Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• Pocket Desktop Protects Your Files, Privacy When Using PCs

  It’s a customized Linux OS on a bootable drive so that you can surf the internet without leaving a trace on the host PC.

• Server

  • Proprietary Servers Take Their Lumps, Linux Servers Float On Cloud 9

    If you want to understand the server racket and you don’t have thousands of dollars to blow, you have to rely on the publicly available information available from Gartner and IDC to try to get a sense of what is going on out there. The market statistics do not map perfectly between the two companies, but you get a better picture than you can from either alone.

• Kernel Space

  • The Cortex-A15 Continues Running Strong On Linux

    Over the past several weeks of running the Samsung Chromebook with its Exynos 5 Dual SoC that is comprised of an ARM Cortex-A15 dual-core processor, I’ve grown quite fond of this latest ARM processor.

  • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: James Bottomley

• Applications

  • 5 ways to check your disk usage on Linux

    In the past I’ve wrote an article about the commands du and df that can respectively give you information about the Disk Usage and the Disk Free of your Linux computer.
    I personally use both of these commands a lot of times at work to check file system and/or directory, but I also understand that on a desktop with Linux you could use something more graphical to see the status of your partitions or directories, so today I’ll show you some programs that can achieve this goal: baobab, cdu, ncdu, JDiskReport and Filelight.

  • Proprietary

    • Darling project aims to get OS X apps working on Linux

    • New Project Aims to Bring Mac Apps to Linux

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to install Ubuntu on Acer’s $199 C7 Chromebook

    • ChrUbuntu Transforms $199 Acer C7 Chromebook Into a Cheap Linux Laptop

    • Regular expreesion in Linux Bash and KSH Shells

  • Games

    • Star Shipping released for Linux!

      In Star shipping Inc. you take the role of the captain of of a cargo ship traveling between star systems to trade goods and commodities in strive to become the richest star ship captain in the galaxy.

    • The Legends of Aethereus Game Is Coming to Linux

      The Legends of Aethereus developers announced a few days ago that the upcoming Legends of Aethereus RPG game will be available for Linux-based operating systems.

    • Linux system requirements pop up on some Steam games

    • Valve: Linux, Big Picture to power ‘turnkey’ living room PCs

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • Contest To Revamp KDE Mascot

      Konqui, the cute and friendly dragon has been the KDE mascot for the last 10 years. The dragon is shy and you won’t see him often on KDE systems. KDE forum admin Neverendingo is planning to give the shy dragon an image makeover. He is organizing a design contest with the Krita community.

    • New KDE Theme Slim Glow With Awesome Fonts

      Slim Glow is one of the top five themes for the KDE Plasma desktop which has been in development since KDE 4.0. Developer Ivan Čukić has released a new version of this theme which is currently available on kde-look.org and will be part of the KDE 4.10.

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 2nd December 2012

• Distributions

  • ComFusion 4.1 Screenshots

  • RamDisk on Linux : what it is and how to use it.

    In the computer there is a precise hierarchy with regard to the memory, according to their speed and size.
    On a computer there are basically three types of memory: the hard drive, the RAM and the processor cache. These memories can be ordered according to the characteristics above, and then, in a hypothetical pyramid, we find at the bottom the hard drive (slow but with a lot of space, in the order of terabytes) in the center there is the RAM (fast, but with little space in the order of gigabytes) and the top there is the cpu-cache (fast but extremely small, ranging from kiloByte to megabytes).

  • Build a Killer Customized Arch Linux Installation (and Learn All About Linux in the Process)

    Don’t like Windows 8′s new interface? Sick of Ubuntu Unity and the new ads that come along with it? Maybe it’s time to create your own, ideal operating system with just the features you want. Arch Linux can make it happen: it lets you build your own personal, killer Linux distro from the ground up.

  • New Releases

    • Clonezilla 2.0.1-12

    • [Toorox] 11.2012 “GNOME”

    • Release Notes: Release Notes for siduction 2012.2 – Riders on the Storm

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • OpenMandriva takes off

        The OpenMandriva community is moving on. The statutes of the “OpenMandriva Association” have been sent to the French authorities and the incorporation process has thus started. At the same time, preparations are ongoing to migrate both the actual development environment of the distribution and the entire community infrastructure. On top of this, the development environment is not just migrated to another server, it is being upgraded to ABF and Git.

        We have thus embarked into an ambitious migration plan and I would like to thank all the teams of developers, sysadmins, infrastructure and communication of the OpenMandriva project who are working hard towards making this a reality.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Nominations Now Open For 2013 Red Hat Innovation Awards

        Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is now accepting nominations for its seventh annual Red Hat Innovation Awards, which will be presented at Red Hat Summit taking place June 10-14, 2013 in Boston.

      • Enterprise Linux 6.4 beta released by Red Hat

      • RBC Capital Reiterates Outperform on Red Hat (RHT)

        RBC Capital reaffirmed their outperform rating on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) in a research note released on Monday morning. They currently have a $64.00 price target on the stock.

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – December 10th, 2012

        * Record number of participants for Mini DebConf Paris
        * Debian on smartphones: a feasibility analysis
        * Official Debian images on Amazon Web Services
        * Reports from latest BSPs
        * Other news
        * New Debian Contributors
        * Release-Critical bugs statistics for the upcoming release
        * Important Debian Security Advisories
        * New and noteworthy packages
        * Work-needing packages
        * Want to continue reading DPN?

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Introducing Ubuntu Filesystem Tree Lens for Unity

            The Ubuntu Filesystem Tree Lens is an Unity Lens that enables users to easily and quickly find files and folder in their filesystem, directly from Unity Dash.

          • Ubuntu Increases Reach with Language Translations

            English may be the uncontested lingua franca of most development communities in our (post-?) Pax Americana age. But for developers who prefer working in other languages, the Ubuntu world has taken a big step toward making it easier to contribute without understanding English. That’s a particularly smart move for an open source project such as Ubuntu. Here’s why.

          • 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) Alpha 1 Released!

          • Introducing Ubuntu Minecraft Lens for Unity

            The Ubuntu Minecraft Lens is an Unity Lens that allows Minecraft players to easily and quickly search most items and tools found in the game.

            Right clicking the results will display a recipe and some other handy information. At the moment, the Lens has various issues that you should check out here.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Ubuntu Linux 13.04 enters alpha, but only for Edubuntu and Kubuntu users

              Even as Ubuntu Linux 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” continues to make headlines following its release back in October, work is proceeding in earnest on its successor, Ubuntu 13.04 “Raring Ringtail.”

              On Thursday, in fact, version 13.04 of the popular Linux distribution entered alpha – a stage that typically gives fans of the open source operating system an early glimpse at what’s to come.

            • Linux Mint 14 “MATE”

            • review of mint 14 part

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Sailfish: the first real competitor to iPhone and Android?

        Right now, it seems that iPhone and Android phones are the main kinds of mobile phones and will be forever.

        After all, Microsoft has spent billions to develop and promote the Windows phone, but it’s not exactly selling like hotcakes (four million in the third quarter this year, as opposed to Apple’s 23 million and Android’s 123 million).

      • Android

        • XBMC 12.0 Beta 3 Brings Support for Android 4.2

        • Xperia™ and Box® renew partnership through 2013

          In an official press release Sony Mobile have confirmed that they will be extending partnership with Box until 31st December 2013. They have also confirmed that almost all the Xperia smartphone and Sony tablet users can now grab free 50GB cloud storage for life,

        • $50 Android Smartphones Are Disrupting Africa Much Faster Than You Think, Says Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales

          While the majority of Africa’s mobile phones are more basic talk-plus-text feature phones — recent figures from analyst ABI Research suggest 3G connectivity accounts for 11 percent of the continent’s overall mobile subscriptions vs. GSM’s 62.7 percent – 300,000 of these $50 Android smartphones have been sold in Kenya, according to Wales and African carrier Safaricom’s CEO Bob Collymore. The pair were speaking at Vodafone’s Mobile for Good summit taking place in London today.

  Free Software/Open Source

  • Four reasons I like developing with open source code

    I have been a developer for a number of years (yes, it’s a large-ish number) and I’ve worked on teams that have developed software on commercial platforms, on teams that have used a mixture of open source and commercial components, and on teams that have used primarily open source. Overall, I’ve developed (no pun intended) a preference for using open source tools and components whenever it’s feasible. Here are some of the reasons why I prefer to develop with open source code:

  • Events

    • 10 Conferences To Attend If You Are Looking To Meet Developers

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Urging Developers to Build Apps For Firefox OS

        Jay Sullivan, Mozilla’s vice president of products, has explained why developers should have an interest in Firefox OS.

        “If you’re looking to build and develop mobile software without the 30 percent toll [Apple charges], Firefox OS will appeal to you,” he told a room filled with about 75 developers.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Richard Stallman and Jono Bacon Differ on Ubuntu’s Amazon Search

    • On Being Childish; An Apology

      On Friday I wrote an article responding to a post by Richard Stallman. Over the weekend both posts caused quite a flurry of discussion; thank-you to everyone who contributed constructive feedback.

      In my post I referred to Richard’s position as seeming a bit ‘childish‘ to me.

      As with every post that I write, I reflect carefully over the words I write before and after I press the publish button. In all of our writing our words affect the thoughts and feelings of others, and I think this resonates even more-so in the Free Software and Open Source world where we all put so much passion and time into what we do as volunteers as well as for those lucky enough to do this as a career too.

    • Stallman’s Attack on Ubuntu Linux is Bad News for Canonical

      Richard Stallman (RMS),the Father of Free Software doesn’t like Ubuntu Linux. Stallman posted a scathing diatribe against Ubuntu on Friday.

      “If you ever recommend or redistribute GNU/Linux, please remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend or redistribute,” Stallman wrote. “In your install fests, in your Software Freedom Day events, in your FLISOL events, don’t install or recommend Ubuntu. Instead, tell people that Ubuntu is shunned for spying.”

  • Project Releases

    • Third Beta Released For XBMC 12 Frodo

  • Public Services/Government

    • To migrate or not to migrate to open source

      Since Microsoft Office price per seat per year for businesses is around $75 two public administrations in the German cities of Freiburg and Munchen decided to switch to OpenOffice. One of them went well while other one did not do so well. The Unsuccessful transition occurred in Freiburg. Their calculations went like this – $75 per year per computer for public administration, which for as many as 2,000 users per year is $ 150,000. However, after five years, although they saved on the prices for licenses, they have spent $600,000, with a disgruntled employee who complained about the incompatibility of file formats. To make things worse, they returned to Microsoft Office, which was at the first year cost of at least half a million dollars.

    • Swiss City Of Bern To Switch To Free And Open Source IT Solutions

      A clear majority 36 to 20 councilors and city councilors in the council of the Swiss city of Bern has voted for a switch to free and open source IT solutions. It instructs the city’s IT department to make future IT purchases platform and vendor neutral and to prefer using open source solutions. This way, the council wants to rid the city of IT vendor lock-in.

    • A proud day for peace and freedom in Europe

      I am very proud today to call myself a European, and to be here in Oslo for the EU’s Nobel Peace prize ceremony. The European Commission is collecting information and updates here. What I want to say is that when I started school in 1946 – yes! – just after the end of the Second World War, I could never imagine that we as a continent would be in this position today. A family, united in democratic values, and more prosperous that seemed possible throughout most of our lives.

    • Is Something Rotten in the State of Freiburg?

      There are “many good examples of municipalities, states, and countries’ ministries changing expensive, heavy and closed proprietary software for free and open-source software,” said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. This move by Freiburg, then, “is more than odd. 100 percent of the people that commented on the Internet have said: ‘Why didn’t they move to the newest LibreOffice or OpenOffice!? It’s insane!’”

  Leftovers

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • Obama Writing “Rules” for Killing People with Drones

    • Drone use will only grow domestically

    • Former US President Carter slams drone attacks

      Former US President Jimmy Carter has slammed American drone strikes in other countries, stating that killing civilians in such attacks would infact nurture terrorism.

    • Was CIA financier-turned Wall Street banker assassinated by the bearded bag lady? New evidence may solve mystery of 1985 shooting

      Nearly 30 years after a former CIA money changer was murdered by a homeless bag lady, new details have emerged that suggest he may actually have been assassinated.

    • Is the U.S. Government Really A Spy Machine?

  • Cablegate

    • Assange: Police Docs Published in Swedish MSM

      ‘Now I understand why the Swedish police and prosecutors don’t travel to the UK to interrogate Assange’, writes Paragraf editor-in-chief Dick Sundevall. ‘They’d have to close the case and declare that no crime has been committed.’

    • What the New York Times Missed in Its 1st Article on Manning’s Torture Hearing

      Barnes elaborated later on that she thought Manning stood for count naked on purpose, to be provocative, despite his record of consistent good conduct throughout his chilling stay at Quantico. If Shane had bothered to stay for the next 6 hours, he would have seen a haughty low-rank Chief Warrant Officer with a chip on her shoulder (she was the most junior person to ever run a brig; if anything bad happened to Manning, it would ruin her career; etc.), who flouted prison regulations in favor of her own “personal opinion.”

    • WikiLeaks Tapes shows up corporate media, celebrates citizen journalists

      One of the first things that will strike you about The Wikileaks Tapes is the unique style that citizen journalist Cathy Vogan brings to interviews.

      The two-disc DVD The WikiLeaks Tapes brings together a wide range of interviews by Vogan with dozens of people on the subject of WikiLeaks.

      From a sound base of knowledge on the subject matter, Vogan delves in to what matters most, the persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks by Western governments, including Australia’s.

      There really are some quite amazing interviews here, especially when you consider the filmmak

    • Wikileaks protest in foreign affairs office

    • From Assange to Kejriwal: Understanding media hostility

      There was a time, not long ago, when Arvind Kejriwal was being billed as the ‘Julian Assange of India’. Perhaps this was born of the sense that Kejriwal’s record of launching high-decibel ‘exposes’ of alleged corruption, which were lapped up by the media, echoed Assange’s periodic WikiLeaks exposes of US cables that chronicled in merciless detail the diplomats’ observations on the ways of the world, and the shadowy side to American and foreign governments’ dealings.

    • Assange is still holed in…

      This is a small working embassy. It has managed to provide one room about 15 feet by twelve feet for Assange to live and work in. He eats and sleeps there. It has little natural light so he looks pale and thinner than he was a few months ago. He presents a confident, optimistic front to visitors but the strain of constant confinement must be telling on him. There have been reports that he has a chronic breathing problem. He keeps busy running WikiLeaks, fighting legal actions and planning for his and WikiLeaks’s future. In one-way it is worse than imprisonment, for there is no telling when it will end.

      All right then. Why doesn’t Assange end it himself? Why doesn’t he hand himself over to the Swedish authorities and return to Sweden and fight the allegations against him. Not so simple. Assange has every reason to fear that once they got their hands on him, Swedish authorities would turn him over to the US. The evidence that the US seeks to extradite and prosecute Assange is substantial.

  • Finance

    • A ‘puny’ fine for GS goof

      An outspoken regulator lashed out at a $1.5 million settlement between Goldman Sachs and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — calling the deal a steal for the Wall Street bank.

      Bart Chilton, a CFTC commissioner, described the cash amount as “puny” and “a slap on the wrist” when compared to the whopping $8.3 billion trade at the center of the case.

      In 2007, a Goldman trader hid the outsize trade as the market unraveled.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Time Gives Up on Factchecking: Corporate Media Can’t Find a Way to Tell the Truth

      In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.

      “Who Is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars,” read Time’s October 15 cover. With a setup like that, one might have hoped for a bold break from the campaign pack, an acknowledgment that facts matter, and that politicians who run on a record of resisting reality should be exposed.

  • Privacy

    • Verizon Files Patent For DVR That Watches Viewers, Delivers Targeted Ads Based On What It Sees

  • Civil Rights

    • Petraeus Punished For Making Love, Not War

      Scahill cites several former intelligence officers to make this point. “A considerable part of the CIA budget is now no longer spying, it’s supporting paramilitaries who work closely with JSOC to kill terrorists, and to run the drone program,” he quotes retired career CIA case officer Philip Giraldi as saying. The CIA, adds Giraldi, “is a killing machine now.” (Q: When wasn’t it?) And retired Army Col. W. Patrick Lang opined Petraeus “wanted to drag them (CIA) in the covert action direction and to be a major player.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Leaked: ITU’s secret Internet surveillance standard discussion draft

      Yesterday morning, I wrote about the closed-door International Telecommunications Union meeting where they were working on standardizing “deep packet inspection” — a technology crucial to mass Internet surveillance. Other standards bodies have refused to touch DPI because of the risk to Internet users that arises from making it easier to spy on them. But not the ITU.

    • Kim Dotcom: Mega Will Turn Encryption into a Mass Product

      Over the past several months a group of coders have been working hard on the new “Mega” which is scheduled to launch January 20 2013, exactly one year after Megaupload was shut down.

      Today, Dotcom revealed the look of the new Mega, showing off the new encryption feature, the registration screen and a new file manager.

      Speaking with TorrentFreak, Dotcom says the new site is the result of many years’ expertise in the file-storage business.

      “It’s special because seven years of experience have been turned into the perfect cloud storage solution. It scales infinitely. It provides up- and download acceleration and resume in the browser thanks to the latest HTML5 technology,” he says.

      The encryption part pictured below is perhaps the most exciting feature unveiled thus far. Before users upload their files to Mega they will be encrypted using the AES algorithm. Advanced security, but based on code that will be open source.

      “File transfers and storage are encrypted with military strength and you don’t have to take our word for it, that part of the code is open,” Dotcom told TorrentFreak.

    • EU digs trenches in ‘real battle’ over the future of the internet

      The European Union has set out its position in the looming fight over control of the internet, arguing that it should ‘stay open and global’.

  • DRM

    • Richard Stallman: ‘Apple has tightest digital handcuffs in history’

      Q It’s nearly 30 years since you started work on the GNU operating system, which went on to become GNU/ Linux, one of the leading examples of free and open source software collaboration. Yet Apple and Microsoft still loom large. How do you feel the free software movement is faring?

      The free software movement has advanced tremendously but proprietary user-subjugating software has also spread tremendously. I would say the free software movement has gone about half the distance it has to travel. We managed to make a mass community but we still have a long way to go to liberate computer users.

      Those companies are very powerful. They are cleverly finding new ways to take control over users. Nowadays people who use proprietary software [programs whose source code is hidden, and which are licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder] are almost certainly using malware. The most widely used non-free programmes have malicious features – and I’m talking about specific, known malicious features.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • CA to app devs: get privacy policies or risk $2500-per-download fines

        They had a month—and now it’s over. Any California mobile-app developers who don’t have a privacy policy obviously available to consumers need to get one and fast. If they don’t, they could be facing potentially massive fines: up to $2,500 per app download.

      • Something really scary is going on in Germany

        Major German publishers with Axel Springer AG as the leader of the gang have for years demanded a law that would force all commercial web services such as search engines or aggregators like the German-Techmeme equivalent Rivva to pay a license fee for automatically processing and displaying headlines or snippets.

      • Pirate Bay Founder Released From Solitary Confinement

        After three months in solitary confinement Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm will be released from custody. The prosecutor suspects Gottfrid of being involved in several hacking and fraud cases but he has yet to be charged in any of these cases. The Pirate Bay founder will now be transferred to a new prison which he will leave as a free man in five months if no new charges are brought against him.

      • Doe’s motion to proceed anonymously granted in In re BitTorrent

        In In re BitTorrent Adult Film Copyright Infringement Cases, defendant Doe 1′s motion for leave to continue to proceed anonymously was granted.