07.07.11

Contents

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

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • Of Operating Systems and Oil Companies

    The bill often comes due with the same inflated price tag. Computer repair shops more and more choose scorched earth methods to fix an infected or broken system. Being a person who partially makes their living from the same pain, it is much, much cheaper to recover data and reinstall than it is to untangle the tentacles of a rootkit or sophisticated virus from the registry.

    Even when things are running smoothly, the Windows user pays for the “convenience” by updating virus software, tolerating Windows updates and suffering sluggish behavior from a system that is six months or longer installed.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux 3.0-rc6

    And quite frankly, Christoph Hellwig has now _twice_ said good things about that driver, which is pretty unusual. It might mean that the driver is great. Of course, it’s way more likely that space aliens are secretly testing their happy drugs on Christoph. Or maybe he’s just naturally mellowing.

  • Could you do Linus “Linux” Torvalds job?

    At $500 US through July 8th and $600 thereafter, that’s a nice discount. Student Registration is $100. Student attendees will be required to show a valid student id at registration. LinuxCon will be held in Vancouver, B.C. on August 17-19, 2011 It will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Linux. Besides a host of far more important Linux and open-source movers and shakers, I’ll be speaking at the conference as well.

  • PCIe, power management, and problematic BIOSes

  • Graphics Stack

    • Nouveau Driver Power Management Against The NVIDIA Blob

      Following last week’s completion of the Radeon driver power management tests against the AMD Catalyst driver, now it is time to turn the tables on NVIDIA. In this article are some power consumption and thermal tests when comparing the latest open-source “Nouveau” driver code against NVIDIA’s closed-source proprietary driver.

      Testing went nearly the same as last week’s Radeon driver power management test. The Watts Up Pro USB power meter was monitoring the system’s power consumption, which was being automatically logged by the Phoronix Test Suite. Also monitored at the same time by the Phoronix Test Suite was the CPU usage and GPU temperature.

• Applications

  • Geeqie Image Viewer Geeks Out on Features

    You wouldn’t use a word processing program to carry on an IM chat, and you shouldn’t rely on an image viewer to handle graphic-intense image editing, collection management and photo album maintenance. That is why you need a quick and handy image viewing app like Geeqie to supplement the image manipulation toolboxes found in full-fledged image editor programs.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to create a simple invoice using Libre Office in Ubuntu.

    • Safer Access without Passwords

    • How To Set Up And Integrate An Ubuntu 10.04 LTSPv5 Server Into A Windows 2008 Active Directory Domain

  • Games

    • Suite of educational games for children – Childsplay

      Childsplay is a collection of educational activities for young children and runs on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
      Childsplay can be used at home, kindergartens and pre-schools. Childsplay is a fun and save way to let young children use the computer and at the same time teach them a little math, letters of the alphabets, spelling, eye-hand coordination etc.

    • Interview with Keith Poole from Desura Part 3

    • 10 Popular Real Time Strategy(RTS) Games for Linux

      Except for some really casual games for Linux and the best of paid games for Linux collection, games for Linux and Ubuntu is a category we haven’t yet really covered here at all. That is going to change from now on. Here is a quick list of 10 real time strategy(RTS) games for Linux(mostly open-source) in no particular order. Please keep in mind that, I haven’t tried them all by myself and many of the games are in the list because of the good reviews they received from users elsewhere. So here they are, read on.

    • A Linux Port is in Works for Action Game ‘Garshasp’

    • ‘No Time To Explain’, New Indie Game Coming Soon to Linux

      New Indie platformer No Time To Explain will come soon to Linux. Developed by Tiny Build Games, No Time To explain has received great response on their their Kickstarter funding initiative with more than 2,000 backers for the game. As much as $26K has been raised for the game though the initial target was 7K only.

    • 18 Extra Hot Linux Commercial Games (Part 1 of 3)

      One of the things we really want to witness is Linux making a significant penetration in the desktop market share. Whilst most supercomputers use the Linux platform, it is lamentable that the vast majority of desktops continue to run Microsoft Windows. Current surveys put Linux’s desktop share at a miniscule 1-2%. Yet modern Linux distributions offer so much for the typical computer user with an unparalleled range of open source software, combined with shining desktop environments that make the operating system extremely user friendly.

• Desktop Environments

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME 3 May not Be Designed for You.

      Since Fedora released GNOME 3, there has been lots of bickering, like when everybody released KDE 4. (Ubuntu gave up on GNOME and went for “Unity,” which is, in short, built on GNOME 3 but with a different user interface).

    • New GNOME haz no friends

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • Fusion 14.1

    • GParted 0.8.1-5

    • Linux Deepin 11.06 正式版发布

    • Clonezilla 1.2.9-12

    • ArtistX 1.1

    • Parted Magic 6.3

      This release fixes a few obscure typos and bugs in some of our scripts. Pburn and Pfilesearch have been added for testing. There are no menu entires yet, so run “pburn” from the command line. If there are any Puppy fans out there that can help us getting these to work as well as they do on Puppy, that would be awesome. If they work okay, then we can add them to the menu in 6.4.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Eugeni Dodonov Sails Away, Quits Mandriva

      There is a community. Hackers hack and take flak. Artists create beauty. Managers manage. Bloggers write and commenters comment. Names become familiar. Personalities began to emerge. Friendships form, rivalries rear, and animosities appear.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Centos 6.0 will be released in the next few hours

      According to Centos’ QAweb Blog, since July 2nd the ISO images of Centos 6.0 Final had been composed and built to be pushed to the staging machine which would then start syncing out to the internal centos.org mirror.

      Yesterday the os/ and isos/ tree had been finally synced out to the internal mirror servers. The updates/ tree were also signed. Since a few things have been fixed, the update should be on the way to the QA machines and synced out to the internal mirrors. So it is ready to be opened to public mirrors in a few hours.

    • Red Hat Previews JBoss Application Server 7

      Red Hat’s JBoss middleware division is now previewing the next generation of its Java middleware. JBoss AS 7 (Application Server) is currently in beta, providing developers and enterprise with an opportunity to see the future of Red Hat’s middleware server technology.

  • Debian Family

    • Get to Know Debian Goodies

      If you work with Debian-based systems, you probably know the basics of working with dpkg and APT’s tools. But there’s much more available. To find out which packages have release-critical bugs, hog the most disk space or still use older versions of files that have been upgraded, you want Debian Goodies.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Xubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal review – Struggling

            A great fan of Xfce-flavored desktops, I am not. Xubuntu, specifically? Well, it has never really struck me as good as its brethren, the Gnome- and KDE-based desktops. However, once in a while, a refresh of bias and opinion is necessary. My last encounter with Xubuntu was back in 2009, almost two years back, a century-worth of time in the Linux frame of reference. So let’s perform another Dedoimedo transformation.

          • Seven Months of Bodhi Linux in Pictures

            Bodhi Linux is still a fairly young project. We gained a good bit of recognition for providing a usable Enlightenment desktop while many others still do not (if they offer one at all). We started back in just November of last year, but the project has matured a good deal in just this short bit of time. The following are screen shots (and some history) from the nine developmental and two stable releases we have had during the last seven months.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Cars: The Next Big Platform Opportunity for Linux?

    If you cycled the clock back a few years, you would find that most people who were enthusiastic about Linux tended to debate its prospects as a desktop operating system. Fast-forward to today, and it’s clear that Linux is finding many of its biggest opportunities at the server level, in embedded Linux deployments, and in other scenarios that lie outside the desktop computing arena. There are more and more signs that the next frontier for Linux may be in cars, as evidenced by Toyota’s decision to join the Linux Foundation as a Gold member.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • GNU/Linux is out Java/Linux is in.

        Why has Java/Linux become so popular? Quite simply because it is being marketed under a single common name. Android. It is not seen as a hobbyist operating system. It is not seen as something done by rebels without a cause. It is recognised as a commercially viable operating system to add value to manufacturers products. In short it has the respect and recognition which GNU/Linux has never been able to achieve. It has become a household name. You ask anyone what Android is and they will be able to tell you. It is being mentioned specifically in television adverts. It is being describe as a feature in manufactured products. That has never been done for GNU/Linux to the extent is being done for Android.

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Google, Virgin America partner to push ChromeBooks, free WiFi in the clouds (the real ones)

      As part of the deal, business travelers can try out a ChromeBook on select flights from San Francisco, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Boston and Chicago at no cost. Interested flyers can access a ChromeBook at departing gates at those airport’s Chrome Kiosks and test it out — as well as Virgin’s free WiFi — on their flights free of charge.

Free Software/Open Source

• Web Browsers

  • The future of PDF is JavaScript?

    Is there anything that JavaScript can’t do?

    The new Mozilla sponsored pdf.js effort is all about using JavaScript as a the mechanism by which a PDF file is rendered and displayed in the browser.

  • Mozilla

    • Ubuntu 11.10 Uses Thunderbird 5 as Default Mail Client

    • Debian Mozilla team creates a Release archive for Iceweasel

• SaaS

  • Cloudera Unveils Industry’s First Full Lifecycle Management and Automated Security Solution for Apache Hadoop Deployments

  • Karmasphere Announces the First “Hadoop Developer Virtual Appliance”

  • Introducing Platfora – Putting a New Face on Hadoop

  • Platform Computing Announces Commercial Support for Apache Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

  • MapR Technologies Announces Availability of the Industry’s Easiest, Fastest and Most Dependable Distribution for Apache Hadoop

• Databases

  • MongoDB is the New MySQL

    Not because MongoDB is a replacement, as Joseph Ritchey argues in his piece “MongoDB is the New MySQL.”

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • OpenOffice – splits and pirouettes

    The splits and controversies around LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org have highlighted a number of issues concerning the licensing and corporate governance of open source projects and communities.

  • Getting the new MS fonts in LibreOffice – or rather, forget about it

• CMS

  • WordPress 3.2 gets a dose of Zen

    From the ‘Freshly Pressed Open Source Goodness’ Files:

    WordPress 3.2 is now out (officially announced on July 4th), a little it more than four months after 3.1 came out.

    The big deal this time around is the new zen approach to a minimalist user interface when writing content. It’s a great idea.

• Semi-Open Source

  • The rise, fall and reality of commercial open source

    In both cases, there are reasons and incentives for ‘going closed,’ so to speak, but it is the true open source efforts that elicit true community benefits: collaboration, transparency, speed, flexibility, security and more. So while open source as a term or identifier may not be what matters most to vendors or customers, there is no question open source is key to the business and future of many, if not most vendors in cloud and mobile computing. Ask Puppet Labs or Chef sponsor Opscode whether open source matters to their customers and their business.

  • Talend MDM Stretches Beyond 100 Million Master Record Milestone on Commodity Server

  • The Sin in Open Source

    I’ve written before about the genuine renaissance open source software represents and the vast implications that openness provides. I admitted that computer science, based on its relative unwillingness to share great ideas, has lagged behind other hard sciences in its understanding of how and where value is created.

    I’ve also written about the principles of open source software and how the mere gifting of source code, while important, does not actually generate the majority of value for the community. Instead, the real value comes from adhering to the principles of open source — transparency, participation and collaboration — and I’ve tried to evangelize this is the real method upon which open source companies help create success.

• Public Services/Government

  • CeBIT Gov 2.0 Conf: Open Source Wrongness

    I was contacted earlier today by “Stephen from CeBIT”. Stephen ultimately was asking whether I would like to pay CeBIT for the privilege of presenting on open source related issues at an upcoming Gov 2.0 conference. Stephen’s line was that there would be many potential customers at the conference so it would be a good investment. In effect, Stephen was asking to be paid for marketing to Government.

    Selling to Government, at least in Australia, is universally acknowledged to be difficult for SMEs. Ultimately the reasons for this are that the Executive is particularly averse to failure and are subject to fairness tests in the award of contracts. As a result, the Executive establishes a bureaucracy to ensure that each potential supplier is treated the same, and any engagement is subject to particularly extensive terms and conditions. All of this carries with it a cost of engaging with Government. In other words, marketing to Government is particularly expensive.

• Programming

  • Migrate from SVN to Git easily with git-svn

Leftovers

• Security

  • Stop Software Attacks From Destroying Your Servers

  • Defending against malicious CDs and USB flash drives

• Finance

  • Goldman Sachs, The Federal Reserve – The Big Bad Wolfs

    Goldman Took Biggest Loan in Fed Program was reported today in Bloomberg both on Bloomberg TV and here on the internet…click here…to read story. While this was a secret loan program at the time – dating back to 2008 and other banks participated – Bloomberg TV reported that Goldman received the lowest interest rates of any of the participants, from near zero to 2.6% as well as the single biggest loan.

    Goldman Sachs & Co., a unit of the most profitable bank in Wall Street history, took $15 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve on Dec. 9, 2008, the biggest single loan from a lending program whose details have been secret until today.

  • President Obama Calls Jon Corzine “Our Wall Street Guy”

    President Obama recruited the former Goldman Sachs CEO Jon Corzine to help him fundraise for his re-election campaign, according to the NYPost.

    The main news is that Corzine has been working on Obama’s 2012 campaign for months. IE: He hosted a fund-raiser at his Fifth Avenue home for Obama. He’s attended secret meetings with Obama, and he organized a meet-and-greet at the Four Seasons for key finance-industry execs and Obama’s new chief of staff, former banker Bill Daley.

• Civil Rights

  • MI5 admits to wrongful surveillance of innocent people, new report says

    The UK’s Security Service wrongly gathered information about innocent telephone users during criminal surveillance, a report into the interception of communications has said.

• Internet/Net Neutrality/Telecom

  • Roseman: A competition watchdog with some bite

    Melanie Aitken has taken on the Canadian Real Estate Association over its multiple listing service. She’s blasted Rogers/Chatr Wireless ads for misleading ads (“fewer dropped calls”). And she’s tried to stop Visa and MasterCard from handcuffing merchants.

  • Free Speech and the Internet

    As the United Nations has said, access to the Internet is a human right. A report by the U.N.’s special rapporteur presented last month to the Human Rights Council in Geneva warns that this right is being threatened by governments around the world — democracies included.

  • Mobile phone firms to be forced to reduce overseas roaming charges

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • It’s official: Spotify is coming to the U.S.

    • Spain’s performing rights organisation SGAE raided by anticorruption police

      he Civil Guard today raided the headquarters of the General Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) in Madrid as part of an investigation into embezzlement and misappropriation in an operation ordered by the anti-corruption prosecutor, who has announced that it has spent the last two years investigating a series of alleged crimes at the powerful artists recording rights organisation.

Reader’s Picks

• DCGS-A, a Microsoft based intelligence system used by the US armed forces has never worked, and cost $2.7 billion and many lives.

  This shortfall translates into operational opportunities missed and lives lost. … several Representatives on July 19 2010, who then asked the US Army to consider switching to another, proven system that the FBI and CIA use: Palantir. The Army refused, and instead rolled out a software update that was meant to fix any issues. Unfortunately, according to the former intelligence officers, the system is still unusable. “You couldn’t share the data,” says one of the former officers, and they both agree that the system is “prone to crashes and frequently going off-line.”

  DCGS-A made the fatal move from java to .NET back in 2008.

  With DCGS-A version 3.0 fielded throughout this year, V-3.1 should be fielded toward the end of 2008. A major addition to V-3.1 is the MFWS framework format. The newest DCGS-A iteration will change from a Java-based MFWS to a Microsoft net-based one, code named “Viper.” “This change will provide the ability to rapidly add analyst tools because there are so many Microsoft developers and applications already available that are potentially useful to the analyst,”

  The alternative, Plantir, seems to be run on gnu/linux and other Unix. A recent job advertisement describes the people they are looking for,

  You tend to pry off useless windows-centric keys on your keyboard and find GUI-based pointing devices superfluous.

• Hardware

  • Toyota joins the Linux Foundation

    I suspected but could not prove that Microsoft had it’s hooks into Toyota and this was why their breaks were failing. The shift to gnu/linux is evidence the company is moving on to better things.

• Health/Nutrition

  • What private insurance really does to your neighbors.

    starting today, I will be sharing on an occasional basis some of the horror stories like the ones I used to work so hard to keep out of the press. … Universal coverage, in my view, is the ultimate goal we all should share. Remember this if nothing else: Until we achieve it, you and your loved ones could easily be facing your own horror stories.

  • Big Pharma’s Latest Shady Ploy to Sell Depression Drugs.

    $4.5 billion in direct drug advertising brings us back to the days of patent medicine claims.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Why do US police have tanks?

    Local police departments are being supplied with military uniforms, weaponry, vehicles, and training. … the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home. … 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • As fires around Los Alamos threaten waste sites the DoE plans another bomb making plant.

  • Soil samples 40 miles from the still uncontrolled Fukushima reactors have Cs-137 levels between 10,000 and 50,000 Becquerel per kilogram.

    The highest reading in the city of 290,000 people far exceeded the level that triggered compulsory resettlement ordered by Soviet authorities following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, they said.

  • Sulfur pollution masked global warming for a while in the West. and the same thing is happening in China today

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • The US now gets more energy from renewable sources than nuclear power

• Finance

  • UN used as tool for water privatization grab.

    Billions of dollars are being given out to the most ardent promoters of water privatization. … We’re also seeing the IMF forcing indebted nations to sell off public assets, including water systems, as a condition of receiving financial support. The whole system is rigged for these corporations, and they still are losing contracts, not meeting their obligations

• Anti-Trust

  • Microsoft pays University of Nebraska $250,000 to use Office 365

    Microsoft did this in hopes that the University would not make the transition over to Google Apps

    Office 360 is so bad that the company has to pay people for lock in and violate their privacy. The unreliable service won’t work with gnu/linux or OSX

  • Microsoft wants $15 per Samsung Android

    I’m told these are poor quality smart phones, though they look great. Microsoft probably limited features beyond the scope of Microsoft’s patents like they tried to do to the Barnes and Noble Nook.

  • How predictable. Apparently Facebook’s video calling doesn’t work for Linux users (but Google+ hangouts do!)

    Though it was not free software and should not be trusted, Skype worked well for gnu/linux users until Microsoft bought it.

  • Microsoft still won’t say what patents Android violates but they have mentioned a number of crazy things in their ongoing lawsuits of Motorola and Barnes and Noble. Shades of SCO, they accuse Droid users of violating patents too.

    Microsoft shills cheer and hope for the worst

• Censorship

  • A deceptively named bill is called out by people who know better

    An ideologically diverse group of 90 law professors has signed a letter opposing the PROTECT IP Act, the Hollywood-backed copyright enforcement/Internet blacklist legislation now working its way through Congress. The letter argues that its domain-blocking provisions amount to Internet censorship that is barred by the First Amendment

    The term IP is intended to confuse.

• Privacy

  • Cisco to build out China’s big brother camera system. Their partner, Microsoft is offering their “decision engine” to help.

  • Creepy game camera knows what you are doing.

    Are you writing in your secret diary again, Winston?