11.27.10

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Linux touchscreen computer runs on dual-core Atom

  Philadelphia-area start-up Telikin has started taking orders for a “crash-resistant” computer with an 18.6-inch touchscreen and a custom Linux stack aimed at computer novices. Apparently based on the MSI Wind Top AE1920 all-in-one PC, the $700 Telikin computer incorporates a dual-core 1.8GHz CPU, 2GB of SDRAM, a 320GB hard disk drive, and four USB drives.

• Server

  • Another step forward for ARM-based servers?

  • 10 Free Server Tools Your Organization Needs

    This list of 10 free, essential tools is an amalgam of tools for all sizes of companies and networks. The range of tools covered here are generally cross-platform (i.e., they run on multiple OSes) but all are extremely useful to the system administrator, network administrator and first-level support personnel. While all of these tools are free to download and use in your network without payment of any kind to their developers or maintainers, not all are open source. The 10 essential tools listed here, in no particular order, are from various sources and represent the very best in tools currently used in large and small enterprises alike.

• Kernel Space

  • Community Notebook: Kernel News

• Applications

  • FocusWriter is all writing, no distractions

    It’s November, and all around the world aspiring novelists (including this reporter) have turned their attention to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). In the spirit of choosing the right tools for the job, I decided to look for an application more suited to fiction than my trusty Vim, and found FocusWriter. It’s certainly not a replacement for Vim, but it’s a suitable word processor for prose.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Set up Solaris 11 Express PV Guest at Xen 4.0.1 (2.6.32.26 pvops) Dom0 on top of F14

    • Create your Web database applications with DaDaBIK

    • How to compile a Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) kernel with sched: automated per tty task groups kernel patch

    • Broken RAID5 you said? Don’t use Java anymore. Go with python instead!

    • Implementing the Singleton Pattern in PHP 5

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE’s Marble Team Holds First Contributor Sprint

      The first Developer Conference for the Free Software Virtual Globe Marble ended successfully on November 7. Almost a dozen developers from the Marble community (the “Marbleheads”) met for a weekend sprint at the basysKom office in Nuremberg.

    • KDE and Ovi Hold First Collaborative Sprint

      The weekend before Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, Nokia invited thirteen members of the KDE community to get together in their offices in that same city for a developer sprint. The topic was Ovi and KDE, specifically how they can work together to widen adoption for both communities, both from a software development perspective and from a purely collaborative effort perspective. The developers were also invited to the main Qt Developer Days (DevDays) event too.

    • A week of post-beta bug squashing!

      In January the KDE community is set to ship major new versions of the Plasma workspaces, the KDE applications and the KDE development frameworks. As usual, a series of beta versions and release candidates is released in the months leading up to the release day, with the purpose of letting users test the changes in the upcoming versions and help us find and fix bugs and regressions.

    • KDE releases openCloud web-based storage app update

      The KDE project has announced the release of version 1.1 of ownCloud, an open, web-based storage application which runs on a user’s personal server. According to KDE contributor and openCloud founder Frank Karlitschek, thanks to a growing development team, the 1.1 update includes a variety of bug fixes, as well as new features.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Endian 2.4.1

    • pQui 3.1

    • Untangle 8.0 is available!

    • BackTrack 4 R2 Released!

    • Chakra 0.2.4

    • Clonezilla 1.2.6-45

    • Salix Xfce 13.1.2 images are released!

      We are happy to announce the immediate availability of the collection of Salix Xfce 13.1.2 iso images. These include both 32-bit and 64-bit standard installation images, as well as a 32-bit live image, that can be used with an optical disk or a usb drive. Both standard and live images can be used for installing Salix Xfce to your harddrive, using a text-mode or a graphical installer respectively. As with all Salix releases, installation can be performed in one of three different modes, “full”, “basic” and “core”. The live image includes, among others, a persistence wizard, that will let the user keep changes, including extra installed packages, personalization etc, between different live sessions. LiveClone is another tool specific to the live image; using it users will be able to easily roll their own custom version of the Salix Xfce Live, that they will be able to install directly to a usb drive or create a new iso image for burning to a CD. These custom images will have all the features the official live image has, including the ability to install the customized system to a harddrive!

    • [IPFire] Core Update 42

      Today we are going to release Core 42 which is a bugfix release and we strongly recommend to install this as soon as possible.

    • Rocks v5.4 (Maverick) is released for Linux on the i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures

      Rocks v5.4 (Maverick) is released for Linux on the i386 and x86_64 CPU architectures.

    • ZevenOS 3.0 release announcement

      Besides that ZevenOS 3.0 also has a lot of new stuff in the Desktop area.
      Thunar has gained a new contextsensitive entry to convert images.
      The deskbar was updated to have a freedesktop.org compliant dynamic menu which is editable with standard tools just like alacarte. Besides that the deskbar gained a lot of contextual menus which allow you to have access to commonly used actions, like change time & date or mute the volume. The quicklaunch items now also have a context menu which allows you to quickly access files & folder bookmarks, webbrowser bookmarks mediaplayer actions and e-mail creation. The deskbar also gained a speed and ressource improvement.

    • Elastix 2.0.3

    • Macpup 511

      Macpup 511 is the latest and is based on puppylinux 5.1.1,”Lucid Puppy”, An official woof build of puppy Linux that is binary-compatible with Ubuntu Lucid Lynx packages.MP511 contains all the apps from Lucid puppy .Extra apps like Firefox, Opera or Gimp are available for easy download from the Quickpet App on the ibar or the Puppy Package Manager.MP511 also includes the Enlightenment E17 window manager. The EFL libraries version 1.0.0 Beta and E17 version 52995 where compiled and installed from source..Please note that not all the options in the E17 system shutdown menu work with puppy linux.That is why the exit menu was added.This menu will also allow you to change window managers to Jwm or Icewm.

    • Unite17_2010_02

      Few sentences of the changes:

      * Brand-new exterior and interior, because I took the liberty of use the testing repo’s.
      * The E17 at least not alpha, but beta . Of course, there are still some annoying bugs, such as that if you want to start an application, which would need administrator rights, something incomprehensible error message we see, that stops the program starts. However, just write in the Sakura (terminal emulator) the smart-root –gui command, and simply launch the package installer or Control Center with the drakconf command, if you have the problem. The Live installer works fine. Of course, this is a non-permanent nature of the error occurs, but often.

    • Announcing Jibbed 5.1

      And again it’s NetBSD time. The long awaited new version of the LiveCD has finally arrived. It is freshly built from the NetBSD 5.1 sources, which is the first feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 branch. It includes many bugfixes and contains the latest packages from pkgsrc. As always, it uses Xorg from base and the xfce4 window manager.

    • VortexBox 1.6 released

      We are pleased to announce the release of VortexBox 1.6. This release has Fedora 14, 4K sector driver support, and support for USB 2 and 192/24 USB DACs. The main goal of this release was to get VortexBox on a more current release of Fedora. This has many benefits including faster boot time, faster files transfers, and better hardware compatibility.

    • Announcing NetBSD 5.1

      The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 5.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 5.1 is the first feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.

    • NexentaStor Community Edition 3.0.4 released

      NexentaStor Community Edition 3.0.4 is now available. The major change is inclusion of many fixes to OpenSolaris b134 from later releases, and appliance enhancements.

  • Debian Family

    • Goodbye Fedora, welcome back Debian, Part 1

      After Fedora 14 proved a non-starter on this Lenovo, I could have gone straight to Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10. But I wanted to get back to Debian, a fast, stable (even though Squeeze isn’t technically Stable, capital “S,” it’s plenty stable, small “s.”)

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • 6 Things to Look Forward for in Upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

        The next major Ubuntu release cycle is slowly coming alive. Ubuntu 11.04 codenamed Natty Narwhal is going to feature some of Ubuntu’s most significant changes ever. All in all, Ubuntu 11.04 is going to be *the* most important release ever as far as Canonical is concerned. Now, lets see what makes this upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal release special.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android: Too Much of a Good Thing?

        Dear Vendors, please don’t try to sell more phones by adding proprietary software on top of Android. If you add software, contribute it back to the community. If you want to sell more phones, make better phones than your competition. (Please!)

      • NFC heads for Android and new commerce network

        Verizon Wireless, AT&T, and T-Mobile announced a new “Isis” venture that will roll out a mobile commerce network based on smartphones embedded with near field communications (NFC) networking chips. Isis supporters include Apple and Nokia, as well as Google, which revealed this week that Android 2.3 will add support for short-range NFC wireless communications.

      • Verizon ships faster, global roaming version of Droid 2

        Verizon Wireless has begun selling a new version of the Droid 2 Android slider with a faster 1.2GHz processor and quad-band GSM global roaming. Otherwise identical to the previous Droid 2, the Motorola Droid 2 Global is also said to offer an improved keyboard and lower battery life.

  • Sub-notebooks

    • Unlocked Palm Pre 2 available in U.S.

      An unlocked version of Hewlett-Packard’s Palm Pre 2 smartphone is now available in the U.S. via Palm.com and HP’s SMB channels for $449. The upgraded 1GHz Pre 2 runs the new version 2.0 of the Linux-based WebOS operating system.

  • Tablets

    • Acer unveils Android smartphone, two Android tablets

      Acer announced three Android tablets due in April 2011, as well as a “Clear-Fi” media-streaming service and an “Alive” app store. The Android tablets include a Dell Streak-like 4.8-inch, telephony-enabled “smartphone” model with 1024 × 480 resolution, a dual-core, seven-inch, 1280 × 800 tablet, and a 10.1 inch model with 1080p video playback.

    • Acer Puts Its Tablet Cards on the Table

      Acer on Tuesday entered the tablet PC market, announcing that it will launch two Android tablets and a third running Windows 7 in early 2011.

    • Android tablets forecast to grab 15 percent share in 2011

      Tablet computers based on Android will comprise 15 percent of the worldwide market in 2011, nibbling at Apple’s iPad share similar to the way Android smartphones gained on the iPhone. That’s the prediction from IMS Research, which adds that by 2015, Android tablets will have garnered 28 percent of the market.

    • Android-powered color e-reader ships ahead of schedule

      The Android-based Nook Color offers a seven-inch display, 8GB of storage space expandable through a microSD slot, Wi-Fi capability, Web surfing, and the option to share selected passages from e-books via Facebook and Twitter.

    • Android ties iOS in ad impressions

      Android now matches Apple’s iOS in ad impressions, with each mobile operating system garnering 37 percent, says Millennial Media. Meanwhile, fellow mobile analytics firm Chitika estimates that the original Motorola Droid has the highest mobile traffic in the U.S. among Android devices at 19 percent, followed by the HTC Evo 4G and Droid X.

Free Software/Open Source

• SaaS

  • Observation: Cloud computing is nothing new

    Cloud computing is not only the latest buzz term, it might well be the model of computing that powers the 21st century. However, it’s easy to forget that personal computing, in which each user has a standalone system that can operate without a network, is itself a relatively new approach.

    The first practical computers were enormous behemoths composed of clicking resistors and vacuum tubes. Much of the early development of these multi-ton monsters had been spurred by the allied code-breaking effort during World War II. For the first thirty years of the history of general purpose computers, computer time was the exclusive privilege of large institutions and governments.

• Healthcare

  • Wendell Potter: “My Apologies to Michael Moore and the Health Insurance Industry”

    APCO Worldwide, the PR firm that operated the front group for insurers during the summer of 2007, was outraged — outraged, I tell you — that I wrote in the book that the raison d’être for Health Care America was to disseminate the insurance industry’s talking points as part of a multi-pronged, fear-mongering campaign against Moore and his movie. An APCO executive told a reporter who had reviewed the book that I was guilty of one of the deceptive PR tactics I condemned: the selective disclosure of information to manipulate public opinion.

• Programming

  • The Languages of Hacker News

    Two weeks ago, iHackerNews.com made available a Hacker News related dataset via bittorrent. For those of you unfamiliar with Hacker News, it’s a portal for developers to discuss relevant items of interest run by Paul Graham’s Y Combinator. Hacker News may not be considered representative of developers broadly, but it is generally well trafficked by alpha geek types, and thus conclusions drawn from it have predictive value.

    The dataset that was made available included a little better than 1.7M items from Hacker News in a basic XML structure. Believing that this represented collective wisdom of a sort, I collected the set shortly after it was made available, which proved to be shortly before it was taken down.

  • Java 4-Ever Trailer

Leftovers

• Father says his faith cost his custody

  An Anderson father says that because he professed religious doubt in a custody hearing, a judge took his children from him.

  Craig Scarberry, 29, this month was stripped of joint custody of his three children, Kaelyn, 7; William, 6, and Ayvah, 4, because he changed his religion from Christian to agnostic.

• Pigford funding passes out of Senate

  On Friday, the Senate passed funding approval for the $1.25 billion Pigford settlement announced last February. The settlement – aimed at putting to bed a class-action brought by black farmers who claim long-time discrimination by the USDA — was brokered following nearly a decade of legal wrangling.

• Health/Nutrition

  • Legal doubts over EU plans to give states choice on whether to grow GM

    Europe’s plans to let countries choose for themselves whether to grow or ban GM crops would be unacceptable under EU and probably international law, says official legal advice offered to member state governments and leaked to the Guardian.

    The advice is highly embarrassing for the European commission (EC) which has long advocated more openness by member states about the technology. The EC appeared to make a major concession in July when it told the 27 member states that they could decide for themselves.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • New Orleans police on trial over killing in chaos following Hurricane Katrina

    There’s not much mystery about how Henry Glover ended up a charred corpse in a burned-out car in the heart of New Orleans. One police officer has admitted to shooting the young black man. Another has confessed to throwing flares into the car where Glover lay covered in blood on the back seat. He then put a couple of shots through the window as the vehicle was consumed by fire. The officer has since called that “a very bad decision”.

  • Security researcher: I keep getting detained by feds

    A security researcher who specializes in online privacy had his laptop and cell phones temporarily seized after returning to the U.S. on an international flight last night.

    Moxie Marlinspike told CNET in an interview today that he had been detained and questioned after an international flight last week and appears to be on a federal “watch list” for domestic flights too but doesn’t know why.

    Asked if he is a volunteer with WikiLeaks, a whistleblower Web site that the U.S. government is seeking to shut down for publishing classified Afghan war files, Marlinspike said: “Definitely not. If anything, I’m slightly critical of WikiLeaks. I question the efficacy of that project.”

  • Israeli army condemns publication of Gaza ‘war criminals’

    Israel’s military today condemned the publication of the names and photographs of 200 Israeli soldiers on a website that labelled them war criminals.

    The site also published the home addresses and ID numbers of many of the Israelis. They included senior commanders and low-ranking soldiers whom the site claimed took part in the three-week offensive in Gaza that began in December 2008. The accuracy of the published details could not be confirmed.

  • Dance Troupe Mistaken for Terrorists

    On November 17th, the Lincoln Tunnel was closed for nearly an hour while police chased a group of people dressed in camouflage who were seen running through the tunnel. Officers of the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force as well as armed Port Authority police sped after the suspects, finally catching them as they neared the Manhattan end of the tunnel and forcing them to their knees at gunpoint.

    Turned out the dramatic operation had protected New York from the onslaught of eight 16-year-old dancers who were trying to make it to a TV appearance.

  • We doctors must protect all victims of torture and malpractice

    In his analysis of the videos revealing the brutal interrogation of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers, Dr Brian Fine of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture says: “All allegations of torture and other ill-treatment should be fully investigated and anyone found to be responsible brought to justice” (Important step toward the truth, 6 November). But what if those responsible include his professional colleagues and mine?

    The accompanying news article raises precisely this concern, stating that “almost all the former inmates complain that they were severely beaten when arrested … On arrival at a British base, most of the inmates say that they were photographed and examined by a military doctor who would take no interest in their injuries” (Abuse claims lift cloak of secrecy over Britain’s Iraq interrogation base, 6 November).

  • Student protests: school’s out across the UK as children take to the streets

    Tens of thousands of students and school pupils walked out of class, marched, and occupied buildings around the country in the second day of mass action within a fortnight to protest at education cuts and higher tuition fees.

    Amid more than a dozen protests, estimated by some to involve up to 130,000 students, there were isolated incidents of violence and skirmishes with police, mostly in central London.

  • TSA Abuses, Dental X-Rays, Children — and How to Lie About Radiation

    This topic should be of concern to everyone — you should read the article. It’s of special note if you have children, since they are particularly sensitive to radiation.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • UN scientists say emission pledges fall well short of halting climate change

    UN research shows that the pledges and promises made last year by 80 countries to reduce climate change emissions fall well short of what is needed to hold the global temperature rise to 2C and avoid the worst consequences of global warming.

    The findings by 30 leading scientists suggest that if countries do everything they have promised, there will still be a 5bn tonne gap per year between their ambition and what the science says is needed. This gap, said the UN, is the equivalent of the emissions released by all the world’s vehicles in a year. Many countries have committed themselves to holding temperature rises to no more than 2C (3.6F) by 2080 but to achieve this global emissions must be reduced from 56bn tonnes annually today to 44bn tonnes by 2020.

  • World’s first tiger summit ends with £330m pledged amid lingering doubts

    The high-profile conservation conference called by Russian president Vladimir Putin and World Bank chief Robert Zoellick mobilised political, financial and celebrity support behind a goal of doubling the number of wild tigers by 2022.

  • Section of Gulf of Mexico closed to shrimpers after tar balls found

    The tar balls are being analysed by the US Coast Guard to determine if they are from the catastrophic BP oil spill.

• Finance

  • Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners

    Throughout the mounting catastrophe, however, many Americans have been slow to comprehend the true nature of the mortgage disaster. They seemed to have grasped just two things about the crisis: One, a lot of people are getting their houses foreclosed on. Two, some of the banks doing the foreclosing seem to have misplaced their paperwork.

  • Germany aims to take Europe’s reins amid eurozone’s woes

    Autumn, Berlin, 2013 and Angela Merkel is anxiously eyeing a third term as German chancellor. The Germans are fed up with Europe. They’re used to being the paymaster, but there are limits to their largesse.

    The Greeks, the Irish, the Portuguese, maybe even the Spanish, have pushed those limits to breaking point through reckless spending, feckless policy–making and then asking the Germans to write them a large cheque.

  • Demand overwhelms program to prevent homelessness

    In rural communities and urban areas alike, one of the least expensive and most unheralded new initiatives of the stimulus bill is quietly saving hundreds of thousands of Americans from homelessness.

    Now housing advocates want Congress to boost the program’s $1.5 billion funding as the vast need for more assistance becomes evident nationwide.

  • Don’t bail out Ireland, free it

    Britain has just promised £7bn towards a €90bn package aimed at rescuing Ireland’s economy. But the bailout has not worked. Instead, we are sinking billions into a temporary rescue of the euro that will prolong Ireland’s economic misery. So we should change course and prepare to offer a dramatically different solution – help Ireland decouple from the euro and allow the country to default on its debts.

  • Belgium joins financial markets’ hit list

    Hold the moules et frites: Belgium has joined Portugal, Spain and Italy on the hit list of countries that may be heading for financial crisis.

  • Irish austerity plan to save €15bn

    More than 24,000 jobs will be cut, taxes raised and welfare payments reduced in plan announced by Brian Cowen

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Cigarette Giants in Global Fight on Tighter Rules

    As sales to developing nations become ever more important to giant tobacco companies, they are stepping up efforts around the world to fight tough restrictions on the marketing of cigarettes.

    Companies like Philip Morris International and British American Tobacco are contesting limits on ads in Britain, bigger health warnings in South America and higher cigarette taxes in the Philippines and Mexico. They are also spending billions on lobbying and marketing campaigns in Africa and Asia, and in one case provided undisclosed financing for TV commercials in Australia.

• Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

  • Chinese dissident plans empty chair protest for Nobel peace prize ceremony

    A Chinese veteran of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 is acting as a go-between in preparations for next month’s controversial Nobel peace prize award ceremony in Oslo.

    The Chinese government reacted furiously to the choice of the dissident Liu Xiaobo as this year’s recipient of the prize and is pressuring other countries to boycott the event. Liu is serving an 11-year prison sentence for “inciting the subversion of state power” by publishing pro-democracy tracts. However, Yang Jianli, now a Harvard-based campaigner for democracy and a friend of Liu and his wife, Liu Xia – currently under house arrest – believes that his empty chair on 10 December will send a message more powerful than any speech or slogan. Yang was asked by Liu Xia on 15 October to work with the Nobel committee to prepare the ceremony.

  • Pakistani woman facing death for blasphemy may be pardoned

  • Life of woman sentenced to death by stoning could be spared

  • The ‘Fix.’ Top FBI Officials Push Silicon Valley Execs to Embrace Internet Wiretaps

    In a further sign that Barack Obama’s faux “progressive” regime will soon seek broad new Executive Branch power, The New York Times disclosed last week that FBI chief and cover-up specialist extraordinaire, Robert S. Mueller III, “traveled to Silicon Valley on Tuesday to meet with top executives of several technology firms about a proposal to make it easier to wiretap Internet users.”

    Times’ journalist Charlie Savage reported that Mueller and the Bureau’s chief counsel, Valerie Caproni, “were scheduled to meet with senior managers of several major companies, including Google and Facebook, according to several people familiar with the discussions.”