06.28.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Our reason for doing so… don’t have one. We set out to provide a service that was easy and inexpensive, we somehow overlooked the developers of these great GNU/Linux distributions. That e-mail opened our eyes to what kind of harm we might be causing, or more likely, what kind of good we easily could be doing but aren’t doing.
So we now donate 20% of every purchase back to the respective distribution’s project, foundation, company or developers, however donations for the distribution are handled. So now when you purchase a Live USB Flash Drive from InaTux you’re also supporting the development of your favorite distribution in the process.
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Summary:
· Announced Distro: Porteus 1.0
· Announced Distro: Sabayon Linux 6.0
· In Other News: Mozilla Firefox 5, Top 10 Unity indicators, and more…
· Tutorial of the Week: Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop Customization Guide
· Review of the Week: Sweet Home 3D 3.2
· Video Clip of the Week: Mozilla Firefox 5 Final Review
· New Distributions: BlueOnyx 5.6-20110621, Semplice Linux 2.0 Alpha 1, Zorin OS Multimedia/Ultimate/Gaming 5, and more…
· Distributions Updated Last Week: Greenie Linux 9N, Fuduntu 14.10, Absolute Linux 13.38, SlimPup 2.8, and more…
· Development Releases: Parsix Linux 3.7 Test 2, openSUSE Linux 12.1 Milestone 2, Scientific Linux 6.1 Alpha 2, and more…
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Server
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The IBM i platform and its bigger brother, the System z mainframe, take a lot of guff for being a legacy platform. But guess what? Solaris is turning 30 next year, as is HP-UX the year after that. AIX will be 25 this year, Windows server variants are almost 20 years old (remember Windows for Workgroups 3.1?), and Linux pretty much freeze-dried after a hectic 20 years of development. OS/400, of course, just turned 23 last week, but has deeper roots back into CPFon the System/38 in 1978 and SSP on the System/36 in 1983. They are all legacy environments as far as I am concerned.
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Kernel Space
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“Mobile users are urged to seriously consider these results, and possibly even avoid the Natty Narwhal…I hate to say it, especially in an Ubuntu review, but the mobile edge goes to Windows for now…There are also compelling reasons for folks to avoid [Ubuntu 11.04] at all costs. Linux gamers should see substantial improvements, while mobile users suffer a dramatic loss in battery life,” were among the critical comments that Tom’s Hardware had in their Ubuntu 11.04 review as they were referencing the power regressions I discovered nearly two months ago within the mainline Linux kernel. As I mentioned on Sunday, the Phoronix Test Suite stack and I have now nailed this major power regression in the Linux 2.6.38 kernel that is affecting a significant number of mobile Linux users. Here is what is happening and a way that you should be able to workaround the serious regression should it affect your computer system(s).
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Jesse Barnes, the maintainer of the PCI subsystem for the Linux kernel and one of the developers who signed-off on the patch that I discovered is causing the major Linux 2.6.38 kernel power regression, has commented on the matter.
When Jesse isn’t working on the Intel Linux graphics driver stack as part of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center, he’s working on the Linux PCI subsystem. At the time the article was published last night that details the 2.6.38 power regression commit, there wasn’t any comment from the kernel developers due to being unable to reach them over the weekend.
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Applications
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The new and improved version of Miro 4 has been available to us for a couple of weeks now and it is time to see what is new in it and what has been improved from previous versions. Miro has a long history and as such it is quite a unique player which offers many interesting features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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Games
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If you’re having a small computer network at home or a huge office with hundreds of desktops, cyber security is something you can never compromise on. One thing that is a quintessential part of security is something we call a firewall.
A firewall is like the security guard at your door who keeps a watch on everyone who goes in and out. By allowing only legitimate connections to pass through and blocking connections based on a certain set of rules, the firewall secures the network from most kinds of threats that lurk around on the Internet.
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While I wasn’t there from the very start of Linux. I was an early adopter. Even before Linux, though, I was a Unix desktop user ranging from the early character interfaces such as the Bourne shell to graphic Unix desktops such as SCO’s Open Desktop—better known back in the day as Open Deathtrap—and Solaris’s Looking Glass. In the last twenty years I’ve used almost every significant Linux desktop out there, and was the editor-in-chief for many years of Desktop Linux. In short, I know what I’m talking about.
Before giving you my list of favorites though, if you don’t know my work, you should know where I’m coming from. First, I’m a big believe in What Works. I use Linux on my desktop not because I find its free and open-source software foundations morally superior to the proprietary competition from Apple and Microsoft. I use it because it works better for me. When it comes to technology, I’m a pragmatist, not an idealist.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia is a fork of Mandriva, a project that has been around under one name or another for over a decade.
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PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6 for 32 and 64 bits computers is now available for download. A 64 bit only release will be available in the coming weeks
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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I enjoyed using Fedora 15 KDE; I think it has definitely arrived as a viable alternative to the GNOME version. Given all of the controversy and problems with GNOME 3, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll see an exodus of disgruntled users move from the GNOME version of Fedora to the KDE version. If so then I think they might find this release of Fedora KDE to be just what the doctor ordered.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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In a previous article about Google Chromebooks, I talked about how these machines will compete with other non-Windows (that is, Linux) netbook options.
But one area I did not touch on was the tablet computer market. In this market, Apple dominates. Others are left scrambling to gain a piece of whatever scraps happen to be left.
Unlike the desktop space, where Linux competes primarily with Windows, any Linux distribution in the tablet market faces existing options that already have iOS and Android heavily embedded.
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Phones
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The N9 and N950 clearly show that Nokia had good smartphones already in the development pipeline, but new CEO Stephen Elop never gave them a chance. He bet the company on Windows phone, which will be good for Microsoft but not so great for Nokia.
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Android
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Right away ZaReason sets themselves apart from other computer vendors by including a screwdriver and encouraging you to tinker with your system. Since actually using your computer all but violates the warranty for most other computer vendors, this is a nice change of pace.
Their hardware policy is also different. ZaReason uses open hardware, so you get components that work with any Linux distribution, and they design their systems to be upgrade-friendly. They also stick with good hardware that you can depend on, rather than pinching pennies on substandard components.
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There it is and XP is too dead to hold back GNU/Linux again. So is Vista. “7″ costs too much in these small, cheap computers. MeeGo is a GNU/Linux distro developed by Nokia and Intel. While Nokia has dropped MeeGo, Intel is still involved and ASUS will ship products.
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Equally, it’s why I distrust proprietary software. I don’t know what it’s doing most of the time, and I assume the worst. I also don’t see the need to guard the software so closely.
An important element of open source is that is never gives up software copyright. All it does is gives me permission to view – and usually edit – the source code. (You also get “free” open source but it’s not as socialist as the proprietary software companies would have us believe.)
Proprietary software is like buying a car that comes with the bonnet welded shut. To check your oil or water levels would require a trip to the manufacturer, and a fee to go with it. Their biggest concern is that, should I see the engine, I would immediately go and create my own car from scratch.
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To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Bungie, the American game developer now famous for its Halo franchise, has announced that it will release the source code for Marathon Infinity, the third game in its Marathon Trilogy. The company says that the move is something it “should have done a long time ago (but didn’t because our legal counsel ‘forgot’)”. This means that the entire Marathon franchise will now be available as open source.
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I’ve noticed a disturbing trend occurring with software. Until recent months it was largely limited to closed source software such as iOS, but today we see it even in the FOSS world.
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Events
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RailsBridge logo (used without permission)
Over 2009, two women worked to bring more people into their programming language meet-up group. Their RailsBridge effort has lessons for community building in free software as a whole.
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Web Browsers
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Even on the sunniest, most peaceful days here in the Linux blogosphere, it’s a pretty safe bet that the Great Browser Wars are still being waged somewhere, whether or not we can actually overhear the particular skirmish of the moment.
Last week, however, the din of the battle roared loud enough for all to hear as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Mozilla come to blows.
There was Mozilla’s declaration that it doesn’t care about enterprise users, of course — which Microsoft seized with glee as an opportunity to promote Internet Explorer.
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Mozilla
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My favourite Firefox 5 feature so far: the handling of tab resizing when you’re closing tabs.
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There has been a lot of FUD written in recent days about Firefox’s rapid release process and what that means to Enterprise IT.
The gist of the FUD is that Firefox 5 represents some kind of issue because it’s not called Firefox 4.
oooh Really?
So if I understand the argument correctly, a simple number change – Firefox 5 instead of say Firefox 4.0.2 is reason enough to cause concern for enterprise IT admins.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Cloud storage kicks ass for those situations were you can either use an online web service to view and edit your files, or where you want a service like Dropbox to sync your files across multiple PCs. You get the benefit of a single access point to your files, and (although you can’t assume this to be the case) your cloud storage provider should have a robust backup system in place to keep your files safe.
Where cloud storage fails is when you just need to get access to one or two files, and your local application does not have any functionality for accessing files stored online. I find myself in this situation all the time with a few OpenOffice documents that are synced with a Dropbox account, but the Dropbox account itself is not synced with all the devices I use. Editing files in this siutation is a case of logging into Dropbox, downloading the file, making some changes, and uploading it again. It’s a tedious process.
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CMS
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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At L-3, Jaghori runs a mobile technologies practice that does iPhone and Android development for the government. It turns out the open source model of Google’s Linux-based Android mobile operating system is appealing to government agencies, Jaghori says.
“95% of all agencies that I’ve talked to have begun looking at Android,” Jaghori says. The agencies are intrigued by “the ability to bring an operating system like Android and really call it your own, develop around it.”
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On March 29 & 30, NASA hosted its first Open Source Summit at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The event brought engineers and policy makers from across NASA together with well-respected members of the open source community together to discuss current challenges with NASA’s open source policy framework, and propose modifications that would make it easier for NASA to develop, release, and use open source software.
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Security
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The news that alleged Lulzsec member Mr Cleary being brought before the courts is widespread. Its very telling that this “growing industry” of crime is hitting the mainstream press and it also shows how completely unprepared and unskilled the UK is in dealing with it.
I am sure the government and its agencies will claim a great victory over the news that Lulzsec is disbanding, but lets look at this a little deeper and see how exactly it is alleged that the power of the UK Police and FBI were brought to the alleged hacker and asberges sufferer.
It is alleged by some that the person now charged with Computer Misuse Act offences was named by Anonymous some time before, which if true really makes a mockery of the involvement of two massive governmental agencies on an investigation which stretched accross the ocean.
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Finance
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Mounting evidence of outrageous behaviour and even more examples of outright FRAUD (committed by JP Morgan Chase?) has become so overwhelming & obvious, that soon, we’ll need “State Scorecards” to track the sheer volume and huge numbers …of lawsuits… being filed against JP Morgan Chase.
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Two and half years removed from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the investing public has grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of criminal prosecutions of, and absence of truly significant fines levied against, the senior executives and companies responsible for igniting the subprime meltdown. Pundits have criticized the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) and the Department of Justice (the “DOJ”) as capitulating to the interests of “big finance,” citing SEC settlements that have been characterized as mere “slaps on the wrist” and the DOJ’s failure to convict a single executive responsible for creating the “great recession” despite significant evidence of intentional misconduct.
For decades, the public’s trust in the integrity of U.S. capital markets was a source of economic stability and unparalleled prosperity. To maintain this trust, investors must believe that they compete on a relatively equal playing field and that the laws governing the markets will be strictly enforced. In furtherance of these goals, violators of federal rules face civil penalties from the SEC or criminal prosecution by the DOJ. In connection with previous corporate scandals, the government held a significant number of the principal wrongdoers civilly and criminally accountable for their misconduct. In the wake of the current financial crisis, however, many argue that the lack of such accountability has eroded the public’s faith in U.S. capital markets.
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It’s time someone answered this question.
The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government injected trillions into the economy, yet the recovery has remained “moderate” at best for two years.
Instead of generating “shovel-ready jobs,” most of that money benefited financial companies that probably deserved to fail. So how are these companies doing? They’re laying off thousands of people, according to a report released last week by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consulting firm.
Layoffs are up 21% this year at banks, brokerage firms and insurance companies. Challenger expects the trend to accelerate through the year and become more or less permanent. So not even those employed at the national targets of bailout envy, such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are safe.
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The case, Arizona Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, was closely watched by advocates for reducing the role of money in politics. They feared that the high court, which has issued sweeping rulings striking down campaign finance restrictions as violations of free speech, would use the case to rule broadly on the constitutionality of programs that provide public money to candidates.
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For the first time in a year, Americans have stopped spending more.
Consumer spending failed to budge from April to May, evidence that high gas prices and unemployment are squeezing household budgets. When adjusted for inflation, spending actually dropped 0.1 percent last month, the Commerce Department reported Monday.
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President Barack Obama plunged into deadlocked negotiations to cut government deficits and raise the nation’s debt limit Monday, and the White House expressed confidence a “significant” deal with Republicans could be reached. But both sides only seemed to harden their positions as the day wore on, the administration insisting on higher taxes as part of the package but Republican leaders flatly rejecting the idea.
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NEW YORK (Reuters) – A former Citigroup Inc vice president charged with embezzling $19 million from the bank’s accounts — an alleged fraud that went undiscovered for more than a year and a half — pleaded not guilty in Brooklyn federal court on Monday.
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… ignorance across practice groups and offices is at the heart of the knowledge-management problem: “You already handled a case like that? If only I had known.” … A first-class knowledge-management program is now as central to a law firm’s success as a library once was.
This article uses the misleading term intellectual property” and the insulting term “content” when they mean business experience and specific documents. The author seems conflicted about the end of the associate exploitation model, outsourcing to foreign lawyers and other business model problems. The average lawfirm is mired in Microsoft desktops and Word, both of which are difficult to manage and hopelessly incapable of the type of management desired.
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Science
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Abandoned oil infrastructure is a major problem in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s estimated that more than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lie beneath the Gulf. Last year an Associated Press investigation found that many of the wells have gone unmonitored for decades — some as far back as the 1940s.
The article describes a new crude leak and has links to relaible monitoring organizations like Skytruth and Southwings.
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“Asbestos is the greatest industrial killer the world has ever known. More people die from asbestos than all industrial causes combined, yet Canada continues to be one of the largest producers and exporters in the world. We are exporting human misery on a monumental scale,” said NDP MP Pat Martin. “Our position is morally and ethically reprehensible.”
Contrary to popular belief, asbestos is not completely banned in the US and there’s lots of material in the average home.
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massive flooding along the Missouri River has put Nebraska’s two nuclear plants, both near Omaha, on alert. … At Prairie Island, Minnesota, extreme heat caused the nuclear plant’s two emergency diesel generators to fail. Emergency generator failure was one of the key problems that led to the meltdowns at Fukushima.
Flooding along the Missouri is not expected to subside till August and one of the plants was already shut down due to a fire that cut power to a spent fuel pool cooling system.
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Anti-Trust
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the story of Yee Lee, who left Skype after a significant chunk of his options had already vested – and still didn’t get any money from them. … I simply don’t believe that Skype did all of this itself, without detailed input from Silver Lake.
If you wanted to know who to thank for Skype breakage, it’s Microsoft partner Silver Lake, who took over all aspects of daily operation. PJ reminds us of Silver Lake’s roll in the SCO copyright extortion and that the managing director is also a Gartner board member. I continue to suspect that the 8.5 billion price tag is a sham of Microsoft self dealing and this is the reason employees, who’s payout amounts to 0.3% of the nominal deal, have been shafted. 2. Ballmer says he will sell users to advertisers, advertisers, advertisers, so there’s not much to look forward to, even if they were able to keep any engineers and are not planning to dog food the codebase.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Civil Rights
Pub Archos 10.1 Internet Tablet
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.27.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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So in my personal opinion, it is pointless comparing a Mac experience to a Linux Desktop one.
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I’m extremely excited to announce that exactly 11 years ago today I made my very first post at LQ, which served to introduce it to the web. As I’ve stated numerous times, since then LQ has exceeded my expectation in every way. 4,382,316 posts and 457,176 registered members does not even begin to tell the story. The community and mod team that has grown here at LQ is truly amazing and something that I’m very proud to be a part of. I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member for their participation, dedication and feedback. Without you guys, LQ quite simply wouldn’t exist.
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In the latest (and seemingly final) batch of documents dumped on The Pirate Bay by computer hacker outfit ‘LulzSec’, a familiar looking operating system can be seen in use.
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Rebooting machines is a interesting study in the varied opinions of the Linux community. On one end, there are folks who will use ksplice or simply avoid rebooting for any reason short of a hardware failure. On the other you have desktop users who reboot their machines daily. I’m somewhere in the middle: For servers if there is a security update to the kernel or glibc that applies, the server should be rebooted. For my laptop, I usually reboot when there’s a reason (I want to test something related to the boot process, there’s a security update, etc).
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Yesterday I mentioned what Anton Altaparmakov of Tuxera had recently said about their NTFS kernel driver being the fastest Linux file-system, which erupted into a large debate in our forums. Within that mailing list thread was also another interesting comment by Linus Torvalds. “Userspace filesystem? The problem is right there. Always has been. People who think that userspace filesystems are realistic for anything but toys are just misguided.”
Torvalds additionally added, “fuse works fine if the thing being exported is some random low-use interface to a fundamentally slow device. But for something like your root filesystem? Nope. Not going to happen. So Andrew, I think that arguing that something _can_ be done with fuse, and thus _should_ be done with fuse is just ridiculous. That’s like saying you should do a microkernel – it may sound nice on paper, but it’s a damn stupid idea for people who care more about some idea than they care about reality.”
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For the multiple Linux kernel power regressions that I’ve talked about on Phoronix now for a number of weeks and have been affecting mobile Linux users en mass, I said I was looking for a better power measuring approach by using an AC power meter / UPS rather than a notebook battery to use in nailing these regressions. Using such a power meter would lead to a fully-automated process by the Phoronix Test Suite as no longer would I need to keep pulling the power plug from a laptop, could use much faster hardware, and allow for some other interesting possibilities. Well, last week I bought a power meter that plays with Linux. So now there’s some news to share.
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Applications
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There was a time when I was obsessed with finding good, free, stable, Adobe Flash animation software, because at the time I was also obsessed with Homestar Runner and other online cartoons and I wanted to make my own. This was before I knew about how much hassle Flash actually is across multiple platforms and long before I knew of the disadvantages of making online animations in proprietary formats.
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Sometime it’s useful to do an assessment of what’s online on your network, probably you think to know every server and service running, but I had more than one surprise in the past, with “test server just plugged in for a short time”, “New test service” or worst, hacked machine that exposed “new service”.
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As you might know thumbnails in Thunar are generated with tumbler. For obvious reasons the tumbler package in Fedora cannot include the tumbler-ffmpeg plugin. By popular demand I now rolled an add-on package called tumbler-freeworld. When installed, this is what it looks like:
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Almost a year ago, I invested in a central London based post-production company. At the time, I had dreams of pushing open source software solutions into the professional post-production arena. Things haven’t quite worked out as planned, and I’ve made very limited headway on this project. Business imperatives took over and changing a whole ecosystem is a big job. I’ve continued to use Linux on my laptop and happily connect to printers and network drives, but that’s about all.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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The Wine development release 1.3.23 is now available.
What’s new in this release:
* Support for stubless COM proxies on x86-64.
* Builtin dxdiag now outputs real information.
* Monochrome bitmap format in the DIB engine.
* Beginnings of a true shell Explorer builtin.
* A number of new D3DX9 functions.
* More support for Indic text shaping.
* Various bug fixes.
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Games
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Beacon is a sweet platformer created in just 48 hours by indie developer randomine that takes us on a memorable 15 minute journey. With fantastic retro music score and 8-bit pixel graphics, the game creates a wonderful atmosphere where an stranded astronaut tries to solve the mystery of a distant planet and how he landed there.
The gameplay is very much like retro platform games that involves lots of jumping. Your character have a jetpack that you can use to reach greater heights. But the core gameplay involves scripted events, hints and clues you uncover while exploring which makes you think for few seconds from time to time. There is no killing, shooting enemies but you just avoid projectiles shot by jumping and moving around.
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Indie Game Studio Oxeye Games is working on a new 2D multiplayer action game – Cobalt. The game was originally being developed as a story driven single player game but now all the focus has shifted on development of multipayer and co-op mode.
The game is currently in early stages of development and an alpha build will be released this year for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. The game will feature cooperative challenges, duel maps as well as team-play game modes.
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Fantasy baseball and baseball stat fans can enjoy a new updated version of the leading cross-platform game for baseball statistics, historical recreation and simulated management game, Out of the Park Baseball v12, now available for all three major platforms. The new version sports more immersive features, a revamped financial system and online leagues.
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The official release date for Unigine’s OilRush real-time strategy game has been June or July of this year in the midst of summer. Recently though we’ve been reporting that it’s looking like the release date may slip for this visually-intense game with a native Linux client. After talking with Unigine Corp, it looks like a delay will be inevitable.
When chatting with Denis Shergin, Unigine Corp’s CEO, on Friday, it appears there will be a minor delay in their planned summer release. “It seems that in order to deliver a good game we need more time.” Additionally, Unigine Corp is still held up by Valve (for Steam) and other publishers.
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This project aims to reimplement the game engine of Theme Hospital, and be able to load the original game data files. This means that you will need a purchased copy of Theme Hospital, or a copy of the demo, in order to use CorsixTH. After most of the original engine has been reimplemented in open source code, the project will serve as a base from which extensions and improvements to the original game can be made.
Changelog:
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Desktop Environments
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But the miracle didn’t sustain. Today, the same techniques that made yields multiply have now rendered many fields unusable due to the upward leaching of subsurface salt deposits, a process that has left their recently enriched owners both destitute and desperate. So also with nuclear energy, which at one time seemed to promise limitless clean energy, but today seems fraught with threats both immediate, with the risk of accidents, and long term, through our failure to come up with adequate storage solutions for radioactive generator waste. And while new technological advances have opened up previously inaccessible sources of fossil fuels, the recent deep drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as unresolved concerns over deep water pollution arising from oil shale “fracting,” remind us in this domain as well that accidents happen, and that unanticipated consequences, by definition, cannot be anticipated.
Meanwhile, the process of globalization continues apace, in all of its positive and negative aspects. The latter include increasing competition for finite resources conjoined with the inevitability that greenhouse gases and nuclear fallout do not respect national boundaries. Indeed, it seems only a matter of time — and not much of that — before hostile alliances and the threat of war rise again. This time it will not be ideologies that define power blocs, but resource dependencies and trading relationships.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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KDE has released a first release candidate of the upcoming 4.7 release of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Frameworks, which is planned for July 27, 2011. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing last-minute bugs and completing translations and documentation.
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GNOME Desktop
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In the past users could just select the their favorite terminal in gnome-default-applications-properties. Some things required additional configuration: For a mail client the system needs to know the command to compose a new mail or to add attachments and for a terminal emulator an option to run something in a terminal is required. Developers could pre-configure these values with an xml file in $(prefix)/gnome-control-center/default-apps.
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Dhananjay Sathe sent in news of an application he’s been working on that will be of use to GNOME 3 users.
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It’s not a race but people do keep track of the relative popularity of various distros of GNU/Linux. After years of being at the top of the heap on Distrowatch, Ubuntu has been passed by Mint and Fedora. At the same time openSUSE passed Debian GNU/Linux.
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Slitaz is yet another Linux distro! (oh no…) It’s a very small and efficient one, ranking in the same category as Damn Small Linux and Puppy. I am probably not the most qualified person to talk about linux distros as i am not the bigest fanboy of them (i’m more of a windows/mac user – but let’s remember mac os came from the same place as linux UPDATE BELOW), but if you want to hear a somewhat more impartial view on the matter keep on reading.
[...]
So definitely go and give it a try, it’s worth at least that!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia project has announced the arrival of a first preview of a Mageia port for ARM processors. According to the developers, the Mageia ARM port, code-named “arm eabi”, will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors. It currently includes several development tools, basic network services, Firefox and LibreOffice and a full GNOME desktop environment – a minimal version of KDE is also included.
Mageia ARM
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Gentoo Family
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The first system I worked with to begin the weekend was Sabayon 6.0. I had Sabayon 5.5 previously installed, liked it a lot, had added quite a bit of software to it, and during a recent upgrade it ran out of space. I unsuccessfully tried to clear the cache of enough space to make it worthwhile to keep, but the disk stayed 100% full, so it was an excellent candidate for a replacement. Too bad: it had worked well, and it also only recently started offering rolling release upgrades as an alternative to fresh installations. But I needed a fresh installation, plus installing a new system always shows off the new features – and sometimes the limitations as well. That, at least initially, proved to be the case here. Sabayon is in the middle of making some infrastructure and packaging improvements. Chances are that in the long run these will work very well. In the meantime, though, I ran into problems. When I went to update the system, it told me that there were eight new packages available, but none of them would install for me, and I started getting error messages about something wrong with the package management system. I sent one of them along to Sabayon; hopefully it reaches them, they are aware of whatever issue it was that cropped up, get it fixed soon, and maybe even drop me a note to let me kno
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Sabayon 6 KDE seemed faster and more stable than Sabayon 5.5 KDE, and the replacement of Mozilla Firefox with Chromium was a pleasant change, I suppose.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat declared war on VMware’s Cloud Foundry today, announcing that 65 new companies have joined the Open Virtualization Alliance backing KVM in a month’s time.
In May, Red Hat, SUSE, BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM and Intel, announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance.
As of today, 65 new members have joined, including Dell. Scott Crenshaw, who leads Red Hat’s cloud effort, denounced what he called VMware’s proprietary cloud platform.
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The US stock indexes closed the week on a negative note amidst rising concerns for the Italian banking sector, Greece’s austerity plans.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 0.96 percent or 115.42 points to close at 11,934.58. The Nasdaq Stock Market Inc. composite index was down 1.26 percent or 33.86 points to finish at 2,652.89. The Standard & Poor’s 500 fell 1.17 percent or 15.05 points to end at 1,268.45. Among other major indices, the New York Stock Exchange composite index slipped 0.99 percent or 79.36 points to close at 7,974.72. The American Stock Exchange composite index shed 0.84 percent or 19.04 points to settle at 2,260.78.
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Fedora
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Final Thoughts: I think Fedora 15 is a decent distribution. Because of the projects philosophical stance on Free Software, there are certain features that are not expected to work out of the box. However, there are other features that have nothing to do with that philosophical stance that did not work as expected. I am referring, of course, to the state of Amarok, the default music player, but also to printer configuration. On many of the top distributions, a connected printer is automatically configured, but not so on Fedora 15 KDE and the other Fedora 15 Spins that I have reviewed. I am yet to review Fedora 15, the main Fedora 15 version, but judging from how a connected printer is configured on Fedora 14, I do not think it will be anything like the situation on these Spins.
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If you fancy a distro that strives for stability and giving you the best cutting-edge software and tools Linux has to offer, Fedora is well worth a test.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical beat the odds with Ubuntu. The fan-base became so large, so fast that Universal Awareness of Ubuntu can be credited to a simple grass-roots effort that expanded across the globe.
It wasn’t television or radio advertising.
It wasn’t billboards.
It was good old fashioned proselytizing.
Gimmee that old-time religion any day.
And if you take some time to really look back at the process, many of us would admit it was a thing of beauty…almost a force of nature.
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Certification is a generic level of functionality to be expected for hardware running on an Ubuntu Release. Part of the challenge is to identify what hardware components should be included in the test.
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This month:
* Command and Conquer.
* How-To : Program in Python – Part 24, LibreOffice – Part 5, Ubuntu Development – Part 2, and Use KDE (4.6).
* Linux Lab – Gnome Shell -vs- Unity.
* Review – PAM Facial Recognition.
* Top 5 – USB Installers.
* I Think – Should Ubuntu keep it’s current schedule, or switch to a rolling release?
plus: Ubuntu Games, My Story, and much much more!
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The following article will list some of the most important panel applets, also called indicators, for Ubuntu 11.04′s Unity interface.
The Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system introduced a different user interface, designed by Canonical, called Unity. The default indicators are nice, but many people complained that they miss their usual applets on the panel.
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It’s been a very long time since I did an in-depth distro review here, but today I’m going to write about my experiences of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. I’ve been running it as my main desktop for about a month. The last version I properly reviewed was Ubuntu 9.10 and though I’ve used the other releases in the meantime, there’s still a lot of changes to talk about with Natty. Most notably the complete shift to the new Unity interface which feels very different to Gnome. I’d heard a lot about it but how would I fare? Let’s find out…
[...]
I know this reads a lot like a review of just Unity and not Ubuntu, but in this release Unity really is the story.
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With two recent releases of Linux operating systems, Ubuntu and Fedora, new age of desktop environments began.
These two operating systems bring you new user interfaces: Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 and GNOME 3 in Fedora.
Are these new interfaces good or evil for Linux community? Let’s try to analyse.
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We have featured a number of really good Ubuntu Unity concepts before, here is another one which supposedly deals with the trash button in Unity more efficiently.
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Flavours and Variants
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nD is a new indie handheld gaming device currently in prototyping phase. nD is a brainchild of Robert Pelloni, creator of Bob’s Game. Many of you who follow Nintendo DS news will be familiar with Bob’s game and Robert as there has been quite a bit of history between him and Nintendo. I won’t get into details about this but you can just search for Bob’s Game on the web or hit Wikipedia for more info.
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Phones
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Nokia has finally announced the long-anticipated N9 handset, the culmination of Nokia’s five-step plan to deliver a mainstream Linux-based smartphone. The N9 is an impressively engineered device that is matched with a sophisticated touch-oriented interface and a powerful software stack with open source underpinnings. It’s a worthy successor of the developer-centric N900, but it provides a user experience that is tailored for a mainstream audience.
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Huzzah! The Nokia N9 has finally arrived in a genuinely consumer-oriented package. Granted, it is not step-five-of-five given the February 11th announcement to abandon Meego as Nokia’s smartphone future, but it is getting rave reviews even from the likes of engadget – usually the first to take a pop at Nokia’s hubris in pursuing alternatives to Android/Apple.
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Android
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In fact, sales of Android tablets have been quite good and share of page views from Android tablets are nearly on par with iPads. iPad + iPhone gets 3.93% of page views on Wikipedia compared to 1.19% for Android. Surely Lawrence Latif and others should know that iTunes soaks up lots of megabytes and megabytes do not trounce page-views as usage. In fact, Gartner shows Android is expected to have a 20% share of tablets shipped in 2011, up from 14% in 2010. They project Android will catch iOS after 2015. I think Gartner is way off on that. The Android tablets released lately are spectacular compared to iPad 1 or 2 and the Android tablets produced in 2010. The Android tablets are being widely promoted by heavy hitters and many smaller operations. The exposure of Android tablets to the market is huge. Android tablets are not being “trounced”.
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The Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch Reader is more than merely a worthy competitor to the Kindle, as I wrote when I saw the e-book reader demonstrated late last month. Now that we’ve tested the device in our labs, it actually scores a few points above the Kindle in our tests. [To clarify: The Nook scores 1 point above the Kindle below it in the 6-to-7-inch category. But it ranges from 4 to 5 points higher than other Kindles.]
That marks the first time since the Kindle launched that Amazon’s e-book reader hasn’t been the top-scoring model in our Ratings (available to subscribers). It also continues the steady improvement in Barnes & Noble’s e-book devices since the company rushed out a glitchy first version of the Nook during the holiday season of 2009.
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OpenShot is a free, simple-to-use, feature-rich video editor for Linux. The brainchild of programmer Jonathan Thomas, OpenShot has garnered a large and enthusiastic following for many reasons, one being Thomas’s responsiveness to user feedback. To quickly see the best uses of OpenShot, check out the beautifully created music videos of Verity and Gersom de Koning-Tan, from the Netherlands. Several of their videos have had more than one thousand video views. These videos have much going for them, not least their musicality and playfulness.
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Thecus is opening the floodgates for new open source modules. With the release of the Thecus software development kit (SDK), third-party developers and adventurous users can get involved in writing their own modules to fit even the most specific needs. This competition is the beginning of building a vibrant Thecus developer community with open dialogue, improved support, and an unlimited range of features that can only be supported by a grassroots society. Everyone will be able to get involved: commercial developers, computer savvy techies, and even basic home users.
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A digital company called The Echo Nest has launched a Shazam-style technology that is open source, and can therefore be used by any developers wanting to incorporate audio-based music identification into their product. There’s a tie up with 7Digital, which means the Echoprint system can identify the millions of tracks in their digital catalogue. As an open source technology it’s hoped that catalogue of identifiable tracks will grow as other developers use it.
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Web Browsers
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Tweet 2
The all-out web browser brawl has competitors throwing dirty punches in a below-the-belt free-for-all fight for market share.
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Chrome
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Google has begun work on the first step of rebuilding Chrome from the inside out on a more secure foundation called Native Client, CNET has learned.
That first step is the built-in Chrome module used to let Google’s browser read PDF (Portable Document Format) files. Linus Upson, vice president of engineering for the Chrome team, revealed the plan in May at the Google I/O conference, and now evidence is emerging that the first step is under way.
References to the Native Client version of the PDF extension have begun cropping up on the Native Client’s bug-tracking database. Programmers are encountering problems with scrollbar rendering, Gmail integration, loading PDF files, and displaying URLs when the mouse pointer hovers over a link
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Mozilla
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I have been using Mozilla Firefox 5 since Mozilla developer announced it, firstly when I decide to add this post I was not going to compare between Mozilla Firefox 5 and Google Chrome 12, just to check Firefox 5 enhancements. But when I used couple benchmarks for checking HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS 3, didn’t expect this result.
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Mozilla has successfully released its first rapid release cycle version of Firefox. While Mozilla is proud, there has been criticism that the new version number cannot be justified given the new features in Firefox 5. The transition also screwed corporate users and there is mounting disapproval close to Mozilla that the current product plan is beneficial to Firefox. Should Mozilla roll back its release strategy?
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Openness/Sharing
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People sometimes ask me why I’m so adamant that Wikipedia must always use free software, even when in some cases it might be the case that proprietary software might be more convenient or better suited for some particular need that we have.
After all, the argument goes, our primary mission is to produce free knowledge, not to promote free software, and whlie we might prefer free software on practical grounds (since it is generally best of breed for webserving applications), we should not be sticklers about it.
I believe this argument is seriously mistaken, and not on merely practical grounds, but on grounds of principle. Free knowledge requires free software. It is a conceptual error to think about our mission as being somehow separate from that.
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Open Data
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The world is experiencing an unprecedented data deluge, a reality that my colleague Edd Dumbill described as another “industrial revolution” at February’s Strata Conference. Many sectors of the global economy are waking up to the need to use data as a strategic resource, whether in media, medicine, or moving trucks. Open data has been a major focus of Gov 2.0, as federal and state governments move forward with creating new online platforms for open government data.
The explosion of data requires new tools and management strategies. These new approaches include more than technical evolution, as a recent conversation with Charlie Quinn, director of data integration technologies at the Benaroya Research Institute, revealed: they involve cultural changes that create greater value by sharing data between institutions. In Quinn’s field, genomics, big data is far from a buzzword, with scanned sequences now rating on the terabyte scale.
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Programming
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The benefit to Perl 6 is obvious, in the same way that applying liberal amounts of lubricant to a mechanical joint producing an extended and incessant whining sound is an obvious solution.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Following the demonstration, we went to lunch up the street, and over drinks B. and I talked about the police fear-mongering that had gone on in the past few months. We wondered whether that would dramatically reduce the number of people on the streets in the week to come. I recall B. saying that despite the police media spin (remember the talk about the sound cannons, the special laws, the constant talk about the violence to come), people knew that the decisions made at these meetings would impact their lives and they would resist it.
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Finance
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he increased cost of oil and gasoline is damaging the American economy and is causing severe economic pain to millions of people, especially in rural America, who often have to drive long distances to work. Many workers are already seeing stagnant or declining wages and high gas prices are just taking another bite out of their paychecks.
People in Vermont and across the country are also worried about the high price of heating oil for the coming winter.
The price of oil today, while declining somewhat in recent weeks, was still over $95 a barrel today. That’s about $30 higher than it was two years ago.
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JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s deal to settle a U.S. regulator’s claims that the bank misled buyers of mortgage-linked securities before the housing market collapsed echoed a case brought last year against Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
JPMorgan agreed to pay $153.6 million to end a Securities and Exchange Commission suit. The SEC alleged that the New York- based bank failed to tell investors in 2007 that a hedge fund helped pick, and bet against, underlying securities in the collateralized debt obligation they purchased. In July, Goldman Sachs paid a record $550 million for failing to inform clients in 2007 that it allowed a hedge fund that also bet against housing to help formulate the CDOs.
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Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, took his seat before a Senate appropriations subcommittee on May 4 to make his case for a $106 million budget increase.
Without the money, Gensler said, his agency wouldn’t be able to perform its new job of policing roughly $300 trillion in U.S. over-the-counter derivatives, a market that includes the credit-default swaps that helped push the U.S. economy into the worst recession in 70 years, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August issue.
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DRM
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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A federal judge ruled Monday that publishing an entire article without the rights holder’s authorization was a fair use of the work, in yet another blow to newspaper copyright troll Righthaven.
It’s not often that republishing an entire work without permission is deemed fair use. Fair use is an infringement defense when the defendant reproduced a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, commentary, teaching and research. The defense is analyzed on a case-by-case basis.
Fedora 14 vs Ubuntu 10.10: Death Match
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.25.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For those of you who’ve followed along on my virtualization posts, you’ve noticed that I’m a fan of certain types of virtual desktop infrastructure implementations. This was not always the case. In fact, if you Google my name and VDI, you’ll find that for most of the past three years, I’ve come out strongly against it. So, you’re probably asking, “Why the change of heart?” The answer is simple, it’s a matter of timing and technology. VDI really was not an option before but it is now.
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So, goodbye, Wintel. We knew thee well. Hello, Apple and Linux.
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Desktop
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A weird little meme is squiggling through the Internet this week, one which I feel obligated to squash because it’s just plain wrong.
It’s this notion that somehow Ubuntu is losing its popularity because it’s slipped in the rankings on DistroWatch. That seems just about the silliest thing I have read in a while.
First, there’s the whole notion of how the rankings on DistroWatch work. They don’t count downloads or boxes: they count page hits for each distro’s page on the DistroWatch site. “Only one hit per IP address per day is counted,” the site explains.
[...]
This is where Linux is: thousands of developers and contributors have poured their skills and hearts into creating this operating system, and sometimes it’s hard not to fall into the old habits from the days Linux is young. But to help Linux, we have to look towards a new future, one where the desktop may not be the primary platform, but one where Linux may yet be the most important operating system the world will ever use.
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Server
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Twice a year, the Top500 Project publishes its list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In the last announcement, we continue to see Linux dominating the list. This is nothing new since Linux has been dominating since the mid-2000s. In fact, Linux share in supercomputing looks a lot like Microsoft’s historical share of the desktop market. I thought it would be interesting to take a step back and look at the performance capability of these computers as a whole and also how the rise of Linux is mirroring the geographical expansion of supercomputers.
Everybody tends to watch the number of Linux systems on the top500, but there’s a fascinating story being told by the Rmax performance numbers (Rmax is the maximum performance of a computer (measured in Gflop/s) achieved in the HPL benchmark. In many ways, this is a much more enlightening statistic, because it shows us the overall nature of performance on this list, instead of just focusing on individual computers. (This time around, five Linux systems were actually bumped off the bottom of the list, even though Linux’s *total* computing power grew by 38%.)
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Applications
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Proprietary
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After supporting online meeting on Windows and MAC, Banckle Online Meeting now allows you to participate and collaborate in web conferencing, eLearning and webinar activities on Linux as well. It can work on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines.
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Games
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Alexander Zubov from Kot-In-Action the developers of the Steel-Storm games loves the GNU/Linux users and want as many of them (us) to buy his game.
But he is very disappointed from the sales, only 3% of the consumers are GNU/Linux users.
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Somehow many years ago I had gotten hold of a Linux version, perhaps it was distributed by Loki.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME Desktop
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Both GNOME and KDE recently underwent massive redesigns. GNOME 2 morphed into version 3.0 with a radically different look and feel. KDE 4 is also graphically much different from the KDE 3 lineage. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has added Unity to the mix. The future of all will depend on ease-of-use perceptions and end-user hardware.
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Linux world is huge. Seems like there are more different distributions then stars in Debian galaxy. Some of them are generic, some of them are not. I have already made couple of reviews of Linux-based Operating System specifically created for creative people. They are brothers in blood: Dynebolic and Puredyne. It would be incomplete set if I just stopped at number 2. Number 3 is much more appalling. That’s why today’s review will be also dedicated to creative Linux.
This Tux was born far-far away from many of you: in country of football, beef and tango. Do you know which country I mean? Yes, that is Argentina.
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Considering that I reviewed Zenwalk 7.0 not too long ago, I must be going on a Slackware-derived binge or something. Yes, both Zenwalk and Porteus are based on Slackware. Maybe my subconscious is trying to make up for the terrible review (not my assessment of Slackware, but my skill level and writing in that post) of Slackware 13.1. Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, Porteus 1.0 came out yesterday, so I decided to review it.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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When I first heard about Mageia I was not too bothered, if anything it was just going to be another Mandriva. Buggy, random crashes, poor 64-bit support and useless.
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Gentoo Family
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Today, it’s not difficult to find a ‘great’ distro, one that makes it easy to get up and running with a fully functional and robust desktop, fast. Even just five years ago, though, finding a ‘do it all’ distro was a little more difficult, and it was for that reason that I found myself loving Sabayon Linux (pronounced Sah-by-yon (silent ‘n’)). Despite being built on an intermediate distro, Gentoo, it made things easy on the layman user – and I know this to be true as I’ve had many Linux novice friends use it and enjoy it.
[...]
Sabayon 6 was my first foray into testing out the Entropy package manager though, and I do have to say that its command-line component, equo, is quite nice.
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Red Hat Family
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Whitehurst’s comments about cloud deployments generally using open source have been echoed by Canonical, which claims that Ubuntu is the most popular operating system installed on Amazon’s EC2 cloud service.
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Fresh off the glow of its first quarter earnings showing double-digit growth, Red HatbizWatch Red Hat Latest from The Business Journals Atlanta in running for 1,000 Time Warner jobsRed Hat CEO: Sales to triple to BRed Hat beats earnings estimates to start off the year Follow this company Inc. announced on Thursday that 65 new companies, including Dell Inc.bizWatch Dell Inc. Latest from The Business Journals DBJ Tech Watch for Friday 6/24: News of Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Google and moreDell joins alliance to compete with VMwarebizWatch VMware Latest from The Business Journals DBJ Tech Watch for Friday 6/24: News of Apple, Yahoo, Facebook, Google and moreDell joins alliance to compete with VMwareTerremark, Verizon to integrate services Follow this company Michael Dell to bid .45M for Seattle TV station Follow this company (NasdaqGS: DELL), have joined the Open Virtualization Alliance.
The alliance, established a month ago, is a consortium of tech companies in favor of an open virtualization technology — which is used to move systems to cloud computing. Red Hat, the Raleigh-based open source company, is a co-founder of the alliance along with IBMbizWatch IBM Latest from The Business Journals Federal Contracts: Big Wins for June 23, 2011Meet the Young and the BoldSAS links with Japan’s Fujitsu to open up revenue stream Follow this company (NYSE: IBM), Intel Corp.bizWatch Intel Corp. Latest from The Business Journals Intel plays role in Obama manufacturing initiativeTop 7 Bay Area Patent Recipients – No. 1Feds OK Intel, Rockstar bids on Nortel patents Follow this company (Nasdaq: INTC) and Hewlett-Packard CobizWatch Hewlett-Packard Co Latest from The Business Journals Toolbox: Week of June 24, 2011Oracle’s Safra Catz: Growth ‘with almost no help from acquisitions’Terremark, Verizon to integrate services Follow this company . (NYSE: HPQ).
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Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has set an ambitious new sales target for the company: Tripling its annual sales to $3 billion in five years.
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As part of Red Hat’s wide ranging cloud briefing today, its middleware division announced that JBoss Application Server 7 will be delivered in July.
Execs provided a brief preview of the forthcoming application server, which will incorporate a full implementation of EE 6, including support for web profiles, a tenfold improvement in startup time, enhancements in operational management and ease-of-use in management, monitoring and configuration.
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Debian Family
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Sam Hartman is a Debian developer since 2000. He has never taken any sort of official role within Debian (that is besides package maintainer), yet I know him for his very thoughtful contributions to discussions both on mailing lists and IRL during Debconf.
Until I met him at Debconf, I didn’t know that he was blind, and the first reaction was to be impressed because it must be some tremendous effort to read the volume of information that Debian generates on mailing lists. In truth he’s at ease with his computer much like I am although he uses it in a completely different way. Read on to learn more, my questions are in bold, the rest is by Sam.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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This was an expected move but it’s still a bit weird because there are quite a few features available in Synaptic which are still missing in Ubuntu Software Center, like upgrade/downgrade functionality, lock packages to the current version and so on. But of course, there are 4 months till Ubuntu 11.10 is released so Ubuntu Software Center might get some (or all) of these missing features.
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Ubuntu 11.04 – codenamed Natty Narwhal – sports a new graphical user interface. This popular Linux distribution’s interface is now an opinion divider but worth investigating to see how the free OS compares to Windows and Mac operating systems.
[...]
the classic Ubuntu is readily accessible and more polished than ever.
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Flavours and Variants
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The default file manager for Xubuntu is Thunar 1.2 which has seen many great improvements recently. The default Thunar interface is quite typical for standard file managers. The left side of the main Thunar window is the shortcuts panel. New items can be dragged into the shortcut panel at any time. The right side of the mian window is where files and folders will be displayed. Above that is a path bar and a menu bar where you can find other ways of interacting with Thunar. Thunar now has improved support for connecting to external devices or networks. Thunar is also lightweight and very fast.
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Phones
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Is it even fair to pit MeeGo against the market that iOS and Android rule at the moment, some may ask. But, since it is here now, the new kid in town will have to face the music from its other big brothers who rule the locality at the moment.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Soon the premium class passengers of the American Airlines will experience the magic of Android powered tablets on their journey. Samsung and American Airlines announced they will provide Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 to travellers in seated in premium cabins for a select number of transcontinental and international flights.
American Airlines, a founding member of the oneworld Alliance, plans to deploy 6,000 of the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 devices onboard select flights beginning later this year.
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This was always Microsoft’s plan since they first were cold-cocked by the sudden explosion of customer interest in netbooks. When netbooks first came along, they almost all ran Linux. Microsoft, which was then stuck with the resource pig known as Windows Vista, simply couldn’t compete. So, reluctantly, Microsoft gave Windows XP Home a new lease on life and sold it below cost to OEMs to kill the Linux desktop on netbooks.
They were successful. Mind you, the last thing Microsoft wanted was for people to keep using XP. They wanted, oh how they wanted, users to turn to Vista. But, they also didn’t want to turn over the low-end to Linux. So, instead they dumped XP Home to OEMs at below cost to chase Linux off netboooks. It worked.
The way things were going to go was clear in June 2009 when, I kid you not, Asus’ chairman, Jonney Shih, after sharing a news conference stage with Microsoft corporate VP, OEM Division, Steven Guggenheimer, apologized for showing an Androd-Linux Eee netbook the previous day.
Mission accomplished, Microsoft finally shut down the XP production line on netbooks on October 22nd, 2010. Today, you can still get XP via the downgrade route from some versions of Windows 7, but you can’t do it for netbooks.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla and the community of developers behind the SeaMonkey Internet application suite have released the first beta of SeaMonkey 2.2 just over a week after issuing a major update with SeaMonkey 2.1.
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Business
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Business intelligence (BI) software is all about deriving value from data. It’s a goal that commercial open source BI vendor Pentaho is aiming to expand upon with the Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition release this week.
The Pentatho BI 4 release includes new tools like an enhanced visual interface and report designer that are intended to help make it easier for users to fully leverage the power of BI.
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BSD
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FreeBSD is a UNIX-like operating system, designed to be super stable and super secure. As such, it is probably not the simplest one to tame and run on a daily basis. Unfortunately, reliability and robustness do not always fully align with the mass-usage model of friendliness.
[...]
While the virtual machine test is far from being a real-life example of how simple or difficult or well-integrated a desktop is, VirtualBSD is a pleasant, refreshing diversion from the mainstream of free operating systems. It is an excellent technology demonstrator. The appliance testdrive proves that BSD is not a monster. Far from it; it’s a witty, charming, highly useful platform that anyone could use.
Even if you never intend on using BSD on your machine as the primary desktop, VirtualBSD could shatter some of your fears and misconceptions about the dreadful UNIX. It may not eclipse the Linux just yet, and probably never will, and it does not have to. What it can do is become another alternative should you need it, should you seek it. Overall, VirtualBSD delivers a handsome punch of good quality in all aspects of the desktop usage, aesthetics, availability of programs, codecs, everything. Quite a surprise and a breath of fresh air.
Looking back at my flirtations with the BSD family, things are getting better, significantly. The critical turning point is not there yet, but in time, this operating system might stir the flames of competition in the software world. For the time being, you have the perfect appliance to play with and sharpen your UNIX skills.
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Licensing
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AVM Computersystems, a manufacturer of DSL routers including the popular FRITZBox, is trying to stop Cybits, a maker of web-filtering software, from changing the code which is present in the firmware of its routers.
The code comes partly from the Linux kernel; given this, the terms of the GPL would extend to the entire codebase giving users the freedom to modify it and use the changed version if they so wished.
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Finance
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I first heard of Bitcoin when the Free Software Foundation announced they would start accepting it for donations. Before long another story about Bitcoin appeared in my news feeds. Then another. And another. Then the new currency got a black eye, and finally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation stopped accepting donations of it. You know something is on very shaky ground when a non-profit will no longer accept donations of it.
Bitcoin began life just two short years ago as what some may characterize as an experiment in a new currency. It was to be one that wasn’t tied to any country currency and demonstrated the characteristics of rising or decreasing in value somewhat like a stock on an exchange. Perhaps the best advantage of using Bitcoin currency was the ability to conduct purchases anonymously.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Freescale i.MX 6 Quad-core reference design at FTF 2011
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.24.11
Posted in News Roundup at 1:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Eric, stop making up random letter combinations that make sense to NOBODY but you. Ok?
If you can’t be bothered to write a few more letters and make things readable, why would you expect anybody else to bother spending the time looking at your emails?
Linus
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3.0 will still be noticeably faster than 2.6.39 due to the other changes made (ie the read-ahead), so yes, the regression itself is
fixed.
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The XFS filesystem has taken a beating for being a big, complicated, foreign filesystem since it’s introduction, and there is no doubt that there is a fair bit of code in there. But an interesting thing happened on the way to the Linux Kernel v3.0.0 – XFS developers have steadily reduced lines of code, while other up and coming filesystems such as Ext4 and BTRFS are steadily growing in LOC and complexity. And XFS has been under constant improvement at the same time as well.
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Graphics Stack
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The open-source developers working on the drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon and NVIDIA (via the Nouveau project) graphics hardware have tossed all their weight behind the Gallium3D driver architecture. The Gallium3D drivers have surpassed the “classic” Mesa DRI drivers in terms of capabilities, performance, and stability. The only strong holdout to Gallium3D has been Intel since they aren’t convinced that it’s the appropriate choice and they aren’t interested in overhauling their Linux driver stack once more with the large upfront investment that’s required in rewriting their user-space 3D driver in moving from classic Mesa to Gallium3D.
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Applications
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Every year or so, I need to convert a printed page to text. It’s not oftener, because, while I do have a collected letters project that would benefit from optical character recognition (OCR), I only work on it sporadically. When I have to sign a publisher’s agreement or some similar document, I can generally just send a scanned image.
But every year or so, only OCR will do for one need or other, and I plunge into a quick survey of the available free software tools. The results have always been fairly dismal and more trouble than they’re worth. However, with the 2.0 release of KBookOCR, a base-level reliability and convenience is now available.
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If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and if you have questions related to your ubuntu system post question to our forums. Thanks for visiting!
BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn’t know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean 90 applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.
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Photographs are wonderful. Digital photographs are even better. We can take, archive and share as many of them as we want, at the smallest possible cost… if we pay the right price. A digital archive of many thousands images (which takes surprisingly little time to happen!) doesn’t tolerate carelessness. If you don’t build and manage it properly from the beginning, it will be worse than not having it at all. Here are a few quick tips to keep normal Jpeg digital photographs under control, with GUI or command line tools that work in any Gnu/Linux distribution. If you generate and store high quality raw pictures you’ll have to follow some extra steps, but that’s stuff for another article.
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Proprietary
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Adobe is preparing to supplement its popular-but-proprietary Flash product with a standards-based animation tool based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Supporting imported bitmap and vector graphics, Adobe Edge produces output compatible with browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, and the Safari versions used in Apple’s iPad and iPhone, the company says.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Out of the Park Developements have announced that OOTPB 12 is now available. OOTB is available on Windows, Mac, Linux and is priced at $39.99.
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About 4-5 days back, I came to know about this awesome project Indie Game : The Movie, a documentary movie about indie games and life of developers. The project had reached $12,000 goal out of $35,000 fund raising target, so I thought I would write about it. But, then I was not able to finish it on time due to office work.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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During the past weeks, we’ve been kind of silent around Plasma Active. This doesn’t mean we’ve just been sitting on our lazy bums, but that we’ve poured a lot of work into various aspects of the Plasma Active user experience. Let me details these changes to give you some idea of where we are. But first off, …
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GNOME Desktop
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If you’re using Fedora 14 and want to switch to BlueBubble, there’s currently no easy way to do this. I recommend you proceed with the regular upgrade, try Gnome 3 for a few days and if you’re not convinced, follow the guide below.
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Nothing like seeing a reddit post, saying you’ll spend a few minutes looking into something, and then realizing you spent multiple hours on it. Today that time sink was Gephi, a pretty cool desktop application for generating graphs from a variety of data sources. It is available in the AUR if you are an Arch Linux user.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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We spoke about this some weeks ago, it’s now done! Thanks to Arnaud Patard (aka rtp) the Mageia ARM port is available for a first preview. The port’s code name is “arm eabi”, as a future port should be “arm eabihf”. It will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors.
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Red Hat Family
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How serious is Red Hat about pushing beyond Linux? Take a look at Red Hat’s latest quarterly results, disclosed yesterday, and a cloud seminar that’s set for today. You’ll get a feel for how the open source company is striving to reinvent its business amid a march toward $1 billion in annual revenues.
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American Linux distributor Red Hat has announced that the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) has gained 65 new members, a nearly ten-fold increase in membership since it was first established last month. Brocade, Dell, EnterpriseDB, Fujitsu Frontech, FusionIO, Gluster, Groundwork Open Source, MontaVista Software, Univention and Vyatta, for example, are among the group’s new members.
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Debian Family
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Joining the ever-growing list of Linux distributions jumping the sinking OpenOffice.org ship for the safety of LibreOffice is the irreplaceable Debian. LibreOffice has been in testing since March, but as of today it’s available for stable 6.0 as well.
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Phones
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For years, Nokia had been working on Linux as a future operating system for its smartphones and mobile devices. Then, the firm did an about-face and chose Windows Phone. Having had no luck with the penguin, the recent release of the N9 smartphone marks the end of an era.
In 2005, Nokia was a pioneer when it produced the 770 Internet Tablet: the first mobile device in its regular product portfolio with a Linux operating system. The unit was a small 5.5 by 3.1 inch tablet computer that would just fit into your trouser pocket; the touchscreen had a sufficiently large diagonal of just over four inches, with a resolution of 800 by 480 – quite high at the time. Linux developers who bought the 770 Internet Tablet, which normally cost €350, received a €250 discount with no strings attached.
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Android
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Archos announced two high-end Android 3.1 tablets that use Texas Instruments dual-core 1.5GHz OMAP4 processors. The eight-inch Archos 80 G9 and 10.1-inch Archos 101 G9 are both offered with a 250GB hard disk drive option, available 3G, as well as standard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and HDMI.
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Google has selectively released Google TV 2.0 “Fishtank” beta code based on Android 3.1, featuring the ability to run an Android app and stream TV at the same time, says a Geek.com report. The company is said to have sent out a Fishtank developer’s system to about 50 developers, while another report says Logitech will offer a 2.0-based system in late summer.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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More details have surfaced about Android 3.2, including support for seven-inch screens and Qualcomm processors. The release may appear on Amazon.com’s Android tablets, which are rumored to be arriving in August bearing Texas Instruments processors and could hasten the fall of the monochrome Kindle.
Google and its Android tablet vendor partners face a double-edged sword in their epic struggle against the almighty Apple iPad. Android 2.x is both functionally and aesthetically lacking on larger screens, especially beyond seven inches. Meanwhile, Android 3.0 solves this problem and introduces some cool features not found on the iPad, but is widely criticized for being buggy and complex.
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The Eclipse Indigo release train is now officially available, delivering 62 projects covering 46 million lines of code. According to Eclipse, there were 408 developers and 49 organizations that contributed code and collaborated for the Indigo release.
“We’re continuing to refine the release process and it’s already quite scalable,” Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, told InternetNews.com. “Even though we’re getting more and more projects and code, we’re finding that we’re able to leverage our history in moving the release train forward each year.”
Milinkovich noted that from a Java developer perspective the Indigo release offers a number of interesting new projects. One of them is the WindowBuilder GUI project, which just became part of Eclipse this year. Google donated the technology to Eclipse in December of 2010, after first acquiring the technology from developer tools vendor Instantiations in August of 2010.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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In a clear challenge to Web calling clients like Skype, Google is building its open-source voice and video chatting software into its Chrome browser, according to CNET.
Google acquired the open-source technology, known as WebRTC, last year when it bought out VoIP software provider Global IP Solutions. The search engine giant is now looking to hand the royalty-free software over to developers for browser-based applications.
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Mozilla
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Three months ago, when we saw the Firefox 4 release, there was a hell lot of buzz surrounding it, and the news trended in Twitter for hours as people felt that, it had been quite a while since they got a new Firefox, unlike the case with Chrome(the direct competitor). Some may admit that, a huge release with a lot of new features is better than frequent releases with not so important features!
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CMS
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Acquia’s Commons 2.0 community management tool provides Facebook-style activity feeds with like and share buttons for the open source content management system.
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Yesterday I wrote about how WordPress has evolved into a first rate platform that can be easily customized. One of the ways that WordPress is customized to meet the unique needs of a site is through the use of plugins that add functionality. Most of these functions are visual and offer visitors a richer experience while on your site. Others are never even seen by the visitor and only indirectly affect his or her experience.
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BSD
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BatteryMonitor for GNUstep now has support for NetBSD acpi too now! Support languished because decent acpi support in NetBSD is relatively recent and reading it requires checking a property list (which is of course more complex, but at least consistent and clean compared to the maze of files linux provides). To manipulate it libprop sports handy functions, yet I always had some problems here and there, until I realized something very cool. Property lists are familiar to GNUstep and Cocoa users.
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Public Services/Government
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As one of the country’s leading open source outfits had abandoned Bristol, one might begin to question the City Council’s commitment to open source. Indeed, your correspondent, cunningly disguised as a member of the public, emailed council leader Barbara Janke about the council’s commitment to open source, highlighting the reliability, lack of licensing fees and lower support costs of open source. Another point I raised with Barbara Janke was the fate of Cllr Mark Wright, the cabinet member with responsibility for IT in the last council and a firm open source advocate, as he did not feature in the new cabinet after the May 2011 council election.
Barbara Janke’s reply is reproduced below.
You are correct that Mark was not re-elected to the Lib Dem cabinet this time. In the current cabinet I have responsibility for ICT in the current cabinet. The commitment to open source remains the same. Mark continues to advise me on this. The council is also heavily engaged with the external digital media and creative sector and this area lies within my area of responsibility.
So there you have it. Bristol City Council remains committed to open source. Perhaps someone less trusting of the City Council than your ‘umble scribe should file a FoI request to ask the council just how far their commitment stretches.
As regards the fate of Mark Wright, Mark Ballard of Computer Weekly has done some fine investigatory work and discovered that Wright’s ousting from the cabinet was a result of internal party politics, not part of a conspiracy to do down open source wherever it reared its head in the public sector.
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Bristol City Council’s seven year campaign to use open source software has been sent reeling after the shock departure of two lead architects of its ICT Strategy.
Councillor Mark Wright, the computer expert who pushed Bristol’s pioneering ICT strategy through the council chamber just last September, was voted out of his post as ICT portfolio holder a month ago, after a private vote of Liberal Democrat members.
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Licensing
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William Theaker recently started working at the FSF as this summer’s licensing intern. In this post, he writes about what brought him to free software, and the goals for his internship.
Hi! My name is William Theaker; I’m a college student from Connecticut interested in free software and copyright law. This summer I will be interning with the FSF; I will be working on various free software licensing issues by answering questions about licensing, investigating possible GPL violations, and working on my biggest project this summer, organizing the drafting archives for the GPLv3. My first interaction with free software was when I started using “Linux” in 2003, though I was unaware of the actual origins of the software in my computer. What I referred to as “Linux” is, in fact, GNU/Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system, made useful by the GNU core libraries, shell utilities, and vital system components comprising a full operating system as defined by POSIX.
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Programming
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The maturing Web development industry is inextricably intertwined with a constant companion: complexity. Gone are the days of assembling a few simple database-backed PHP-driven pages and calling it a website; these days clients expect rich JavaScript-based user interfaces, cloud-backed data stores, and tight integration with third-party APIs. To accommodate such challenges, developers have put a great deal of time and effort into devising tools and techniques which help to identify, track and resolve bugs. One such technique is continuous integration, which facilitates the merging of code changes made by various members of a development team by automating tedious processes such as testing, documentation generation, and deployment.
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The software giant’s cloud computing service went down for over three hours.
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Hardware
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AMD has publicly announced it is withdrawing its support from BAPCo, a non-profit consortium which develops and distributes a benchmarking program called SYSmark, refusing to endorse the latest version of the suite because its results are allegedly unrepresentative of the workloads used in everyday computing. The company also believes there’s a bias in favor of Intel.
The suite uses a number of application-based benchmarks to recreate usage patterns in the areas of office productivity, data/financial analysis, system management, media creation, 3D modeling and web development. Among the applications used in SYSmark 2012 are Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Acrobat, WinZip, Autodesk AutoCAD and 3ds Max, and others. But AMD argues that BAPCo is not taking advantage of GPUs for general purpose computing tasks, despite the fact that many applications support it, and instead solely relies on performance of CPUs.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Paris, June 23rd, 2011 – The Mexican Senate approved a resolution calling on the government not to sign the anti-counterfeiting agreement ACTA. La Quadrature calls on French and European Members of Parliament to do the same.
Radiohead – Paranoid Android: YouTube Artists Mix by OHADI22
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.23.11
Posted in News Roundup at 6:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Pichai says that Chromebooks are ideal for anyone who doesn’t want to deal with the complications that come with more traditional operating systems.
[...]
“We have 160 million users of the Chrome browser and for them, buying a Chromebook would be the most seamless transition ever. If you’re already using Chrome sync, and you log in to a Chromebook and first time, it’s all there.
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Why is a “command line” on a microwave OK, but not on a computer?
Why are dashboard indicators OK on a car, but not on a computer?
Why is it OK to have three remotes with a total of 200 buttons just to watch TV, but if a computer interface has more than two steps to do anything, that’s unacceptable?
[...]
Everybody’s too embarrassed to admit that they don’t know how to use a phone, so they MAKE SURE THEY KNOW HOW TO USE A PHONE. Being computer illiterate, however, is trendy and fashionable. It’s considered cute in our society to giggle tee-hee-hee, “I’m a computer-dummy!” But to be a phone dummy? Now you’re ostracized from society, handicapped, crippled, can’t even get a job or a date!
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The moral I learned after my pride was shattered: You don’t have to be a genius anymore to use Linux. Any plain, regular individual may use it provided that he or she remembers it is something different and thus wants to learn about it.
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Server
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Some of the most rewarding PC games out there were built by indie developers using open source code.
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Fun tank fight and strategy game Digitanks will be soon ported to Linux. The developers of the game have launched a new exciting 5 for $5 gaming bundle but 4 out 5 games are for Windows, the only one for Linux being Steel Storm : Burning Retribution. In the same announcement post, they have said that a Linux port for Digitanks is on the way.
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Ninety percent of today’s Linux distributions “can be easily used by just about anyone when properly configured and presented with a couple minutes of explanation to the new user,” wrote Thoughts on Technology blogger and Bodhi Linux lead developer Jeff Hoogland in his post on the site.
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Gentoo Family
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We’re once again here to announce the immediate availability of Sabayon 6, one of the biggest milestone in our project.
Letting bleeding edge and reliability to coexist is the most outstanding challenge our users, our team, is faced every day.
There you have it, shining at full bright, for your home computer, your laptop and your home servers.
Because we do care about our community, we do listen to our users, we consider them part of the game, we decided to leave GNOME3 out for another, last, release cycle, in order let things to settle down: providing a broken user experience has never been in our plans.
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· Linux kernel 2.6.39.1;
· X.Org Server 1.10;
· GNOME 2.32.2;
· KDE SC 4.6.4;
· Chromium as default web browser;
· Native support for Btrfs filesystems;
· Support for 16:9 and 16:10 widescreen LCD monitors;
· Brand new and amazing artwork and boot music intro;
· Improved boot speed;
· LibreOffice 3.3.3;
· Entropy 1.0 RC10;
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT: News ), the world’s largest seller of Linux software, said Wednesday after the markets closed that its first quarter profit rose 35% from last year, as revenue surged 27% amid strong demand for its products and services.
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT), the largest seller of Linux software, aims to triple sales to $3 billion in five years, helped by the rising popularity of cloud computing, Chief Executive Officer Jim Whitehurst said.
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Red Hat shares are likely to rise this morning after its latest quarterly results exceeded expectations and the Linux software company upped its guidance for the year.
Meanwhile, the Raleigh-based company has narrowed its search for a new headquarters site to “two or three” and expects to make a decision by the end of the summer, Chief Financial Officer Charlie Peters said in an interview.
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Red Hat’s top brass talks a good game about being concerned with the global macroeconomic situation, but the truth of the matter is that what Red Hat has is selling despite the economy, or maybe because of it. And all that the world’s largest beneficiary of the open source community needs to do is not screw it up and it will break the $1bn mark this fiscal year.
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Red Hat Enterprise MRG delivers high-speed/low latency, open-standard application messaging; a deterministic low-latency realtime kernel; and a high-performance computing grid scheduler for distributed workloads and cloud computing. Today’s release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2.0 expands upon the Enterprise MRG functionality with the following enhancements…
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Debian Family
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But what about Debian Squeeze, the project’s Stable release? Stable Debian releases traditionally don’t get new packages in their core repositories. That means LibreOffice will be included in the next Stable release, the current Testing release (Wheezy). Wheezy will be declared stable sometime in the future. I’d say a year from now.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu, meanwhile, has now slipped down to third position for the month, marking the first time in a very long time the distribution has held anything but the No. 1 crown.
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…wait till you experience Unity – and there’s a lot more to it than glitter.
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Some would argue that Unity doesn’t make things easy, though. At least in terms of desktop customization, Softpedia’s tutorial is worth looking into for this reason. The tutorial walks you through cleaning your desktop, installing the Cairo dock, installing a new GTK2 theme, and making final touch-ups.
Community outcry against Unity will continue for the next couple of years, but easy-to-follow documentation for it is appearing, and, in the end, it will probably make Ubuntu friendlier for many potential new Linux users. If you are brand new to Ubuntu itself, also check out our guide to free Linux resources.
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*
Oneiric development is in full swing and with Feature Freeze still 7 weeks away, most of the intrusive changes are landing in the development release as we speak. Alpha 2 will be released in two weeks which should be a great time to check out what’s currently happening. As always: the status overview might give you an idea how each feature is progressing.
[...]
In 2004 I had been using Debian for a couple of years already as my exclusive computing experience and enjoyed it very much. Looking back it’s a bit hard to say why I never got involved in Debian immediately.
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Synaptic Package Manager will be no longer shipped as default application as an update today removed it from CD. However, it will be easily installable from repositories.
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Flavours and Variants
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We’ve created a faux desktop that acts as a graphical index. Just click are the area that you want more info on!
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Phones
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Android
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Google is activating some 400,000 new Android devices every single day now(source) and Android is already the fastest growing and most popular smartphone OS in many parts of the world. In tune with its rising popularity, Android’s applications base is also showing stupendous growth. We have already featured a bunch of must have open source Android applications and now here is a collection of Android apps dedicated to travelers among you.
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Sony Ericsson announced two compact Android 2.3 phones, including a 1GHz, 3.0-inch Xperia Active, which offers features such as water resistance and Ant+ wireless networking — aimed at personal fitness and health monitoring.
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I have great respect for SJVN, and I am also a big fan of his for writing sensational headlines. The latest being “Five reasons Android can fail”.
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Groklaw reports, “In the reexamination of U.S. Patent 6192476 the USPTO has issued an office action in which it rejects 17 of the patent’s 21 claims.”
The site further writes, “While Oracle has asserted seven different patents in its claims against Google, if this reexamination is exemplary of what Oracle can expect in each of the other reexaminations, Oracle will have a hard time finding claims that it can successfully assert against Google, and there lies Oracles conundrum. Oracle either has to agree with the court’s directive to limit the number of claims it will assert at trial, or it is likely the court will simply stay the trial until the reexaminations are complete.”
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Amazon adopts processors developed by Texas Instruments, with Taiwan-based Wintek to supply touch panels, ILI Technology to supply LCD driver ICs and Quanta Computer responsible for assembly, the sources indicated. Monthly shipments are expected to be 700,000-800,000 units.
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While open standards give customers options, execs from Dell, VMware and Facebook at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco Wednesday said that open source wouldn’t be the death of innovation or revenues in cloud software and hardware development. However, businesses that wish to survive will need to provide value over and above the commoditized aspects of open computing platforms.
[...]
Unlike proprietary solutions, open source offerings let developers use computing platforms without the fear of being locked in. For them, the advantage isn’t about being free so much as being flexible. “Everyone wants to be in the public cloud, but there are few that want to walk into the deep end and just jump in,” said Derek Collison, CTO and Chief Archictect of VMware’s Cloud Division.
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OpenStack is based on a software project originally begun by NASA, designed to manage its computing needs. Since the project was first announced last July, in order to reduce government expenses and keep the software growing, 77 companies have joined it.
Why? Ever since Amazon (AMZN) made a success of its EC2 cloud, software companies and hosting providers have been searching for a way to match it.
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With the recent Righthaven ruling effectively declaring Righthaven’s legal strategy a sham, someone going by the somewhat uncreative name “Plessy Ferguson” sent us the following essay claiming that the ruling is a disaster for open source development.
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“Our platform becomes even more powerful for developers with this new addition.”
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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INTERNET GIANT Google has launched an open source Chrome extension that can help with identifying client-side security holes.
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Mozilla
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In the announcement, Eich describes how he wrote the first prototype for the script language in just 10 days, 16 years ago; at the time, he was practically the only person handling the development. He also discusses some early milestones, including standardisation by Ecma (European Computer Manufacturers Association).
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Complaints pretty much have one thing in common: They claim there isn’t enough ‘new and shiny’ things inside FF5 to warrant a major version. This is illogical thinking because major version means NOTHING when it comes to usability of software. I’ve noticed that I can browse and use FF5 just as easily as I could FF4 and FF3 before it…I still type in URL’s and websites display. My plugins all still work. It starts up a bit faster and websites seem to load just a bit faster…which is good. So why all the whining and complaining?
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Healthcare
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Of keen interest regarding the VA’s open-source project is: Will the remodeled VistA remain as open as the current VistA is, or will it become more proprietary, subjecting users to an increasing number of software license fees? To look for answers, I’ve asked the VA to send me a copy of Tiag’s winning bid, but some clues can be found in a 72-page document linked to the contract award notice posted June 20 on the FedBizOps website.
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Project Releases
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The latest release of Eclipse BIRT, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, has been made available by the Eclipse Foundation project as part of the Eclipse Indigo release train. The latest version includes a reworked POJO runtime which is easier to integrate into Java EE applications; previously, as BIRT was an Eclipse-based project it relied on OSGi to deploy the report designer and the runtime, but the latter was difficult to configure under Java EE because of OSGi’s classpath handling.
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After two months of development, the Blender Foundation and its associated online developer community have announced the arrival of the second stable release of the Blender 2.5 series. According to the project’s roadmap, the next stable update to the open source 3D content creation suite, Blender 2.59, is expected to arrive in August, after which development on the 2.6x cycle will begin, targeting new updates every 2 months.
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Public Services/Government
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Sirius’ managing director, Mark Taylor, said his company had been engaged by the council 12 months ago to undertake strategic work prior to the roll out of an open source pilot. However, he says Computacenter unilaterally changed a joint report made by the two companies at the last moment and “we were kicked off the project”.
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Councillor Mark Wright, who pushed through the project in September 2010, was voted out of his post as ICT portfolio holder a month ago, after a private vote of Liberal Democrat members.
[...]
The ICT portfolio was passed to Council leader Barbara Janke, who has said she is still committed to Bristol’s open source strategy, which she had backed when Wright put it before the Cabinet as an instrument of economic regeneration and part of Bristol’s “Digital City” campaign.
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South Korea is pushing to build an open source-based center that will consolidate information on North Korea next year, an official said Thursday.
The envisioned center will collect scattered information made public by media reports, press releases and announcements by international organizations, said the official at the Unification Ministry handling inter-Korean affairs.
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Licensing
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Law suits involving the interpretation of the GNU General Public License actually tend to be pretty far and few between . . . except in Germany. And that’s where we find the most recent case of interest involving Cybits, a company that makes products for protecting children on line, AVM, the maker of the Fritz!Box router, and well known GPL enforcer, Harald Welte, who in this instance is intervening on behalf of Cybits. This suit involves the actions of Cybits which downloads the Fritz!Box software/firmware onto a user’s computer, modifies that software, and then reloads it onto the Fritz!Box router. AVM brought an action for copyright infringement, trademark infringement and violation of competition law.
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Openness/Sharing
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When we talk about the upheaval in educational publishing, we often focus on what students read, via digital textbooks, apps, and e-readers and tablets. But there’s another side to all this, and that’s the production of the scholarly works.
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Programming
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The Eclipse Foundation has announced the release of Eclipse 3.7, codenamed Indigo. The latest version of the popular open source integrated development environment (IDE) introduces some new components and improved functionality.
Eclipse’s modular design and emphasis on extensibility have helped attract a large ecosystem around the software. It is built and maintained like a tooling platform rather than just a standalone application. A great deal of specialized functionality is implemented in plug-ins, allowing the IDE integrate with a lot of external tools and support a wide range of programming languages and development toolkits.
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Standards/Consortia
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Mankind has always struggled to agree on the best way to do certain key tasks. This is the origin of society itself – every culture that has ever existed has at its heart a shared set of standards by which it lives and through which it interacts with the world around it.
These standards define what is and what isn’t acceptable, and they give the members of that society a shared frame of reference by which they can understand each other. Language, commerce and even religion have all been expressions of that shared set of standards.
Financial messaging standards are a continuation of this trend. Sitting at the heart of virtually all economic activity, from executing the smallest retail transactions to managing massive global institutional businesses, they play a key role in enabling modern society to function effectively.
Nowhere is the cause of standards in financial messaging championed more enthusiastically than at SWIFT. Since its genesis in the 1970s, SWIFT has worked at removing ambiguity and incompatibility in how banks and financial institutions interact with each other, while simultaneously championing security and higher levels of automation.
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Bill McCcluggage, deputy government CIO and Cabinet Office director of ICT policy, has sharply curtailed the government’s previous plans to mandate royalty-free open standards. According to reports, McCluggage was speaking to the Guardian Computing Conference in London when he said that the government only intends to implement a handful of open standards.
Referring to government ICT policy, McCluggage said “It doesn’t say we will mandate all open standard, it says we will decide upon a series of open standards and then we will decide which ones to almost fixate upon in terms of delivery.”
Although the policy described by McCluggage may have a better chance of success, it is a step back from the previous policy declaration of open standards mandated across government. That policy had already drawn criticism from standards organisations who objected to the royalty-free element of the UK Government policy.
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Civil Rights
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EFF has filed an amicus brief [PDF], urging the US Supreme Court to grant certiorari to Timothy Vernor in Vernor v. AutoDesk. This is a first sale case, so I know many of you are interested in this latest development.
Here’s Groklaw’s coverage of the decision by the appeals court last year, and here’s our coverage of the ruling at the district court in 2009, which had ruled in favor of Vernor, only to be reversed by the appeals court. Some background and resources on first sale cases may help you to follow along. Here’s a list of important first sale cases on Groklaw’s Legal Research page. If you recall, Michael A. Jacobs of Morrison & Foerster, who represented Novell against SCO successfully, represents AutoDesk.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The Pirate Party is constantly working hard to protect the rights of citizens across the country. From the outset we have been vocal critics of the Digital Economy Act. The Act was forced through in the dying days of a discredited parliament and survived a judicial review. It has seen popular opposition and objection from business, it has been rejected by those who it will have an impact on as well as those who must enforce it.
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ACTA
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With the EU Commission’s announcement of the upcoming release of a memo regarding the signature and ratification of ACTA by the European Union, La Quadrature has sent a letter to Christine Lagarde, French Minister of Economic Affairs. The citizen advocacy group solemnly asks France not to sign this dangerous and illegitimate agreement and encourages citizens from all the negotiating countries to do the same.
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Anti-Trust
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The FTC again demonstrates it is a servant of big business, not citizens of the US much less the rest of the world. The Slashdot comment is:
users will be able to turn to Microsoft when asking questions of Skype’s sometimes-spotty service
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There’s a kind of employee stock purchase agreement loophole which permits company owners to buy back stock from non-executive employees at a low fixed price before a merger or acquisition. All the appreciation in company value moves back from employees to investors.
If Silver Lake was funded by Microsoft to begin with, the takeover is a self deal and the $8.5 billion price tag is another Microsoft sham.
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The service worked well before Microsoft came around, why would they need to fix it? The forced upgrades have outraged Apple users.
[Mac] Users with v2.8 are being pushed an update to v5 regardless of update preferences. I even restored v2.8 from TimeMachine only to have it update itself again within minutes, offering only an option to relaunch the app.
Non free software is an injustice, the extent of which is only a thought experiment or one owner away.
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Intellectual Monopolies
Lulzsec, Anonymous join forces to hack governments
Credit: TinyOgg
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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PS3 Hacker Resigned to Prison Sentence after Money Dries UpAmerican hacker George Hotz got all the headlines for his exploits trying to bring Linux back to the PS3, but he was only one of many working towards the same goal. And while Hotz today walks free, not everybody is so lucky.
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What’s going on is that you really do have a fatal error in your code, and it’s an error that you can’t see. In fact, it’s invisible. The error is that you have uploaded a file that you created on a Windows machine.
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Desktop
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The sources pointed out that ARM-based systems using Android were already launched under the smartbook name two years ago with Toshiba and Lenovo both launching products in the retail channel. However, due to weaker than expected demand, the related products were soon phased out of the market.
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So you’re in the market for a new computer, preferably a netbook or ultra-thin portable, but you want a device with Ubuntu pre-installed.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Some filesystem fixes (btrfs, cifs, afs, xfs, nfsd).
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As mentioned last week, a plethora of Linux power tests are on the way now that we have found an AC power meter with USB interface that works under Linux and we’ve been able to integrate nicely into the Phoronix Test Suite and its sensor monitoring framework. In this article is one of the first tests that have been completed using this power-measuring device as we monitored the Linux kernel power consumption for an old Intel Pentium 4 and ATI Radeon 9200 system for the past several kernel releases. Even this very old desktop system looks to be affected by the kernel power problems.
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Red Hat’s Eric Sandeen has written an interesting blog post concerning the size of popular Linux file-systems and their kernel modules. It turns out that the XFS file-system is losing lines of code, while maintaining the same feature-set and robustness, but the EXT4 and Btrfs file-systems continue to have a net increase in lines of code.
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Graphics Stack
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The remarkable computation power of General Purpose Graphical Processing Units (GP-GPUs) has led them to steadily gain traction in High Performance Computing (HPC). But creating GP-GPU programs can require new programming methods that often introduce additional work and code revisions, or even re-writes, and frequently become an obstacle to the adoption of GP-GPU technology.
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Intel’s current-generation “Sandy Bridge” processors continue to sell incredibly well and perform phenomenally relative to AMD’s current offerings and Intel’s previous-generation hardware. Under Linux, the Sandy Bridge support is now excellent if pulling in the latest components (namely the Linux kernel, xf86-video-intel, and Mesa) and only continues to be improved over time with advancements like their new driver acceleration architecture. By year’s end, Intel is expected to launch their “Ivy Bridge” processors as the successor to Sandy Bridge. Intel is already preparing the Ivy Bridge Linux support code.
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Applications
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Although it doesn’t sync with other computers or a Web-based calendar, it does much of what you would expect from a solid PIM. As long as you’re on the same machine, it’s constantly available. I dislike apps that force me to keep an open window or minimize it to avoid constantly closing and opening them. If you are like me in that regard, you will take very quickly to Osmo’s background feature.
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Proprietary
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According to a Google Group post by Henrik Andreasson, “We would like to announce that a new open source project is about to land in src/third_party/webrtc.
All details about WebRTC in general can be found at http://www.webrtc.org/. Our goal is to enable Chrome with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. We are working hard to provide full RTC support in Chrome all the way from WebKit down to the native audio and video parts. When we are done, any web developer shall be able to create RTC applications, like the Google Talk client in Gmail, without using any plugins but only WebRTC components that runs in the sandbox.”
The team is implementing WebRTC into its Chrome browser, which will enable users to chat in real time without having to run clients like Skype. Since its runs in Sandbox, your system remains secure and safe.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It’s been a while since we last checked in with 0 A.D., the open source project which, as I’ve said before and will say again, could have huge implications for the open source channel. Sadly, the game is not yet complete, but it’s made some major leaps in recent months, which the team recently shared with me. Here are the highlights.
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PlaneShift is a free and open source MMORPG for Linux featuring a 3D virtual fantasy world. Unlike many other MMORPG’s, there are no surprises of premium content in PlaneShift which will limit your gameplay or unbalance the game. There are no limitations in skills, ranks, abilities, items you can gain with your free account. There are no time limits or additional constraints.
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Desktop Environments
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Claire Rowland, user experience guru, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer’s Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.
Claire is Head of Research for Fjord London, an international digital service design agency and has worked extensively in user experience research and design. Recently her focus has been on a shift in user experience from the desktop toward services delivered through multiple platforms of widely differing form factors and the cloud. Her research and recommendations relate to what this shift means for what users expect from their devices, and what effective design, across platforms and the cloud, looks like. It also addresses what users increasingly care about the most, and what this might mean for Operating System design.
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I’m looking forward to working with Xfce directly and more closely after working years with Xubuntu. It’s both easier for us and assures that all Xfce users can enjoy the improvements, not just those who use Xubuntu.
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GNOME Desktop
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A new project called “SweetTooth” aims to help improve the GNOME3 extension infrastructure, making it easy for the users to find and install approved extensions.
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This text is based on a personal interpretation of several events, and as such it reflects one of several potential interpretations, MINE!
On the last GNOME Team meeting there was a small topic to check if it would be interesting to have a GNOME2 spin for the upcoming 12.1 release of openSUSE. It was decided not to provide a GNOME2 spin and somehow this suggests that GNOME2 is dead for openSUSE (unless someone takes the job in).
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You can find hundreds of Linux distributions, depending on what your needs are. For this scorecard, we’re focusing on desktop distributions that are fairly popular, well-supported, and have a reliable release history, and strong community. In last year’s scorecard, we started with seven distros — this year, we’ve narrowed the field to six distributions:
* Debian
* Fedora
* Linux Mint
* openSUSE
* Slackware
* Ubuntu
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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New York, June 22nd (TradersHuddle.com) – Shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) closed the trading session at $43.75 near its 50 day and 200 day moving averages currently set at $44.64 and $43.31 respectively. Red Hat’s price action is above the 200 day moving average but below its 50 day moving average, signaling a possible break out.
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EC2 has many different operating systems available, including Windows Server and several different Linux versions including SUSE, Oracle and OpenSolaris. (On the horizon are support for Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu and Gentoo.)
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A recent Oracle Support note has some Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers wondering about Oracle’s future support of Red Hat. But one expert says it’s more a statement of Oracle’s plans for its own database storage management features.
The note, released this spring and updated earlier this month, has to do with ASMLib, a support library for the Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature of Oracle Database. According to the note, the support library “allows an Oracle Database using ASM more efficient and capable access to the disk groups it is using.”
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The developers of Scientific Linux (SL) have released version 5.6 of their Linux distribution. As with the project’s previous versions, this one is a free remodeling of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the same version number – SL 5.6 therefore also includes all of the improvements that Red Hat added to RHEL 5.6.
In the release email, the developers emphasise the Atom Shine graphical theme as being one of the main innovations, followed by a list of packages that the SL developers have included which are not in RHEL 5.6. Versions of SL prior to 6.0 contain a lot of such packages; in SL 6.0, the developers added only a few additional packages, referring users instead to repositories such as ATrpms, EPEL and RPMforge for additional software.
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Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) shares have spiked 4.07% after closing bell today with a the report of a fiscal first-quarter profit of $32.5 million, or 17 cents a share, up from $24 million and 12 cents a share from the same period last year.
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Total revenue for the quarter was $264.7 million, an increase of 27% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $225.5 million, up 26% year-over-year.
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Red Hat Corporation is a great Linux company: the first company to earn a billion dollars on free software.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The surprise, for me, was that I could get the majority of my work done on an old, “slow” PC that I’d written off as useless. That’s definitely one of Linux’s charms: it has very modest system requirements.
I also found it very comforting to work without the threat of malware, which is more or less non-existent in Linux. (Of course, there’s always phishing, which is OS-agnostic.)
For my work situation (which, again, is largely Web-based), Ubuntu made a fine substitute for Windows. In fact, I’m still using it, even though my HP has been repaired and returned. I can’t abandon Windows altogether just yet, but that day may come.
Something else to keep in mind: every time you buy a new PC, you’re paying upwards of $100 just for the Windows license. If you buy 10 machines, opting for Linux could save you $1,000. (The trick is finding a vendor that offers the option. I know Dell does.) Ubuntu, like all Linux distributions, is free.
And pretty awesome. If you haven’t tried it, you owe it to yourself to do so. Hit the Download page and check out the “Try it from a CD or USB stick” option.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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* Google,
* HTC,
* LG,
* TI,
* Toshiba,
* Dell,
* HP,
* Apple,
* Archos,
* Amazon,
* Acer
* Sharp,
* Asus,
* Lenovo, and
* millions of “white box” tablets.
Even the few who are producing tablets running that other OS are producing Android/Linux versions. B
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Web Browsers
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At long last, Mozilla has managed to calculate how many Firefox users have at least one add-on installed: 85%. It gets better, though: the average Firefox user has no less than 5 add-ons installed — but considering over 2.5 billion add-ons have been downloaded in the last 5 years, that’s not all that surprising. In total, 580 million add-ons are used every day by the Firefox user base.
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We all know that add-ons are one of the best things about Firefox and Firefox users love their add-ons. However there was never any clear data on the add-ons installed untill Firefox 4. In Firefox 4, a new feature was introduces which allows Mozilla to keep track of an aggregate of add-on usage in Firefox.
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It seems like now is the time to revisit the notion of integrating HTML5 into Sugar itself. I feel that this can achieve a far more powerful outcome than just swapping Browse with Surf. The primary weaknesses of HTML5, its immaturity and dearth of good development tools, are being addressed. Microsoft and Adobe are continue to move towards HTML5, which can only be a good thing.
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Chrome
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Google has been trying out a redesign of Chrome’s famous New Tab page. The new interface is more organized than the previous one as it cleverly categorizes apps and bookmarks into separate screens. The user can slide between the screens by simply grabbing and pushing the mouse in the required direction. Here’s how to enable it on your browser.
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Mozilla
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Unnoticed in the Tuesday release of Firefox 5 was Mozilla’s decision to retire Firefox 4, the browser it shipped just three months ago.
As part of Tuesday’s Firefox 5 release, Mozilla spelled out vulnerabilities it had patched in that edition and in 2010′s Firefox 3.6, but it made no mention of any bugs fixed in Firefox 4.
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I am a software geek and I love new software. As a businessperson, I also want to be as productive as possible when using my software. New software can cause things to stop working and become a productivity killer.
Today I got news about a new version of Firefox. It is my browser of choice and I couldn’t stop myself from installing it. Of course this version comes only a few weeks after the last version was released. The explanation for the quick update cycle was to keep up with the update cycle of Google Chrome. After reading the explanation, it got me to thinking if rapid updates were truly a good thing?
We definitely need browser updates on a regular basis to patch security issues. Yet those updates don’t have to come as a new version with new features (and new problems).
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If you demand total extension compatibility it may be worth waiting a few days for incremental fixes to appear for Firefox 5. However, it appears to be much faster than other versions and other browsers, and mostly reliable upon release. That’s yet another reason to expect heated market share competition between Firefox and Google Chrome throughout this year.
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Mozilla has officially released Firefox 5, only 3 months after the releases of Firefox 4 following the rapid release strategy of Google Chrome. The idea behind is to bring about changes in the browser as soon as possible and keep the browser up-to-date by creating different development channels.
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I’m a Google Chromium (right now version 12.0.742.91) user because of the speed. I found previous versions of Firefox to be just a little too slow. Especially when starting the browser. Through the grapevine I heard people discussing the better speeds of Firefox 5.0, which was released this week. This makes me re-consider using Firefox as my default browser. I took a look at the speed and several of the new features. Here are the results.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle’s broad legal front against Google has been whittled back further, this time by the US patent and trademark authorities, according to Groklaw.
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected 17 of 21 claims associated with one of the patents in Java that Oracle asserted Google had violated with Android. The patent in question is number 6192476, one of six Oracle says Google has stepped on.
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The leading open source projects were forked and Oracle distanced itself from them. OpenOffice is dead (only to be scavenged by IBM), OpenSolaris is gone, Hudson is gone, Java has become a ‘closed’ technology owned by Oracle/IBM. Java developers may never forgive Oracle for the way it took a U-Turn from its own stand on Java. Now, MySQL is the only major open source project which is being run by Oracle – forks are already in place in case Oracle pulls plugs off MySQL.
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CMS
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The development of the new Kajona version 3.4.0 took nearly ten months, but it was worth waiting. The Kajona team used the time to refactor many aspects of the system, providing both, visible changes at the user-interface and invisible changes under the hood. Like the release name “berlin” hints at, most of the feedback from this year’s LinuxTag in Berlin was already implemented in Kajona 3.4.0.
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Business
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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In a case that could threaten open source GPL licensing in Germany, a Berlin court yesterday began hearing a lawsuit from German DSL router vendor AVM against web-filtering software firm Cybits. AVM charges that by modifying Linux kernel code in router firmware, Cybits is infringing on copyright, while Cybits’ defense claims GPL licensing permits it to alter the code.
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Project Releases
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The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.58. This is the second stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign, development and stabilizing work.
We name this version “Stable” not only because it’s mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.
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The Tornado project developers have announced the release of version 2.0 of their open source web server. The Python-based, non-blocking web server framework was first released as open source in September 2009 by Facebook, following its acquisition of FriendFeed.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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“Winning the Future through Open Innovation,” is a progress report recently released by Aneesh Chopra, US Chief Technology Officer, to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) on the Administration’s Open Government Initiative.The report highlights a number of programs at different agencies that represent a wide variety of open innovation techniques, from opening datasets and APIs to creating incentives for competition or testing and certifying open standards.
Less than a week after the report’s release, the Administration launched the Campaign to Cut Waste through the newly-formed Government Accountability and Transparency Board (GATB), an 11-member group which will review and cut about 50% of Federal websites to reduce spending and prevent duplication of efforts.
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Open Hardware
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Upstart mega-multicore chip maker Tilera has not yet started sampling its future Tile-Gx 3000 series of server processors, and companies have already locked in orders for the chips.
That is how eagerly hyperscale data center operators are anticipating some alternative to power-hungry Xeon processors from Intel and Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices.
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Programming
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Perl version 5.12.4 is a recommended update for all users of Perl 5.12.
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Standards/Consortia
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The Hungarian government wants to use the Open Document Format, a vendor independent format for electronic documents, as a default for its documents. Zsolt Nyitrai, Minister of State for ICT, earlier this month explained to the parliament that legislation to use ODF by default is being prepared.
The ODF plans were announced on 1 June, during a conference in the Hungarian Parliament “The Parliament of Information Society”.
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The F.B.I. seized Web servers in a raid on a data center early Tuesday, causing several Web sites, including those run by the New York publisher Curbed Network, to go offline.
The raid happened at 1:15 a.m. at a hosting facility in Reston, Va., used by DigitalOne, which is based in Switzerland, the company said. The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the raid.
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Security
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Finance
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Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and a host of US megacorps are lobbying hard for a massive tax break – and they’re gaining powerful friends in business, government, and labor in support of that effort.
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In other words, the answer shall remain secret. Only those deemed worthy by Goldman may see its data, which purportedly refutes the Levin report. The rest of us are kept in the dark. We cannot challenge Goldman’s claims, because we cannot see what they see. They know what they are talking about; we do not. Instead, we must rely on Andrew Ross Sorkin, Holman Jenkins, Dick Bove, and others to reveal the truth.
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other owners of large metals warehouses are being scrutinized by the London Metal Exchange after being accused by users like Coca-Cola Co. of restricting the amount of metal they release to customers, inflating prices.
The board of the LME met on Thursday to discuss complaints from aluminum users and market traders, who say operators of warehouses, which also include J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Glencore International PLC, should be forced to allow the metal out more quickly to meet demand.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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While former U.S. Rep. Anthony’s Weiner’s scandalous “sexting” has had a slew of negative consequences for him, it has meant big business for a local company that started making an action figure in his likeness.
There has been a “mad rush” of interest in the latest offering from HeroBuilders.com, a company at 198 Goodhill Road known for controversial figures it makes and sells online, President Emil Vicale said Monday.
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For a guy who claims not read newspapers — or care what the polls say or the public thinks — Rick Scott sure is putting a lot of effort into trying to score some good publicity.
In fact, if regular old rank-and-file Floridians won’t write nice things about him in letters to the editor, Scott has decided to write the words for them.
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Over and over, cable TV and Sunday news show pundits have been telling us that Social Security is going bankrupt, and we have to raise the retirement age or the economy will collapse. These two axioms have practically become common knowledge. The only problem is, there isn’t a shred of evidence that either statement is accurate.
So how did it happen that these erroneous statements have become mainstream American group-think? It’s the result of a sophisticated corporate echo chamber propaganda strategy funded primarily by the Koch brothers for the purpose of turning business-friendly, fringe right-wing ideas into mainstream policy arguments. The echo chamber strategy is very real, and has been perfected by corporate interests over the last several decades. It involves carefully selecting and fine-tuning a message that resonates with the populace, and then arranging to get that message repeated over and over through a variety of credible media sources.
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Censorship
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From these links you can access what looks like the proposals for a voluntary website blocking scheme, apparently put forward by the Rightsholder Group engaged in Minister Ed Vaizey’s roundtable discussions with ISPs and others.
The documents, sent to James Firth’s blog, set out a dangerous voluntary scheme that would involve ‘expedited court procedures’ and a ‘balance’ between evidence and speed of action. Definitions of what content is to be judged blockable is scarce. References to exactly how such blocking would work, and the consequences, are non-existent. The case for blocking is left unmade, with no analysis about the effects of such measures. There is cursory reference to the rule of law and proper oversight. The proposal, if it is the genuine proposal, adds up to a dangerous revocation of the rule of law where lobby groups would decide what you are allowed to see and read.
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It is unacceptable for trade groups and government to conduct policy in this way. Censorship proposals must be made and discussed in public. Many of us will oppose any censorship that impacts directly and widely on free expression. Governments would be wise to assess the strength of our arguments, rather than waiting for trade bodies to find their narrow, commercial arguments unravel once their proposals reach the light of day.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Given the critical role it plays in communication, culture, and commerce, most people now recognize the importance of Internet access. My weekly technology law column (Toronto Star version, homepage version) notes a new report for the United Nations Human Rights Council takes Internet access a step further, however, characterizing it as a human right.
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The Netherlands on Wednesday became the first country in Europe, and only the second in the world, to enshrine the concept of network neutrality into national law by banning its mobile telephone operators from blocking or charging consumers extra for using Internet-based communications services like Skype or WhatsApp, a free text service.
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A broad majority in the Dutch parliament voted for crucial legislative proposals to safeguard an open and secure internet in The Netherlands. The Netherlands is the first country in Europe to introduce a net neutrality law. In addition, provisions were launched protecting users against disconnection and wiretapping by providers. Digital rights movement Bits of Freedom calls upon other countries to follow the Dutch example.
The net neutrality proposal (Dutch) prohibits internetproviders from interfering with the traffic of their users. Dutch telecom incumbent KPN recently received world-wide media-attention because it planned to charge Internet users for the use of innovative and competitive services such as Internet telephony. The legislative proposal aims to prevent this, while still allowing for measures in case of congestion and for network security, as long as these measures serve the interests of the internet user. A small technical error in the amendment was introduced last minute and will in all likelihood be corrected next week.
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DRM
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After years of negotiations, a group of bandwidth providers that includes AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are closer than ever to striking a deal with media and entertainment companies that would call for them to establish new and tougher punishments for customers who refuse to stop using their networks to pirate films, music and other intellectual property, multiple sources told CNET.
The sources cautioned that a final agreement has yet to be signed and that the partnership could still unravel but added that at this point a deal is within reach and is on track to be unveiled sometime next month.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Earlier, we mentioned that a bill from the Mexican Congress opposing ACTA was going to the full Congress today, and apparently the bill was approved. Now, the question is whether or not the Mexican executive branch will try to ignore the will of Congress on this issue and sign ACTA anyway.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Veterans Affairs Department has awarded The Informatics Applications Group Inc. of Reston, Va., a $5 million contract to be the custodial agent to manage VA’s open source community to modernize its VistA electronic health record.
The vendor, TIAG, is a management and technology services company, which has performed business process and clinical applications work for the Defense Department.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Censorship
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Intellectual Monopolies
Fiber optic cables: How they work
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.22.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s director, has some heartening news for Linux world professionals. He waslinux-logo recently quoted saying, “Linux’s increasing use across industries is building high demand for Linux jobs despite national unemployment stats. Linux.com reaches millions of Linux professionals from all over the world. By providing a Jobs Board feature on the popular community site, we can bring together employers, recruiters and job seekers to lay the intellectual foundation for tomorrow’s IT industry.”
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Server
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In the latest Top 500 Supercomputer list list, which was released on June 20th, Linux accounts for 91.00 % of the top supercomputers. Linux is followed by Unix with 4.6%; and Windows with 1.2%. When it comes to super-fast computers like supercomputers or IBM Jeopardy winning Watson, Linux rules.
Of the fastest of the fast, the top ten supercomputers all run Linux. The top ten, lead by the K Computer at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe Japan, are all capable of performing more than 8 quadrillion calculations per second (petaflop/s) This ranking is determined by how fast the computers can run Linpack, “a benchmark application developed to solve a dense system of linear equations.” The highest ranking pure Windows supercomputer, the Magic Cube at China’s Shanghai Supercomputer Center, comes in at 40th.
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Man, what a busy time lately!!… I have struggled big time to finish any of my ongoing articles, but fear not, this blog is very much alive and kicking. Stay tunned for upcoming articles, for there are some interesting things on the way, including reviews for Fedora 15, Fuduntu 14.10, Zorin 5 OS and (maybe) an article on why I decided not to review Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity.
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Penguin Computing, experts in high performance computing (HPC) solutions, today announced the immediate availability of PODtool, an interface that makes it easy to offload excess workload to Penguin’s on-demand environment Penguin Computing on Demand (POD).
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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The kernel hackers have optimised the Btrfs code and extended it to include new functions; a substantially improved tool for testing the experimental filesystem is soon to be released. Ext4 now supports the “punch hole” technology for deallocating unused memory areas within a file.
Early this week, Linus Torvalds released a new pre-release (RC) for Linux 3.0. In the release mail for the fourth RC, he mentions some more extensive changes to the DRM subsystem. Among those changes are patches that improve support for the graphics core of AMD’s recently introduced Llano, which was introduced between RC2 and RC3.
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After much discussion we decided we bite the bullet and upload a 3.0 kernel. At least we get a chance to identify problematic applications, while still keeping our options open to move to a 3.0.0 kernel for release should that be prudent. As expected this was not smooth sailing, not least for the kernel packaging which needed much love to even correctly build this version. Plus we had to hack the meta packages to allow that to be reversioned later too.
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Graphics Stack
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James Simmons has written a status update to the OpenChrome development list concerning his ongoing work towards enabling kernel mode-setting (KMS) support for VIA hardware with this community-maintained VIA Linux project.
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Corentin Chary has announced the release of XWayland and the new xf86-video-wlshm driver.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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When you receive and need to handle multiple text files that use characters that are not natural to the English language, you may run into the problem that is dealing with different character encodings. This is particularly noticeable in websites, where if the browser try to interpret the text file with an encoding that differs from the actual encoding that the file is using, we can see strange symbols where this characters were supposed to show, but it is not limited to websites, any program that is made to work with languages other than English may present a similar problem if it is not appropriately handled.
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Wine
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Today we’ll be talking with Tom Wickline, leader of the Bordeaux Technology Group, a company specialized in development of Windows compatibility software, supporting Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana and Mac OS X.
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Games
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0
The indie game developers Jugilus who developed Little Space Duo are working on a new game called Legions of Ashworld.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Russell Ossendryver and his WorldLabel company do an amazing job of supporting the open source software movement and individual open source projects. His company’s blog often features articles by prominent tech writers covering Linux and open source software. And now WorldLabel has kindly agreed to sponsor a competition for the best digiKam tip, where the winner will bag a cool Ubuntu-based Teo Pro netbook from ZaReason.
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Following the success of last years’ event, the Spanish KDE community again held its national Akademy event, Akademy-es 2011, between the 20th and the 22nd of May 2011 in Barcelona. The event was sponsored by Google and Qt/Nokia and was supported by the Linux and Todo-Linux magazines. KDE enthusiasts from all over the country gathered to discuss free software and KDE.
This year the event had two different hosts: the Polytechnical University of Catalonia (UPC) made its Master Classroom available for Friday’s presentations, whereas the School of Sant Marc-Sarrià hosted us on Saturday and Sunday.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Foundation today announced that it has appointed Karen Sandler as Executive Director. Sandler’s dedication to software freedom, her non-profits experience and her involvement in a wide range of free and open source software communities distinguish her as the logical choice for GNOME. “I’m very excited that Karen is joining the GNOME Foundation as Executive Director!”, says Stormy Peters, former Executive Director who has recently joined the GNOME Board as a new Director, “Karen brings a wealth of experience in free software projects and nonprofits as well as a passion for free software. That experience will be invaluable as GNOME continues to expand its reach with GNOME 3.0 and GNOME technologies.”
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In November 2010, after I informed the GNOME Foundation that I’d like to submit some names of potential Executive Director candidates, Germán Póo-Caamaño invited me to serve on the GNOME Foundation’s Executive Director Hiring Committee. We agreed that the Committee’s work would remain confidential (as any hiring process is wrought with complicated and frank discussions). I usually prefer open processes to confidentiality, but with things like hiring, confidentiality is somewhat of a necessity.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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You may hardly find a hard-core GNU/Linux user who has not heard of, or used, Mandriva. Mandrive once was the Android of Linux world. It was user-friendly and powerful. But the company went into trouble and the project was forked.
Mandriva fork Mageia took birth recently, quit a lot of ink was spent on Mageia, we covered it regularly, keeping a close eye on the development of the project. I believe it is very important for the users to have multiple choices. Ubuntu is the king, the emperor of the GNU/Linux world. We do need a prince (Linux Mint is a king in its own right). We need a distro which is not only easy to use but also continues the legacy of Mandriva — the #1 distro which ruled the DistroWatch list before Ubuntu arrived.
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Gentoo Family
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One of the great things we’ve got at openSUSE is openSUSE Build Service. Web service where we can commit sources and recipes and it will produce bunch of binaries for various distributions. Not just for openSUSE. We are friendly people and we love to work together with other distributions. After all, we all have a common goal – make open source succeed and defeat common enemies (some greedy people trying to steal some of our freedoms). OBS follows this path and it is a great tool that can help anybody to package his software for any distribution. It is easy to use and easy to get involved. We even have a public instance where anybody can submit a data and use package for his own purpose. If you want to build a package just for Fedora, we will let you do that. Of course we will be much happier if you’ll consider building it for openSUSE as well, but we don’t force you to do so.
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Red Hat Family
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Piper Jaffray is reiterating its Overweight rating and $57 price target on shares of Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT).
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Itway SpA announced that it has signed a commercial agreement for the distribution of the Open Source solutions born through the collaboration between Red Hat, Inc., a supplier in the open source solutions, and Acronis, a company active n the production of solutions for backup, restoration and security of physical, virtual and cloud environments.
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Red Hat Italia organized its fifth open source day last week in Rome, and it was quite a success by the numbers: 700 people subscribed to the event, about 500 attendees, 6 talks in the plenary session and 12 speeches in the parallel sessions.
I have been following the whole event before running the final round-table, and I wish to share here some notes from the event.
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Fedora
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On Friday my new Lenovo ThinkPad x220 arrived and of course in the evening after I finished work, I was jonesing to put Fedora 15 on it. The machine is a type 4286CTO (Smolt info here). I started by booting into the BIOS and checking the options as shipped by Lenovo. There wasn’t much to change here, other than to enable hardware virtualization so I could more easily run KVM on the laptop should I choose to do so later. I didn’t enable the extra direct IO option, VT-d, because I’ve seen it cause weird installation problems in a lot of cases.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Unity Grab Handles are a fun and aesthetically beautiful way to resize windows in new Ubuntu Unity. Even though they are not enabled by default in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, you can easily turn Unity Grab Handles on by following a few easy steps.
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Figures from Distro-watch show that the popular front of Linux, Ubuntu, is sliding in popularity.
While the distro is still tops, it is starting to look like others are eating into its user base faster than Homer Simpson at an all you can eat penguin steak buffet.
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Some of the work done to enable Sandybridge Suspend (S3) and Hibernate(S4) showed how painful it can be to get hardware to do what it oughts to do! The problem arises when you find yourself with not many tools to debug what is going on, since your console and half of the OS functionality has already gone to sleep.
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Freescale Semiconductor announced a series of 28nm-fabbed QorIQ multicore processors, featuring a 64-bit PowerPC core clocked up to 2.5GHz. The Linux-ready Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) QorIQ series will debut in early 2012 with the T4240, offering 12 cores dual-threaded to 24 virtual cores, numerous acceleration engines, and cascading power management, says Freescale.
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Phones
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Nokia announced its long-awaited MeeGo Linux-based follow-up to the N900 phone — but when this ships later this year it may well be the company’s first and last MeeGo device. The Nokia N9 features an OMAP3630 processor, up to 64GB storage, a 3.9-inch AMOLED display, an eight-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, NFC, and a “Harmattan” UI with swipe-gesture support, says the company.
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Android
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ZTE is one of the leading Chinese brands in the world, and they have announced decent and affordable handsets in past, like the trio of new Android phones at MWC. Now ZTE is back again with the announcement of their new Android device, the ZTE X880, codenamed Libra. The Libra is yet another good looking, mid-range device from ZTE. It runs on Android, and there is no custom UI. Yeah, this baby is running stock Android.It was launched in several Asian countries this week, and soon this device will find its way to the UK, maybe as a successor to the ZTE Blade.
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All you patient Android users waiting on an official TiVo app might not have to wait much longer. According to a full-page TiVo advertisement found in the latest issue of CEPro’s magazine, the TiVo app will be coming “soon” to Android OS products.
Exactly what “Android OS products” it will be coming to remains a mystery, as does the specifics of what features the app will include. The statement does come after a reference to the TiVo app for Apple’s iPad so one can assume the Android version will include the same features.
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We’ve been hearing a bit more than normal about our friends from Sony Ericsson. First there was the announcement that they’ll be incorporating NFC chips into future devices, and now this. We’ve gotten our hands on a photo of what’s being dubbed as the Xperia Duo. We don’t have any real specs at the moment, other than the fact that it’ll be packing a dual-core processor and what appears to be a rather large screen. Our best guess is that it’s hovering somewhere around 4.3 inches, possibly even 4.5, with a front-facing camera. One thing that stands out to me is that the display seems to be nearly edge-to-edge, which should make for an excellent viewing experience.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Panasonic, the maker of Toughbook laptops, is joining the Android fleet. Panasonic is working on an enterprise-grade Android tablet to the market in the fourth quarter of this year.
The new Toughbook tablet will appeal to a wide variety of users, including mission critical government personnel, highly mobile field forces, SMB’s looking for a competitive edge, security conscious IT managers and bottom-line focused CFOs.
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Thus, for every once-new single-vendor open source project there will be an eventually-new community project, in addition to the originally-new community projects. The ratio may play out to be something like one single-vendor for two community-owned projects, though I think the total number of new community-owned projects is likely to be much higher. So the ratio of successful single-vendor / community-owned projects may well be stabilizing in the 1-10% range. (Please note that I’m just guessing; also, I’m excluding small random ultimately not successful hobby projects here.)
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These days, more and more people work at home at least part of the time. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, more than half of the 29.6 million small businesses in the country are home-based.
If you add to those figures the number of people who telecommute to their jobs part of the time, the Telework Research Network estimates that between 20 to 30 million people work from home at least once a week. And WorldatWork claims that approximately 44 million Americans work at home at least one day a year.
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Openness matters. Even in the land of open-source software, where openness is the default.
What this means, as Riehle further elaborates, is that even single-vendor open-source projects, which have open licensing but comparatively closed development processes, will give way to community-led projects over time. “Ultimately, all single-vendor innovation will be commoditized through a community-owned project.” Not a good prognosis if you’re in the business of selling support or “enterprise” versions of open-source software.
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Brian Behlendorf, the founder of the Apache Web Server project and a lead developer on Subversion, discusses how to get started on an OSS project — and what to expect
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Open source is not only software, but also an approach to software development. The public nature of open source projects lets us show how open source software development scales to the largest project sizes. The following figure illustrates the scalability of open source software development. I call it the big bang of open source.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Shortly after releasing software for audio and video chat as an open-source project called WebRTC as open-source software, Google is beginning to build it into its Chrome browser.
The real-time chat software originated from Google’s 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions (GIPS), a company specializing in Internet telephony and videoconferencing.
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From today’s viewpoint, Chrome is a fantastic browser that has shaped an entirely new generation of Internet software. If we credit Firefox with waking up Microsoft in 2004 and convincing the software giant that browsers need to be more secure, then we need to credit Google with waking up both Mozilla and Microsoft and reminding them that the web browser was stuck in the mud and simply did not evolve anymore.
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Mozilla
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Bookmark and Share
Mozilla released Firefox 5.0 that fixes several security issues, stability issues and introduces new features.
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Mozilla just released Firefox 5, and while most of the updates are under the hood, there are a few cool new features worth mentioning.
* “Do not track” options for Android, better visibility in Preferences of desktop version
* CSS animation support, which helps developers build more dynamic websites
* Better support for JavaScript and Canvas
* Updated support for MathML, HTML 5, XHR, and SMIL.
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After the wildly successful launch of Firefox 4 not all that long ago, it’s hard to believe the next iteration of Mozilla’s popular and free open source browser is already here.
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Firefox 5 has been released today as the part of its Rapid Release Program. There are lots of under the hood changes in this release that improves overall performance, speed, stability and security for the World’s second most popular web browser.
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SaaS
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Databases
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The latest stable release of Monty Widneuis’s MySQL fork MariaDB, 5.2.7, has been made available. A new addition is HeidiSQL, which is bundled with the Windows installer for MariaDB.
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Significant Performance Gains Now Available Through Couchbase Single Server 2.0 Developer Preview
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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A new version of Open Office, the free office suite, has just been released into the wild. Apparently it’s been through a revamp and is now more compatible with Microsoft Office files. The press release accompanying the launch boasts that OpenOffice has gone from being the “free alternative” to the “preferred choice”. Interestingly, though, the new version hasn’t gone with a Microsoft Office-style “tabbed” Ribbon interface, but has instead stuck with familiar menus and toolbars.
Given that office users are more or less evenly divided between those who love and loath Microsoft’s tabbed interface, this seemed like a good time for a head to head. Has OpenOffice really managed to cut through the tangle of the old-style user interface to produce an office suite that’s both familiar and easy to use?
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Probably the most boring open source story recently has also been the one getting the most ink. The problem with with the Apache/OpenOffice saga is that the real story already happened, it’s history.
Oracle’s “gift” of OpenOffice.org to Apache, and the change of license from copyleft to permissive, is merely an epilogue referring back to a prologue: Oracle’s sudden ownership of the open source office suite as a mere byproduct of their acquisition of Sun.
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Google has filed its response to Oracle’s damages claim and as expected the filing rips apart the arguments of an expert witness. One of the more notable items in the filing is the issue of when Java was fragmented.
Oracle wants a hefty damages for what the company alleges is Android’s patent and copyright infringement on Java. Florian Mueller estimates that Oracle is seeking at least $1 billion or so from Google. That figure—given the Nokia and Apple settlement on Tuesday—seems plausible.
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CMS
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Acquia’s social business software distribution, Drupal Commons has allowed many developers to build community sites easily with Drupal. This has always been one of the major goals of Drupal Commons – to help Drupal adoption by making it easy for people to create great community sites quickly without having to build from scratch.
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Business
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LGPL license model extended to cover both development and deployment with support packages introduced for core Open Source offerings
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Licensing
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If AVM succeeds in forbidding others from exercising the freedoms explicitly granted by the GNU General Public License terms, it will directly contravene the legal rights of the original authors of the programs, who decided that software freedom and cooperation is more important to them than directly receiving license fees. Moreover, there are also significant economic and business implications. First, it will give device manufacturers the chance to veto software from third parties on their products, resulting in worse products for the user and them being locked-in to purchasing future products from a particular vendor. Second, it will give companies like AVM an unfair advantage over their competitors who are in compliance with the Free Software licenses which they use. Third, it will threaten the cooperative software development model, which has been successfully used by many companies worldwide for three decades.
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Openness/Sharing
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How can the Internet help spread scientific discoveries? The internet has heralded a new level of openness and data sharing since its inception. While this revolution of information has swept across our society, openly sharing information in the scientific arena has yet to see a boon in activity. With scientists remaining extremely protective over their discoveries, we have to ask if this behavior is hampering future scientific discoveries.
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When writing documentation for GNU/Linux or any other FOSS project it makes sense to license it under some sort of Free license. Doing so will allow others to redistribute and build on it. But with the plethora of Free Documentation licenses available it can be confusing to choose the right one for you. This article will explain the differences among some of the most common licenses so that you can make the best choice.
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Programming
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The language road in computer science is littered with the carcasses of what was to be “the next big thing.” And although many niche languages do find some adoption in scripting or specialized applications, C (and its derivatives) and the Java language are difficult to displace. But Red Hat’s Ceylon appears to be an interesting combination of language features, using a well-known C-style syntax but with support for object orientation and useful functional aspects in addition to an emphasis on being succinct. Explore Ceylon and find out if this future VM language can find a place in enterprise software development.
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The Haiku open source software project, which is building a clean-room implementation of the BeOS platform, has published its third alpha release. The new version was made available over the weekend, and it offers enhanced hardware support, better stability, and a wide range of new features. I tested Haiku Alpha 3 in VirtualBox and on my HP Mini netbook.
BeOS was one of the most advanced desktop computing platforms of the ’90s, but it failed to gain mainstream acceptance. Be’s assets were sold to Palm and eventually ended up in the hands of Japanese browser vendor Access. After Be’s demise, the subsequent owners of the BeOS copyrights declined to continue development or release the code base. The Haiku project was formed in 2001 with the aim of rebuilding the operating system from scratch.
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Health/Nutrition
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The global consulting firm McKinsey & Company set off a firestorm when it released a report last week suggesting that 30 percent of U.S. businesses will stop offering health care benefits to their employees after most of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act go into effect in 2014.
The White House was quick to challenge the validity of the report, noting that McKinsey has so far refused to provide any details of the methodology used to reach its conclusion. All McKinsey will say is that its report was based on a survey of 1,300 employers and “other
proprietary research.”
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If you haven’t gotten much of a raise lately, it’s probably because the extra money that might have been put in your paycheck instead went to your health insurer if you are enrolled in an employer-sponsored plan.
Many Americans haven’t seen a pay increase of any kind because their employers can’t both increase their wages and continue offering decent health care coverage. It has become an either-or for people like Zeke Zalaski, a factory worker in Bristol, Connecticut, who hasn’t had a raise in years.
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Roswell Park Cancer Institute and the public health advocacy group Americans for Nonsmokers’ Rights have posted a YouTube video about the plight of casino workers, some of the last employees in the country forced to breathe secondhand cigarette smoke at work.
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Beginning September 2012, FDA will require larger, more prominent cigarette health warnings on all cigarette packaging and advertisements in the United States. These warnings mark the first change in cigarette warnings in more than 25 years and are a significant advancement in communicating the dangers of smoking.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has enlisted former Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh and ex-White House chief of staff Andy Card for a “road show” to promote a bipartisan blitz against what it deems excessive and costly government regulations.
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Last week, the House Appropriations Committee approved an amendment by Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) that would immunize the tobacco industry against many FDA regulations preventing them from making tobacco more addictive and marketing it to children.
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In his first-ever Netroots Nation appearance, former Democratic Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold asked the crowd to take back the Democratic Party and the U.S. government.
Everything is a Remix Part 3
Credit: TinyOgg
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06.21.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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To see if this is truly a difficult task, or if the challenger is just another anti-Linux FUDster that is too ignorant to know how easy it can be to administer a Linux PC. This person does not really explain what is meant by “all apps”, so I am guessing that to mean usable in Office suites and programs like The GIMP by any user on the PC to set the font for creating documents and text in graphics.
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The Linux user spent the next ten minutes showing the other guy his system. He fielded the “complaint” of needing Windows for certain things by opening VirtualBox and demonstrating his Windows XP install within. He let the other student navigate throughout his laptop and provided instruction when needed.
In the end, the biggest obstacle was convincing him that the entire shootin’ match didn’t cost anything, aside from a Windows and MS Office license for his VirtualBox and even then, it was going to be largely unnecessary.
They then retrograded into a comparison of their classes the first semester, where each was from and other mundane conversation. After a few more minutes, the Linux guy shut down his computer and stood to leave. I glanced up at him and he looked in my direction.
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Desktop
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The answer is simple: Microsoft has a better, more aggressive marketing strategy. Moreover, companies prefer to purchase licenses so that that they can blame somebody when something goes wrong.
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Server
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Eucalyptus was one of the first companies on the cloud computing scene and Mickos is among the most respected open source entrepreneurs in the industry (having been CEO of MySQL AB before its acquisition by Sun Microsystems).
Mickos took a few minutes to share his thoughts on cloud computing and Linux, the new Open Virtualization Alliance, and how Linux has shaped our lives over the last 20 years.
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Mainframes are dead! I was told this when I first started working in the computer industry in 1994. However, in 2010 Mainframe revenue was approximately $2.55 billion. Perhaps Mr. Twain stated it best when he said, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
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Kernel Space
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Future versions of the Linux Kernel (such as 3.0) will include support for the Xen hypervisor. This means that Linux distributions will typically offer out of the box support for both hosting Xen and running as a guest operating system under Xen.
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Applications
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The power of collaborative development is doing wonders in the world of computing. Open source software is no longer just a cheaper alternative to those premium software tools, but now they are technically superior and user centric too. There are open source alternatives now for all types of software’s in cloud computing, OS, editing tools, office suites and the list just goes on. Today we take a closer look into UM Player (Universal Media player), an Open Source media player which is in fact gaining huge user base in Ubuntu community too.
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Dolphin is the default file manager in KDE and it features an easy to use interface, tabs, previews, three view modes (icons, details, columns), vertical window splitting, file and folder sorting, service menus, tags, two-mode location bar.
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Proprietary
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First of, I never ever been a fan of Adobe Air apps, their lack of integration with the native OS UI (At least on Linux) is a big turn off of me. Hence when Adobe announced that they would be pulling the plugs off adobe air for Linux. My reaction, similar to that of many Linux users, was Meh
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Instructionals/Technical
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Desktop Environments
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The Desktop Summit 2011 is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities in Berlin, Germany from the 6th August 2011 to the 12th August 2011.
The organizing team is now inviting applications to hold workshop and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at the Desktop Summit. Read on for more details and how to make a proposal.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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How do I make my debugging with KDE more productive? What steps do I take? How have you debugged KDE-based applications? I know about the KDE wiki page, but is there anything else?
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A desktop is more than just panels and widgets. It’s also an ecosystem of applications specially written to use its resources and to fit its concepts of usability. That means that when you weigh GNOME against KDE, you need to consider their applications as much as the desktops themselves.
Not all software categories vary with the desktop, of course. The time is long gone when KOffice and the only partly realized GNOMEOffice vyed with each other for users — although KOffice is becoming increasingly mature, and GNOMEOffice’s AbiWord, and Gnumeric are all going concerns, most people just use LibreOffice.
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DoudouLinux is a Debian-based distribution targeting young children, with a goal to make computer use as simple and pleasant as possible. The project’s version 1.0, code name “Gondwana”. DoudouLinux provides tens of applications that suit children from 2 to 12 years old and gives them an environment as easy to use as a gaming console. Kids can learn, discover and have fun without dad and mum always watching!”
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Cloud is the next big thing when it comes to desktop computing. There are many big software companies who are busy readying themselves for the cloud in one way or the other. First it was cloud-based or online backup services, and then cloud-based music, and now cloud-based operating systems are here.
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I always keep an eye out for interesting and different Linux distributions. There are quite a few which are very specialized, either for a particular purpose or application, or for particular kinds of hardware. One of those which caught my eye recently was AV Linux, a Debian-based distribution which includes a lot of audio and video creation and editing software. It is described on the AV Linux home page as first and foremost a well-rounded OS suited for most common daily computer tasks and runs on most Windows PC’s and Intel Macs. That’s fair enough, because it is a nice, solid derivative of Debian GNU/Linux – oh, and I should mention here that it is running Linux kernel 2.6.39.1, making it the first full release I have seen running 2.6.39 – but then they go on to describe the operating system optimizations they have made and the packages they have included in the base distribution, and it becomes clear that multimedia creation and editing is where this distribution is really interesting.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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One thing in Ubuntu, which has always hit rock bottom in terms of popularity, is Ubuntu Software Centre. The reason often cited is its weak design and layout. Lot of attempts were made, but none of them brought a wind of change in perception among the user community. The guys at Canonical have been under fire recently to resolve this problem. One more attempt is round the corner, Ubuntu Software Centre 5.0 is expected to launch soon.
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Flavours and Variants
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Last month I did a post detailing Bodhi’s desktop of the week contest. If you spent any time poking around the rest of our spiffy new website you will also notice that several other useful pages have appeared.
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I’ll tell you what, after all of that talk about forks last week, it’ll be nice to turn my attention to something less controversial today. Let me check my Topic O’ the Day board and see what’s next for discussion… Monday… ah, here we go…
[...]
But despite the quiet origins of these forks, the problem has grown to the level where Linux kernel maintainer Linus Torvalds has publicly threatened to stop pulling ARM-related changes into the mainline Linux kernel; a threat that could effect dozens of companies’ livelihoods and the course of embedded Linux development.
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Phones
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Android
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Android operating system’s strong integration with existing Google products and the wide offering of devices and carriers, makes it a strong challenger for Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
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Rumored details have surfaced concerning the Nexus 4G, the upcoming addition to Google’s line of pure-blood, no-nonsense Android phones. The 4G will reportedly feature a dual-core CPU running at up to 1.5 GHz, along with the ability to record 1080p video. Traditionally viewed as a developer phone, the Nexus line may appeal to other sorts of buyers as well.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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anasonic announced it will release a ruggedized, “enterprise-grade” Android tablet in the fourth quarter of this year. The Toughbook-branded device will have a daylight-viewable, 10.1-inch touchscreen with active stylus, a GPS receiver, “full-shift” battery life, and an optional 3G/4G cellular modem, the company says.
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Huawei announced a seven-inch tablet that will apparently be the first to include an upcoming Android 3.2 version of Honeycomb — said to be better optimized for seven-inch designs. The MediaPad offers a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, as well as a WSVGA display with a pixel density of 217 points per inch (ppi), and is set for a global launch in the third quarter.
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It’s been a while since we’ve heard any major news about India’s ambitious $35 tablet, but a new report suggests that it’s finally inching toward reality. According to the Times of India, the controversial project is approaching the finish line with 100,000 units expected to ship this summer, starting this month. The government is expected to deliver 10,000 tablets to IIT Rajasthan in late June, while another 90,000 units will be rolled out over the next four months.
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Zemlin: Yeah. When you have open source components within a product — let me back up — today if you have a dedicated supply chain, you use a product data management product or some sort of supply chain management product to have data about your bill of materials across your supply chain. You get different components from different suppliers, they’re getting integrated into a factory somewhere, and so on and so forth.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Chrome Web Store is all the more important after the arrival of Chromebooks powered by Chrome OS- a radical-re-thinking of Google that assumes all the programs reside on the web. Chrome Web Store has almost anything you can look for! And thankgod, its not just apps related to work you will find some addictive games as well.
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Mozilla
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Ladies and gentlemen, a few minutes ago (June 20th) Mozilla unleashed the stable version of the highly anticipated Mozilla Firefox 5.0 web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems.
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As expected, the Mozilla Project has released version 5.0 of Firefox. The update to the open source web browser comes just three months after the project’s last major version, Firefox 4.0, which suffered a number of delays – Mozilla has adopted a version model similar to that used by Google for its Chrome browser.
One of the most important additions in Firefox 5 is support for CSS animation, a feature that browsers such as Safari have offered for some time. When creating a CSS animation, a developer specifies the animation’s duration and name in the CSS rules for the HTML element in question. The @keyframes selector associated with this name is followed by the rules that describe the element’s beginning and end points as well as optional intermediate stages.
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Webian Shell is a full screen web browser that has been designed to replace your current operating system. It can be used with Windows, Linux and OS X. Get the free download here.
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Mozilla today released Firefox 5, three months to the day after Firefox 4 was released. The new Firefox 5 release marks the successful debut of Mozilla’s rapid release process, which iterates new releases every three months.
Firefox 5 includes new performance, standards and privacy improvements as well as improving the overall stability of the browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android users.
“Firefox 5 is the fastest Firefox ever, and also the fastest ever to market,” Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Firefox at Mozilla told InternetNews.com. “Our new rapid release cycle means that the improvements get into users hands more quickly. The latest version of Firefox includes more than 1,000 improvements and performance enhancements that make it easier to discover and use all of the innovative features in Firefox. “
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Maybe you were asking yourself what happened in the Google Summer of Code Visio Import filter project since last week.
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LibreOffice gained a fresh burst of momentum last week as the makers of productivity software not only released a new, stable update but also announced the participation of Google and other big-name sponsors in its brand-new advisory board.
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BSD
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It is as easy to use as any other KDE-based Linux. But I don’t see much being done on this route of BSD popularisation.
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Licensing
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Now, we’ve released a freely available new white paper, “A Five-Step Compliance Process for FOSS Identification and Review” that discusses key aspects of two compliance actions: identifying open source in a product’s code baseline, and performing architecture and license reviews on the path to approving FOSS inclusion. The white paper reviews inputs, outputs, and essential process elements involved in five interrelated compliance steps: scanning source code; positively identifying FOSS, its licensing, and its provenance; reviewing licenses and license compatibility issues; reviewing architectural interactions of proprietary and open source components; and achieving final approval for FOSS use. So, download the white paper for some useful information!
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A Germany company that provides DSL modems, using in part the Linux kernel, is trying to deny another company the right to modify GPL’ed software. The company, AVM Computersysteme Vertiebs GmbH (AVM), says that Cybits AG is violating its copyright by distributing Internet filtering software that modifies AVM’s software. Harald Welte, who has spent a great deal of time pursuing GPL violations has intervened in the case.
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Programming
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Version 4.6.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is imminent. A 4.6.1 status report issued this morning signals there are no outstanding P1 regressions and that this point release branch is now frozen. The GCC 4.6.1 release candidate was subsequently issued.
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For a long time I’ve been thinking about just how much Github has revolutionized open source. Yes, it has made managing the code base significantly easier but its real impact has likely been on the social aspects of managing open source. Github has rebooted how the innovation cycle in open source while simultaneously raising the bar for good community management.
The irony may be that it has done this by making it easy to do the one thing many people thought would kill open source, more easy: forking. I remember talking to friends who – before Github launched – felt that forking, while a necessary check on any project, was also its biggest threat and so needed to be managed carefully.
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Standards/Consortia
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This Plugfest is a two day interoperability workshop on open document exchange formats hosted by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in Berlin, in collaboration with OpenDoc Society, the OASIS ODF TC, OASIS ODF OIC and the OASIS ODF Adoption TC.
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Adobe simply “is not serious about GNU/Linux,” said blogger Robert Pogson. “They’ve made many of their GNU/Linux releases second-rate and refused to release many products for GNU/Linux.” The longer the company continues on that path, “the more irrelevant they will become. … If Adobe cannot or will not compete in the FLOSS market, to hell with them. The world can cooperate to make the software it needs.”
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So, as The Economist observed in 1100100 [100 in binary] and Counting in its June 9, 2011 issue:
“The firm’s centenary is an occasion to reflect on many things digital, but one question stands out: why is IBM still alive and thriving after so long, in an industry characterised perhaps more than any other by innovation and change? This is not just of interest to business historians. As IBM enters its second century in good health, far younger IT giants, such as Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia, are grappling with market shifts that threaten to make them much less relevant.”
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The Haiku operating system, which seeks to be free software and implement compatibility with the BeOS platform, has now experienced its third official release in ten years of development. Haiku R1 Alpha 3 is this new official release and it offers a lot of changes.
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Security
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Sony’s unprecedented spree of security breaches in the last two months may be finally cooling off, as profit- and attention-seeking hackers move on to other vulnerable targets. But it’s not quite over yet.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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The CRTC’s hearings on vertical integration begin Monday. For the next two weeks, this means that the four major vertically integrated media companies in Canada – Bell, Shaw, Rogers and Quebecor – could face tough questions about whether they have the clout to dominate telecom, media and Internet services across the country and, if so, what should be done to curb that potential?
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ACTA
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Sources say that the European Parliament’s Trade Committee (INTA) will tomorrow consider asking the Parliament’s Legal service to answer questions about ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Here are some questions the FFII would like to suggest. The questions may resolve uncertainties regarding ACTA.
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Join us for an informative discussion on the effects of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement on music. Known as ACTA, the agreement has been for years under international negotiation and is designed -amongst other issues- to drastically change the policies concerning counterfeiting copyrighted works.
While ACTA has attracted strong support and fierce opposition, this talk brings together trade associations, artists and academics with different views to discuss the effects of the legislation to the creative process. The panel will tackle important questions like: How the proposed ACTA will affect ‘fair use’ and equivalent practice? What will be the effects of the enforcement practices on the creative economy and music creativity? Issues of finance, property and matters of sampling/remixing will also be discussed.
Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Awesome New Plymouth Theme!
Credit: TinyOgg
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