is offering the Android community a complete, open-source NFC stack solution that can be used to greatly speed development and time to market, requiring only that the small hardware abstraction layer (HAL) portion be tailored for specific hardware.”

    • Galaxy Nexus: A Dazzling Phone With an Enormous Appetite

      The Samsung Galaxy Nexus features an impressive screen, a nice camera and the latest and greatest version of Android — Ice Cream Sandwich. Its voice control option is no Siri, but it gets the job done. However, the phone seems to guzzle power, significantly depleting the battery in just a few hours of moderate use.

    • Android variant Cyanogenmod passes one million installs

      Yesterday Koushik Dutta, a member of the Cyanogenmod team, announced that the distribution had reached the one million installs milestone. Cyanogenmod is a community led distribution based on Google’s Android known for supporting many smartphones and tablets.

      According to Cyanogenmod’s statistics, just under 24 per cent of Cyanogenmod users run 7.1. While detractors claim that Android is fragmented between several different vendors, Cyanogenmod’s statistics show that the vast majority of its users run Cyanogenmod 7.0 or above, near the latest bleeding edge of Android.

    • NSA releases ultra-secure open source Android derivative

    • NSA Releases a Security-enhanced Version of Android

    • Workforce mobility driving growth in global handheld device market

      Mobile, handheld computers are changing the way people do business. A new report from GIA says that open source operating systems such as Google’s Android are expected to dominate the market going forward, while single-source systems such as Apple’s iOS and RIM are going to lose market share.

    • Android Ice Cream Sandwich gets free NFC stack

      Inside Secure SA, a fabless supplier of near field communications (NFC) chips, has announced a free, open-source NFC protocol stack that it has made available for version 4.0 of the Google Android platform that is otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Introducing Ubuntu Secured Remix 11.10

    Softpedia is proud to introduce today a new Linux operating system based on the popular Ubuntu distribution, Ubuntu Secured Remix.

    Ubuntu Secured Remix 11.10 is actually based on the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system and is a slightly modified version of the Ubuntu Desktop Live CD.

INSIDE Secure Introduces Open NFC Stack for Google Android 4.0

Release of OpenNebula 3.2 for Data Center Virtualization and Private Cloud Computing

The OpenNebula Project is proud to announce the release of a new stable version of its widely deployed open-source management platform for enterprise data center virtualization. OpenNebula 3.2 is the first stable distribution produced by OpenNebula’s new release cycle aimed at faster delivery of new features and innovations to the community, based on their requirements and feedback, while also increasing technical quality.

Take a decision to enter FOSS in 2012

So, the year changed again and with it come quite often new decisions. Some swear to work out the superfluous kilos, pounds, or whatever standardized measure your country uses, gained too fast during the festivals. If it is your decision, it is for sure good for your body and I wish you success that goes beyond the act of subscribing to a local gym (and never appearing there after first month).

But this could be also a nice time to take a decision that you were procrastinating with for too long. That one is good for your intellect and programming skills (even though you don’t consider yourself a programmer yet). What about starting to contribute to a Free and Open Source Software project (FOSS)?

Big Switch Networks Intros Open-Source OpenFlow Controller

Big Switch Networks, a new vendor in the nascent, but growing field of OpenFlow-based networking, has introduced an open source controller for companies that want to build applications on top of the controller in an environment where the network intelligence is in the software-based controller rather than in the physical hardware of routers and switches. Big Switch, which also has a commercial controller offering in beta release, said it is offering the open source controller, called Floodlight, to stimulate development on the OpenFlow protocol.

Events

• Playing games, going UpSCALE at SCALE 10X

  The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 10X is putting the final touches on the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America. Games? SCALE has them, as well as classes at SCALE U and the rapid-fire UpSCALE talks and more.

• Looking forward to FOSDEM

• Keynote Q-and-A: Selena Deckelmann

• Speaker Q-and-A: Alison Chaiken

  A: My name is Alison Chaiken. For years I worked on cool technologies in the area of device physics and BioMEMS, but the projects I worked on always ended in cancellation and opportunities were diminishing. I’ve used Unix and Linux for almost 30 years on my personal systems. When the original Bug and Gumstix came out, suddenly I had the epiphany that by I could convert my hobby into a career with more positive impact on the world.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Nuxeo Opens U.S. Headquarters in NYC

    Nuxeo, the provider of an open source content management platform for business applications, today announced the opening of its U.S. headquarters in New York City. The company initially expanded into the United States in 2009, and already has offices in Boston and Silicon Valley.

BSD

• FreeBSD 9.0 Delivers More Power to Serve

  One of the oldest open source operating systems is getting a new release. FreeBSD 9.0 was officially released this week, providing users with a boost in performance and capabilities over the FreeBSD 8.0 branch that was released in 2009.

• FreeBSD 9 release updates ZFS support

  OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM FreeBSD has released FreeBSD 9.0, almost a year after its previous release, updating ZFS to pool version 28.

Project Releases

• Introducing PyG3T

• ForgeRock Announces OpenIDM 2.0

  ForgeRock, the vendor behind the I3 Open Identity Platform, today announced OpenIDM 2.0, the next generation open source Identity Management (IDM) solution.

Openness/Sharing

• What makes a city open source?

  What qualities make a city open source? Is it technology, government policies, or businesses? No. It’s the mindset of the people. It’s the philosophy and the culture.

  About a year ago, I started trying to define an open source city. I’m very interested in seeing my own city (Raleigh, NC) become a hub for open source and a leader in open government. With Red Hat’s announcement to stay headquartered in Raleigh earlier this month, the City of Raleigh appears poised to “establish a growing ecosystem of partners and providers around the open source leader and to bolster Raleigh’s reputation as a leading open source community.”

• Open Data

  • Google IP addresses link Indian contractor to vandalism of Open Street Map

    Someone hiding behind a range of Google IP addresses in India has been up to no good. Allegedly, the person or persons behind the range of Google IPs have been accessing the open-source map project called Open Street Map and using tools there to vandalize maps of major cities. The vandalism has included things that could get some users of the map into danger.

  • Google Contractor Caught Mucking Up Competing Open Street Maps

    Late last week, a story broke about how a Google contractor was apparently scraping info from a Kenyan crowd-sourced phone directory, Mocality, and then calling businesses pretending that there was a joint Google-Mocality venture for which businesses had to pay. Google responded that it was “mortified” by these actions, and are investigating them. However, ReadWriteWeb, is now reporting that the very same contractor has now been called out for vandalizing Open Street Maps, the more open alternative to Google Maps that has been getting a lot more attention lately. It appears the vandalism was deliberate, doing things that are hard to spot — like reversing the direction on one-way streets.

  • Google accused of vandalising OpenStreetMap

    Google has once again been accused of underhand business tactics, this time by OpenStreetMap. The not-for-profit organisation published a light-on-detail blog post alleging that Mountain View was “moving and abusing” the mapping outfit’s data.

    However the very same post appears to have been completely debunked by an OSM sysadmin, who claims to have first uncovered the issue.

• Open Hardware

  • ‘Open-source’ robotic surgery platform going to top medical research labs

    “We decided to follow an open-source model, because if all of these labs have a common research platform for doing robotic surgery, the whole field will be able to advance more quickly,” said Jacob Rosen, associate professor of computer engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and principal investigator on the project.

Programming

• The Danger of Day-Tight Compartments

  What I was really happy about, however, was the Microchip MPLAB X, which runs nicely under my OS of choice, Linux. I promised that this week I’d show you a little bit about MPLAB X under Linux, and I’m as good as my word.

  The IDE is based on Netbeans (see the Figure) which is, of course, a Java program so it isn’t too surprising that it runs well under Linux. Netbeans is on par with other modern development environments — it interfaces with bug trackers, version control, and additional tools you expect to use while writing software.

• new ruby RPM bindings

• The FOR looping statement. A semantic compiler plugin

Google Really Is Less Evil Than Its Competitors

Kevin Drum asks: “Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever really believe that ‘don’t be evil’ stuff?”

Actually, yes. At a minimum, the people who work there do. When I spent a summer there in 2010, I found the idea of Google holding itself to a higher standard than other companies was widely shared by rank and file Google employees. And it shows up in their behavior.

Google’s decision to exit the Chinese market over human rights abuses reportedly sparked a fierce debate within Google’s triumvirate, with Sergey Brin pushing hard for pulling out based on his own experiences growing in the Soviet Union. Google does more than any other technology company I know of to bring transparency to takedown and surveillance efforts around the world.

The Weak Antitrust Case against Google

Security

• Abolish the Department of Homeland Security

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Junior TSA badges for young fliers

• Bakery Creates TSA-Safe Cupcakes After TSA Defends Its Confiscation Of ‘Dangerous’ Cupcakes

Censorship

• India Grapples With Web Censorship

  India has long faced an uneasy tension between allowing free expression to its citizens and staunching sectarian violence among its people. It was one of the first countries to ban “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie. Lawsuits forced the Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain to live in exile during the last several years of his life. An academic book about the 17th-century warrior known as Shivaji was banned for fear of offending Shivaji’s modern-day fans, until the Supreme Court lifted the prohibition.

Civil Rights

• Argentina Building Huge Biometric Database For Use With Police’s Face Recognition Technology

  One of the more unfortunate consequences of Moore’s Law is that technologies that erode privacy are becoming cheaper every year – and hence more attractive to governments eager to spy on their own populace. The latest to heed the siren call of mass surveillance is Argentina.

Intellectual Monopolies

• How IP Laws Have Locked Up Martin Luther King’s Brilliance

  The most recent episode of On The Media explored this… and also talked about how most of King’s speeches were actually built off the works of others, but then (obviously) turned into something much more powerful through his detailed study and understanding of how to preach.

• Copyrights

  • Who Isn’t Talking About SOPA?

    Now on the business side, all of the the vendors in my list above are also all infrastructure type players and all of them have large government contracts of some type, meaning it might be politically expedient for them to be on the sidelines (for the most part). At this point, thanks to regular people signing petitions and standing up against SOPA, it looks likely that this will never pass Congress. But it is still interesting to note where everyone stands.

  • Wikipedia joins SOPA and PIPA protests: dark day ahead

    A growing number of web sites are planning online protests this month against the SOPA and PIPA legislation being introduced to the US House of Representatives and Senate. Wikipedia is the latest big-name site to join the cause.

  • Wikipedia joins SOPA blackout day

  • Nvidia does not support SOPA

    CHIP DESIGNER Nvidia has spoken up to say that it does not support the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation in the US Congress.

  • The Pirate Bay will stop offering torrent files

    THE FILESHARING Pirate Bay web site will no longer offer downloads of bittorrent files and will instead provide only ‘magnet links’ to users.

    According to Torrent Freak, The Pirate Bay started replacing the current default bittorrent download links with magnet links on Friday. In a month, the internet’s largest bittorrent web site will stop serving bittorrent files indefinitely.

  • ACS:Law solicitor Andrew Crossley gets suspended

    DISGRACED SOLICITOR and former ACS:Law proprietor Andrew Crossley has been suspended at a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, banned from practising law for two years and ordered to pay £76,326.55 in costs.

    Crossley figured prominently in a scandal that saw his firm and another called Mediacat target internet users with threatening letters accusing them of having committed copyright infringement.

  • Andrew Crossley appears before a disciplinary tribunal

  • Controversial Protect IP Act Looks Headed for Revisions

    Among other provisions, the original version of PIPA would give the U.S. government the right to seek court orders demanding that U.S. Internet providers block access to certain websites. Many critics from the tech industry have said the bill would encourage Internet censorship and infringe on users’ freedoms.

  • Colorado Senator Mark Udall Opposes PIPA

    On Saturday, Colorado Senator Mark Udall publicly opposed PIPA. I’ve been talking to Mark and his team for about a month about this and I’m incredibly proud of him for taking a stand on this issue. I’ve been a supporter of Mark’s for many years and his willingness to listen to his constituents, think about and understand the specific issues, speak his mind, and take a leadership role continues to impress me.

  • Twitter CEO says SOPA blackout protest idea “silly”

    Update: Commenters say that Dick Costolo was taken out of context by The Guardian; that he referred only to the idea of Twitter going dark as silly.

    This is a fair point, and it encapsulates something important: it’s not reasonable to expect everyone to go dark for a day, and it’s not fair to think less of them if they choose not to.

  • Reddit, Cheezburger, and Anonymous will go black Jan. 18 to protest SOPA

  • SOPA shelved, fight must turn to PIPA; Wikipedia will join blackout

  • Google To Use Home Page To Protest PIPA Tomorrow

  • 12 Hours Dark: Internet Archive vs. Censorship

  • It’s Baaaaaaaaack: Lamar Smith Says SOPA Markup To Resume In February

  • Sponsor of online piracy bill calls Wikipedia blackout a ‘publicity stunt’

    House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), called Wikipedia’s plan to temporarily shut down on Wednesday to protest his bill a “publicity stunt.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Are Your Linux Skills Right for HPC Jobs?

Do you have what it takes for that Linux job with an HPC vendor you’ve got your eye on? Brent Welch, the director of software architecture at Panasas, talks about the role Linux plays in HPC at Panasas and the in-demand technical skills supercomputing suppliers need from job applicants.

Last year, Panasas, a provider of high performance parallel storage solutions for technical applications and big data workloads, moved into new corporate headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and expanded its team by more than 50 percent in areas such as engineering and sales. Panasas hasn’t been the only supercomputing-focused company growing and hiring recently. In fact, high performance computing (HPC) vendors across the industry are hiring, but they are running up against a shortage of skilled talent.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 245 – Dirty I/O

  Ubuntu TV announced, MPL 2.0 released, LiMux reports success, CouchDB gets forked, Mandriva seems to be really dying and much more including a lot of soundboard fun.

Kernel Space

• Linux developers fix a homemade network problem

  Linux kernels 3.0.17, 3.1.9 and 3.2.1 fix a problem with the handling of IGMP packets that was introduced with updates in Linux 2.6.36. An IGMPv3 protocol packet being processed soon after the processing of an IGMPv2 packet could lead to a system crash caused by a kernel panic.

  On 6 January, Simon McVittie reported strange crashes of his Linux notebook in the Debian bug database. Debian developer Ben Hutchings found that the problem was caused by a division by 0 that can occur with IGMP packets that have a Maximum Response Time of 0. As a result, Linux systems running a kernel version from 2.6.36 or later, up until the patched versions, can quite easily be crashed remotely using certain IGMP packets if a program has registered to receive multicast packets from the network. Typical examples for such programs include the avahi mDNS server or media players, such as VLC, that support RTP.

• Graphics Stack

  • Using The New Radeon Gallium3D 2D Color Tiling

    Patches finally arrived last week for 2D color tiling in the Radeon R600 Gallium3D driver. The patches were then re-based this past weekend and benchmarked by Phoronix. Will the 2D color tiling patches, which affect the Linux kernel, Mesa, libdrm, and xf86-video-ati DDX make the more recent Radeon graphics cards more competitive under open-source to the Catalyst driver?

Applications

• AbiWord Review: A Lightweight Alternative To LibreOffice

  When it comes to word processing, the program most people are familiar with is Microsoft Office, and for good reason: Microsoft has had a monopoly on commercial office software since 1996 (when Microsoft sabotaged Wordperfect), and OpenOffice (developed from the StarOffice code-base) didn’t achieve significant popularity until 2005.

• New GIMP brushes collection

  For some months gimpbrush.com is collecting brushes which you can use to greatly enhance GIMP for all kind of painting and image editing!

  Meanwhile more than 80 brush packs have been collected from different sources, and most of them are really quality work! You’ll find commonly used ones (Floral Brushes, Grunge or Hearts) but there are also some uncommon brushes as well like Halftone- or Water-brushes. It’s a great website, so don’t miss it!

• Proprietary

  • Catching up with Håkon Lie

    Opera Software’s chief technology officer Håkon Wium Lie was in India recently. Apart from working with Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web, Lie was the one who proposed the concept of cascading style sheets (CSS) for the web. He spoke at length about his ideas. An excerpt:

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How-to install VMware Tools in Linux VM Video

  • How to install a new ROM on your Android smartphone

  • Printing from Adobe Reader – Fixed

  • New To Linux: Part 1 – What is It and is It For Me?

  • Add a Vintage Effect in digiKam

  • How to install Linux Mint 12 KDE on a btrfs file system

  • Manage inventory with Wallaby

  • Ubuntu Remove File Association

  • Make sudo stop asking for password when executing some commands

  • How to Solve “The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG” Error in Ubuntu Updates

  • How to take screenshots in VirtualBox – Tutorial

  • Bash Lamp Setup

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.37 released

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Aurorae 3: Window Decorations with QtQuick

    Once upon a time there was a window decoration which was KDE’s default decoration. But years ago it fell into a deep sleep. The world changed while the decoration slept. Compositing was added, decorations received shadows, Qt introduced the graphics system raster and many many more changes.

  • KDE Plasma Desktop Widgets

  • KDE Font Oxygen ‘Fit for Testing’

    KDE’s very own font is coming along nicely with its developer releasing an updated preview version for download.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Tuning GNOME 3

    A recently launched web site is collecting extensions for the GNOME 3 interface. These extensions can be used to individually tailor the shell of the often criticised desktop environment and, for example, give it a GNOME 2 feel.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization: overview of RHEV-M, RHEV-H and RHEL

    Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a powerful and versatile server virtualization platform that’s often overshadowed by vSphere and Hyper-V. Because the underlying KVM hypervisor is integrated into the Linux kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) can sometimes offer superior cost, security and performance than other virtualization offerings. But to get the most out of RHEV, you must understand how it’s architected.

  • Red Hat RHEV 3.0 to launch this Wednesday?

    Commercial Linux and Java development tool distributor Red Hat has big aspirations in the server virtualization and cloud computing arenas, and it looks like the company is getting ready to bust out the 3.0 version of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization hypervisor – RHEV for short.

  • New and revised modules in JBoss Seam 3.1

    Version 3.1 of the JBoss Seam Java EE web framework has been released. In the announcement, project lead Shane Bryzak mainly highlights the changes since version 3.0, which was released in April 2011. For example, the Solder module now includes the Seam Catch exception handling framework, the Seam Config XML configuration technology and Seam Servlet for servlet integration. Seam Transaction, formerly a part of Seam Persistence, is now available as a separate module that provides transaction-related features for POJO-based Java Beans.

  • Fedora

    • Thoughts on Gnome 3 & Fedora 16 Linux

      Recently one of the people I’ve deployed Linux for came to me and wanted to purchase a new PC to replace a spare Pentium 4 PC they had sitting around that was still running Windows 2000. They had started to use the Windows 2000 PC after having it sit for a couple years, and soon found that it was not able to keep up with today’s websites and other activities. Even Avast Antivirus refused to run (it would install, but would not perform a full scan). While the latest version of GNU/Linux can work on a Pentium 4 PC fairly well, it can become sluggish at times for heavy use. Eagerly to assist, I found them a refurbished HP desktop with the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM. Once it arrived, I verified that it came with the full Windows 7 media (which it did), and immediately wiped the drive and installed Fedora 16 Linux on it.

    • First look at Kororaa Linux 16

      Regular readers may recall that toward the end of 2011 I reviewed Fedora 16, the latest release from the Red Hat-sponsored project. Fedora’s latest did have some points in its favour — great hardware support, a smooth transition to systemd and an installer which, while having some issues, is still better than most Linux installers available. But I’m sorry to say that I also found several issues with the release: none of the graphical package managers were useful, Fedora shipped with the notorious plain GNOME Shell as the default desktop environment, the default install comes with a small selection of software and adding non-free repositories is a manual process. All in all the experience had its frustrations and so it was with cautious optimism I approached Kororaa Linux 16. Kororaa is based on Fedora and adds various extras and makes tweaks to the underlying system in much the same way Linux Mint makes adjustments to Ubuntu.

    • Fedora 17 Gets Beefier: Another Round Of Features

      The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) met again today and approved several more features for this first Fedora Linux release of 2012. It was only at the FESCo meeting one week ago where they approved a whole lot of features like the inclusion of the long-awaited GIMP 2.8, the GCC 4.7 compiler, the oVirt virtualization component, PHP 5.4, and various other new packages and configuration changes. This is in addition to many other changes previously talked about on Phoronix.

    • 3 must-have extensions for Fedora 16 and other GNOME 3 installations

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Watch Ubuntu TV Playing Movies

      • New Unity Features: Shortcut Hints Overlay And Launcher Switcher [Ubuntu 12.04]

        The latest Unity from BZR got two very interesting new features: shortcut hints overlay and new launcher switcher.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • If I’m offline for a while …

          I’m just mucking around, changing operating systems again.

          My old laptop (running Linux Mint 11) headed toward slow death a month or two ago. I eBayed myself a newer ThinkPad and upgraded (or so I thought) to Mint 12.

          I’ve been loving Linux Mint since version 8 or so, and I guess I’m not alone in that since it’s risen from nowhere to become one of the top Linuxes, if not the top Linux, for real people. Love its media friendliness!

          But 11 had problems. Not the Mint team’s fault, but there were some new Ubuntu features they got stuck with (hidden slider bars that you can’t see until you’ve moused over them — and moused over them in just exactly the right way — was a very, very, very bad idea). (Okay, they’re scroll bars, as everybody in the comment section is reminding me very diplomatically. I don’t care what they’re called, as long as they work properly.)

        • Lubuntu 12.04 News Roundup

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi number 1 goes for £3,500 on eBay

  The Raspberry Pi project is almost a perfect example of open source engineering story. Well, it has started in popular fashion – a £20 Raspberry Pi computer sold for £3,500 on eBay last week, writes Steve Bush.

  The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which intends to sell its educational computers directly, auctioned 10 of its beta production board on eBay.

• Now a $15 Linux Computer?

  Looks like everyone is trying to build a smaller and cheaper Linux computer. FXI is bringing Cotton Candy for about $200, production for $25 Linux computer Raspberry Pi has already started and now Rhombus Tech is aiming to deliver a low cost $15 (estimate) Linux PC Allwinner A10.

  Allwinner A10 will have fully GPL compliant hardware and is more powerful then Raspberry Pi. At least on paper now as the production has not started yet and there are no prototype builds. However, the development is going on rapidly and sooner or later they will deliver it.

• Ubuntu TV vs. Google TV: Battle of the Linux-based Smart TV

  Google TV, despite being launched and relaunched with much pomp and expectations, has not quite managed to reach the market it intended to. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to proclaim that the foray of Internet on our television screens previously has been an utter failure. And this, you see, is despite the fact that there are giants like Apple and Google scampering for the top spot.

  Last week, Ubuntu’s own little warrior came sauntering into this hallowed market, but only to deliver a nice big surprise. At CES, when the Unity-based Ubuntu TV was unveiled, even the most pious of Apple fanboys couldn’t help feeling a tinge of jealousy. The demo, which showcased a beautiful-yet-functional interface, left all the Unity-bashers a tad guilty.

• Phones

  • Samsung Merges Bada OS with Linux OS

  • Android

    • PulseAudio Ported To Android, Compared To AudioFlinger

      A developer at Collabora has brought PulseAudio to Google’s Android operating system. In the process of this port he has closely compared the performance and features of the once-notorious PulseAudio stack to that of Google’s AudioFlinger.

      AudioFlinger is Google’s audio stack equivalent to PulseAudio. AudioFlinger provides a single output path for PCM, a software mixer for various playback stream types, playback stream resampling, and a single input capture path. Collabora decided it would be interesting — and of potential interest to their customers — to bring the PulseAudio stack over to Android. Among the desired PulseAudio features mentioned to have on Android was its modular framework, power saving features, and flexible routing, among other traits.

    • HTC Ville Coming to T-Mobile; ‘HTC Family’ Tipped

      Besides the introduction of the Titan II for AT&T, HTC was fairly quiet at CES — no doubt reserving its best devices for either dedicated events or a Mobile World Congress debut next month. We’ve just learned that, somewhat unsurprisingly, T-Mobile will beging carrying the slim, Ice Cream Sandwich-powered HTC Ville this spring. We say somewhat unsurprisingly because on the one hand, T-Mobile has a history of carrying high-end HTC hardware, but on the other hand, the quad-core HTC Edge (Supreme?) is also waiting in the wings. Ville has been leaked as a 1.5GHz dual-core, sub-eight millimeter handset with a 4.3-inch qHD display and point-and-shoot quality camera.

    • Samsung Galaxy Note hitting Verizon as Galaxy Journal, also headed to Sprint?

    • Asus says there’s no 3G Transformer Prime

      A couple of weeks ago, various websites have reported that Asus would want to launch a 3G version of its Transformer Prime Android tablet. But this doesn’t seem to be true.

      According to FocusTaiwan, today Asus stated that “no such product exists on its current roadmap.” However, the company expects to introduce 3G versions of future high-end devices included in the Transformer series.

    • Google, LG Are Said to Be in Negotiations to Collaborate on New Television

      Google Inc. (GOOG) is considering giving LG Electronics Inc. (066570) first access to the next version of its Google TV software so the Korean company can build a compatible set, according to two people with knowledge of the project.

      The partnership would be similar to the arrangement Google has had with Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and HTC Corp. to create Nexus handsets for the Android operating system, said the people, who declined to be identified because the talks aren’t public.

    • SE Android released: Build your own NSA-approved Android device today

      On January 6, the US National Security Agency (NSA) released the first public release of the Security Enhanced (SE) Android Project, a program designed to find and plug security holes and risks in the Android flavor of Linux. SE Android is based on the NSA’s SELinux, first released in 2000.

    • NSA releases security-enhanced Android

      The National Security Agency’s SELinux Project has announced the first release of SE Android, a security enhanced version of Google’s Android operating system. SEAndroid is the name of both a project to identify, and find solutions for, critical gaps in Android security and of a reference implementation of a security enhanced Android. The project is currently focusing its efforts on enabling SELinux functionality in the hope that it can limit the damage done by malicious apps, but hopes to widen its scope in the future.

    • Google TV to gain personalized recommendations

      Google is planning a new version of Google TV that will integrate personalized recommendations based on user preferences, says a report. Meanwhile, Google TV 2.0 received a review from DeviceGuru, which praised the Android 3.1-based interface and Chrome browser, but dinged the poor Flash performance and continuing lack of Android apps.

Breaking down the gender divide in open source and open culture

The tipping point for Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora was when one of her friends was groped for the third time in a single year at a conference. “As I heard about it I knew I’d remember all the times I’d been groped as well, and insulted and harassed — and that was just too much,” Aurora says.

Aurora waited a month then emailed Mary Gardiner, who she knew from LinuxChix and Linux.conf.au. The result was the Ada Initiative: A non-profit organisation the two formed that aims to break down barriers women face when it comes to participation in open source, open technology and open culture more broadly.

Perens: The iPhone is Destroying Democracy (And Open Source)

The iPhone is Australia’s most popular smartphone, and it’s very much in evidence at Linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat. But in the opening keynote for the conference, leading open source advocate Bruce Perens argued that the continued success of the iPhone threatens not just the potential success of open source, but the future of democracy

Making a case for excluding users from open source

Open source or free software is meant to remove the shackles of proprietary software binding users all over the world. This in itself is a very noble idea and goal. However, it’s also a very tough goal. Not because people are happy with their shackles but because most people don’t care about them. I see around myself people who want to do stuff and it doesn’t matter how they do it. Want to watch some TV show online? Pay Netflix, Hulu, whatever, to watch it. Even with all the hoopla about content piracy, people are signing up in droves for these services.

Computers are complex machines. Not everyone can or is willing to understand how they function. All many people want is to be able to fire up a browser and connect with friends/family using Facebook or to sign in to Hotmail every once in a while. They also want to be able to carry a phone that can play music, games, YouTube, etc.

Events

• LCA2012 Diary: The Smart And The Sweaty

  Attending Linux.conf.au is a great way to enhance my knowledge and scare me into presenting, but it’s an exhausting five days. It’s mentally exhausting because of all the new information to be acquired, and it’s physically exhausting because it’s the height of summer in Ballarat and the temperature is 32 degrees or more.

  Today is the first day of “proper” conference, although there were plenty of good things to discover during the mini-conference sessions. Bruce Perens’ opening keynote discussed the threat the iPhone represents to open source software before examining a potential future led by open source hardware. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he certainly got people thinking. As one attendee commented: “The trouble with this event is it gives you all sorts of ideas for stuff to do.”

• Linux.conf.au 2012 kicks off in Ballarat, Australia

  Last night I arrived in Ballarat after catching a train from the bustling city of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. Ballarat is the small town venue for Linux.conf.au 2012, the largest annual Linux conference in the southern hemisphere.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • User Sovereignty for our Data

  • Mozilla: We’re About to Grab More Data About You, But Here’s How We’ll Keep It Safe

    Mozilla has some big plans up its sleeve in 2012. The non-profit open source foundation is planning some features for its Firefox Web browser and beyond that will require greater access to user data. In a blog post, the organization explains exactly how it intends to use and handle that data. In short, very carefully.

    Some of Mozilla’s initiatives for this year include an HTML5 Web app store, a mobile operating system and perhaps most intensive of all, a decentralized system for user identification and authentication at the browser level. In other words, a browser-based replacement for usernames and passwords.

  • Has Firefox Lost Its Edge?

SaaS

• Release of OpenNebula 3.2 for Data Center Virtualization and Private Cloud Computing

  OpenNebula 3.2 is the most feature-rich enterprise-class open-source software for comprehensive management of virtualized data centers based on Xen, KVM and VMware.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Bug fix release LibreOffice 3.4.5 is out

  The Document Foundation has announced the release of version 3.4.5 of LibreOffice, a maintenance update for the 3.4.x branch of the open source office suite. The new version addresses almost 30 bugs found in the previous release, improving the program’s overall stability.

• LibreOffice 3.4.5 Released

• LibreOffice 3.4.5 Is Now Available for Download

  A few minutes ago, January 16th, The Document Foundation company proudly announced the fifth maintenance release of the LibreOffice 3.4 open source office suite software for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms, bringing several bugfixes and improvements.

• Bug fix release LibreOffice 3.4.5 is out

• LibreOffice 3.4.5 Released

CMS

• Top 20 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) – Part 1/4

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • BonitaSoft Announces 350 Percent Revenue Growth

    BonitaSoft, the leader in open source business process management (BPM), today announced corporate growth for 2011. The company achieved a record year, tripling its customer base to more than 300 and growing total revenue by 350 percent. The company added more than 200 new customers in 2011, including Stanford University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, SNCF, Portugal Telecom, Australian Department of Sustainability and Environment, Galapagos Province, and Sammons Financial Services.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• GRUB 2 Editor

  Mostly, I prefer using a command line for system administration. However, I’m willing to rethink this preference in the case of the GRUB 2 Editor for KDE.

  Not too long ago, editing the GRUB boot manager was a straightforward task. You edited a text file directly, and, if in the long intervals between changes you forgot the structure of a boot entry, you could usually figure out what to do from existing entries. About the hardest thing to remember if you didn’t have an example to crib from was how to boot an unsupported operating system like Windows.

  However, in distributions like Ubuntu in which GRUB 2 has replaced Legacy GRUB, editing has become more complicated. Not only has the basic configuration file changed its name from menu.lst to grub.cfg, but you’re not supposed to edit it directly. Although you can edit directly if you know what you are doing, the fact that basic concepts have been renamed still complicates everything. Moreover, after making changes or setting up a kernel that isn’t packaged, you need to run the command update-grub.

Project Releases

• Node IDE Nide gets 0.2 release, now also native on Mac

  Nide, an IDE for Node.js written using Node.js and accessible through a web browser, has been updated to version 0.2. The new release makes the IDE available as a native Mac OS X application, though this edition is “still at an early development stage”. Originally developed as part of the Node Knockout 48-hour coding competition, the developers have continued to enhance the MIT-licensed project.

Public Services/Government

• Why Open Source is Good for German Software Businesses

  At a meeting this evening, a lobbyist confided in me: “Open source is bad for German software vendors!” I gasped. He couldn’t be further from the truth. If this was mechanical engineering or electrical engineering, he’d be right. ME? EE? Germany is top. Software? Not so.

Openness/Sharing

• Wi-Fi And NBN Lessons From An Open Source Town

  Free public Wi-Fi is still a relative rarity in Australia’s major cities, so how is it possible to make it viable in a town with less than 400 people? Newstead offers some interesting lessons about Wi-Fi, the National Broadband Network (NBN), open source and how to manage community projects.

• Open Hardware

  • MakerBot Replicator video shows off open-source 3D printer

    Sick of going to shops and buying plastic toys like a chump? That woeful life could be behind you thanks to the MakerBot Replicator — a 3D printer that prints plastic goodies. We’ve gone hands-on with the Replicator at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, so check out our video above to learn how this mechanical marvel works.

  • ZPM Espresso is making an open source home espresso machine

    Making good home espresso is possible, but the machines tend to cost a small fortune. ZPM Espresso, a startup in Atlanta, is hoping to change that with its open-source espresso machine.

    If the company succeeds, it could have a nice market for itself, as the espresso and specialty coffee market have been growing quickly around the world. (Can you tell based on how many Starbucks and Peet’s Coffee places there are?).

Programming

• OpenMP May Finally Come To LLVM/Clang

  Multi-threading in LLVM has been brought up and it looks like some developers may finally be taking on the challenge of bringing OpenMP support to this growing open-source compiler infrastructure.

• Sorry state of dynamic libraries on Linux

• How we enable others to write 3rd party plugins with Maliit

  We finally published a video about Maliit – an input method framework including a virtual keyboard – and 3rd party plugins. Kudos goes to Jon for making time for that.

  This video highlights one of Maliit’s key features: pluggable input methods which come with their very own user interfaces. The Chinese input methods show how Maliit offers support for composed characters. The video is proof that 3rd party development for Maliit (open-source and proprietary) is not only possible but also happening.

• Trying out initramfs with selinux and grsec

Why Is NBCUniversal Threatening To Report Commenters They Disagree With To Their Employers?

This one is a little bizarre. David Seaman, a contributor to Business Insider, claims that he lost his contributor status at the site following a dispute he had with an NBCUniversal employee, Anthony Quintano, concerning NBC’s coverage of both SOPA/PIPA and NDAA. The details are a bit complex, but I’ve emailed with David a few times.

Intel’s Itanic is close to the end

In the last week we reported how the Itanium Solutions page, hosted by Intel has been disappeared with virtually no traces left. The ISA, launched to fanfare in 2005 – had as members Intel, HP, NEC, SGI, Unisys, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, Oracle, SAP and SAS – as reported by ZD Net here. All of these competitors working together in perfect harmony. Right.

Finance

• Everything You Need to Know About Wall Street, in One Brief Tale

  If there was ever a news story that crystalized the moral dementia of modern Wall Street in one little vignette, this is it.

  Newspapers in Colorado today are reporting that the elegant Hotel Jerome in Aspen, Colorado, will be closed to the public from today through Monday at noon.

  Why? Because a local squire has apparently decided to rent out all 94 rooms of the hotel for three-plus days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

  The hotel’s general manager, Tony DiLucia, would say only that the party was being thrown by a “nice family,” but newspapers are now reporting that the Daddy of the lucky little gal is one Jeffrey Verschleiser, currently an executive with Goldman, Sachs.

  At first, I couldn’t remember how I knew that name. But then I looked it up and saw an explosive Atlantic magazine story, published last year, called, “E-mails Suggest Bear Stearns Cheated Clients Out Of Millions.” And then I remembered that piece, and it hit me: Jeffrey Verschleiser is one of the biggest assholes in the entire world!

Censorship

• UK.gov rejects mandatory filters, rebuffs Claire Perry

• Spain adopts unpopular web-blocking law

  Websites accused of copyright infringement could be blocked within 10 days of a complaint, under legislation approved by Spain’s recently elected government.

  The Sinde Law, named after the former Spanish Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde, establishes a new intellectual property commission to evaluate complaints about allegedly infringing websites. Complaints deemed valid will be passed to a judge who will determine whether or not to close down the site. It is not clear what technical means will be used, but the law’s proponents law claim that the process could take as little as 10 days.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Trademarks

  • I’m Not A Fan Of This Craptastic Trademark Lawsuit

    We’ve seen some pathetic trademark lawsuits this year (SUE MOAR KALE, anyone?), but I’ll nominate this long-running litigation money-sink (going over 3.5 years) as the saddest trademark case of 2011.

    Fancaster registered its mark in 1989 for broadcasting services, and over the years it’s been used in connection with a range of services, “including selling Fancaster branded radios, charging customers to watch closed circuit boxing matches, producing karaoke shows, transmitting sponsored news messages to wireless pagers and cell phones, and conducting live demonstrations of FANCASTER broadcast services” (cites omitted).

• Copyrights

  • Putting SOPA on a shelf

    Misguided efforts to combat online privacy have been threatening to stifle innovation, suppress free speech, and even, in some cases, undermine national security. As of yesterday, though, there’s a lot less to worry about.

    At issue are two related bills: the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the even more offensive Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, both of which are generated intense opposition from tech giants and First Amendment advocates. The first sign that the bills’ prospects were dwindling came Friday, when SOPA sponsors agreed to drop a key provision that would have required service providers to block access to international sites accused of piracy.

  • US Copyright Lobby Wants Canada Out of TPP Until New Laws Passed, Warns of No Cultural Exceptions

    The U.S. government just concluded a consultation on whether it should support Canada’s entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations (I have posted here, here, and here about the implications of the TPP for Canada based on a leaked chapter of the intellectual property provisions). The Canadian government submitted a brief one-pager, pointing to Bill C-11, ACTA, the dismantling of Canadian Wheat Board, and forthcoming procurement concessions to Europe as evidence that it is ready to negotiate the TPP.

    While most submissions support the entry of Canada into the negotiations, it is worth noting that the major intellectual property lobby groups want to keep Canada out of the deal until we cave to the current U.S. copyright demands. The IIPA, which represents the major movie, music, and software lobby associations, points to copyright reform and new border measures as evidence of the need for Canadian reforms and states “we urge the U.S. government to use Canada’s expression of interest in the TPP negotiations as an opportunity to resolve these longstanding concerns about IPR standards and enforcement.”

  • SOPA Derailed

    According to a prominent U.S. Congressman, SOPA will not come up for a vote and is, thus, effectively dead, but PIPA remains active in the Senate.

  • The internet wins: SOPA has been shelved, but we must remain vigilant

    Over the weekend, the White House released a strongly-worded opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The President has threatened to veto any legislation that “reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet,” which includes SOPA and PIPA. Just hours after this, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa said that SOPA had now been shelved indefinitely by the House of Representatives. It will not be voted on when the 112th Congress reconvenes for its 2012 session. The internet has won.

  • SOPA Killed!

    Marking the victory of freedom and American way of life representative Eric Cantor(R-VA) has announced that he will stop all action on SOPA, the examiner reports. We are still trying to verify the information as they is no credible source for the story.

  • SOPA/PIPA Supporters Pretend White House Statement Means We Can Rush Through SOPA/PIPA

  • Harry Reid Says He’s Concerned PIPA Will Break The Internet, But We Must Move Forward With It, Because Of ‘Jobs’

    In a short appearance on Meet the Press on Sunday, Senate leader Harry Reid continued to insist that the Senate intended to move forward with PIPA, despite the widespread concerns, despite the White House’s statement against the bill, and despite multiple Senators — including bill co-sponsors — asking him to hold off putting the bill to a vote.

  • Even Thieves Are Ignoring DVDs And CDs As Worthless

    It’s been kind of funny to see that the various “public service announcement” videos that have been created and/or used by the government lately (see here and here for example) show people selling counterfeit DVDs on the street. There’s a reason for this, of course. The one study that suggests any kind of link between movie infringement and organized crime/terrorism was based on some really out-of-date reports of connections between… counterfeit street vendors. But that was all from over a decade ago. Of course, as we noted many, many years ago, there’s no significant business in selling counterfeit DVDs and CDs any more, because of competition from free file sharing sites.

  • HR 3699

    Kudos to Kevin Zelnio, who shoots down the self-serving rationales behind the so-called Research Works Act recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Darrell Issa and Carolyn Maloney. This piece of legislation would reverse the National Institute of Health’s open access policy, which requires that all tax-payer funded research be available to the public for free. Kevin’s piece appears in Scientific American’s blog, and is well worth the read.

  • How PIPA and SOPA Violate White House Principles Supporting Free Speech and Innovation

    Over the weekend, the Obama administration issued a potentially game-changing statement on the blacklist bills, saying it would oppose PIPA and SOPA as written, and drew an important line in the sand by emphasizing that it “will not support” any bill “that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.”

  • Rupert Murdoch Lashes Out Bizarrely Against The White House For Asking Congress Not To Break The Internet

  • The Lies Of NBCUniversal’s Rick Cotton About SOPA/PIPA

    Chris Hayes, over on MSNBC, decided to be the first to seriously break the mainstream cable news’ boycott over SOPA/PIPA with a big debate on the bill — mainly between NBCUniversal’s top lawyer, Rick Cotton, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Chris’s opening discussion is quite good, and suggests he’s certainly sympathetic to all of us who are vehemently opposed to the bill.

  • It’s Official: Wikipedia To Go Dark On Wednesday

  • Wikipedia to join reddit in SOPA blackout Wednesday

    Seeking to “send Washington a BIG message,” Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced that the English version of Wikipedia will go dark on Wednesday to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, anti-piracy bills now being considered by Congress.

  • Send A Sympathy Card Over The Death Of The Internet To Your Senator

  • SOPA/PIPA: How Far We’ve Come; How Far We Need To Go

    On October 26th, I was flying from San Francisco to Washington DC to meet with folks in the House of Representatives to explain why they should be careful about making the same mistakes as the Senate with its anti-piracy bill, PROTECT IP (PIPA). We had been assured by Rep. Bob Goodlatte that Congress had heard the myriad complaints about PIPA and that the House version would take them into account. Instead, as the plane I was on flew over the Rocky Mountains, I started getting a flood of emails from people sending me the first release of the House’s version of the bill, now known as SOPA (originally, the E-PARASITE bill, a name they dropped immediately when everyone started mocking it). Thanks to the wonderful innovation of WiFi-in-the-sky, I was able to sit in my cramped seat, read the bill, and write up my horrified post explaining just how much worse SOPA was than PIPA (an already disastrous bill).

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• Linux Kernel Grows Past 15 Million Lines of Code

• LessFS Pairs De-Duplication With Snappy Compression

  Btrfs isn’t the only file-system to take advantage of Google’s Snappy compression as a speedy means of transparent file compression, but the LessFS file-system has also supported Snappy for the past few months. This open-source file-system also has de-duplication support.

• Graphics Stack

  • VMware’s New Graphics Architecture Is Shaping Up

    VMware’s overhauled Linux graphics driver stack is shaping up and coming together nicely in time for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, which will allow for 2D/3D guest acceleration within virtualized guest machines.

    VMware’s graphics stack for use on their virtualization platform has been a long time coming. Back in 2009 they introduced their Gallium3D driver and the adjoining Linux kernel DRM, but up until now both have been considered experimental / staging and not built by default. With Mesa 8.0 and the Linux 3.2 kernel that has changed with both being considered stable and good enough for default use by its customers. Their mainline DRM driver also does kernel mode-setting for its virtual “SVGA II” graphics adapter.

  • DirectFB 1.6 Release Is Imminent With New Features

    DirectFB 1.6 is about to be released this month and it will bring new features to the Direct Frame-Buffer project.

    The DirectFB road-map for a while has long cited “The release of 1.6.0 is planned for end of January 2012.” Earlier this month on the mailing list it was then confirmed by Denis Oliver Kropp that the release is coming this month. “Correct, we’ve been too busy with other things, but this month we should see 1.6.0 :)”

  • Closer To Radeon H.264 VDPAU In Gallium3D

    On Sunday morning there were a number of video-related commits to Mesa for H.264 Gallium3D by AMD’s Christian König.

    While not yet a complete implementation, Christian König did land the H.264 infrastructure inside the VDPAU Gallium3D state tracker. This was only about 100 lines of code (commit) while several other commits pushed this morning also furthered the video support (commits by König).

  • Closer To Radeon H.264 VDPAU In Gallium3D

    On Sunday morning there were a number of video-related commits to Mesa for H.264 Gallium3D by AMD’s Christian König.

    While not yet a complete implementation, Christian König did land the H.264 infrastructure inside the VDPAU Gallium3D state tracker. This was only about 100 lines of code (commit) while several other commits pushed this morning also furthered the video support (commits by König).

  • Nouveau For Open-Source NVIDIA In Mesa 8.0 Is Mixed

    After looking last week at the ATI/AMD Radeon Gallium3D performance under Mesa 8.0 and comparing its performance to Mesa 7.11 and the closed-source AMD Catalyst driver, along with the LLVMpipe driver performance, we’re now focusing upon the Nouveau Gallium3D implementation that seeks to provide open-source NVIDIA hardware support. This comparison is pitting Nouveau in Mesa 8.0 against Mesa 7.11 and the official NVIDIA Linux driver.

  • In OpenCL Push, AMD Makes Progress With LLVM For Gallium3D

    On Sunday there was a new RFC patch-set by Tom Stellard of AMD with a new TGSI to LLVM conversion interface. The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver with its LLVM shader back-end was also updated, which is a prerequisite to OpenCL support.

    Sunday began by Christian König making progress with H.264 VDPAU support in Gallium3D, which is one of AMD’s top three priorities for their open-source Linux driver. Tom Stellard meanwhile has been working on one of the other priority projects: enabling OpenCL in the open-source driver.

Applications

• Video editing with OpenShot: Capable, but lacks some polish

  The OpenShot video editor was the easiest to get in Ubuntu Studio’s “Oneric Ocelot” release, so we had a chance to try it out recently. It’s pretty good — much more capable than Kino. It provides similar capabilities to Blender’s VSE, but without the burden of learning Blender. In fact, the learning curve is very gentle, because the interface is clean and simple.

• Staying happy with Gnumeric: finding the leading apostrophe

  In my previous article about GNUMeric , entering data with a leading apostrophe, as in ’12/3, ensures that the 12/3 will be interpreted by Gnumeric as text, even when the cell is formatted ‘General’.

  But Gnumeric displays the 12/3 without the apostrophe. It’s hidden. This can lead to unpleasant little surprises when sorting groups of cells, some of which contain hidden apostrophes and some of which don’t.

• Backup your data in Linux with DejaDup

  Hard disks break. Really, they do. When it happens, most people are sadly unprepared: even the most experienced computer person ony recovers a (big?) portion of their data. Even today, with cloud computing. The reason? Backing up is tricky. If you use GNU/Linux or Ubuntu, it’s easy enough to make an incremental backup using rsync and gpg. If you have no idea what this means, don’t worry: welcome to Déjà Dup, the best backup gem I have ever seen.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Weekend Project: Learning Ins and Outs of Arduino

  • How To Install Unity 5.0 In Ubuntu 11.10

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 6.2 x86_64 With Apache2 [ISPConfig 3]

  • Installing An Oracle-Ready CentOS 6.2 Server

  • Tomes of Mephistopheles gameplay

    So Alex from Kot-In-Action has finally given us a sort of demo trailer for some gameplay of what will become Tomes of Mephistopheles. It looks interesting and as usual from Kot-In-Action the graphics are already looking rather good.

• Games

  • Desura adds free adventure games!

    Desura one of our favourite clients to get games for Linux has added a couple of free downloadable adventure games.

Desktop Environments

• The Surprisingly Juicy Desktop Linux Market Share Report

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 25th December 2011

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 1st January 2012

Distributions

• Three Spins You May Not Have Heard Of

  Always on the lookout for something interesting I found three more esoteric spins of major distributions and set out to give them a quick test run.
  This was helped by a streak of bad luck recently which resulted in me suddenly having two partitions available.

  To give you a quick run down on the string of events, I set out to upgrade my Fedora 14 LXDE (i686) install I intended to use for gaming. There’s a well documented but unsupported procedure for Fedora called Preupgrade which allows to skip one release, in my part straight to F16. The software will then inspect your system, determine the packages that need to be upgraded, and download them into an archive that is installed at next reboot. You are warned that you need a wired connection if you just download the installer (Method 2), but that it’s ok to interrupt package download to resume at a later time. I did just that half way through to attend some business, but found out later that somehow even initiating the download of updates without installing them had already corrupted or removed wireless drivers.

• New Releases

  • ArtistX 1.2

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 182

    Summary:
    · Announced Distro: Fuduntu 2012.1
    · Announced Distro: Linux Mint 12 KDE Release Candidate

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva: The ides of January are come

    So, today is January 15. Tomorrow, we will know if Mandriva Linux, a distro that has been around since 1998, is gone. One can but find a resemblance between this date and the prophecy that the soothsayer gave to Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

• Debian Family

  • Raphael Hertzog’s Debian Squeeze discs are well worth the money

    I’ve burned hundreds of Linux and BSD discs since I figured out what to do with an ISO sometime in late 2006/early 2007. I’ve saved many and gotten rid of many as well.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Interview with Quackers

      • My Unity 5.0 Experience

        Unity has improved a lot recently. I feel that I can continue using it if it’s memory consumption stays under control. I’m testing it on Ubuntu 12.04 which is currently in an early pre-release state. Unity crashed twice while writing this blog entry so I hope it’s just some underlying bugs that will be solved by the time Ubuntu 12.04 hits release.

        As for deploying it at client sites, I don’t think I could recommend that until it’s memory issues are resolved. Losing 1GB of RAM is a lot. Simple day to day tasks should be more intuitive (finding recent docs, accessing menus, accessing what used to be known as ‘Places’, etc), and it would help a lot if the Dash home were customisable (I couldn’t find a way to do it from within Unity or anything about it in the documentation). The Gnome 3 Fallback session is very solid and very familiar and I think I’ll continue to recommend it for the typical user desktop. At the rate that Unity is improving though, that might soon change.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Peppermint OS Two Review

          Peppermint OS is a distribution that is based on LUbuntu 11.04 (LXDE Desktop) and is geared to use more cloud applications. It’s sleek and simple desktop reminds us that a desktop doesn’t have to be cluttered to be useful.

          Peppermint can still allows you to add applications like any other distribution and note that it can easily be used on older machines.

          The software that is found on Peppermint OS has been carefully selected to make sure that resources are not over-utilized causing your system to slow down. Granted that this distribution is geared more towards cloud use, broadband internet would be of the utmost importance.

        • Following the unique way of Trisquel

          Trisquel is a GNU/Linux distribution with geographical roots in Spain. The project started off as localization of Linux for the Galician language, and later became more than just a local Linux distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux-Based EverSense, A Smart Thermostat

  Allure Energy has been turning the temperature up at CES 2012, with it’s new Linux-based EverSense, a tablet/ thermostat. Or as the company like to call it, “A home environment and energy management product.”

• Phones

  • Samsung Sacrifices Bada To Make Linux OS Great

    Samsung has announced it plans on fusing its home-grown Bada operating system into the Linux based Tizen.

  • Samsung Planning To Merge Bada OS With Tizen

  • Samsung merging bada with Tizen for smartphone push

    Samsung has announced plans to merge its homegrown bada smartphone platform with open-source Tizen, a collaborative OS integrating Nokia-reject MeeGo, with the first Samsung Tizen devices tipped for release this year. ”We have an effort that will merge bada and Tizen” Tae-Jin Kang, Senior Vice President of Samsung’s Contents Planning Team told Forbes at CES 2012 last week. Tizen will show up on “at least one to two” Samsung phones in 2012, Kang confirmed; earlier this month, details leaked on the Samsung I9500, believed to run the new platform.

  • Android

    • A Final Goodbye to Nokia and a Hello to Android

      Just a little over a year ago, I detailed why I opted for Nokia’s Maemo powered N900 instead of an Android device. To be precise, I purchased my Nokia N900 on the 4th of Jan 2011, and wow, what an excitement it was to hold such an incredible device. A full blown, Debian based GNU/Linux OS in my pocket.

      However, it was not long to be before the groundbreaking, expertly leaked burning platform memo to Engadget and the subsequent Elopcalypse of Feb 11 2011. For long time Nokia loyalists like yours truly, it was like a dream shattered. We’d always dreamed of having MeeGo as the third force in a fiercely competitive arena dominated by the two tech giants of North America: Google with their Android offering and Apple with iOS.

      But the all knowing Nokia board knew better. To salvage Nokia from its not so desperate situation, they had to bring in a former Microsoft employee to head a company that was at the forefront of pushing GNU/Linux to millions of people around the world. And as was expected, the inevitable happened: the bringing to its knees of one of the most powerful and recognized technology companies on Earth.

    • My favourite Android applications: Part 2

    • Intel’s Medfield series processor debuts on the Lenovo K800

      Intel has been trying to get into the smartphone segment for a long time now but they have finally managed to do it with the Lenovo K800, which will be the first smartphone to hit the market running on Intel’s 32nm Medfield platform.

    • HTC Explorer budget smartphone

      The latest from startlingly prolific smart phone manufacturer HTC won’t be top of the list for mobile aficionados. It’s a basic entry-level Android with middling specs though these are still probably a cut above its bog-standard price. But for smartphone newbies, what it offers may prove to be more than enough.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Indian Government May Ditch Aakash Tablet

    The foot in the mouth minister Kapil Sibal who bear the credit of launching half baked products and call for Internet censorship may pull plugs off yet another of his projects — this time its Android based Aakash Tablet.

    According to reports India’s Union human resource development (HRD) ministry may not extend the letter of credit (LC) to DataWind, the maker of Aakash.

  • USB 3.0 Is Coming to Smartphones and Tablets

Open source writing tools

There has been an impressive change in tools and techniques which writers can use for the good. It is easy to locate one (or more) for individual needs. Whether it is writing a novel, graphics applications or tutorials, these writing tools can serve multipurpose. Writing skills can gain unmatched dimensions on integrating with these advanced techniques. Your love for writing can potentially experience a boost by adapting with the modern applications. You can search one and get many on the internet.

AURA Launches Alternative PHP Server Stack for IBM i

AURA Equipments today launched iAMP Server, a free collection of software for running PHP workloads on the IBM i server. iAMP is composed of binaries for several products, including PHP, the standard Apache Web server, and the MySQL database. AURA says it developed iAMP, which runs primarily in the PASE AIX runtime, to provide IBM i shops with a standards-based alternative to Zend Technologies’ PHP solutions for the platform.

MathJax for mathematics, an open source that works in all modern browsers

“MathJax is an open source JavaScript display engine for mathematics that works in all modern browsers. No more setup for readers. No more browser plugins. No more font installations… It just works.”

Events

• FOSDEM 2012, Hardware Security and Cryptography, Call for Papers

  This is a call for talks and presentations that will take place in the Security devroom at FOSDEM 2012. Do you develop software that can do HTTPS queries? Can it use keys and certificates on a smart card? Does your service use RSA keys for signing? Can it work with hardware keys? Are you interested in protecting your private keys like Three Letter Organizations or do you want to roll your own proper PKI with a smaller than five or six digit budget? How can we make cryptographic hardware Just Work with any application that uses crypto? The devroom is the place to share experiences and learn.

SaaS

• Exclusive Interview: The Core Of ownCloud Will ALWAYS Remain Free And Open Source

  The ownCloud project recently announce its evolution as a company. We reached out to the ownCloud team to understand the evolution of the project into a company. Here is an exclusive interview with Markus Rex, the new CEO, CTO of ownCloud and Frank Karlitschek the founder of ownCloud.

Semi-Open Source

• Jaspersoft drives open source analytics

  Jaspersoft says it is working closely with Red Hat to leverage its cloud application life cycle management tools. Jaspersoft’s reporting capabilities can be deployed on-premises, as well as public, private, or in a hybrid cloud environment.

BSD

• PC-BSD 9.0 (Isotope Edition) available

• PC-BSD 9 Screenshots

Project Releases

• Skrooge 1.2.0 gains new features

  Version 1.2.0 of the open source Skrooge personal finance manager has been released. The new version includes updates to the Search & Process plugin and adds the ability to Import & Export of non-local files.

Has Microsoft Word affected the way we work?

But has word processing changed the way we write? There have been lots of inconclusive or unconvincing studies of how the technology has affected, say, the quality of student essays – how it facilitates plagiarism. The most interesting academic study I looked at found that writers using computers “spent more time on a first draft and less on finalising a text, pursued a more fragmentary writing process, tended to revise more extensively at the beginning of the writing process, attended more to lower linguistic levels [letter, word] and formal properties of the text, and did not normally undertake any systematic revision of their work before finishing”.

My hunch is that using a word processor makes writing more like sculpting in clay. Because it’s so easy to revise, one begins by hacking out a rough draft which is then iteratively reshaped – cutting bits out here, adding bits there, gradually licking the thing into some kind of shape.

ISC seeks wider input for BIND 10

The Internet Systems Consortium is looking for a few more good programmers to bring the next generation of its open source BIND DNS server software to fruition.

“The goal is to move away from having BIND a heavily sponsored corporate product,” said Shane Kerr, ISC’s BIND 10 engineering manager. “ISC will always maintain ownership of the code, but we would like there to be more of a community around it.”

Security

• Malicious Software Attacks Security Cards Used by Pentagon

  Chinese hackers have deployed a new cyber weapon that is aimed at the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and potentially a number of other United States government agencies and businesses, security researchers say.

Finance

• Greenspan’s Laissez Fairy Tale

  We continue to witness remarkable developments in the intersection of the related fields of economics, finance, ethics, law, and regulation. Each of these five fields ignores a sixth related field – white-collar criminology. The six fields share a renewed interest in trust. The key questions are why we trust (some) others, when that trust is well-placed, and when that trust is harmful. Only white-collar criminologists study and write extensively about the last question. The primary answer that the five fields give to the first question is reputation. The five fields almost invariably see reputation as positive and singular. This is dangerously naïve. Criminals often find it desirable to develop multiple, complex reputations and the best way for many CEOs to develop a sterling reputation is to lead a control fraud. Those are subjects for future columns.

• Farewell, lost AAA

  It is official. Two months and a half after I claimed all these “last chance” european summits would amount to nothing really important and would not change the course of the present events, France lost its “sacred” triple A ratings. Given that many people explained how unreliable these rating agencies are -after all the very same agencies did claim Greece had solid finances and Goldman Sachs was doing things right four years ago- it should not be a serious thing. Yet, the consequences of the loss of the AAA rating will be real, and will probably have a snowballing effect in Europe (another one).

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Scott Walker’s Texas Rangers

  It has been a tough holiday season for Scott Walker. The state lost 14,600 jobs in November and a new government report indicates that Wisconsin leads the nation in killing public sector jobs. A November poll has support for the recall of the governor at 58 percent, up from 47 percent in the spring, and next week Wisconsin residents are preparing to file over 500,000 recall petitions to trigger a gubernatorial recall. Is it any wonder that Wisconsin’s governor decided to fly to Texas to find a friendlier crowd?

• Emotional news framing affects public response to crises

  When organizational crises occur, such as plane crashes or automobile recalls, public relations practitioners develop strategies for substantive action and effective communication. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that the way in which news coverage of a crisis is framed affects the public’s emotional response toward the company involved.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Canadian content doing just fine without regulator — on the Internet

  Even without a leg-up from regulators, Canadian content is just as likely to be watched as American programming — online, anyway.

  Despite not being held to the same “Cancon” carriage rules as traditional broadcasters, YouTube reports that Canadian videos are being sought-out and viewed at a rate roughly on par with those originating in the U.S. And the sheer amount of content is staggering.

  Analysts say there are so many uploads from this country, it would take half a lifetime to watch just one year’s worth — and that’s if you never left the computer to sleep. Annually, in fact, they calculate that the site features more original Canadian content than has ever been broadcast during prime time on CBC (English and French) and CTV combined.

• Complaints about online traffic delays accelerating, says CRTC

  Complaints against Internet providers deliberately slowing down online traffic are way up in Canada, according to the telecommunications regulator.

  Fifty-two complaints have been filed since last fall, when the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission issued a public reminder to Internet service providers about the rules on controlling the flow of traffic on their networks.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • White House To Oppose SOPA

    The White House has responded to the petition agains ant-freedom bills SOPA, PIPA and OPEN (Online Protection and Digital ENforcement Act).

  • SOPA Will Ultimately Be Our Fault

    As was the DMCA

    As was The Patriot Act

    As was The NDAA.

    And so it will be for SOPA/PIPA.

  • Copyright Wars escalate: Britain to extradite student to US over link site

    Richard O’Dwyer, the 23-year-old British college student who operated the TVShack link site, can be extradited to the United States, ruled Judge Quentin Purdy of the Westminster Magistrates Court today. O’Dwyer’s attorney says he will appeal the ruling.

  • Big Content: the frenemy of consumer electronics makers

    A trip to CES is a combination of candy store window shopping and a trip to some nightmarish, dystopian future with thirteen-dollar-an-hour WiFi. Beneath all of the shiny gadgets, desperate marketing pitches, bizarre keynotes and sleep deprivation, there were a number of themes emerging at CES as the manufacturers of all these shiny toys tried to latch onto something to pull themselves out of the doldrums that hung over the last year. One was the lengths device-makers will go to for content; another was the anointment of “cloud” as a critical feature check-box.

  • Libraries are the best counter to piracy

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Linux in 2012: what to expect

Desktop

• Samsung Updating Google ChromeBooks, Unveils ChromeBox

  Samsung, one of the companies that first jumped on board to produce ChromeBooks, is improving on its design and also launching something completely different: the ChromeBox. Are there channel implications? Oh, yeah.

  Both Engadget and 9to5Google noticed that Samsung had a bevy of Chrome-based devices on display at CES 2012. The new Series 5 ChromeBook isn’t anything remarkably special beyond a speed bump (2GB of RAM, 16GB SSD and a faster Celeron-based CPU) and a new matte aluminum shell. But the ChromeBox, a device few remember Google teased us with in 2011, has finally arrived.

Kernel Space

• Linux kernel 3.2.1 Is Available for Download

  Greg Kroah-Hartman announced last evening, January 12th, that the first maintenance release of the stable Linux kernel 3.2 is available for download and all users should upgrade to it.

• Frontswap Still Not Ready For Linux 3.3 Kernel

  While the Frontswap patches with Cleancache have been available for several Linux kernel release cycles, the Frontswap support still hasn’t been merged. Another Oracle developer is now taking over maintenance of Cleancache and getting Frontswap finally ready for merging, but it’s too late for the Linux 3.3 kernel.

• Btrfs Picks Up Snappy Compression Support

  New patches have been published for the Btrfs file-system that implement support for Google’s Snappy compression algorithm, which promises to deliver better performance beyond LZO compression.

  Andi Kleen of Intel has posted his updated Btrfs snappy compression patches, which he says are now ready for merging. “Here’s a slightly updated version of the BTRFS snappy interface. snappy is a faster compression algorithm that provides similar compression as LZO, but generally better performance.”

• Graphics Stack

  • Mesa 8.0 LLVMpipe: Fine For Desktop, Not For Gaming

    Continuing in the coverage of the soon-to-be-out Mesa 8.0, here are some benchmarks of the CPU-based LLVMpipe software driver for Gallium3D.

    LLVMpipe is the CPU-based software rasterizer driver that is faster than the standard Gallium3D “Softpipe” since it leverages LLVM for taking advantage of more of the CPU — especially on modern hardware with SSE3/SSE4, multiple cores, etc. See LLVMpipe: OpenGL With Gallium3D on Your CPU and Gallium3D LLVMpipe On The Sandy Bridge Extreme for just a small portion of the Phoronix coverage of this unique software driver.

  • Moving Closer To NVIDIA Optimus On Linux

  • Enlightenment Is Enlightening Wayland

    Back in November I reported on Enlightenment E17 coming to Wayland and shared the first screenshot. That first screenshot was very early and didn’t show EFL (the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) doing too much under Wayland, but in the past two months there has been much more progress.

Applications

• First installment: A crude imitation of khanacademy’s video lectures using GNU/Linux

  The following offers a description–prefaced by a narrative about whence came my inspiration–of a rather kludgy GNU/Linux solution I cobbled together for enhancing my on-line lectures with a video element. I am far from being technically adept as a GNU/Linux user, having only lately in my 11 years of GNU/Linux use become reasonably proficient at administering my own small stock of GNU/Linux machines and my small LAN. Despite a lack of anything that could really pass as expertise in this field, I want to offer this description for two reasons: 1) it may be of help to others who are equally inexpert as I am and who wish to do something like what I’ve done; and 2) perhaps those who are more technically adept will weigh in and offer corrections, point out alternative applications, make suggestions for improving what I’ve come up with, or all of the above. It is with these caveats that I offer a description of my humble and rather unsophisticated attempts.

• Bitwig Studio: A Professional Music Creation Software (DAW) Comes to Linux

  Bitwig is an international music software company based in Berlin. The company was founded in 2009 by a team of music enthusiasts with extensive experience in the music technology industry and a strong vision about new cutting-edge methods of music production, live performance and collaboration.

  The team includes many veterans who worked on Ableton Live, a popular software for professional music creation.

• The Best PDF Viewer for Linux

  Linux has quite a few PDF readers available, but Okular stands out as the best of the bunch, due to its ability to comment on, highlight, and otherwise annotate PDFs.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Learning Linux Commands: top

  • How To: Create Custom Quick Lists in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Ubuntu 11.10 Samba Standalone Server With tdbsam Backend

  • Play Cut the Rope on Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox

  • Mount your box.net (box.com) account in linux

  • 3 must-have extensions for Fedora 16 and other GNOME 3 installations

  • Build An FTP Server on CentOS 6

  • Understanding Linux File System Quotas – Installation and Setup

  • How to install Razor-qt on Linux Mint 12 KDE

  • Run fsck on a XenServer VM

  • How To: Add Gmail to the Message Menu in Ubuntu 11.04 & 11.10 (Unity)

  • Easily Sync Your Local Documents With Google Docs Using Super Flexible File Synchronizer

  • Search for songs through Unity Music Lens with the Grooveshark Scope

  • Search and replace on steroids: Do more with these sed commands

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.37 Rounds Out The DIB Engine

• Games

  • 3 Nice Blender Made Games for Linux

    Blender is known for its 3D creation capabilities worldwide and is widely used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications and games with cutting edge computer graphics. Quite a number of videos and animated movies have already been created using Blender and we have featured the very best of them before. But they are not alone, games are there too. Let’s find out the best games available for Linux made using Blender.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Big Bash Of Video Players On Gnome 3

    Big Bash Of Video Players On Gnome 3 is a lazy comparative study of Linux based video players , specifically those which are available on GNOME 3.2.1 , openSUSE 12.1.openSUSE 12.1 offers a large variety of video players based on various platforms like gstreamer , phonon , xine , mplayer etc : Most of the video player options can be installed through the addition of OSS , Non OSS , Update and Packman repositories in YaST.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Fuduntu : funny name but interesting distro launched version 2012.1

    • Fedora vs. openSUSE vs. CentOS: Which Distribution Should You Use? [Linux]

      Not too long ago I wrote a similar article about the top three distributions of the Debian side in the Linux family (Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint), but as a true Linux geek I would never want to forget the entire other side of the Linux family, probably best known as the “RPM family”.

      All of these Linux distributions use .rpm files as installable packages rather than the .deb files which belong to the Debian family. So, let’s get started!

    • Fedora Running Beefy Contest

      Máirín Duffy, head art team designer for Fedora, posted a strange message Friday afternoon. She’s seen a vision of the future and it was of Fedora mascot Beefy Miracle holding some sort of futuristic ray gun at a poor radioactive panda. What could this mean for the popular Linux distribution?

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu — Traitors of Linux, Open Source Software and The Community: Is Ubuntu Becoming Too Commercialized?

        Unfortunately these are similarities that I do not like. Ironically my choice to soon abandon Ubuntu was ultimately caused by the creation of their product they called Unity. It was the final push that tipped me over the edge. With over 700 various linux distributions to choose from, there is no reason for me to continue using a commercialized by-product of one of the most amazing free and open source operating systems ever created –Debian. My choice with considering Slackware is completely based on my desire to try something different during a pivotable point in my journey of learning the most as I can about linux.

      • Ubuntu in the Corporate

        Such a little thing – getting a thumbnail for your images, videos or office documents. In Windows, once a directory has been thumbnailed, it creates a hidden file “thumbs.db” in that directory, so that when other people visit the directory, there’s no need to recreate every thumbnail from scratch.

        In Ubuntu, however, there is. Every user stores their own version of thumbnails . At work, my .thumbnails directory is a little shy of 40Mb. If you multiply that by 1000 employees, you’ve just wasted 39.96Gb of data creating the same set of thumbnails 1000 times. Bandwidth, Disk I/O, wasted. Worse, if you make your staff’s home directories a network share, you’re now wasting 40Gb of storage across your home share.

Devices/Embedded

• Plug Computer takes on education with Marvell SMILE Plug micro server

  Marvell announced an education platform combining its Plug Computer, Arch Linux, and software developed in collaboration with Stanford University. The SMILE Plug micro server runs on a 2GHz Marvell Armada 300 processor, sets up a secure Wi-Fi cloud for up to 60 students, and provides a “Classroom 3.0″ connected, secure, interactive learning environment.

• Aruba Brings Wi-Fi to Wall Plates

  The typical Wi-Fi deployment today involves access points deployed in hallways or rooms as standalone boxes. As the move towards pervasive wireless access grows, so too have the demands on wireless infrastructure. That’s where Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN) is aiming to fill a gap with a new wall mountable access point.

• Raspberry Pi is About to be Served – Manufacturing Has Begun for the $35 Computer

  What do you feel like doing, going out for dinner or buying a computer? The computer’s probably cheaper. In a joyful moment for the the charity, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that as of “a couple of days” before January 10th, production has begun on their $35 Linux computer. The Raspberry Pi Model B is an ARM GNU/Linux Box with 256 MB memory, 700 MHz processing, HDMI port, and Blu-Ray video quality capabilities. According to the post by foundation spokesperson Liz Upton 10,000 of the Model B computers will be fully constructed in a manner of weeks. As stripped down as a computer can probably be, the Raspberry Pi Model B is little more than a circuit board that fits in the palm of the hand. Yet that tiny bare bones board holds the promise of cheap computing for all.

• Google TV 2.0 review, tweaks, and screenshots

  Google recently rebooted Google TV with the release of Google TV 2.0 based on Android 3.1 (Honeycomb). This detailed review introduces Google TV 2.0, demonstrates its features, apps, and flexible new user interface, and shows how to add customized folders and shortcuts to the homescreen for instant access to all your favorite apps and websites.

• oundation tips 2012 schedule, sends LinuxCon to San Die

  The drone control systems used to operate U.S. military drones appear to have made the switch to Linux, says Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, in a tweet.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android Design site brings UI designers up to speed on Ice Cream Sandwich

      Google launched an “Android Design” website that offers an in-depth style guide for Android 4.0 app developers. Explaining how to create apps for both smartphones and tablets across multiple vendors and devices, the guide gets down and dirty on details such as themes, notifications, typography, navigation, multi-pane layouts, and much more.

    • 5 Best Free Android UPnP Clients

      UPnP stands for Universal Plug and Play. It is a set of computer network protocols which enables devices on a home network to be aware of each other and access selected services. This collection of protocols with the appropriate software offers a very easy method of sharing media on your network as it features automatic discovery and supports zero-configuration.

      There are many devices that run UPnP audio visual servers. For example, a wide range of software exists for the Linux, Windows, and OS X operating systems that turn computers into media servers. Many NAS devices also have built-in UPnP media servers. We even see UPnP turning up in routers, audiophile hard disk players, and HD media players.

    • Google Asks Android App Devs to Design by the Book

      Now that Android has “taken the world by storm,” as AppsGeyser VP Eduardo Robles put it, Google apparently wants to tame the beast. It has launched a style guide — Android Design — in the hope of reining in app devs and encouraging a more uniform look and feel for Android products. “It’s only natural to bring out a tool like [Android Design] right now,” said Robles.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Intel’s educational PC gets dual cores, 12-hour battery

    Intel announced the fifth generation of its reference platform for education-focused portable PCs. The Classmate now features a dual-core Atom N2600 processor, delivering battery life of up to 12 hours, plus optional capacitive multitouch functionality, according to the company.

  • Ordered Aakash Tablet? Check Your Status Via Email

    The hottest selling Indian tablet Aakash is overwhelmed by the orders. There are thousands of buyers waiting for the delivery of their Aakash 2 tablets. The anxious customers are looking for the information about their order from various sources. Now the company behind Aakash has stepped up their efforts to help these customers.

  • Android 4.0 Confirmed for Archos G9 Tablets

    Archos is brand name that is quite popular and known all over the world. We all love them for their wide range of Android tablets. If you are familiar with their G9 Tablets or currently using one of them, then you would love to hear that Archos just confirmed an ICS update for G9 Line.

  • Genesi MX Smartbook Review

    Genesi currently offers two products with the EFIKA mx51 ARM board. They are the SmartTop and the SmartBook. I own one of their SmartBook models and today I would like to do a comprehensive overview of the device.

Video editing with Blender VSE: “It’s complicated”

Coming from Kino, Blender’s “Video Sequence Editor” is a huge step up. Most people don’t think of Blender when considering video editing tools, but in fact, Blender contains a very good one. This is not a separate application but an editing mode within the Blender application. It can work directly with animated scenes created within Blender or with video footage from other sources. Evaluating it is a little tricky because of this unique niche.

Perens: the FOSS fire still burns

The primary author of the Open Source Definition, Perens was in Melbourne today en route to Ballarat to attend the 13th Australian national Linux conference where he will be delivering the first keynote on Tuesday. The conference begins on Monday.

[...]

The enthusiasm is still there in 2012. Perens is wiser, older – “I don’t have so much hair now,” he laughs – but open source is still very much what drives him.

Events

• Linux Foundation tips 2012 schedule, sends LinuxCon to San Diego

  The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences. These include the Linux Kernel Summit, which will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.

• Linux Foundation tips 2012 schedule, sends LinuxCon to San Diego

  The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences, starting with the Android Builders Summit Feb. 13-14, co-located in Silicon Valley with the Embedded Linux Conference, Feb. 15-17. The Linux Kernel Summit will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.

• One Week To SCALE 10x Linux Event

  This will be the 10th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) that’s taking place in Los Angeles, California and is all about open-source and Linux. This year’s weekend event will range from talks about Python to MySQL, Git, Qt, and and even a Tux Paint demo. Keynotes include Greg DeKoenigsberg at Eucalyptus Systems (previously at Red Hat and known within the Fedora community) talking about “Amazon and the Future of the Open Cloud” and Selena Deckelmann talking about mistakes and downtime.

SaaS

• OpenStack Doesn’t Want Any Forks

  The notion of being able to fork a project is core to open source. It’s also potentially a bad thing in some cases as it can lead to fragmentation of a user base and compatibility issues.

  The OpenStack effort which is currently trying to figure out how to govern itself in a new OpenStack Foundation isn’t keen on forks. In a Friday Webinar talking about the goals of the new Foundation, Rackspace VP of Business & Corporate Development Mark Collier specifically took aim at the fork issue.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Ten nice Extensions for LibreOffice

  LibreOffice is an open source Office Suite, an excellent alternative to MS Office. If offers a number of features and the added functionalities in the form of extensions. Here are some of the useful extensions for LibreOffice.

BSD

• For a Free Linux Alternative, Try FreeBSD 9.0

  Linux may not yet enjoy the widespread recognition that Windows does, but there’s no denying its popularity on servers, its growing use on desktops, or its ubiquity in the mobile world in the form of Android.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Google To Go After Go-One In GCC 4.7 Compiler

  Google’s Go was originally announced in 2009 and reached a production status in 2010, but in 2012 only version 1.0 of the language is being readied. Go version 1 will be a stable, long-term release with no language or API changes. This forthcoming specification is described in this Google document.

  Ian Lance Taylor at Google has shared his desire of having Go v1 in GCC 4.7. Go was sent into GCC 4.6 already, but Google is just concerned about making sure this long-term version 1 support makes it into next release — GCC 4.7.

Public Services/Government

• ‘German cities following Munich’s open source example’

  Municipal administrations in Germany are starting to follow the example of the city of Munich, and increase their use of free and open source software, reports the Financial Times Deutschland on 3 January. “The demand for open source is growing – and not only at public administrations”, according the newspaper. It mentions the cities of Freiburg and Jena as examples of city administrations following Munich’s lead.

• Call for Leaner US Government

  One thing that reducing complexity should do is to cut the numbers of data-centres and IT organizations in government. This involves a lot of work but in the end more should be doable by fewer people and fewer computers. Probably more will be done with GNU/Linux and thin clients. Obama has already shown with whitehouse.gov that FLOSS works. Several departments have already deployed a lot of FLOSS and the overall plan for a more open government should call for open standards and FLOSS.

Openness/Sharing

• Robotic surgeons get open source boost

  The cost and complexity of commercial robot surgeons has meant slow penetration in the market and to only one player–Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci.

  But that could all change if researchers at the University of Washington (UW) carry out their plans to accelerate innovation in surgical robotics.

  UW researchers will do final testing and then ship their latest version of robots named Ravens to five universities, including Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The common goose

The rapid expansion of digital technologies, and opening up of new channels of communication and information, challenges notions of the ownership of ideas. Richard Hillesley investigates…

Finance

• Market Best Place for Fed’s AIG Bonds, Delaney Says

  Steven Delaney, an analyst at JMP Securities LLC, talks about a Wall Street Journal report, citing people familiar with the matter, that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. offered to buy a bundle of risky mortgage bonds that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York acquired in the 2008 bailout of American International Group Inc. Delaney, speaking with Betty Liu on Bloomberg Television’s “In the Loop,” also discusses the outlook for mortgage securities.

• Goldman Sachs Said to Offer Bid for New York Fed’s AIG Assets

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. approached the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with a bid for a block of the mortgage bonds assumed from American International Group Inc., prompting the central bank to weigh an auction of the debt, three people familiar with the matter said.

  The central bank may sell securities held by its Maiden Lane II vehicle with a face value of about $7 billion, said the people, who declined to be identified because the deliberations are private. New York-based Goldman Sachs may have sought the bonds for itself or clients, they said. Four or five dealers may be asked to assemble bids this month, they said.

• What Does Goldman Sachs Do For You?

  You may have noticed that the rehabilitation of Goldman Sachs is in full throttle. Its brand is coming back according to YouGov’s BrandIndex’s Buzz score. Goldman’s share price has been falling recently but Goldman never seems to go without clients. Goldman is being sued by a number of individuals and firms but that is just the cost of doing business and they have set aside billions of dollars to deal with that contingency.

  Adam Davidson of The New York Times is offering his bit to rehabilitate Wall Street and that includes Goldman Sachs. His take on Wall Street is that without Wall Street “The poor would stay poor;” “There would be no Middle Class;” and “Lots of awesome things would never happen.”

  He asks two questions: “How does Wall Street do this?” and “Is it still O.K. to hate Wall Street?”

Censorship

• European Internet Blocking Plans

• German Court: ISP Must Not Block Access To Foreign Sites, Even If They Are Illegal

  This follows a decision in Düsseldorf at the end of last year, where a judge had ruled that Vodafone and Telekom were not responsible for the content of Web sites, because they played no role in selecting material, and therefore should not be forced to block access. Moreover, the latest judgment can be used as a precedent in similar cases, according to the Der Spiegel report.

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Major changes To Take Place In The Internet In 2012

  The Internet is set to witness a phenomenal change in 2012 with 5 major changes under way, having the potential to modify Internet history like never before. A technical upgrade is going to happen from Internet Protocol version 4 to version 6 and key Internet infrastructure and operations contracts controlled by the U.S federal government are going to be re-bid.

• Are Canada’s Digital Laws Unconstitutional?

  One of the first Canadian digital-era laws was the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act, a model law created by the Uniform Law Conference of Canada in the late 1990s. The ULCC brings together officials from federal, provincial, and territorial governments to work on model laws that can be implemented in a similar manner across all Canadian jurisdictions.

  While a federal e-commerce law may have been preferable, the constitutional division of powers meant that it fell to the provinces to enact those laws.

DRM

• The Four Horsemen of the General Purpose Computing Apocalypse

  Cory Doctorow’s “keynote to the Chaos Computer Congress” and follow-up post (Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing) on BoingBoing raise the alarm about keeping the Internet and PC “free and open.” Doctorow makes excellent points and if you haven’t watched the keynote or read his essay, you should do so right away.

  I’m generally in agreement with Doctorow, but I’m not really sure that he goes quite far enough with Lockdown. Doctorow’s focus on the copyright war we’re facing with things like SOPA and PROTECT-IP is well warranted, but I’m not sure it covers everything.

• Microsoft ‘Trustworthy Computing’ Turns 10

  “Bill Gates fired off his famous Trustworthy Computing memo to Microsoft employees on Jan. 15, 2002, amid a series of high-profile attacks on Windows computers and browsers in the form of worms and viruses like Code Red and ‘Anna Kournikova.’ The onslaught forced Gates to declare a security emergency within Microsoft, and halt production while the company’s 8,500 software engineers sifted through millions of lines of source code to identify and fix vulnerabilities. The hiatus cost Microsoft $100 million. Today, the stakes are much higher. ‘TWC Next’ will include a focus on cloud services such as Azure, the company says.”

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • As SOPA/PIPA Becomes Toxic, Frantic Congress Test Runs Dropping DNS Blocking Provisions

    Well, well, well. It looks like some in DC are starting to get the message that there is real concern with SOPA/PIPA. The latest is that the fact that SOPA/PIPA support is becoming “toxic” is starting to make the press. In response to that, plus significant pressure from those within the government who are concerned about online security issues… the folks behind both SOPA/PIPA are doing some trial running of finding out how people would respond if they just completely dropped the DNS/site blocking aspects from the two bills. The goal is to get the tech industry to “stop opposing” the bills (if not actually support them). Clearly, the opposition is having a pretty big impact, and we’re hearing that some of the “pressure” to “fix” these bills is coming from pretty high places. Separately, even with the House Oversight Committee hearings scheduled for next Wednesday, it sounds like Lamar Smith has decided he wants to restart the SOPA markup on the same day (perhaps with a new version of SOPA… sans DNS/site blocking).

  • Don’t Be Fooled: Leahy Is NOT Removing DNS Blocking Provisions, Merely Delaying Them

  • Lamar Smith Follows Leahy’s Steps With Plans To Delay DNS Implementation In SOPA

  • White House Comes Out Against The Approach In SOPA/PIPA In Response To Online Petition

  • Raging Grannies Come Out Against SOPA/PIPA

  • Free Culture Pitfall: Bait-and-Switch Free Licensing

    Last year, as I was checking the licensing and attribution on the tracks in my soundtrack library for Lunatics, I came across a bizarre and rather disturbing practice: bait and switch licensing as a ploy to sell music. This is a truly weird idea, if you understand what a free-license means, and it’s deeply unethical, but here’s what I think is going on: the artist (or more likely, some intermediary, such as a small record label) gets the idea of using a “free” loss-leader to try to draw people into buying a commercial/proprietary album. This is okay in itself, but the problem lies in that confusing word, “free”.

  • My SOPA Prophecy Has Come Half-True

    Dammit, this is frustrating. You see how prophecy works? It’s just like in the stories, where you make a wish to a genie and you wish to be a millionaire, and then you’re buried in piles of worthless Zimbabwe currency that’s worth about $1.88 American, and the genie goes, “Oooooh, you meant in DOLLARS! Well, sorry, you already spent your wish.”

    A while ago last December, I spake the Prophecy “SOPA shall not pass”. And I promised to follow up on that, which I’m doing now.

    It came half-true: Lamar Smith has now cut the DNS-blocking part from the SOPA bill. This was the part that made the bill so Draconian and had everybody in such an uproar. So, without the Gestapo-like powers to black out millions of websites at the fingertips of the Black Hand of the MPAA/RIAA, SOPA now becomes another toothless, gummy, mushy bill that kinda-sorta makes online piracy a no-no, just like twenty other laws we already have.

    But they’re still trying to pass SOPA anyway.

  • Obama Administration Responds to We the People Petitions on SOPA and Online Piracy

  • Righthaven complains about ‘scorched-earth’ efforts to enforce judgments

  • Libraries Are The Best Counter To Piracy… So Of Course Publishers Are Trying To Limit Them

    Interesting blog post by Peter Brantley over at Publishers’ Weekly last week, mocking the big publishers for supporting SOPA/PIPA, despite the fact that it (1) won’t stop much, if any, infringement, but (2) will have massive unintended consequences. The first half of the post focuses on SOPA/PIPA and uses the recent Cory Doctorow talk we wrote about to highlight how this is yet another example of old line content businesses not understanding how the technology works.

  • Sega Gets It Right About SOPA: It’s Time For A Hard Reset On Copyright Law & Congress

    With the news that the ESA supports SOPA, thus representing all its member companies on the matter, many gamers have taken to writing to ESA member companies asking for their input on the matter and especially asking them to oppose the legislation. As Kotaku reports, one such gamer has received word back from Sega after writing a very nicely worded letter outlining his concerns over SOPA.

  • US Can Extradite UK Student For Copyright Infringement, Despite Site Being Legal In The UK

    Want to understand just how insane things may get under SOPA/PIPA? Just take a look at what’s already happening under today’s laws. Back in 2010, one of the first websites that Homeland Security’s ICE (Immigrations & Customs Enforcement) group seized was TVShack.net. TVShack was a site that collected links to TV shows. Certainly, many of those shows were likely to be infringing — but TVShack did not host the content at all, it merely linked to it. Richard O’Dwyer, the guy who ran the site, was a student building an interesting project over in the UK. However, the US Department of Justice decided that he was not only a hardened criminal, but one who needed to be tried on US soil. Thus, it began extradition procedures. Even worse, nearly identical sites in the UK had already been found legal multiple times — with the court noting that having links to some infringing content was certainly not criminal copyright infringement. That makes things even more ridiculous, because extradition is only supposed to be allowed for activities that are criminal in both the US and the UK.