03.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Linux is generally considered the go-to OS for under powered computers. Wanting to challenge the preconceived notion that Linux requires ‘a computer made in the last 20 years,’ [Dmitry] built the worst Linux PC ever around a simple 8-bit microcontroller.
-
So much for the sycophants of M$ claiming costs had ballooned with GNU/Linux. Frankly, I am surprised they found so few problems with that other OS. Perhaps users “just rebooted” and made problems go away with that other OS. 46 per month with GNU/Linux is rather trivial for thousands of desktops. The help-desk people must nap a lot. I’ve had that many requests to reset passwords with ~100 PCs. I’ve had a few users who forgot passwords every weekend…
-
The Star Trek tricorder has become a reality, thanks to the hobby project of a cognitive science researcher. Dr. Peter Jansen has developed a handheld mobile computing device that has a number of sophisticated embedded sensors. The device is modeled after the distinctive design of the 24th-century tricorder.
-
Desktop
-
So let’s recap, new interface that many people won’t like. Old operating that needs to be replaced.
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
The cut command, as the man page states, “removes sections from each line of a file.” The cut command can also be used on a stream and it can do more than just remove section. If a file is not specified or “-” is used the cut command takes input from standard in. The cut command can be used to extract sections from a file or stream based upon a specific criteria. An example of this would be cutting specific fields from a csv (comma separated values) file. For instance, cut can be used to extract the name and email address from a csv file with the following content:
-
Kernel Space
-
While I was out chasing computer history last week, the Linux 3.3 kernel was released. And a very interesting release it is, though not for its vaunted re-inclusion of certain Android kernel hacks. I think that modest move is being overblown in the press. No, Linux 3.3 appears to be the first OS to really take a shot at reducing the problem of bufferbloat. It’s not the answer to this scourge, but it will help some, especially since Linux is so popular for high volume servers.
-
Graphics Stack
-
Announced yesterday was the release of kmscon, a terminal emulator for Linux that’s similar to what’s offered inside the kernel, but instead it’s in user-space and relies upon the kernel’s DRM interfaces as well as Mesa.
-
-
-
-
Applications
-
Multimedia/Graphics
-
-
The Yorba Foundation has announced the release of the newest version of its Shotwell photo organiser. Shotwell 0.12.0 adds the ability to straighten photos, support for GTK+ 3, the ability to recognise more Android devices for photo import, and more.
-
-
The GIMP photo editor is a popular favorite among FOSS fans. However, some users think the app’s interface could benefit by looking more like the one found on Adobe Photoshop. That’s where GimpShop is supposed to come in. However, it seems development on GimpShop for Linux has fallen woefully behind.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine
-
Games
-
Linux Games are going main stream now. Wasteland 2 follows the greatly successful 1988 version of the role playing game, by the same name. Wasteland follows the success of Double Fine Adventure developed by game producer of Brian Fargo of InXile Entertainment.
Termed a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game, it is expected to be a computer-only genre and will not be developed for consoles or other handheld platforms. The dream with Wasteland 2 is to create the magic of theFallout game series, which had earlier proved to be a complete new gaming experience in this genre.
-
Desktop Environments
-
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
-
KDE Cascadia will be held in partnership with LinuxFest Northwest (LFNW) in Bellingham, Washington on April 28 and 29, 2012. This is a pilot of regional KDE gatherings in conjunction with established grassroots FOSS conferences. The goals are to reduce the effort and expense associated with a single annual stand-alone meeting, and to increase user and developer involvement in KDE. The LFNW Organizers warmly welcome the KDE Community.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
-
GNOME 3.4 will be a big release, as it’s the one that will ‘refine’ the GNOME 3.x experience. This is not an initial attempt, or even just a bug fix stability effort. GNOME 3.4 is about making GNOME 3.x great.
-
-
-
-
-
-
I have never being a big advocate of the GNOME desktop environment, most especially the standard (default) GNOME 3 desktop. That is why I am looking for distributions that ship with a modified GNOME 3 desktop. Three that I have so far identified are: KahelOS, Deepin Linux, and Comice OS 4.
So, what exactly are the new features of GNOME 3? Will they reveal that the developers listened to critics or are still forging ahead in the direction that started this whole mess? I am not in a position to answer those questions because no distribution has been released with GNOME 3.4 yet (it was just released today).
-
-
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
Depending on how you look at these things, Red Hat has long been a billion dollar company. With a market cap of almost $10-billion dollars, Red Hat, the biggest of Linux companies, has long been open-source’s shiniest success story. The gold standard of business success, though, is making a billion dollars in revenue in a single fiscal year and Red Hat has just this feat off.
-
-
-
Open source cloud offerings have specific characteristics that provide benefits above and beyond proprietary offerings, two top officials at Red Hat said during a webinar this week.
-
-
-
-
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation, has congratulated Red Hat for registering more than $1 billion in revenues. He writes, “I would also like to use this occasion to show that there is significantly more at play here. It isn’t just the billion dollars Red Hat is making with open source; there are many more reasons why Linux and open source are fundamental building blocks of the future.”
-
When Red Hat (RHT) announced strong quarterly results yesterday, the figures essentially ended a recent debate about Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs. Ubuntu Server. Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth recently suggested Ubuntu is more popular than RHEL for some server applications. But when it comes down to dollars and cents, business-centric applications, and partner engagement, most evidence still points to Red Hat as the overwhelming Linux market leader.
-
-
Sixteen years ago, few imagined that a handful of people at a Linux start-up in North Carolina were laying the groundwork for an open source business with more than a billion dollars in annual revenue. Yet as we stand at that milestone, and as we take the opportunity to reflect, we believe our success speaks volumes about the power of community.
This billion dollar milestone is not only a win for Red Hat—it is a victory for open source advocates everywhere. Our fight has always been about something greater than just access to software code. The open source movement is rooted in shared values about knowledge; it is founded on ideas that are both ordinary and revolutionary. As members of this community, we elevate transparency over secrecy. We prize freedom rather than control. This is the open source way: sharing ideas and information, contributing to an intellectual commons that leads to greater innovation and benefits us all.
-
Fedora
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
The new Ubuntu LTS release looming in the horizon tempted me to try it out as a candidate for a my next Linux OS. Here’s what I think.
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is pretty stable for its current status as beta. The linux kernel at version 3.2.0-20 feels good and seems to support wider range of hardware. The AMD Turion CPU seemed to be reasonably cool while idle. But still Linux has a long way to go in terms of prolonging battery usage. All applications are up to date at least to the latest stable versions which is the best thing in Ubuntu.
-
-
-
-
Canonical launched Landscape system management tool without much fanfare sometime ago. Now, in a most recent update, they have integrated Landscape with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, again without much hoopla. In line with a recent move by Canonical integrating handy Privacy Management tool into Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, this is yet another bold initiative by them.
-
-
-
Unity 5.8 landed in Ubuntu 12.04 this weekend – but what’s new and what’s improved? Let’s take a quick gander…
-
-
With the official release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” being less than one month away, the feature freeze having long passed, and the kernel freeze being imminent, it’s time for the usual biannual Ubuntu Linux benchmarking festivities at Phoronix. In the coming days and weeks there will be numerous articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when it comes to its desktop/workstation performance, boot performance, power consumption, and all sorts of other figures to judge the performance of Ubuntu’s Precise Pangolin release. One area from the testing thus far that has stood out has been the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS performance on older PC hardware, but unfortunately it’s not standing out for a good reason.
-
In the open source community, we celebrate having pieces that “do one thing well”, with lots of orthogonal tools compounding to give great flexibility. But that same philosophy leads to shortcomings on the GUI / UX front, where we want all the pieces to be aware of each other in a deeper way.
For example, we consciously place the notifications in the top right of the screen, avoiding space that is particularly precious (like new tab titles, and search boxes). But the indicators are also in the top right, and they make menus, which drop down into the same space a notification might occupy.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
The Raspberry Pi foundation issued a statement today with a status update on their much-anticipated $35 Linux computer. The first 2,000 completed units have arrived in the UK, but the devices aren’t ready to be shipped out yet because the foundation’s retail partners won’t distribute them to purchasers until they have been stamped with the CE marking.
The CE marking, which you can find on many consumer electronics products, certifies that a product conforms with the regulatory standards of the European Economic Area. In order to apply the CE marking to a product, it has to undergo a conformity assessment and the manufacturer has to produce certain documents.
-
Raspberry Pi’s Linux-based Fedora operating system, which was developed primarily to encourage kids to code, looks potent enough to compete with Microsoft’s Windows 8 when it arrives. It is even powerful enough to handle everyday jobs which are done with word processing and spreadsheets.
-
Phones
-
Android
-
The Note, which bridges a divide thanks to its large screen and smartphone connectivity, has a role and is selling well, apparently.
It’s an odd one, the Note, with its 5.3in screen. It looks like a small tablet in a giant hand or an oversized phone in small one. We quite liked it when we reviewed one.
Overall, five million have been sold, Samsung says, which is pretty high. Just in the UK, for example, the Note is not cheap and the white version is exclusively sold through John Lewis, which limits its opportunities a bit.
The Note has been on sale for five months thou
Source: The Inquirer (http://s.tt/18mXC)
-
-
Android is a market leader in consumer segment, however it needs to catch-up with iOS in the enterprise segment. Android partners are building solutions to boost enterprise adoption of their devices. Lenovo has launched its Android app store targeted at enterprise customers.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
Curious about the low-cost Amazon Kindle Fire Android tablet? If you’re quick, you might be able to snag a refurbished unit for $139 at Amazon today. The company introduced the Fire at the end of 2011 at the loss-leader price point of $199, though it’s rumored to cost over $190 to build. So at $139, you’d be getting the Android-powered tablet well below cost.
-
A fresh new community has recently come together in the form of OpenTablets.org. The brain-child of Matthias Lee, the community’s primary effort centers around MakePlayLive’s premier tablet, Vivaldi. There is a lot of productive discussion there concerning Plasma Active, and making it run proper on this device, but the community also welcomes discussion about any other open tablet platform or open-source software running on various other hardware.
-
Recently I read an article from Wired Magazine about the creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds. The article portrays him as a family man, yet when it’s time to get to work he does just that. And we already know this, as he is the chief of the Linux kernel which as we know is a lot of work. But, as with the nature of open source software, he takes a lot of pride with his work, which is clearly evident as he turned down an invite to Apple directly from Steve Jobs. This says a lot. Many of those that use proprietary software and purchase it over and over, have a hard time absorbing the fact that open source software is free and that developers write the software not to make a profit, but because they enjoy doing it and saw a need for the software they write. As I’ve mentioned before, the end result is quality software that any developer can open, look at, and tweak if they wish. Or, they can inquire with the main team in charge of the particular software title and offer their help. It’s a huge system of collaboration, and a very effective and powerful one.
-
-
This is an interview with Jeffrey D. Long, Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa (USA) and author of the book “Longitudinal Data Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences Using R“. Dr. Long answers questions about his book and how he uses R in his work in behavioral sciences.
F4S: Hello Jeffrey. Please, give us a brief introduction about yourself.
I am a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa (USA). My expertise is applied statistics in the behavioral and medical sciences. I am the head statistician for Neurobiological Predictors of Huntington’s Disease (PREDICT-HD), funded by the National Institutes of Health and the CHDI Foundation, Inc. PREDICT-HD is a longitudinal observational study of individuals at-risk for Huntington’s Disease (HD), which is an inherited neurodegenerative disease. PREDICT-HD has several scientific sections that concentrate on different aspects of HD, including brain imaging, cognitive functioning, motor impairment, and psychiatric problems. My biostatistics team analyzes data from the scientific sections to answer substantive research questions.
-
-
Events
-
Among the items on the 2012 LF Collaboration Summit schedule worth pointing out (and the ones where likely I’ll be at) include:
- The Importance of Linux at Intel
- OpenMAMA
- The Linux Kernel: What’s Next [Panel]
- Intro to Tizen and Community and Architecture Overview
- Kernel in the Way: Bypass and Offload Technologies
- Introduction to Tizen SDK
- The Decline of the GPL and What To Do About It
- Architecture of a Next-Generation Parallel File System
- Upcoming Technologies: Wayland & oFono
- Dtrace
- LLVM Toolchain – Update and State of Building Linux with LLVM
- UEFI as the Converged Firmware Infrastructure
- Btrfs Filesystem: Status and New Features
- GCC, C++ and Transactional Memory
- The Future of the GNU C Library
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that runs the Firefox project, has more than 450 million users worldwide and is known for its open source projects.
It’s just as open in real life. Mozilla treats volunteer developers as nicely as they treat their staff. They even give them office space.
-
-
SaaS
-
ownCloud Inc., which develops open-source software for building cloud infrastructure, has existed as a commercial entity for only a few short months. But it has already begun racking up partnerships throughout the channel, highlighting the plentiful opportunities available at the juncture of the cloud and open-source. Read on for the scoop, and what it means for the open-source ecosystem more broadly.
ownCloud has been around as an open-source project for a while, but its launch as a commercial venture dates only to late last year. Since that time, ownCloud has pushed out an important point release of its platform that brought novel functionality not only to the ownCloud package, but to the open-source channel as a whole, where ownCloud currently has no real contenders — which is probably for the best, since competition from proprietary platforms like Dropbox and iCloud should keep the team busy enough.
-
CMS
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Free Software Foundation president Richard M. Stallman announced the winners of the FSF’s annual free software awards at a ceremony on Sunday, March 25th, held during the LibrePlanet 2012 conference at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
-
-
At the Free Software Foundation’s Libre Planet conference in Boston, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the inventor of the Ruby language, was honoured with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Luis Falcon received the FSF’s Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of GNU Solidario for its GNU Health project.
-
Programming
-
Standards/Consortia
-
-
Today is Document Freedom Day. It’s not the easiest subject to explain. It’s easy to explain why being free to video a police encounter in the USA is important, or why it’s wrong for your eBook to be remotely controlled by a vendor, but many people fail to understand the subtlety of why a document format is important.
Having your work in a format that will still be readable in 20 years makes sense, and being able to be sure when you share a document with others that they will be able to read it and work on it is good, but people glaze over when you try to explain that an ISO standard is not enough. Having a document format standard that is beyond the control of any individual vendor and is fully implemented in multiple products is crucial, but seems esoteric.
-
-
-
-
Security
-
Finance
-
Long standing readers may recall the 2009 row over the pay level of Andrew Hall, the head of a Citigroup oil trading unit. He had made $100 million in 2008 on a long-standing pay arrangement that gave him a pay deal for his team that was just below 30% of profits, a level unheard of since Mike Milken at Drexel (and we all know how well that turned out). Kenneth Feinberg, Obama’s pay czar, refused to back down, leading to the predictable hue and cry as to how terrible it would be to break Hall’s contract (we pointed out that there were likely ways to do just that, that big producers like Hall were often guilty of expense abuses that would allow for termination for cause).
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
Sharon Higgins, the independent researcher and blogger who helped found Parents Across America, reported in the Washington Post this week that the largest charter school network in the United States is a Turkish religious sect that few Americans know about.
-
The Florida “Stand your Ground” law that may protect George Zimmerman, the man who recently shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, became the template for an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) “model bill” that has been introduced in dozens of other states. As the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has reported, the bill was brought to ALEC by the National Rifle Association (NRA). (The law at issue is also known as the “Shoot First” bill or the “Castle Doctrine” law in various states.)
-
Privacy
-
It’s “offensive that several courts have ordered accused people to decrypt, possibly incriminating themselves,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “Police have all kinds of other options for their investigations, including access to computers powerful enough to decrypt, surveillance and search. An accused person should not have to convict himself.”
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
“Great news: this new deal puts an end to roaming rip-offs. This is really great news for anyone who’s been stung by high charges when using a mobile abroad.
For the first time ever, there will be new consumer rules for mobile data – so you can browse the web abroad with confidence.
And most importantly, for the first time ever, we will open the market to competition. Because competition is the best guarantee of long-term, low prices.
Users will see dramatic price cuts in time for the summer holidays: and prices will continue to tumble until 2014.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
ACTA
-
The European Parliament’s INTA Committee yesterday soundly rejected a proposal to refer the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement to the European Court of Justice for review. ACTA critics viewed the proposal as a delay tactic designed with the hope that public opposition to the agreement would subside in the year or two it would take for a court review. The 21-5 vote against the motion means that the INTA committee will conclude its ACTA review later this spring with a full European Parliament vote expected in June or July. The lack of support for ACTA within the European Parliament is now out in the open with multiple parties indicating they will not support the agreement. For example, MEP Bernd Lange stated:
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.28.12
Posted in News Roundup at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Desktop
-
First and foremost, what does it even mean to say desktop Linux is “dead” if it’s being embraced and used by growing numbers of individuals and corporations around the world?
-
So, the mystery is solved. From this data we can clearly understand how NetApplications gives such a huge share to that other OS and very little to GNU/Linux (0.62%) compared to Wikipedia (1.54%), for instance. We don’t know what the numbers would be without the bias but Wikipedia has no motivation for bias except to English language. We can assume the global usage is much higher because GNU/Linux is much more popular in non-English countries like BRIC (India is English speaking but also has many other languages) where governments promote GNU/Linux.
-
Kernel Space
-
Graphics Stack
-
A mailing list message this morning raises the possibility that Intel’s open-source graphics developers could soon be working on GPGPU/OpenCL support.
-
Kristian Høgsberg has pushed updated patches this morning for XWayland in the X.Org Server that re-base this work to the X.Org Server 1.12 series. He’s also updated the XWayland support for the xf86-video-intel graphics driver. XWayland is the effort for allowing an X.Org Server to run as a Wayland client.
-
Tom Stellard of AMD has called upon the LLVM developers to include the R600 GPU back-end into the LLVM project, which is the code for generating compute and graphics shaders inside the LLVM compiler infrastructure for targeting Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 series graphics processors.
-
-
Applications
-
The central piece to this project is a server-based music player. I am using the Music Player Dæmon (MPD), a wonderful server-based system released under the GNU General Public License and available from the repositories of most Linux distributions. Install the software with your favorite package management system. In addition to this player, you need to set up a streaming system. Icecast fulfills this requirement and also is widely available. Install it as well.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
Overgrowth is the game developed by Wolfire that was announced nearly four years ago as a third-person action game that is still considered to be in an alpha/preview state. Overgrowth was announced for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X platforms. The Linux port of this game began last year by a Wolfire contractor (Edward Rudd), but finally there’s some good news to report on the Linux progress.
According to a Phoronix reader, Seon-Wook Park, those that have pre-ordered Overgrowth were informed through their private forums yesterday that the Overgrowth Linux port is nearly ready. Besides the native port, Overgrowth is now working under Wine too, per this WineHQ.org AppDB entry. Pre-ordering comes at a cost of $29.95 USD but includes DRM-free alpha access to the game.
-
Desktop Environments
-
GNOME Desktop
-
We were astonished by the response we received on our Google + page. The overwhelming response in favour of Gnome 3 Shell was incredible. You can read it yourself, here are some comments that we liked.
-
Tweet
We are running a poll on Muktware to see which desktop environments are popular among Muktware readers. To everyone’s surprise KDE is leading the poll with a huge margin, whereas Unity and Gnome Shell are neck-to-neck with each other.
-
-
-
After delving into where in the world people seem most keen on Linux, I couldn’t resist taking the research into Google Insights a bit further and seeing what trends were visible on the questions of which Linux distribution seemed to be most popular over time.
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
Debian Family
-
These days there are hundreds of Linux-based operating systems that you can boot from a CD, DVD, or USB flash drive without installing anything to your hard drive. This lets you try out an operating system without replacing your current one — and it may also help you repair a broken operating system by booting from removable storage to run a disk scan, repartition a drive, or make other changes.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
After performing a fresh Linux installation, most users are concerned with customizing their desktop or application set for their needs, but an increasing number of enthusiasts tend to be looking at their kernel. The Zen kernel was once very popular, but of increasing popularity amongst die-hard Linux enthusiasts is the Zen-related Liquorix kernel. While it claims to offer superior performance for common workloads, is this really the case? Here are some benchmarks of the stock Ubuntu 12.04 kernel versus the 3.2 kernel offered by Liquorix.
-
Lest you wonder whether this was an intentional naming decision, it does seem to be that Canonical is deliberately avoiding using the L word. The release notes were imported by Canonical’s Kate Stewart (release manager) with the “Ubuntu kernel” language. From skimming the rest of the release notes brings up only one mention of “Linux.” This is to mention that on PowerPC if Ubuntu is installed “along side linux, the system does not automatically boot into the newly installed system.” So Canonical clearly seems to be trying to distance itself from Linux, here.
-
-
-
Canonical announced a few minutes ago (March 27th), in a security notice, that a new kernel upgrade for its Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system is available.
-
-
The development team behind the hugely popular open source media player and entertainment hub, XBMC, has announced immediate availability of the newest XBMC 11.0 “Eden” release as well as XBMCbuntu, a new Ubuntu-based live CD.
There have been a number of changes since the previous version was announced over a year ago. The default skin, Confluence, has been vastly improved and received some performance increases thanks to features like Dirty-region rendering and a new JPEG decoder, among others.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
-
-
Raspberry Pi will be on sale to consumers from Wednesday morning according to Premier Farnell and element14, who also released an update to the pricing
-
Phones
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
After a several month hiatus, the individual(s) working to reverse-engineer Skype’s binary client have successfully “deobfuscated” the Skype 5.5 release.
“We got deobfuscated skype v5.5!!! I can’t belive in this. But its fucking true. Great thanks and congratulations going to Vilko,” begins a new post on the skype-open-source blog.
-
-
-
Free and open source software has touched all our lives whether we know it or not. Often misunderstood and treated with suspicion, many businesses take advantage of the benefits of it without acknowledging the community that powers it.
-
The time has come for small and medium businesses to get the recognition they deserve, according to Andrew Savory, newly-appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at open source systems integrator Sirius, with a new generation of smart British technology companies proving that they can deliver services just as well, sometimes cheaper, and sometimes better than their large entrenched counterparts.
Savory, an active member of The Apache Software Foundation, joins Sirius from the LiMo Foundation, a non-profit technology consortium dedicated to creating the first Linux-based mobile operating system for smartphone devices. Coming from an open source, small business background himself, Savory is excited to see a step-change in the way that SMEs are being viewed, thanks to initiatives like the government’s G-Cloud.
-
f at first you don’t succeed, open source the sucker. Peek has released an open source version of their Peek Mobile operating system, allowing hackers to use the all-but-obsolete little email device as a hacker platform. The Linux release is available the PeekLinux wiki and hackers are already adding new apps and functionality to the tiny device.
-
Over the last few years open source technology has enabled mobile phone networks to be set up on a shoestring budget at hacker conferences, on a tiny Pacific island and at a festival in the Nevada desert. Andrew Back takes a look at how this has been made possible and at what’s involved in building a GSM network using OpenBTS and OpenBSC.
-
Events
-
Gardiner is a long-time member of the Sydney Linux User Group, an office-bearer of Linux Australia, and a regular member of the technical panel that chooses talks for the annual Australian national Linux conference.
Last year Gardiner, along with Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora, set up The Ada Initiative, a project to help increase the participation of women in technology. The project was born after several incidents of sexist behaviour towards women at FOSS events.
-
Next week’s Palmetto Open Source Software Conference — or POSSCON — is starting to bring some serious high-tech street cred to Columbia.
The conference – which grew substantially in each of its past four years — focuses on the communal development of software like Open Office and Firefox that developers share with the world, often for free.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
-
-
Google’s upcoming “Daisy” Chromebook will reportedly use Samsung’s ARM-based Exynos 5250 SoC.
-
Mozilla
-
You can opt out of being tracked online by using a Web browser with support for Do Not Track, a privacy feature that lets you tell supporting websites that you don’t want to be tracked by third parties (advertisers, marketing firms, and the like). It’s like putting yourself on an online version of the Do Not Call list.
Now Mozilla is developing an open-source operating system for smartphones and tablets that supports Do Not Track from the ground up. Code-named Boot to Gecko (B2G), this Linux-based mobile OS is designed to bring the (comparatively) rigorous privacy standards of the World Wide Web to smartphones and tablets.
-
Mozilla has teamed up with Web design studio Little Workshop to develop a Web-based multiplayer adventure game called BrowserQuest. The game is built with standards-based Web technologies and is designed to be played within a Web browser.
With the technical capabilities offered by the latest standards, Web developers no longer have to rely on plugins to create interactive multimedia experiences and application-like user interfaces. As we reported earlier this month, modern standards are making the Web an increasingly viable platform for game development.
-
If you are a Firefox 3.6 user you know by now that support for that branch of the web browser will end on April 24, 2012. As it stands now, Firefox 3.6.28, released on March 14, is likely the last version of Firefox 3.6. Mozilla will not update the version of the browser again unless a major security or stability issue forces them to.
With Firefox 3.6 out of the picture, Firefox users still using the branch are asked by Mozilla to either update to the current stable version of the browser, which is Firefox 11 at the time of writing, or the Firefox Extended Support Release. The latter has been specifically designed for organizations as a way to lessen the impact of Mozilla’s new rapid release process on the company’s IT department.
-
-
-
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
A group of LibreOffice developers have added experimental collaborative editing capabilities to the open source office suite. The feature allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously over the Internet. The collaborative editing functionality was implemented by grafting Telepathy to LibreOffice.
-
CMS
-
Business
-
Opscode, the maker of the open source Chef tool that the company says can help system administrators “rule the cloud”, has lured more big backers as momentum builds for that tool’s open source, hosted, and licensed versions.
-
-
Funding
-
-
If you’re a post-secondary student, 18 years or older, you have a golden opportunity this Summer. Contribute to an open source project that you care about, and get paid to do it. Once again, it’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) time, and open source organizations are beating the bushes to find the best ideas and applicants.
The GSoC has been an annual tradition since 2005. Google partners with mentoring organizations and offers students stipends for successful completion of open source projects. Students get a stipend of $5,000 USD and the mentoring organization receives $500. Students get a $500 stipend after coding begins on May 1st, a $2,250 payment after a successful mid-term evaluation, and $2,250 after the final program evaluation. Oh, and don’t forget the t-shirt.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
-
Roland McGrath has announced that the GNU C Library (glibc) Steering Committee is dissolving. The direction of the project will now be governed more informally by a team led by the current maintainers.
-
Project Releases
-
Public Services/Government
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Last month, we posted a survey asking, “If you could open one of the following data sets tomorrow, which one would you open and why?” We got a great response–279 people voted and there were several comments.
-
Programming
-
The Eclipse Foundation for open source development tools is eyeing July as the release date for the 1.0 version of its Orion browser-based IDE for building Web applications, which will be discussed at this week’s EclipseCon 2012 conference in Reston, Va.
-
-
Standards/Consortia
-
No one has seen the Tizen mobile platform in action yet, but whatever browser the in-development platform is using has blown away the competition for HTML5 performance.
Listed only as “Tizen 1″ on The HTML5 Test (THT) site, the development version of the Tizen browser scored 387 points out of a possible total of 475 points within the mobile phone browser category.
-
1&1, GMX and WEB.DE receive the German Document Freedom Award for the use of Open Standards. The prize is awarded by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. (FFII). 1&1 is awarded for automatically adding XMPP for all customers of their mail services. The Document Freedom Award is awarded annually on the occasion of Document Freedom Day – the international day for Open Standards. Last years winners include tagesschau.de, Deutschland Radio, and the German Foreign Office.
-
Security
-
Finance
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
In an uncharacteristic move for a Fox News anchor, Wallace asks some tough questions of the Chair of the House Budget Committee. Since the Ryan plan would lose 10 trillion dollars of revenue over ten years, Wallace asked exactly which tax loopholes would be closed to raise the revenue that would be lost from reducing the tax rate. But Ryan could not name specific loopholes that he would close as part of his plan because “that’s not the job of the budget committee.”
-
The gun lobby has come under the spotlight for its role in the so-called “Stand Your Ground” or “Shoot First” law that may protect the man who shot and killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida –- but many other special interests, including household names like Kraft Foods and Wal-Mart, also helped facilitate the spread of these and other laws by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
-
ACTA
-
LQDN demonstrates that their voting expectations do not depend upon the ECJ rerferral but their procedural input is quite a bit confusing. I had some strange artefacts in my DSL connection and then found out the ethernet cable between the router and the splitter was broken. You could argue that LQDN add some fog of war and inserted confusion in the process. I just wonder if MEPs would switch to a different cable. If you dismiss the current proposed procedures of the rapporteur David Martin as “delay” tactics what’s the actual alternative for Parliament?
-
The EU Parliament has refused to freeze the ACTA debate, and will not refer the agreement to the EU Court of Justice. In a 21 to 5 vote, the Parliament decided to stick to its calendar and will vote on ACTA in June, as originally planned. The Commission’s technocratic manoeuvres have not stopped the Parliament, and the door remains open to a swift rejection of ACTA.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.27.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:01 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
On top of its impressive performance stats, the 7508 also showed off multiple redundancy and load-balancing mechanisms and recovered quickly from failures. And it did all this running on Linux, with all the extensibility that comes with Unix-like operating systems.
-
The fallout from all this will be that Android/Linux tablets will become the norm in 2012 and ARMed devices will be abundant to take Android/Linux. Intel tablets will need huge batteries to last more than a few hours, also raising the costs. GNU/Linux will be available to offset their higher hardware costs… Love it. Wintel is feeding the fire of */Linux. Using the opponent’s weight to the opponent’s disadvantage is a winning strategy. The cloud will slurp up a huge market from Wintel this year and next.
-
Desktop
-
I am Philip Newborough. I am a web developer and GNU/Linux enthusiast. I produce an unofficial Debian derivative known as CrunchBang. At the moment, I am working full time on CrunchBang, trying to improve its quality and purpose. I love working on the project and I love learning more about the Debian system.
-
This Linux OS distribution is one of the most famous in the world. There are almost no people who are acquainted with Linux, but never heard of this OS. At this moment of time, it is on the 29th place in the Distrowatch rating, somewhere between Xubuntu and GhostBSD.
-
Kernel Space
-
Applications
-
-
How many reasons do you need to use Linux? Free, stable, inordinately fashionable. And now, a way of automatically backing up every single application you’ve installed.
For those that know, APT is Debian’s incredibly easy and useful package manager. You want some software? Use the command line sudo apt-get, or the Synaptic Package Manager or the Software Manager of the Debian distro of your choice, find the software, click install, and there we go.
When I upgrade to a new version of a Linux distribution, whether it’s Ubuntu or Linux Mint, I always do a clean install, as I find it far less troublesome.
-
-
Proprietary
-
For all the hype around Netflix it is easy for us Linux users to forget there are alternatives. Its not that Netflix is (debateably) the best, but rather its the most widely used that causes us to neglect the numerous options that are actually available to us. In this article I want to present some of those alternatives, and how they hold up against Netflix. One caveat however is that I cannot fairly compare the variety and quality of the programming selections of each service seeing as the former is too large to parse, and the latter is inherently subjective.
-
Feeling a bit disorganized? Looking to take control of your projects? Take a look at Tracks, an open source Web-based application built with Ruby on Rails. Tracks can help you get organized and Get Things Done (GTD) in no time.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine
-
For many people out there one of the biggest challenges of moving from one operating system to another is finding applications to do all the things a person did with their first operating system. After all, the majority of the population isn’t as interested in what operating system they have, rather they focus on which applications they can run. With this in mind CodeWeavers has a product called CrossOver. The CrossOver suite allows a user to install and run Windows applications on Linux distributions or Mac OS X. If the mission of CrossOver sounds similar to WINE that is because CrossOver is based on the WINE project, but with additional effort put into polishing the user experience and testing compatibility. With the recent release of CrossOver XI the folks over at CodeWeavers offered a free trial and, as many of our readers are new to Linux and will likely benefit from the ability to run Windows applications on their new OS, I gladly accepted.
-
Games
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
KDE deployed a new mirror network this weekend. The mirror network is used to spread released software to users. In the old system, users had to select a mirror server manually. The new system selects a mirror automatically, based on the country where the user is located. If there is no mirror for that country, a mirror is selected based on continent. In either case, mirrors that are geographically closer are preferred. If there is an even better mirror—such as one in the same network as the user, it is preferred over all others. Here is the current list of the official KDE mirrors.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
-
GNOME 3.4, the latest major update to the GNOME3 desktop, is set to be officially released on Wednesday. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting features of this biannual GNOME update.
The release notes coming out on Wednesday when GNOME 3.4 is to be officially announced will exhaustively cover the changes to GNOME 3.4 since the 3.2 release last September. However, in looking over the change-logs for the GNOME 3.4 packages being checked-in and with testing of GNOME 3.3 development releases, here’s some of the most interesting GNOME 3.4 features that go on my list.
-
As the three followers of my blog may have noticed, I am unhappy with the direction both Gnome and KDE have taken. The tablet is a great portable media consumption tool, and minimal productivity tool, also a game machine, but really limiting for all around computing.
Moving desktop interfaces in the direction of the pinch/swipe/poke/prod tablet interface LIMITS their usability. Point Of Fact. Limit is the key word here. The major desktops have fewer customization options, far fewer gadgets, so to speak.
-
-
New Releases
-
-
-
-
A new version, simply labelled “2012_3_24″, of the Parted Magic open source, multi-platform partitioning tool has been released. According to lead developer Patrick Verner, the update fixes a number of issues related to interaction between the BusyBox tool collection and Clonezilla, and upgrades a number of the included applications.
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
Shares of Red Hat (RHT) have climbed 23.8% over the last three months to close at $51.54 on March 22, 2012. The company is looking to keep that trend going when it releases its fourth quarter results on Wednesday, March 28, 2012.
-
-
-
Debian Family
-
I have always been a Debian fan and had planned on just installing a vanilla Debian desktop on this machine with my own customizations. I recalled then that Mint was getting their direct Debian based version going. I have really liked the “Mint treatment” in terms of user interface and end experience functionality, I just can’t stand ubuntu because of the horrible things they do to security in the name of “user friendliness”.
-
Clement Lefebvre, the creator of Linux Mint, has announced the updates to the Linux Mint Debian Edition. With this update, for the fist time, Linux Mint Debian users will get access to Gnome Shell, MATE and Cinnamon. This update brings Linux 3.2 kernel, MATE 1.2 (with mintMenu and mintDesktop now fully ported to MATE), Cinnamon 1.4, KDE 4.7.4, Gnome Shell 3.2.2 and Xfce 4.8.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Recoll is a full text search desktop tool which indexes the contents of many file formats including OpenOffice, MS Office, PostScript, MP3 and other audio files, JPEG and more. Besides regular searches, Recoll also lets you perform some advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like “AND” or “OR”.
-
-
-
-
-
With an eye toward easing the deployment of private clouds, Dell said this week at the WorldHostingDays conference in Germany that it had partnered with Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical to deliver its Cloud Solution product in Britain, Germany and China.
-
-
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Phones
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
Wishtel, a company based out of Mumbai, India has come up with its own series of Android-powered tablets under the brand name ‘IRA’. The 3 tablets are called IRA Thing E, IRA E and IRA Icon E. All of these tablets have a 7.0 inch screen and are running on either Android 2.2 Froyo/ 2.3 Gingerbread OS or Linux OS.
-
The Vivaldi tablet is a 7 inch tablet and open source KDE Plasma Active software. The €200 tablet is expected to start shipping in May, but the folks behind the official Vivaldi user forum at OpenTablets.org got their hands on an early unit — and they’ve ripped it apart to see what makes it tick.
-
-
Sustrick and Lucina, along with some members of the ZeroMQ community, have created the Crossroads I/O fork, which, like ZeroMQ, is licensed under the LGPLv3. The project’s goals are to serve as a user-space implementation of messaging, educate developers about distributed messaging, design for global, 20-year use cases, and encourage a commercial ecosystem to grow around the project. Specifically, they wish to be vendor neutral and implement a “liberal (e.g. Linux-style) trademark policy” that allows use of the trademark by third parties.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
According to data from StatCounter, Google’s Chrome browser has about 30 percent market share at this point, and it may be on track to challenge Internet Explorer’s share, which has been dwindling for years. A close look at market share data for the leading browsers, though, shows that Chrome’s usage is highest on weekends, and its share numbers tend to drop during the week, suggesting that users favor it at home, but may favor Internet Explorer when at work. That’s a challenge Google needs to overcome.
-
SaaS
-
Free Software advocates quickly demonize SaaS as the ultimate way to take your freedom away. A lot of them dismiss the advantages of having data online highlighting (and rightly so) the fact that you may be locked out of your own data anytime. My question is: what if SaaS is in fact the way to go, the future, and just need to hurry the hell up and make sure that it’s easy to install, and use, the great SaaS available under a free software license?
-
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
Chakra, the KDE-centric distribution, has moved the latest LibreOffice to the stable repo’s. Thie means “it is no longer needed to install the complete office suite, it is split up in different components, and you can choose which parts to install,” says the project page.
-
CMS
-
Business
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
-
Today is a good day. I am back from presenting at LibrePlanet 2012 this weekend.
-
-
Project Releases
-
Public Services/Government
-
Iceland has kicked off a migration project to put its public institutions on a strict diet of free and open source software. The move will affect a wide variety of institutions, and it could result in savings for the country’s cash-strapped government. However, just because software is free as in beer and free as in freedom doesn’t mean maintenance will come at no cost.
-
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Gangplank was created by two entrpreneurs in Chandler, AZ who loved their city, but felt that it lacked the culture to make creative ventures successful. It was started just before the recession 4 years ago. It started by trying to help technical entrepeneurs through seed funding and incubation, but quickly found the community needed so much more. In the last four years the space has increased from 2,500sqft to 14,000sqft and has opened three new locations. It has partnered with two cities (Avondale, AZ and Chandler, AZ) and is activating creatives to get involved in government and their community. Bringing fresh ideas and the concept of iterating through ideas to find success. Gangplank has started a collaborative workspace movement that was highlight this year as one of Entrepreneur Magazines 100 Most Innovative Companies.
-
Open Hardware
-
Quanta’s gross margin in the fourth quarter of 2011 is expected to have dropped to 3.3% from 3.7% in the third, while Compal is expected to see its percentage dropped from 5% in the third quarter to 4.8% in the fourth.
-
Programming
-
Standards/Consortia
-
Though VMware provides its low-end offerings for free, it can’t stay in the game by relying on those alone; it makes its money exclusively from selling high-end virtualization and virtualization management software. Unlike its competitors, VMware doesn’t have much of a revenue stream from operating systems and other products. And when it attempted to overcome that weakness, it was blindsided. More on that in a bit.
-
Jill Stein, a doctor and activist from Massachusetts, is running for the Green Party nomination for President of the United States. Stein is the frontrunner for the party’s nomination, running against comedian Roseanne Barr and veteran Green Party activists Kent Mesplay and Harley Mikkelson. Stein’s campaign, headed up by Wisconsin native Ben Manski, is focusing on getting enough delegates in each state to win the party’s nomination at the July 2012 Green Party convention in Baltimore and on securing November ballot lines in all 50 states.
-
Environment/Energy/Wildlife
-
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has drafted a “chemicals of concern” list to restrict the use of certain chemicals and alert the public to their possible dangers. But the list remains secret and dormant because it’s stuck at the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) for review.
-
DRM
-
In Spring 2011, I started a project to attempt to create a free-culture compatible / non-DRM alternative to Blu-Ray for high-definition video releases on fixed-media, and after about a year hiatus, I’m getting back to it with some new ideas. The first is that I’ve concluded that optical discs are a bust for this kind of application, and that the time has come to move on to Flash media, specifically SDHC/SDXC as the hardware medium. This is a more expensive choice of medium, and still not perfect, but it has enough advantages to make it a clear choice now.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
ACTA
-
Brussels, March 26th 2012 – Today is the beginning of a decisive week for the future of the ACTA procedure in the EU Parliament. Tomorrow, Members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) may decide whether to vote on ACTA in the next few months as originally planned, or to follow the rapporteur David Martin in buying time and defusing the ongoing debate through technocratic manoeuvres. Citizens must call their MEPs now and urge them to face their political responsibility by rejecting ACTA.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.26.12
Posted in News Roundup at 3:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
-
Sabre did look at that other OS but decided they did not want the lock-in. Having decided to move to Intel processors, they did not want to have to change software again if they moved to another CPU and GNU/Linux runs on everything…
-
Desktop
-
Ah, statistics! How we love to deceive ourselves with them! Sometimes we tend to forget they are numbers applied to measure a reality, but they are affected by many variables. Therefore, statistics become a useful prediction, but a prediction is, ultimately, a guess nonetheless.
I am saying this because, since I migrated to Linux in 2009, I have been listening to Windows fanboys chanting that “according to Netmarketshare and StatCounter, Linux accounts for a skimpy 1% of the total market”. And the funny thing is that they believe it!
-
Kernel Space
-
For those owners of Intel’s latest-generation Core i3/i5/i7 “Sandy Bridge” processors, here’s a quick look at the impact of some GCC tuning options specific to these latest AVX-enabled Intel processors.
-
-
-
Con Kolivas announced this weekend the release of an updated BFS scheduler for the recently-released Linux 3.3 kernel. The new BFS scheduler is at version 0.420 and is codenamed “Smoking”, with “a fairly large architectural change” since earlier versions of this out-of-tree kernel scheduler.
-
-
If Android is Linux’s prodigal son, the two parties came a little closer to reconciliation recently with the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel, which merges Android back into the Linux mainline. Despite all this geeky jargon, this is a change that could actually matter even to people who aren’t programmers. Here are the details in plainer English, and why they’re worth noting.
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
As Phoronix Forums readers have been quick to discover, early “beta” builds of AMD’s Catalyst 12.3 proprietary Linux driver have begun to appear publicly.
First pointed out earlier this morning was an “OpenCL1.2betadriversLinux.tgz” package from AMD’s web-site. This OpenCL 1.2 beta driver Linux package was joined by an updated Windows driver too with improved OpenCL support. The beta Linux driver is from the fglrx 8.96 release stream, which is what will be Catalyst 12.3.
-
-
There’s a few updates concerning Linux benchmarks of NVIDIA’s brand new GeForce GTX 680 “Kepler” graphics card, the ARM-based NVIDIA Tegra 3 platform, and other Linux performance topics.
-
Applications
-
-
-
Proprietary
-
Opera web browser is almost available for every device we have these days such as desktop, tablet, mobile devices and it’s available for the major platforms. Now, Opera software ASA will provide a new web browsing experience called “Opera TV Browser”, which will allow you to have a full browsing experience through Linux and Android based TVs.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
-
-
Ryan “Icculus” Gordon will be talking about using open-source tools for game development next weekend at the 2012 Flourish conference.
As written about last week, Ryan Gordon will be talking once again at the Flourish conference in Chicago at month’s end. Last week his topic wasn’t disclosed for this open-source conference, but it’s since come to light: Open Source Tools for Game Development.
-
-
Desktop Environments
-
There’s new releases of some key EFL — Enlightenment Foundation Libraries — packages. This round of Enlightenment package updates has also introduced some new components.
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
GNOME Desktop
-
The GNOME Project announced a few minutes ago, March 23rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Release Candidate version of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings more fixes to the existing bugs.
-
-
-
New Releases
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Red Hat Family
-
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT): HP (NYSE:HPQ) plans to work with Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) to develop Linux code for mission critical operations, according to The Inquirer. Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows and Linux will begin gaining market share in mission critical computer, HP believes, the publication stated.
-
Red Hat is an undisputed leader of the Linux world. The company has broken all records by registering a whooping $909 million in revenues for 2011. The company is a great example of profitability from open source. Red Hat now powers more than 50% of the global trading volume. The company claims that 100% of the Top 5 Asia Pacific stock exchanges, run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
-
Fedora
-
Swapnil: Can you tell us more about the Fedora Audio Spin, what is the goal of the project?
Brendan: Traditionally Fedora has been known to walk the leading edge in free and open source software development but for some reason this has never been realised in the realms of pro-audio/music creation.
We see the Fedora Audio spin as a great way to encourage people to use Linux audio and strengthen and invigorate the community surrounding Fedora Audio. We are aiming at producing a spin which allows Linux audio enthusiasts to quickly setup up and configure their audio workstations for audio and music production.
-
Debian Family
-
Jörg is a very active contributor within Debian, and has been for a long time. This explains why he holds so many roles (FTPmaster and Debian Account Manager being the 2 most important ones)… Better known as Ganneff (his IRC nick), he’s not exactly the typical hacker. He has no beard and used to drink milk instead of beers. 
-
After a year when there was just a single candidate, the incumbent, standing for the post, 2012 will see three developers slug it out for the post of leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Project.
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
-
Unity 5.8 has landed into Ubuntu 12.04 with new features and fixes. It seems lots of work has gone under the hood as I have never seen Unity interface so fast.
Its just flying and for a moment I really thought that its Unity 2D as after Unity 5.8 update, the dash menu got lots of UI tweaks and it now looks very much like Unity 2D’s dash.
-
Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS (long-term support) is being built with the latest Linux kernel and OpenStack IT and is currently undergoing integration and quality assurance testing with Dell’s version of OpenStack.
-
-
Ubuntu Unity get bumped to version 5.8 bringing with it many bug fixes improving its polish and perfection. Most of the bug fixes are barely major but improves the overall Unity interface. Lets go through them one by one.
-
Flavours and Variants
-
Bodhi Linux 1.4.0 has been released, in this quarter update, Enlightenment has been built from a fresh SVN pull from March 20th and the default Midori browser has been updated to the latest version, a more current build of Linux Kernel ( 3.2.0-19 ), software in repositories were updated to the latest version (Firefox11, chromium 17, LibreOffice3.5…) , also this release comes with some minor improvement, this include include resolving an issue that had prevented PCManFM’s application menu from working, E17′s everything module calculator feature now works out of the box and more.
-
Bodhi Linux is a lightweight Ubuntu based distribution that uses Englightenment as its desktop manager. It is geared for those who have older hardware or who prefer lighter desktops compared to the heavier GNOME or KDE.
Bodhi comes as an installable LiveCD which when first started, is quite similar to that of Ubuntu’s startup so if you’ve used Ubuntu before, you’ll feel well at home.
The amount of diskspace needed is very low at a whopping 1.2 GB for those who want to install it instead of using it in a Live environment. Installation was quite simple with going through a few configuration steps and then from there and not too long after it’s installed. Installation times will vary depending on your hardware specifications.
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
Amazon has updated its Kindle for Android app, brining support for Kindle Format 8 and a larger assortment of illustrated children’s books, comic books, and graphic novels to Android devices. It’s great news for comics fans as you can now read your favorite comics or graphic novels in stunning visuals on your Android devices.
-
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
-
Meet Vivaldi, the new opensource tablet from the gang over at MakePlayLive. You might already know a thing or two about the Vivaldi, because it used to be called the KDE ‘Spark’ Tablet. What you should really know is that at heart, it is just a giant Google Nexus S. But what makes it so special?
-
-
-
Numerical computation tools that run on GNU/Linux platform such as Ubuntu, Debian or Fedora are a huge blessing for all mathematical computation ‘freaks’, be it students or researchers. The expensive proprietary utility, Matlab, may be a leader in terms of introducing newer applications, but the Free (as in ‘freedom’) Software alternatives available are not lagging in any way.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
Tweet
One of the major gripes about Google’s ambitious Chromebooks is its price. It is quite expensive given the limitations it has. If reports are to be believed Chromebook may become extremely cheap.
-
One may wonder what future holds for Google’s Gentoo Linux based ChromeOS. The initial sales of Samsung and Acer Chromebook was not impressive. There were many reasons for the slow sales of the Chromebooks, but the future is bright as we move towards cloud-based computing.
The ChromesOS is gaining popularity among hardware players, after Samsung and Acer now Sony is also joining the elite Chromebook club. Sony has reportedly submitted a filing for its first Chromebook to FCC. FCC E-filing is showing a Sony device which fits the bill of a Chromebook. Any doubt over it being a Chromebook is removed on the ‘manual’ page which specifically points at ChromOS:
-
-
According to some FCC leak and rumoring, it looks like Sony is about to release a new Chromebook and the FCC info may point towards it running on an ARM Processor! T25 is the leaked processor info, that sound like the Tegra 250 T25. I think the thinking was T25 is intermediary between T20 and T30, in between Tegra2 and Tegra3. Basically, I think, the hope should be that if it’s a Tegra2, that it has a new faster memory bandwidth and a higher clock speed compared to the “first generation” Tegra2 devices that were released back since the end of 2010!
-
SaaS
-
When Amazon and Eucalyptus finally announced plans to partner on cloud computing, the big winners were cloud integrators seeking to move workloads between on-premise IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Amazon Web Services. But ultimately, Talkin’ Cloud believes Amazon and Eucalyptus were reacting to OpenStack — which is available as both an on-premise or public cloud platform.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
CMS
-
Drupal is a hugely popular content management system, but for all of its flexibility and power it’s missing a key component: an easy way to manage image galleries. If you need to create and manage image galleries in Drupal, here’s an easy approach that won’t cost too much of your sanity.
-
Dries Buytaert is programming wunderkind. He learned to program when he was six years old — even before he could read.
Today he is internationally famous as the creator of Drupal, one of the world’s most successful open source projects.
-
BSD
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Project Releases
-
XBMC, the very well known open-source multimedia / HTPC project, has finally reached its XBMC 11.0 (codenamed “Eden”) milestone.
-
Openness/Sharing
-
Finance
-
The “toxic culture of greed” on Wall Street was highlighted again last week, when Greg Smith went public with his resignation from Goldman Sachs in a scathing oped published in the New York Times. In other recent eyebrow-raisers, LIBOR rates—the benchmark interest rates involved in interest rate swaps—were shown to be manipulated by the banks that would have to pay up; and the objectivity of the ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association) was called into question, when a 50% haircut for creditors was not declared a “default” requiring counterparties to pay on credit default swaps on Greek sovereign debt.
-
-
For the first time in several years, the rate of growth in Los Angeles County food stamp use has slowed. That’s little consolation however given that total participation zoomed from just above 600,000 to over 1,000,000 people since the onset of the financial crisis. As longtime readers know, I’ve tracked the series as a backdoor view on rising energy costs–and in the case of LA County–gasoline costs in particular. | see: Los Angeles County SNAP Users vs. Price of Oil 2007-2012.
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) filed a complaint today with the Government Accountability Board (GAB) based on newly discovered documents revealing that numerous Wisconsin legislators have received corporate-funded gifts through their connections to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Although ALEC describes itself as the largest membership group for legislators, over 98% of its $7 million budget is from corporations and sources other than legislative dues. Documents obtained via Wisconsin open records law and other sources show that ALEC corporations are funding lawmakers’ out-of-state travel expenses to posh resorts for ALEC meetings with corporate lobbyists, in addition to gifts of entertainment and exclusive parties.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.23.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Kernel Space
-
First of all, this was the last pull request where Jesse Barnes of Intel is handling the role as maintainer of the Linux PCI sub-system. Jesse has announced he’s handing off the PCI maintainer role to Bjorn Helgaas, a software engineer at Google. “He’s been a core PCI and Linux contributor for some time now, and has kindly volunteered to take over. I just don’t feel I have the time for PCI review and work that it deserves lately (I’ve taken on some other projects), and haven’t been as responsive lately as I’d like, so I approached Bjorn asking if he’d like to manage things. He’s going to give it a try, and I’m confident he’ll do at least as well as I have in keeping the tree managed, patches flowing, and keeping things stable.”
-
HP, which has a long history of developing and maintaining its own UNIX operating systems such as HP-UX and VMS, now sees Linux and Microsoft Windows gaining market share in the mission critical market. HP said it will commit code to the Linux kernel, working with Red Hat as its mission critical Linux distribution, and added that it wants to work with the open source community rather than just do its own thing.
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
-
About eight hours after the introduction of the GeForce GTX 680, rudimentary support for this NVIDIA graphics card has been added to the Nouveau DRM/KMS driver in the Linux main development branch. At the beginning of the week, the developers began to prepare this branch for Linux kernel version 3.4, the release of which is expected at the end of May. With version 3.4, Nouveau will also cease to be rated as a staging driver.
-
AMD said it will complement its closed source Catalyst drivers with open source versions for Linux users. Although the firm’s open source efforts lag considerably behind its Catalyst drivers, AMD’s Alex Deucher announced that the firm’s latest open source driver release supports its Southern Islands GPUs found in Radeon HD 7000 series graphics cards.
-
Applications
-
-
We dance around the topic of what the Linux desktop needs to succeed all the time, and usually it comes down to this argument: the Linux desktop needs to have a better design. That is the core thread of almost every argument I hear lately.
For example, it was the first topic listed by Canonical’s Jonathan Riddell, who (up until recently) was Canonical’s lead developer of Kubuntu, the company’s KDE-flavored release when he stepped through a list of answers to the question “So how can KDE remain relevant?”
-
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
We were contacted by Matthias Lee, owner of opentablets.org, a couple weeks back. Since then, they have put together forums for Vivaldi and have started posting news and information about our efforts.
I know some of you will ask “What about forums.kde.org?” Plasma Active forums and related KDE discussions will continue there, while opentablets.org will focus on our specific tablet (and other) future products. This is the beauty of open participation: everyone gets to add their own flavour.
We’re really excited about opentablets.org as it is one more piece of the community support and interaction puzzle being filled in by the community itself.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
I am not just another gnome 3 hater in the most fashionable and popular way. That’s, though I don’t like the way it defies the traditional workflow, the biggest problem for me, is something else. It’s the shoddy quality of the software, even after one year of its initial release.
Forget the usability, still the gripes are many, ranging from its integration into the system to how it talks with various other core components such as graphics, desktop effects, and the overall stability.
-
This was actually going to be a preview of SolusOS, both because I wanted to do it and because a commenter had requested it. Unfortunately, MultiSystem refused to write SolusOS to the USB, while SolusOS was unbootable after being written to the USB by UnetBootin. Hence, I could not try it out. Instead, I am trying out Cinnamon 1.4.
-
-
-
-
New Releases
-
Red Hat Family
-
-
Oracle has announced that it is making supported versions of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1 (R1) available on Oracle Linux 6; currently, this is only for Oracle Linux 6 with the company’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. Oracle Linux 6 is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle’s own kernel added.
-
-
Fidelity’s Scot Blessington, Quintiles’ Steve Brechbiel, ABB’s (NYSE: ABB) Gary Rackliffe and Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) Craig Youst all praised the area’s talent pool of educated workers as a major factor in their company’s decision to expand in the market.
-
Scientific Linux is an unknown gem, one of the best Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones. The name works against it because it’s not for scientists; rather it’s maintained by science organizations. Let’s kick the tires on the latest release and see what makes it special.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
-
Iain Farrell, project manager at Canonical’s Design Team uploaded today the new wallpapers for the up-coming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.
The wallpapers are not yet officially uploaded in the current development release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but we have the originals and there are 16 new beautiful photos.
Without any further introduction, we’ll present below the photos that were already approved for the final version of Precise Pangolin.
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Phones
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
It is planning to release two variants of its tablets in the country. While one variant will be running on Android 2.2, the other variant will have Linux Sugar OS on-board. The Linux variant of the tablet will also have the native Hindi language support.
-
Akamai Chief Product Architect Guy Podjarny has announced that the company’s Mobitest tool is now available as open source. Mobitest is a testing agent for benchmarking the performance of mobile web pages, originally created by Blaze. Blaze was acquired by the Massachusetts-based content delivery network and cloud services provider in February of this year.
-
-
-
HP says that instead of selling its webOS mobile system or killing it off, it’s making it available as open-source software that anyone can use and modify freely. The company is hoping more mobile apps will be developed under webOS by offering it to the open-source community.
-
Open source software is available for free, along with its source code, and it has developed its own substantial following since the early days of computing. The best known implementations are in infrastructure areas, with the well-known Linux, Java, and PHP packages. Recently, it has gained added attention due to its central role in cloud IT, and through the growing Linux-based Android ecosystem. There are many open source programs available, and there is major support from companies such as IBM and Red Hat. Well known applications include the Mozilla web browser, LibreOffice, Pentaho, WordPress, Moodle, Drupal, and SugarCRM ; but these are just the tip of the iceberg.
-
A decade ago most enterprises avoided Open Source software, but things have changed. Right now Open Source use at enterprises stands at higher than 75 percent, and Gartner predicts that in just five years that 99 percent of enterprises will have adopted some amount of Open Source software. So rather than Open Source being considered as a marginalized alternative to commercial software, Open Source is increasingly becoming the mainstream option.
-
-
Users are taking control, and there’s no stopping them from bringing their own network-connected devices to the office. Today, every phone, every e-book reader, every tablet is a gateway to a world of networked computing. Even if you tried to prevent your employees from bringing them into the building, only military-grade security could stop them.
The BYOD (bring your own device) trend is variously viewed as “a world of pain for IT,” a security challenge that’s solvable, and something to be tolerated with grim resignation. And there’s a growing industry of companies who want to help you stop it, cripple it, or control it.
-
Events
-
One of my favorite projects I have the good fortune to be contributing to was created by the US Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate (that’s DHS S&T in Beltway lingo, the equivalent of the R&D arm of the agency for the rest of us mere mortals) It’s called the HOST program (Homeland Open Security Technology).
-
-
Web Browsers
-
Like many people, I’ve been tracking the steady ascent of Google Chrome – and corresponding decline of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – for some time now. Just recently, yet another milestone has been reached, apparently:
Google’s Chrome narrowly became the world’s top internet browser for the first time on Sunday 18 March 2012, according to StatCounter, the independent website analytics company.
As the accompanying graph indicates, there are some very interesting patterns to be observed.
-
Mozilla
-
Mozilla has announced the arrival of the latest development version of Firefox 13 in the Aurora channel. This in-development version will arrive as the production version of Firefox in approximately twelve weeks. The development version includes a redesigned home page, changed “new tab” behaviour, and auto-completion in the browser address bar.
-
SaaS/Big Data
-
-
-
-
Software features are good, but certification that they actually work is even better — particularly in the open source channel, where users don’t always enjoy the same kind of warranties that are common in the proprietary ecosystem. In this respect, the world of open source Big Data management became a little more stable with the recent announcement that MapR’s distribution of Apache Hadoop has been certified for Talend Open Studio for Big Data. Here’s the scoop.
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
CMS
-
-
Open source is a fantastic element of the software ecosystem and recent studies have shown that it’s on par with traditional proprietary software. Drupal is one of the ring leaders in the open source movement by providing expansive, yet simple tools for Web site content management systems. It’s even so popular that it’s used for the White House’s Web site.
-
Business
-
Free and open source software has touched all our lives whether we know it or not. Often misunderstood and treated with suspicion, many businesses take advantage of the benefits of it without acknowledging the community that powers it.
Before going any further, free software is not about price, rather an ideology that advocates that software has most utility when there are no barriers to its ability to be used, improved and studied at the source code level.
-
Semi-Open Source
-
Funding
-
The Linux Foundation has received the most revenue amongst all of the free software and open source non-profits and directly pays its leader the most, but the highest compensation of any sort is still being received by Mozilla Foundation Chair Mitchell Baker, along with her CTO Colleague Brendan Etch.
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
Volunteer for The GNU Project by participating in the Google Summer of Code! More information is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/
-
The glibc developers have announced the release of version 2.15 of the GNU C Library. The new version fixes a significant number of bugs and adds two new Linux interfaces (process_vm_readv and process_vm_writev). The biggest improvements come in the area of optimisation, however, with many operations being improved throughout the code. This release also adds four new locales, including support for the Native American Unami language, which, according to Wikipedia, is extinct.
-
Public Services/Government
-
Openness/Sharing
-
While using a touchscreen to game isn’t a problem for most people, there are still gamers out there who can’t stand the thought of playing games without an actual gamepad. Well, unfortunately there aren’t a lot of options out there for such purposes. This is where The Evolution Team’s DRONE comes in. Called an open source Bluetooth controller, it is a gamepad designed to work with your smartphones and tablets.
-
-
In this guest post, Frank Tobe, a robotics analyst and publisher of The Robot Report, describes a recent debate between two prominent robotics executives and their opposing views on how to nurture profitable robotics businesses.
-
I frequently get asked why I spend so much time talking about the entertainment industry here on Techdirt, and one of the points I make is that I think what’s happened to the entertainment industry over the last decade and a half is really a leading indicator of the type of disruptive change that has already started to impact, or will soon be impacting, nearly every industry imaginable. As such, by understanding what’s happening and how not to respond, perhaps we can help lots of other industries move more smoothly into the future. So I’m always interested and intrigued by parallels in totally unexpected industries. Just recently, the good folks over at NPR’s Planet Money put together a fascinating episode about modern farm economics (and host Adam Davidson also wrote a NY Times piece on the same subject). While it mainly focuses on Claudia, the high-tech cow, it also has some key economic points that will likely sound familiar to regular readers (unfortunately, these key economic points are only in the audio version of the podcast, and were left out of the transcript).
-
PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
-
In February, Common Cause wrote to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, asking for an explanation about an apparently unreported $1,350 gift from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 2009. Cantor’s office immediately responded, claiming our inquiry was without foundation, but last week his office quietly amended his financial disclosures to include the gift from ALEC.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Trademarks
-
California-based publisher files application with United States Patent & Trademark Office for “video game software.”
-
Copyrights
-
The first time I ever heard someone declare the death of copyright, it wasn’t a dreadlocked GNU/Linux hacker or a cyberpunk in mirror shades: it was a music executive, circa 1999, responding to the launch of Napster.
I thought he was wrong then and I think he’s wrong now — as is everyone else who’s declared copyright to be dead.
The problem is in the name: copyright. The Statute of Anne and other early copyright rules concerned themselves with verbatim copying because copying was the only industrial activity associated with creative expression at the time. There were lots of crafts associated with culture, of course, – performing music, plays and dance, painting pictures, and so on – but these weren’t industrial activities.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
Commodore USA has released the new AMIGA mini and the VIC mini, two small form factor PCs with a bit of retro styling, but very new and powerful guts
-
-
-
-
Kernel Space
-
-
-
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
The Gallium3D compute infrastructure, which is the underlying work for supporting OpenCL over this open-source graphics driver architecture, is on approach for landing in the very near future. This has been one damn good day for open-source Linux graphics drivers following the earlier Nouveau surprise announcements.
-
-
Soon, the kernel will support several AMD graphics cores that are used in recent Radeon graphics cards and in various upcoming processors. In systems with Intel graphics, using hibernation can cause memory corruption. The development of Linux 3.4 has started.
-
Applications
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
Jonathan Riddell, the KDE developer, recently announced that Canonical stopping funding the Kubuntu project and reassigning him in a new role. Looking at Canonical’s focus on Unity, that’s not a surprising move. I don’t know how Canonical works, but looking at the new challenges they set for themselves with every release, I do think they need all the hands they can get. The result of that hard work is evident – Unity is shaping up really well.
-
-
-
-
Have an old computer lying around that you’d like to use for some light web surfing, document editing, and other tasks? I mean like a PC with a 1999-era Intel Pentium III processor? It turns out there’s an OS for that… and it’s not Windows 98.
-
In my last blog about Linux Live Environments, I mentioned REMnux, an environment specifically built for malware analysis. I’d spent a little time with REMnux when it first came out, but decided to take the latest version (3.0) for a test drive.
-
New Releases
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
Canonical’s next long-term support release of its flagship Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04 is in late beta. This next release, due out on April 26th, is in beta now. I’ve been using it for several weeks now and so far, so good.
Indeed, the new Ubuntu is good enough already that I’ve it on my default Ubuntu system: a 2009-era Gateway DX4710. This PC is powered by a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor and has 6GBs of RAM and an Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3100 for graphics. No, it’s not fast, but unlike Windows 8’s beta, you don’t need a fast computer for Ubuntu.
-
From a pool of thousands, 15 photographic wallpapers have been chosen for inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04.
-
-
-
-
With Ubuntu remaining uninterested in systemd, the Upstart init system continues to be developed. Released today was Upstart 1.5 with a few new features.
-
-
However, while that beefed up version may be available at some point, costs and demand will likely hold it off for a while, the popular mini-computer’s designer said.
-
Phones
-
Android
-
NASA has made great efforts to get the public interested in their various projects and avenues of research using tools such as social media networks and their suite of mobile applications. Unfortunately, those applications have almost exclusively been iPhone exclusive. Of the over 20 mobile applications NASA has released, only a scant have made it over to everyone’s favorite open source mobile operating system.
-
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Android is open source and built on Linux. Fortunately for Android enthusiasts and independent developers, however, Sony has made life a little easier by releasing the open source archive for the Xperia S device. Of course, there are some catches. Read on for what this announcement means for the juncture of Android and free software.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
-
Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
-
The Document Foundation (TDF), which produces the leading open source office software suite LibreOffice, is on schedule for the release of a cloud version of its software next month.
The team released the last update to its 3.4 build on Thursday and is now focused on developing version 3.5 further, but the group is now also ready to go live for cloud services in April. That said, the team reserves the right to hold off on launch until the last few software fixes come in, TDF spokesman Italo Vignoli told The Register.
-
Project Releases
-
Public Services/Government
-
OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE is finding favour on the Icelandic government scene with the announcement that all of its public administration organisations will adopt it.
-
Iceland’s push to move its public sector to open-source software has made some headway, with most of the shift seeing Windows swapped for Linux.
-
Security
-
Some words just seem to go together: “bread” and “butter”; “trial” and “error”; “Microsoft” and “security breach.” The MS12-020 Remote Desktop Protocol vulnerability revealed last week shows once again that when it comes to data security, Microsoft is its own worst enemy and any “secure” system can be compromised.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.22.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
The busy folks at Pen Drive Linux have updated their handy Universal USB Installer tool to support four more distros. Which means it can now convert live CDs of Deepin Linux, LinHES Linux, Trisquel Linux and Satux Linux to run on USB keys.
-
-
CS: My first PC was an Apple LC II back around 1993. Then I got hold of a Windows 3.1/ DOS 5 PC. I spent most of my time in DOS because Windows was barely functional. I learned about Linux from a local computer magazine, Computerbits, and installed my first Red Hat around 1995. From 3.5” diskettes!
Apple was very different then, they actually encouraged users to get under the hood and learn about the system, and you could get detailed manuals. They didn’t evolve into shiny, unfriendly closed boxes until later.
-
Desktop
-
The GNU/Linux desktop has been around and growing for a while now but 2012 will be special:
* Android/Linux and GNU/Linux are getting together on ARM,
* Many OEMs are now producing desktop/notebook machines with GNU/Linux, including some old and new styles,
* thin clients, which love GNU/Linux, are now respectable (growth 20% p.a.)…, and
* Android/Linux is invading the desktop space on ARM and x86.
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Kernel Space
-
-
Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman will be moderating the highly-anticipated Linux kernel panel at the Collaboration Summit in a couple short weeks. He was generous enough to take a few moments recently to answer some questions about what we might hear from the Linux kernel panel, as well as some details on his recent work and projects. Oh, and we couldn’t resist asking him about the new Raspberry Pi.
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
-
-
-
-
NVIDIA has finally introduced their first Kepler-based graphics card: the GeForce GTX 680. The new Kepler graphics architecture is an exciting successor to Fermi, but how well does this new graphics processor work under Linux? Here’s a glimpse in what to expect for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 series on Linux.
First of all, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 is designed to compete with AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 Southern Islands graphics card. The GTX 680 has a 28nm GK104 Kepler GPU with 1536 CUDA cores, 128 texture units, 1006MHz core clock, PCI Express 3.0 support and initially there’s just 2GB of GDDR5 video memory on a 256-bit bus. The GeForce GTX 680 has a 195 Watt TDP and carries a $500 USD price-tag.
-
This morning I wrote about the launch of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 as the first-to-ship NVIDIA GPU based upon their brand new Kepler architecture. At the start of the morning it looked to be the usual NVIDIA launch: binary driver support should be in place with an official driver update due out at any time and it would mark the start of the usual Nouveau driver game of reverse-engineering the support in the coming months. With Fermi and past NVIDIA generations there’s never been same-day open-source Nouveau support in any form, but it’s generally taken months to get the display to light-up with KMS.
-
Applications
-
People ask me why on Earth would I subject myself to such dreadful text editor as vim. With it’s weird mode system, nonstandard keyboard shortcuts and all kinds of strange quirks it is not what you would call a user-friendly piece of software. Most users new to this particular editor hit a brick wall at step one: entering text. When you open vim and try to type into it will do strange things. It will mostly beep at you, or display some messages in the status bar but not type. Unless of course you happen to hit a vovel lie a or i or o, in which case it will suddenly come alive and let you type.
-
At first sight, GloboNote looks like yet another sticky notes tool. But this unassuming application has a few clever tricks up its sleeve. For starters, GloboNotes offers a handful of text formatting options, including bold, italics, and underlined. The utility allows you to organize notes into groups, and you can display and hide all notes belonging to a specific group in one go. GloboNotes also sports the ability to perform simple calculations directly in notes: type a calculation (e.g., 3+2=) and press F2 to view the result.
-
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Wine
-
Games
-
CraftStudio is an upcoming collaborative gaming making tool for Linux, featuring Minecraft style blocky graphics.
-
-
Our team is working on polishing the game for an alpha release now. I’ve been working on adding info to the HUD as well as giving players a few more options while out in space. Rusty has made an incredible “asteroid belt” themed mission for us.
-
While the new Humble Bundle is already pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars, there’s a new Source Engine game coming to Linux, and Wasteland 2 is likely coming to Linux, as just some of the recent Linux gaming achievements, there’s still not a surplus of Linux-native games. Even without there being excessive amounts of Linux-native games, not all of the titles that do come are destined to sell well.
Last month I wrote about the Tomes of Mephistopheles reaching an alpha state, which is a game being developed by Kot In Action — the same studio behind the popular Steel Storm series. Tomes of Mephistopheles is powered by the DarkPlaces engine, which is a great game engine for being free and open-source, and that alpha access to this Kot In Action title is available for a $10 USD pre-order.
-
Desktop Environments
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
-
After nine long months of hard work, the KDevelop team proudly announced last evening, March 20th, the immediate availability for download of the KDevelop 4.3 software, which comes with improved performance, lots of new features and assorted bug fixes.
-
-
I have been using KDE under openSUSE for a while now, and for the first time in my life started to love KDE. Last night I went on a test driver and installed couple of KDE centric distributions including Mageia and Mandriva just for the sake of comparison.
These two distributions showed what wonders can be done with KDE, if integrated well. The moment I booted into Kubuntu, I realised why Kubuntu is so low in Distrowatch (at 27). This is ironic because the 26 spots are dominated by KDE centric distros such as Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Chakra, Mandriva, etc.
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Come April 26th and the release of Ubuntu 12.04 a vast number of Ubuntu users will be getting their first taste of the Unity desktop since its basic beginnings as the Ubuntu Netbook Remix in the last LTS.
-
-
-
New Releases
-
-
The Zorin OS team has announced the release of Zorin OS 6 Lite. This release is based on Lubuntu 11.10 and uses the LXDE desktop environment to provide one of the fastest and most feature-packed interfaces for low-spec machines.
-
PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
-
Back in the Fall of 2011, September 4th to be exact, I decided it was time to migrate from the sinking ship of Mandriva to the new Mageia distribution which is based on the best of Mandriva while leaving the chaff of Mandriva behind. It is now six months later and I am ready to report on my experience so far. To sum up this article in a sentence, “Mageia works and works well.” If you just want the summary, that is it, you can stop reading here. If you want more, read on. I will start with what I haven’t liked since that is my shorter list.
-
Gentoo Family
-
-
Gentoo isn’t the highest profile Linux distribution. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it
-
Red Hat Family
-
Fedora
-
Though we’re still a few month away from the May release date for Fedora 17 – aka ‘The Beefy Miracle’ – the Fedora community is now turning its attention to naming Fedora 18.
-
Debian Family
-
Derivatives
-
Canonical/Ubuntu
-
We may never know every detail about Ubuntu’s user base. But some of its characteristics became a little clearer this week as Canonical’s Gerry Carr began releasing the results of the company’s recent survey of people running Ubuntu, the Linux distribution. Don’t get too excited just yet, as we’ll have to wait a few more days for the full survey findings. But if you’re interested in what’s been learned so far, keep reading…
-
-
-
Flavours and Variants
-
-
Phones
-
Android
-
The plight of developers will soon come to an end as the industry will see more Android 4.0 phones launched in 2012.
According to Digitimes, “The supply of smartphones running on Android 4.0 will increase substantially starting the second quarter of 2012, with mid-range to high-end models coming from brand vendors including HTC, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Mobile Communications, while China-based handset makers may launch models based on Qualcomm’s 7227a solution and MediaTek’s MT6565 platform for the entry-level segment, according to industry sources.”
-
Sony has released the source code for the Sony Xperia S phones. This is Sony’s flagship device (no more Erricson) which runs on 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Dual Core processor. This is the first time the company has released source code for a product built on the Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 platform. The code is targeted at inividual enthusiasts and projects like CyanogenMod to be able to take full advantage of the hardware by creating custom ROMs.
-
Sony has announced that they have started shipping their flagship Android phone Xperia S. The phone will be available globally. The phone is powered by a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Dual Core processor and runs Android 2.3.
-
Sub-notebooks/Tablets
-
India is the next big Android market. Another Indian-based company Zync has launched a Rs 8,999 (US$ 178) tablet ‘Zync Z-990′ for the Indian market.
-
It’s always good to hear from the movers and shakers in the open source community, and in addition to a number of recent interviews on timely open source topics here on OStatic, a number of compelling interviews with FOSS leaders have appeared on other sites. If you’re looking for some great input from the bleeding edge, check out this collection of interviews worth reading.
-
Black Duck Software and North Bridge Venture Partners, in partnership with 451 Research, yesterday announced a collaboration to conduct the sixth annual Future of Open Source Survey.
The survey, an annual bellwether of the state of the open source industry, is supported by more than 20 open source software (OSS) industry leaders and is open to participation from the entire open source community.
-
Events
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
Yes. It’s true. For one day, March 18th, 2012, Chrome, and not Internet Explorer (IE), was the most popular Web browser in the world. It won’t be the last day. While the start of the work week put IE comfortably back on top. When users aren’t chained to their desks, they’re choosing to use Google’s speedy Chrome.
StatCounter, the Web-site analytics company research arm StatCounter Global Stats found that Chrome was the number one browser in the world that day. StatCounter data comes fron over 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) to the StatCounter network of more than three million websites
-
Mozilla
-
Enter Linux in general–which is typically much faster, particularly on older hardware–and xPUD in particular, an Ubuntu-based distro built around Firefox that’s lightweight and made for speed.
-
One week after Firefox 11 officially landed in Ubuntu 11.10 last week, a few hours ago (March 21st) Canonical announced that the Mozilla Thunderbird 11.0 email client is now available on the official software repositories of the Oneiric Ocelot operating system.
-
SaaS
-
VMware vs. OpenStack: Plenty of pundits are debating the merits of each platform for cloud computing. Now for a twist: Within the cloud storage market, the recent hot rumor involves VMware (VMW) potentially buying Rackspace (RAX) in order to disrupt potential competition from OpenStack, the open source cloud platform. Here’s a reality check from The VAR Guy.
-
OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solutions with Ubuntu are to be offered by Dell to UK, German, and Chinese companies
-
-
-
Born as a research project in the computer science department at UCSB, Eucalyptus the company was founded in January of 2009. Originally intended to replicate a subset of the Amazon cloud’s featureset in software that could be run locally, one of the project’s primary differentiators was its compatibility with the Amazon API. Importantly, however, this support was unofficial: Amazon neither supported nor legally blessed this feature. Which meant that its appeal was throttled by the uncertainty of Eucalyptus’ legal footing. More than one large vendor has privately characterized the Amazon API as a “non-starter” because their legal departments could not be assured of Amazon’s intent with respect to the intellectual property issues involved.
-
CMS
-
Earlier this year we announced that we would be conducting a Drupal usability study that we would live stream so viewers could watch as participants worked with Drupal 7. Becky Gessler and I are excited to announce our analysis of the results that we will also present at DrupalCon Denver to the Drupal community in a “core conversation” session with Jen Lampton called “User eXperience for Open Source: How to Galvanize a Community.”
-
-
FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
-
This quarter, Ludovic Courtès contributed a continuously-built Nix-based QEMU image, raising the count of GNU/Hurd distributions to three: Debian GNU/Hurd, Arch Hurd, and now Nix. His build is still pretty basic, but a step into the right direction: continuous integration is a great facility for automated testing.
-
The Google Summer of Code 2012 is on! If you’re a student, consider applying for a GNU Hurd project — details to be found on our GSoC page.
-
-
The GCC development team is celebrating the 25th year of the GNU Compiler Collection, a collection initiated by the first public release of GCC (GNU C Compiler) in 1987 by Richard Stallman. Over the years the GNU Compiler Collection, renamed as other languages joined the toolchain, shaped how developers acquired the tools of their trade and provided a platform for new compiler developments. As part of the celebration, the developers have released GCC 4.7.0, a major release of the compiler collection that brings with it new functionality.
-
-
-
Licensing
-
“In judo, the goal is to use the momentum of the person attacking you to defend yourself, and that is exactly what copyleft does”
-
Standards/Consortia
-
Last year, I wrote about the key pillars of openness in today’s enterprise IT industry, highlighting open source software, real open standards, open clouds, and open data as the ‘Four Pillars of Modern IT Openness.’
More recently, I wrote about what I now consider to be the fifth pillar, which is open application programming interfaces (APIs). Of course, when we talk about ‘open’ anything — open source, open standards, open clouds, open APIs — there tends to be debate about what is really open, how we should define open and who should or should not be able to carry the phrase. My focus on open APIs and on APIs in general generated some good discussion, as well as some pushback (Jim comment on LI, regarding the value of APIs compared to open source software, which APIs are open, and how open is open enough?
-
Finance
-
Goldman Sachs Group Inc lost its bid to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of defrauding investors by selling risky debt linked to subprime mortgages that it planned to bet against.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero in New York keeps alive a hedge fund’s claims over a $2 billion offering of collateralized debt obligations, amid intense scrutiny over Goldman’s activities before and after the 2008 financial crisis.
-
ACTA
Permalink
Send this to a friend
03.21.12
Posted in News Roundup at 7:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Kernel Space
-
-
To get the most out of your systems, you want detailed insight into what the operating system kernel is doing. A typical approach is to sample stack traces; however, the data collected can be time consuming to read or navigate. Flame Graphs are a new way to visualize sampled stack traces, and can be applied to the Linux kernel for some useful (and stunning!) visualizations.
-
-
Graphics Stack
-
Applications
-
The TEA Text Editor is a very handy writing tool that delivers a much different user interface. For most computer users cranking out words or program code for digital consumption, text editors are often preferable to feature-bloated word processors. TEA pours on features yet keeps from getting too steamy.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Games
-
You may have heard a few days ago that Dear Esther, a game built upon Valve’s Source Engine, would be ported to Linux and released in the coming months. Well, here’s more details about that Source-based game is getting to Linux.
-
Desktop Environments
-
GNOME Desktop
-
Users who choose between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 are rarely making that decision on a purely rational basis. In my experience, users of GNOME 2 are often choosing what they know, while users of GNOME 3 are technophiles who enjoy anything that is new.
Neither is likely to go over the two generations of GNOME feature by feature. In many cases, the choice seems made before login.
But what happens when the two desktop environments are compared in general features? I’m a fan of neither GNOME 2 nor GNOME 3, but I decided to find out.
-
-
New Releases
-
-
Today sees the release of Legacy OS 4 Mini an Update / Replacement for TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta. Those updating from TEENpup 2010 Mini Beta will need to save any important documents, music etc to an external Hard Drive, USB stick etc as a full reinstall is required to update to this new version, sorry!
-
Debian Family
-
Spending a couple of days intensely running Linux Mint 12 on a very nice desktop PC sent to me for review by ZaReason (much more about that later), I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the annoying bugs in Mint that made me a lot less productive than I am in the Debian Squeeze system I’ve been running on my laptop since late 2010.
-
-
In this interview, Luke Kanies, CEO and founder of Puppet Labs, explains why the Puppet configuration management tool is a huge hit with sys admins, and tells us what to expect next from the popular open source project.
-
We got another reminder of how disruptive open source software is to mobile computing this week, when Linux and Android merged back together. This appears to be good news for a number of parties, but Android and Linux developers and users seem particularly likely to benefit. The inclusion of Android code in the Linux kernel and the ability for Linux developers to more easily work on the Android environment and applications also ties into some of the key topics we’ll be covering in a Webcast March 21 titled ‘Open Source, A Tale of Two Cities in the Mobile Enterprise,’ presented by 451 Research and Black Duck Software.
-
Web Browsers
-
Chrome
-
Ever since Google started working on its Chrome OS operating system, it has had a pronounced focus on allowing users to only work with cloud-based data and applications. This has drawn criticism from many users, and some from us here at OStatic, as seen in this post. With Chrome OS, Google placed a heavy bet on the idea that consumers and business users would have no problem storing data and using applications in the cloud, without working on the locally stored data/applications model that they’re used to.
-
CMS
-
Licensing
-
-
Are developers actually chasing down license violations?
-
Openness/Sharing
-
There are some pretty basic things that a researcher can do to make their work into an open content project. Here are a few.
-
Programming
-
Finance
-
Censorship
-
The Obama administration has condemned Iran for trying to take control of the Internet. In addition, The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued guidance and licensing information to further support the free flow of information to citizens of Iran – a freedom the Iranian regime has consistently denied to its people.
-
Internet/Net Neutrality
-
They’re selling us out. Just weeks after Internet users from across the globe came together to to beat SOPA, the major ISPs are cutting a deal with Big Content to restrict web access for users who are accused of piracy.
-
Intellectual Monopolies
-
Copyrights
-
ACTA
-
Concerned of the ACTA dossier many citizens contacted the press staffers of his colleague Commissioner Neelie Kroes. Commissioner Michel Barnier is right when he emphasized the need for better communications. Karel De Gucht had the opportunity to embrace the public attention to ACTA, and strengthen the institutional cohesion with the European public, help the transformation of the EU towards an “Europe of the citizens”. He didn’t exercise this opportunity, and it appears to me the reason is a fundamental disrespect to democratic principles, he doesn’t take the public seriously.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA