Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 16/7/2011: PCLinuxOS Reviews, Kororaa 15 Coming



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Operating Systems


  • Windows Got Me Lost, Linux Came To Rescue On The Roads Of Brussels
    Not again Microsoft. Incidents like these were one of the reasons why I threw your crappy products out of my door and migrated to GNU/Linux.

    Well, now I did not know where was I. After two stops, the bus came to a halt. It was not the NATO stop. The driver said something in French, which meant that's the last stop. I told him that I wanted to go to NATO. He said bus won't go there. The message was supposed to flash on the display, but Microsoft Windows screwed it. My appointment was at 12 and it was already 11.50. I was 3 Km away from the NATO HQ.



  • Graphics Stack and Compiz

    • NVIDIA 275.19 Linux Driver Published
      While NVIDIA is already in the middle of working on the 280 driver series and there's been a public beta of that, this Friday morning NVIDIA has released a new 275.xx stable release. While this release is still tagged in the 275 series, it does contain a few worthwhile fixes and new hardware enablement.


    • Maximized windows which must be larger than the screen size
      There’s been an odd case that I’ve not seen one window manager be able to handle correctly. It’s the case where you are required to resize a window to be smaller than than it’s defined minimum size, because you are tiling it, semi-maximizing it or maximizing it. Basically attempting to fit a big object into a small space because the user requested it.




  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments



  • Distributions

    • The Dark Side of Distrohopping
      As fun as distrohopping is, it’s not all wine and roses. There’s a dark side to never being able to stay with one distro and that’s what I’ll talk about in this column.


    • New Releases



      • Introducing Linvo GNU/Linux
        A new distribution flew onto my radar today and thought it might be interesting to take a quick look. Linvo is Bulgarian hailed distribution based on Slackware featuring the GNOME 2.32 desktop. Yesterday, developers released Linvo 2010.12.6.

        I say new because it's new to me and the Distrowatch database, although its version numbers go back to 2009.0. News posts on the Website start March 13, 2009 with what appears to be the first release on March 28, 2009.


      • Kongoni GNU/Linux 2011 (Firefly) released.
        I’m very happy to announce the stable release of Kongoni 2011 (codename Firefly). Most bugs and glitches have been removed and we can say now that Kongoni is ready for the stable release.

        Some extensive work has went into the Live CD and initrd. We have moved to initramfs for the Live CD, udev is used now and there is no limitation in space when creating the initramfs as we dropped dd and mkfs.ext2 in favor of cpio. This also should make the Live CD a bit faster and much more reliable.




    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS 2011.6 KDE review
        PCLinuxOS has all the tools it needs to be one of the best Linux or BSD desktop distributions, but for some reason, they always manage to miss the mark. It is understandable that for a community distribution, the community decides it wants, but at some point, the developer(s) should take a stand and educate the less knowledgeable member if the community why certain ideas should not be implemented. Comments posted by some of its members here should give you an indication of what I am trying to convey.


      • PCLinuxOS 2011.07 MiniMe KDE Released




    • Gentoo Family

      • Pardus 2011.1: Turkish Delight
        I have written in my previous review that Pardus is OS which deserves very close attention.


      • Gentoaster – Week 7 progress report
        This week has been excellent in terms of progress. The Gearman worker/client is now complete, and can be used to queue builds. I’ve tested this setup on a few different machines and it seems pretty solid as long as you configure the paths correctly. Also, as part of this, builds will now isolate all their activity into a single directory. It’s not chrooted as such, like I said in my previous progress report, because the use of binaries from the host is required. I’m not entirely sure chrooting makes any sense after giving it some more thought, because they’d still be root and they could break back out of the chroot anyway. However, all input to this tool is heavily sanitised before it reaches Gearman, so the potential threats should be dealt with before they even reach the build tool.




    • Red Hat Family

      • Up Close & Personal with Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst
        BY going through some famous books about magic, James Whitehurst hopes to find a spell that can create an even closer bond between him and his nine-year-old twins, Jack and Emma. He finished reading the whole Harry Potter series last year in the hope that he could share more with his son and daughter, whom he says are so fascinated with the fantasy tales of the boy wizard.

        You see, while Whitehurst is passionate about his job, nothing is more important to him than his family. “Family always comes first,” the president and chief executive officer of Red Hat Inc, the world's leading provider of Linux and open-source solutions for the Internet, tells StarBizWeek.


      • Fedora

        • Kororaa 15 (Squirt) Beta released
          The first beta release of Kororaa 15 (codename “Squirt”) has hit the mirrors, and is available for download, in 32 and 64 bit with KDE 4.6 and GNOME 3.






    • Debian Family





  • Devices/Embedded



    • Phones



      • Android

        • Toshiba Thrive: Boxy, but it's good.
          That’s what I thought when I heard Toshiba was introducing its own tablet, another “me too” in the Android space, the Thrive.

          I mean, we’ve already got the Motorola XOOM, the Acer Iconia A500, the Asus Transformer, and now the ultra-sexy and thin Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is generally regarded as the front-runner out of all of these devices and the only one of this group that currently presents any real challenge to Apple’s iPad 2.






    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Kogan Agora PRO review
        The Kogan Agora PRO is a lightweight budget laptop with 11.6in screen and Ubuntu 11.04 operating system.


      • 12.1-inch netbook runs Ubuntu on dual-core Atom
        Asus released a netbook that comes with an unusually large 12.1-inch screen and -- at least in some markets -- Ubuntu Linux. The Eee PC 1215P includes a dual-core Atom N570 processor, 1366 x 768 pixel resolution, up to 2GB of RAM and 320GB of hard disk storage, six hours' battery life, and optional Bluetooth, the company says.


      • ASUS Preinstalls GNU/Linux








Free Software/Open Source



  • A Grab Bag of Unsung Open Source Gems


  • Project Harmony, Open Hardware License and Open Hardware Repository
    First, Project Harmony has released version 1.0 of its contributor agreement templates. Version 1.0 includes a rather nifty Agreement Selector tool that generates both individual and entity agreements for your project. Project Harmony does not come down on the side of license-in versus assignment-in; its primary benefit is to assure standardization of language regardless of approach. Check it out.


  • How I learned to stop Architecture and love Free Software
    When I was finishing high school I was destined to continue my academic life studying Architecture. I took special art classes to get prepared to study one of the fine arts I always loved, and so I did, I entered the architectural school at my hometown in the Canary Islands.


  • Events



  • Web Browsers

    • The safest web browser?
      Surely not a difficult question to answer? Just look at the statistics for security vulnerabilities- especially those that were exploited by malware "in the wild" before a patch was issued and how long those vulnerabilities remained unpatched.


    • Browser Wars: Usage stats for June 2011


    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Webian Shell Takes On Google Chrome OS
        Anyone who was around during the original browser wars between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape might remember the ill-fated 'webtops' that both Microsoft and Netscape attempted to create. In both cases, each company tried to build a kind of operating system shell that centered around the Web browser as the main or only interface.

        These early webtops were both horrible failures that basically set the whole idea of browser-as-operating system back 10 years. But maybe they were just way ahead of their time. Because now, two of the browser leaders are once again pushing browser-only interfaces.






  • Databases



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • OpenOffice: Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride
      If yesterday’s announcement by IBM is any indication, the answer is “not likely,” despite the fact that Big Blue’s latest commitment to OpenOffice, on its surface, sounds like good news. The reason? It’s too little, and too late. Here’s why.

      First, let’s start with the announcement. As reported in various venues (e.g., ComputerWorld, The Register and Heise Online), IBM will be donating the standalone source code for its ODF-compliant Lotus Symphony office suite to the Apache Foundation. As you’ll recall, Oracle became the owner of OpenOffice after acquiring Sun Microsystems. After issuing various mixed signals, Oracle officially decommitted to supporting OpenOffice, and contributed the code in early June (but not the trademark) to the Apache Foundation, where it can now be downloaded under version 2.0 of the permissive Apache License.


    • Google's Java Jam
      Oracle's lawsuit against Google is "a test case really for whether or not Oracle will be able to monetize Java in the mobile space," according to IDC's Al Hilwa. Developers use Java for the attractive tool that they know and love at the top end of the technology. But whether at the bottom end of the technology it breaks any of the rules with the way the Dalvik engine works is what is being tested.


    • OpenOffice.org in Apache: The Next Step
      A few weeks ago, I wrote about what submitting OOo to Apache meant for the various parties involved. In particular, I said “IBM can continue to develop Symphony, with a licence it’s happy with.”




  • Programming





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