• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Does Loving Linux Make Us Dislike Windows?

Today I’m a full-time desktop Linux enthusiast, who is familiar with dozens of popular distributions. I’d consider myself very comfortable with Linux on the desktop. What’s interesting though, is the change in how I view Windows.

These days, I avoid Windows as much as possible since I feel much more limited with it. Perhaps this is what Windows users trying Linux feel when stepping outside of their regular computing routine?

Samsung Remove Ubuntu Logo From Galaxy Ad [Updated with video]

Seeing the Ubuntu logo sailing alongside hundreds of Android App icons in a TV spot for Samsung’s Galaxy S II was a strange, but not unwarranted, sight to begin with.

Answering readers and critics on Linux configuration anarchy

Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 159

Desktop

• Seven Concerns on the Linux Desktop

  Instead, the major desktops seem to be responding to the pressures around them rather than taking charge of their direction. Some of these pressures are self-created, while others are historical or common to all modern desktops, free and proprietary alike. Some are barely articulated, although they operate no less powerfully for that.

  Whatever their origins, here are seven concerns that are shaping the Linux desktop today:

Audiocasts/Shows

• Episode 165: Vertigo

• Linux Outlaws 222 – Don’t Be Harshin’ Our Mellow

  Met Police asks who is the real Topiary?, Google is shutting down their Labs, Emacs violates the GPL, flying drone snoops your wifi and GSM, CentOS wants to re-implement ksplice and Dan finally reviews Gnome 3 on Fedora 15.

Kernel Space

• Kernel Log: First release candidate for Linux 3.1

  Expected to be released in about two months, the next kernel version will offer optimised virtualisation, add bad block management components to the software RAID code and include an extended Nouveau driver for NVIDIA’s Fermi graphics chips. Several developers have been criticised for their clumsy use of Git in this development cycle.

  Linus Torvalds has issued the first release candidate of Linux 3.1, closing the merge window of this version, whose final release is expected in late September or early October, 17 days after the release of Linux 3.0. Therefore, the first phase in the Linux development cycle was three days longer than usual. This was caused by the diving holiday Torvalds is currently taking in Hawaii; he is providing an impression of his trip on Google Plus.

• Linux 3.1-rc1 Kernel: A “Pretty Normal Release”

• How to piss off a Linux kernel subsystem maintainer – part 6

  There’s nothing like waking up and receiving in your inbox, a few scant hours after the merge window has opened up again, a plea for why you haven’t already reviewed and applied all 117+ patches that the author sent to you a few weeks ago, back when they well knew you could not apply them due to the merge window being closed.

  Oh, and to top it all off, as the message was sent in HTML format, it didn’t hit the mailing lists, I was the only one who received it. Because of that, I figured it was better if I just ignored it as well, just like the vger.kernel.org filters did.

• Graphics Stack

  • Ryan Gordon Criticizes Open-Source Drivers Again

    There’s just one and a half days left to the Humble Indie Bundle #3, but in less than two weeks the game offering has already grossed nearly $1.9M USD. Recently the developers behind these indie games had allowed the community to ask them questions on Reddit about their work. Ryan “Icculus” Gordon was one of the developers responding and he had provided some interesting comments.

  • Charlies Games original Bullet Candy comes to linux!

    As we retweeted via twitter on the day and as now other awesome sites have picked up, Charlies Games have ported over the original Bullet Candy to Linux.

    It will cost you a measly $1 + if you are feeling nice anything more you wish to donate.

  • Mesa GLSL-To-TGSI Is Merged To Master

Applications

• 3 Linux Apps for Converting Videos

  PC and mobile users often need video conversion tools because of the restrictions placed on various devices. While one device may play H.264 perfectly well, another may insist on MPEG2. These limitations are not insurmountable. With the proper video conversion tools, you can make videos that play everywhere from YouTube to your Blu-ray player.

• Minitube 1.5 to the rescue

• 8 Best CAD Apps for Linux

  Computer-aided design (CAD) is the use of computer technology for the process of design and design-documentation. But are there any good free CAD apps for Linux? Strangely, that is one of the questions we often receive in our mail. We will try to list not just the free CAD apps here, but also the non-free ones that works well under Linux(in no particular order).

• New DRM-Free, “Designed On Linux” Comic Book

  Specifically the great adventures. I’m a huge fan of the classic Sci-Fi heroes like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. Average guys (well… mostly average), put into seemingly impossible situations — to save the girl and, often, save the entire planet.

• 10 small Linux apps to take note of

  Day in and day out, there are small (or smallish) applications I have come to completely rely upon. Without these tools, my job and/or my sanity would become precarious. These tools range from entertainment to administration (and all points in between). So I thought I would share my short list with my loyal readers. Check out these apps, then pick and choose those that belong on your must-have list.

• The best file encryption software in open source – group test

  While LUKS isn’t just a means of encrypting a file system, that’s certainly its most common usage. Developed as a reference implementation of the TKS1 standard for secure key setup created by Clemens Fruhwirth, it’s possibly the most commonly used whole-disk encryption system around for Linux distributions.

• 5 Free Open Source Security Tools

  Network and server security can be expensive, but not having good security is even more expensive. Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds thanks to the many free and open source security solutions that are available to web hosting professionals and system administrators. The following are five that will help lock down your server and keep you informed when evildoers strike.

• Download of the Week: Coherence Plugin for Rhythmbox

  To mix things up, this episode of Download of the Week will not feature an application or a game, but rather a plugin: rhythmbox-plugin-coherence.

  After many years of being a member of the bandwagon to unseat Rhythmbox in favor of Banshee as the default, I end up getting a PS3 and regretting my choice in media player due to the one small gem that is the Coherence plugin for Rhythmbox.

• 6 Alternatives to Google Earth

• Happy birthday Dancer!

• Proprietary

  • TRAUMA Has Been Released !

    About two years ago I’ve posted about the Flash Based Point-and-Click Adventure game named TRAUMA.
    Now it’s been finally released !

  • Adobe Flash Player 11 Linux Performance

    In the middle of July, Adobe released the first Flash Player 11 beta, which had updated the Linux version too. The Flash Player 11 release notably incorporated native 64-bit support, once again, after the earlier “Square” 64-bit beta had lagged behind in terms of updates. Shortly following the Flash Player 11 Beta 1 release I had carried out some Linux benchmarks, but those results never seemed to make it out the door. Here are those results for anyone interested in seeing how the CPU usage and system power consumption differ between Flash 11 with and without VDPAU rendering and then against the open-source Gnash Flash Player.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • [How To] Create A Minimal-looking Narwhal Desktop

  • How to add contrib and non-free repository in Debian GNU/Linux

  • Linux Mint: An updating tip

  • [Alpha version] Now it is simple to install rpm packages on other pc which don’t have internet connection.

  • XO-1 Laptop Triage: 5 Quick OLPC Repair Tips

  • Git Archive Master vs Subversion Export

  • Rotating you Gnome 3 Background images

  • Laptop Mode Tools – Laptop power saving package for Linux systems

  • Use the Focal Length Analyzer Script with digiKam

  • 15 Linux Bash History Expansion Examples You Should Know

  • sgv, StarDraw 2.0 examples with text ?

  • Setting Up Unison File Synchronization Between Two Servers On Debian Squeeze

  • Hack Windows passwords using the Linux application chntpw

  • Super Collision At Studio Dave: The New World Of SuperCollider3, Part 2

  • Rotating your Gnome 3 Background images

  • First Steps Of Running Linux Via Terminal Instead Of Desktop

  • How to install the Pronet Wifi Adapter on Ubuntu

  • Set up Spice-Gtk-0.7 on Ubuntu 11.10

  • Using A File As A Storage Device

  • The Perfect Server – CentOS 6.0 x86_64 [ISPConfig 3]

  • An Introduction To Linux Command Line Part-1

  • Installing rsnapshot On CentOS

  • How To Create an Ebook with OpenOffice.org

  • Wi-Fi File Sharing between Blackberry Playbook and Linux

  • Enabling Compiz Fusion On Linux Mint 11

  • Using Emacs Text Editor – Part 1

  • A Surprisingly Easy Tip for Upgrading Ubuntu

    Some versions of Ubuntu don’t automatically give you the option to upgrade to the latest version. In this week’s Ubuntu is Easy segment, I show you the easy way to upgrade Ubuntu to the latest release, which as of when this video was released is 11.04, Natty Narwhal!

  • Mixing Debian testing and unstable packages

    I installed Debian testing (wheezy) on my workstation about a month ago. Recently I wanted to install some packages, but they were not in the testing repository because they were blocked by the automatic rules that make a package transition from unstable to testing. For example, the arduino package was held down by gcc-avr and avr-libc packages. The situation of the arduino package can be checked on its page on Debian Package Tracking System.

  • The Python Standard Library by Example: A Review

    Stop! If you are just beginning to learn the Python programming language, do not buy this book! This book was written for intermediate to advanced Python programmers who want to be able to put their hands on the Python standard library of modules (which is why I’d recommend buying the hard copy if you meet the qualifications). This is not a book that will teach you the first steps in programming in Python.

    Another thing. Although the transition to Python 3 is coming along nicely, like the transition from IPv4 to IPv6, the future isn’t here yet. This book was written showcasing the Python 2.7 library and this version of Python will likely be with us for some time. If you’re looking for a Python 3 library resource, this book isn’t for you.

• Wine

  • Help support Wine-Review

  • Wine 1.3.26 Released

• Games

  • 3D Puzzle Game ‘Cubosphere’ Beta Released for Linux

    3D puzzle platform game Cuboshpere has reached the first beta stage. The game is inspired by classic PlayStation game Kula World where you control a rolling 3D sphere to complete objectives and collect keys and other items.

  • Unique 2D game ‘In The Dark’ Seeks Kickstarter Funds

    Novacut’s recent success on Kickstarter has kickstarted an raft of Linux-based projects contacting us for coverage of their money-drives on the unique social funding service.

  • Helena the 3rd Demo

  • QUAKEKHAAAAAAN

  • Bullet Candy For GNU/Linux Released !

    Charlies Games the developer of many space shooters has finally ported to GNU/Linux one of his first games, Bullet Candy

  • Open Source in Humble Indie Bundle #3: Haaf’s Game Engine (HGE)

    Bundle #3 is soon over and the *nix port of the Windows-only zlib-licensed engine HGE has been now released as open source as well. It is the engine used by Hammerfight from the Bundle. Visit the pages: hge, hge-unix.

  • Linux Users Continue To Spend More On Humble Indie Bundle

  • Developers and Fans Benefit From Humble Indie Bundle Pay-What-You-Want Model

    By now, we’ve all heard the traditional content industries complain about how technology hurts their business model. But, of course, the story does not end there. While the record labels, movie studios, and video game producers have not figured out a way to compete with free, others have. And this is good news for the rest of us, because it reduces the influence of the traditional gatekeepers who formerly operated an ironclad monopoly on what content we could experience and at what costs, and also because it allows developers and artists without major deals to widely distribute their work and to find new ways to get paid.

  • Humble Indie Bundle #3 Does More Than Two Million Dollars

    With still twelve hours to go in the two-week sale of a collection of DRM-free multi-platform games, the third Humble Indie Bundle has pulled in more than two million US dollars. As of right now, the gross amount is $2,038,931.51 from 351,251 transactions, which is a new record for the project.

  • Want to win a copy of Humble Indie Bundle 3?

    Okay guys so because this bundle is just that awesome i have a copy of the bundle up for grabs for one lucky winner. It includes everything as the price was set as such to make sure it includes the second bundle too!

  • QuakeCon 2011 – John Carmack Keynote

  • Humble Indie Bundle 3 Adds 6 More Games Taking Total Count to 11!

  • Play DotA clone Heroes of Newerth on Linux Natively For Free

    Heroes of Newerth (commonly known as HoN) is a free-to-play action/real-time strategy game based on DotA. The developer S2 Games announced last Friday that HoN is now free-to-play. HoN is heavily inspired by the popular Warcraft 3 mod, Defense of the Ancients (DotA), but with vast improvements in graphics and gameplay. In HoN, two teams of up to five players each take on the role of special Hero units. With the assistance of AI-controlled armies, each team sets out with the sole objective of destroying the other team’s base. As a match progresses, players can earn experience and gold which can be used to upgrade skills or purchase items to make their character more powerful.The game is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Desktop Environments

• Open Source: Pondering the Linux GUI

  First we had the KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.0 debacle. A release numbering scheme by the KDE folk that differed from what is considered the norm ended up with alpha level code being pushed out in most major desktop distributions of Linux. Many people were so upset about radical and broken changes to KDE during this period they left KDE, swearing never to return. It does not matter if KDE is “okay” now. Some of these people will probably not return to KDE.

  Some of the disenchanted former KDE using folk moved to Gnome and liked what Gnome was at the time. These people got comfortable with Gnome 2.x and enjoyed the features it has. Now we have the strangeness that is Gnome 3. Once again, many people are not happy with the changes in Gnome 3. Especially upsetting to some is the loss of functionality they took for granted and an extreme change in the look and feel of Gnome.

• Five Linux Desktops That Aren’t Unity or GNOME 3

  GNOME 3, however, has turned out to be just as controversial, and if any evidence were required, none other than the father of Linux himself–Linus Torvalds–recently provided it by condemning the desktop environment and switching to Xfce instead.

• Linus Hates GNOME 3 and I Don’t

  My editor at LinuxPro, Joe Casad, asked me if I wanted to write an article covering the differences between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, but I declined (I was already working on something else). The reason for his request was this piece by my colleague, Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, where Steven that talks about Linus Torvalds’ intense dislike for GNOME 3. In the article, Linux suggests that a fork of GNOME 3 is in order.

• Does Linus Run Linux Mint?

  Earlier he mentioned some of the other distributions he has used. In 2007 he told apcmag.com, “So right now I happen to run Fedora on my machines. Before Fedora had PowerPC support, I ran YDL for a while, and before that I had SuSE. Funnily enough, the only distributions I tend to refuse to touch are the “technical” ones, so I’ve never run Debian, because as far as I’m concerned, the whole and only point of a distribution is to make it easy to install.” He even took a swipe at Gentoo or LFS I think when he added, “so Debian or one of the “compile everything by hand” ones simply weren’t interesting to me.”

• What Would Linus Do About GNOME 3? Why, Use Xfce

• 9 Most Useful Compiz Plugins

  Last time we wrote about all the useless plugins in Compiz. This time, we won’t be bashing your favorite compositing window manager. Today, we’ll be listing the most useful plugins Compiz can boast of.

  So, without much ado, here’s a list of the most useful and popular Compiz plugins out there (in no particular order):

• Desktop Summit 2011 Berlin, Aftermath

  I am sad to leave already, but tomorrow I’ll start my internship at the Mayflower office in Munich. I had a really good time in Berlin and enjoyed the talks at the Desktop Summit.

• Keynotes and Sandals – Day Two at Desktop Summit 2011

  For the second full day at the Desktop Summit, the organizers played a little trick on us by starting talks at 9:00 a.m. Those who were awake enough after the dinners and chat of the previous night were treated to talks on Calligra (the KDE creativity and productivity suite), suggestions about blending the web and the desktop, color management and the build process for GNOME. Those who were still in bed will have to wait for the videos and slides to be posted online in the next few days.

  The hallways and courtyard were again busy with small, lively discussions. As the morning went on the attendance at talks increased noticeably. Sunday was also the day of the press conference, where key figures from GNOME, KDE and the cross-community organizing team met with the press to answer their questions about the event and the future of free software.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Control The Music Your Way With Amarok [Linux]

  • World domination

    KDE dominates the Desktop Summit, they even convinced the design shop opposite the venue to decorate with an big K.

  • Get the branding: Unofficial KDE abbreviations list

    Sometime last year I expressed my thoughts on the kde-promo mailing list that one of the reasons for lacking support of the KDE rebranding initiative from 2009 was the lack of official abbreviations – after all, “KDE 4.7” is easier to write than “KDE Plasma Desktop 4.7”. I got no responses but for the last months I didn’t really care a lot.

    After yesterday’s announcement of KDE Frameworks 5.0 I’ve seen talk about “KDE 5.0” on several web sites. But as anyone into KDE knows, there is no KDE5. Reading the mailing lists and other Planet KDE posts, it seems to me that the Plasma Workspaces won’t necessarily jump to the next major version once Frameworks 5.0 are released.

  • Keynotes and Sandals – Day Two at Desktop Summit 2011

    For the second full day at the Desktop Summit, the organizers played a little trick on us by starting talks at 9:00 a.m. Those who were awake enough after the dinners and chat of the previous night were treated to talks on Calligra (the KDE creativity and productivity suite), suggestions about blending the web and the desktop, color management and the build process for GNOME. Those who were still in bed will have to wait for the videos and slides to be posted online in the next few days.

    The hallways and courtyard were again busy with small, lively discussions. As the morning went on the attendance at talks increased noticeably. Sunday was also the day of the press conference, where key figures from GNOME, KDE and the cross-community organizing team met with the press to answer their questions about the event and the future of free software.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Five awesome new themes for your gnome shell

    The gnome shell extensions are getting more and more cool by the day. With high quality themes gnome shell really becomes the most pleasant Linux desktop to use. This is a list of five wonderful shell themes. You could use it on your gnome shell theme in ubuntu, fedora or any other distro.

  • Transparent voting: why I like the idea even though I think it would be useless

    Transparent voting is an idea that is ideally really useful but also completely useless in GNOME.

    Some people in GNOME have been asking for transparent votes. When the board votes, they would like to know who voted which way. I totally agree with them – it’s important to know how different board members think so that you can make educated choices. However, I also agree with the people that say that it would be totally useless.

  • GNOME Shell Multi-Touch Support State

    On the third day of the Berlin Desktop Summit there wasn’t any major announcements like the previous two days when we found out the KDE plans for Wayland, basic plans for KDE 5.0, and initial thoughts concerning GTK4. One of the talks that I attended on Monday that was of closest interest to that of Phoronix content is the work being done towards making a multi-touch GNOME Shell.

Distributions

• Linux Distro: Tails – You Can Never Be Too Paranoid

  Tails takes the form of a bootable live image that can be used from a CD ROM, a USB stick or via a network boot. Once booted, it executes from RAM, taking care not to make use of a swap partition. The desktop is Gnome 2.0 and the applications are a fairly standard selection. The web browser is an old, but usable, version of Iceweasel 3.5 (Debian Firefox). There are other applications to handle graphics work, audio editing, media playback, text editing, instant messaging and a email client – basically, everything you need when you’re on the run from enemy agents. Extra software can be added via the Synaptic package manager which pulls directly from the Debian repositories. So far, so similar to most other live desktop distros. Security and limited footprint on the the host machine are the areas in which the distro differs from the run of the mill.

• Reviews: Here’s looking at Linvo, kid

  Since I got into the Linvo trial to try out their atomic updates, I’d like to talk some more on the subject. Though I haven’t had a chance to install it yet there is another project out there with a surprisingly similar objective to Linvo. This other project is called NixOS. NixOS is a small distribution built on top of the Nix package manager, which is designed to make updates atomic and to insure the operating system is always in a usable state. As with Linvo’s stated goals, NixOS is said to support multiple users installing different versions of software. Nix also has a roll-back feature. The result is supposed to be a system without global program directories (/usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, etc), instead each version of each package gets its own directory. NixOS is a research project and isn’t targeted at home or business users. However, for people who are interested in trying out something different you can learn more from the project’s website.

• The Six Best Linux Community Server Distributions

  One question we get a lot: What are the best community server distributions? That question isn’t as simple as it sounds. What makes a distro “the best”? Why community distributions, specifically? It’s not a simple question — but read on and we’ll point you to six distros that will help you reach a satisfying answer.

• Browser Linux – An Extremely Lightweight & Fast OS For Older x86 Computers [Linux]

  Unless you’re a web developer or programmer, you most likely don’t really need a whole lot of applications aside from a web browser, perhaps a media player, file manager/viewer and text editor. Maybe that’s why a lot more people nowadays own smartphones, tablets, Chromebooks, etc, and can get away with not using their main computers or laptops for light web browsing. If you wish to have an equally lightweight operating system with just the tools you need but on your actual laptop, you can use Google Chrome OS or Jolicloud.

• Tiny Linux distro gets dependency fetching and simpler USB install

  Team Tiny Core announced a new version of its small-footprint, in-memory Linux desktop distro. Tiny Core 3.8 includes faster shutdown, updates to the BusyBox tool collection, improved searching, and the ability to re-download non-installed extensions, among other enhancements.

• New Releases

  • Tiny Core 3.8 Has Been Released | Changelog | Download

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Releases 11.2 LiveDVD to Crickets

    Ah, Gentoo. Gentoo was once one of the most popular distributions going. But somewhere along the line it declined. It’s become a fringe distro that even with dedicated developers and loyal users can’t seem to get its mojo back. I used Gentoo for several years and perhaps the reasons I moved on might be the same others did as well.

    In 2002 Gentoo was sitting at number three on the Distrowatch Page Hit Ranking. It’s been falling down that list every year since. This year it’s at 18. Version 11.0 was released in March and I don’t think anyone reviewed it. The Rolling Programmer tried, but “hit a brick wall.” Regardless, I don’t think it’s not-so-ease-of-use that took Gentoo down. I lay the blame at Moore’s Law.

  • Installing Gentoo on a Notebook in 2011

    The first time I installed Gentoo, back in late 2004, I used an at-the-time brand-new Dell Inspiron (5150 if I recall) notebook as the victim. At that time, Gentoo was a new world to me, and a confusing one. It took me about a half-week’s worth of actual work to get it installed, but it happened, and it was one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had with a PC.

    There was a problem, though. As Gentoo is hugely a do-it-yourself Linux distribution, there are many things that are just not done for you without your explicit consent. Things have become a little easier over the years, especially with the very informative guides and major improvements made to Gentoo’s own software, but even today it’s still an amazing challenge to get it installed onto a PC and configured correctly (the latter being the more difficult part).

    [...]

    I am glad I decided to give Gentoo another shot on a notebook, and I can’t see me moving off it anytime soon.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat to Present a Cloud Technology Update via Live Webcast on August 10

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that members of the Red Hat executive team will host a press conference that will be broadcast live via webcast at 12pm ET on Wednesday, August 10.

  • Red Hat Extends Open Source Summer Teaching Program to the Academic Year

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the expansion of its Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) 2011 that took place in late July in Raleigh, NC. Now in it third year, POSSE is a higher education faculty program that immerses professors in the culture, tools and practices of open source communities. Due to the overwhelming success of this year’s summer weekend workshop, several POSSE activities are scheduled throughout the 2011-2012 North American school year.

  • Fedora

    • No Btrfs by default in Fedora 16

      BTRFS WILL NOT BE THE DEFAULT FILE SYSTEM FOR F16

    • Feature preview of Fedora 16 installer

      Fedora 16 is more than two months away from final, stable release, but pre-Alpha installation ISO images have been floating around. News from the Fedora camp have already indicated that btrfs will be the default file system on Fedora 16, joining the ranks of MeeGo, the first (Linux) distribution to use btrfs as the default file system.

      With several articles already published about Fedora and btrfs (see the latest here), I downloaded a pre-Alpha image just to see what the new partitioning scheme will be on Anaconda, the Fedora system installation program, with btrfs. If btrfs is to be the default, a file system with a built-in volume management system, what will happen to LVM?

    • Monday in Fedora

      I suppose this is a sort of a test. I’m going to keep a little log of everything I do during the day related to Fedora. We’ll see how far I get.

    • Fedora 16 Alpha Release Candidate 2 (RC2) Available Now!

      As per the Fedora 16 schedule [1], Fedora 16 Alpha Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is now available for testing. Please see the following pages for download links and testing instructions. In general, official live images arrive a few hours after the install images: see the links below for updates. When they appear, the download directory should be the same as that for install images, except with the trailing “/Fedora/” replaced by “/Live/”.

    • Btrfs Switch Postponed To Fedora 17

      While it originally appeared that Fedora 16 would be the first major distribution (besides possibly counting MeeGo) to switch to Btrfs as the default Linux file-system, that’s not going to happen. Fedora 16 will continue defaulting to EXT4 and it will not be until Fedora 17 now that Btrfs will be the Fedora file-system default.

• Debian Family

  • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD on production

    During the last few weeks I had to work through some of the limitations that were holding me back, such automated driver load and FUSE. I was lucky enough that other people filled the missing pieces I wanted, such as NFS client support and a GRUB bugfix that broke booting from Mirrored pools.

    [...]

    If you have installed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, was it meant for production or just a “toy machine”? If you considered using it on production, did it succeed at satisfying your needs, or did something hold you back? Leave your comment!

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Membership

        The Ubuntu project accepts many kinds of contributions from people all over the world. After time, many contributors develop a sense of belonging and ownership of the project. When someone has been with the project for a long time and have made significant contributions to the project, then they may apply for membership. When you become an Ubuntu member, you become an official part of the project. You become a representative. You get an @ubuntu.com email address, an Ubuntu cloak on Freenode. You even get to vote on who serves on the Ubuntu Community Council, the top-level community governance committee in Ubuntu. For people who are serious about Ubuntu, membership is a big deal. Many people consider Ubuntu membership one of their biggest achievements.

      • Canonical Working to Put Ubuntu on the ‘App Development Map’

        Ubuntu may be marketed as “Linux for human beings,” but Canonical is working hard to make it the open source platform of choice for app developers as well. And it’s now calling on those who fall into the latter category to offer feedback on how Ubuntu can better meet their needs. Read on for details.

        I’ve always interpreted Ubuntu’s “Linux for human beings” mantra to mean that the operating system was built first and foremost to be friendly for non-geeks. To a remarkable extent, Ubuntu has succeeded in that vein, distinguishing itself as the most popular and one of the simplest Linux distributions for desktop users.

      • [Screenshots and Video] First Look at All New Ubuntu Software Center Tech Preview

        Ubuntu Software Center is getting a complete makeover in its GTK3 avatar and first tech preview of this whole new look landed today in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot.

        Being just a tech preview as of now, the current Software Center is still there by default. However, the demo can be launched by running the command software-center-gtk3 from the terminal.

      • Is Canonical Weighing Other E-Mail Options with Thunderbird?

        Few people are as passionate about their e-mail clients as they are about, say, browsers or phones. But that certainly doesn’t mean all mail apps were created equal, as Canonical showed recently when it commissioned a comparison of the open source clients Thunderbird and Evolution. Here’s a look at some of the findings.

        The Thunderbird standalone e-mail client enjoys relatively wide popularity. Developed by Mozilla, it runs on pretty much every modern operating system out there, and has been around for nearly a decade.

      • Amazon issues with EBS affect Ubuntu images in the EU-WEST region

      • Top 5 Ubuntu Alternatives

        The following article will list five of the best alternative operating systems to the popular Ubuntu OS, personally selected by the author.

        We’ve written this article to help some of our readers in finding a good alternative to the current release of the Ubuntu operating system, because of the Unity interface.

        Personally, I use Ubuntu 11.04 everyday and I have no problem with it. When Unity was about to be born, I was like “no way I am using that,” but I got used to it, and I’ve even managed to customize it the way I like it.

      • Ubuntu: The desktop Linux with the cloud inside

        Things can get really confusing when you start working with cloud-computing but we can all agree that having cloud file-storage is a good thing. It’s just so much easier to keep files in a universal storage box in the sky than worrying about whether you put the right USB drive in your laptop bag when you left for work. At this time though only one mainstream desktop operating system comes with the cloud built-in: Ubuntu.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Has Firefox 6 and Thunderbird 6

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Free app brings easy penetration testing to Android

      Zimperium will soon release a penetration-testing app called Android Network Toolkit (Anti), ready to sniff our Wi-Fi vulnerabilities for good or evil, says Forbes. The software was shown at the DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas, following a Black Hat security conference that featured presentations on a new DARPA Cyber-Fast Track project, the Shady RAT cyber-attack, and Facebook facial-recognition tools.

    • HTC releases OpenSense SDK for tapping 3D, stylus features

      HTC released a software developer kit for its Sense UI skin for Android. The OpenSense SDK offers APIs that let developers harness the GUI’s look and feel, as well as a stereoscopic 3D display (available on the Evo 3D 4G smartphone) and a stylus pen (available with the HTC Flyer and Evo View 4G tablets).

    • Android ‘smartwatch’ acts as Bluetooth extension to smartphones

      Blue Sky has begun taking pre-orders for the “I’mWatch,” an Android 1.6-based gadget that offers a 1.5-inch screen and audio jack, interacting with smartphones via Bluetooth to display alerts. The device follows last week’s WIMM One wearable Android watch, as well as an Android-based watch platform from Motorola called the MotoActive that popped up recently on the web.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Motorola Xoom gets Android 3.1

    Motorola has released a UK Android 3.1 update for the Motorola Xoom, activating long-awaited features for early adopters.

    The patch brings users up to speed with Honeycomb’s improved multi-tasking, resizable home screen widgets and keyboard and mouse compatibility, as well as a host of support for other USB or Bluetooth devices.

  • Lenovo ThinkPad Tablets: A Closer Look From Inside Lenovo

    The wait is over. Here at Lenovo, we have introduced our new Android-based ThinkPad tablet — taking the brand full circle. You can read the press release here. It’s hard to believe that the first ThinkPad, introduced back in 1992, was a pen-based tablet, but it was. The iconic ThinkPad 700c ushered in the familiar notebook form factor later. I once wrote a blog that goes deeper into the ThinkPad tablet history lesson for those who are curious. Nearly 20 years later, could our new ThinkPad tablet be the weapon of choice for business success? I think so.

  • Seven-inch Sharp Galapagos tablet runs Android 3.2

    Sharp announced a seven-inch, 1024 x 600-pixel “Galapagos A01SH” tablet running Android 3.2 on an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor — and its FCC approval suggests it’s eventually destined for the U.S.. Meanwhile, the Toshiba Thrive “Honeycomb” tablet has received a sleep-and-resume bug fix, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 got a “magazine-like” TouchWiz UI update.

  • Pandigital launches $159 Android tablet with Cortex-A9 processor

    Just a few days after Pandigital began selling a $170 Nova and $180 Planet tablet at BestBuy and Amazon, respectively, it introduced a third seven-inch Android tablet called the Star, for $160. What’s more, the company disclosed that all three tablets include ARM Cortex-A9 processors, representing a price breakthrough for products based on the technology.

Events

• OSCON Round-up

  Reading some stories recently, it would be easy to conclude that there was some sort of a decline in open source. I’ll not pretend to have new and objective data on the subject, but having just returned from OSCON in the USA I have to say rumours of the death of open source are premature.

• Ohio LinuxFest Registration is Open for Business

• ESC Boston features giveaways, tackles embedded security

  Keynotes and tracks were announced for the ESC (Embedded Systems Conference) Boston, set for Sept. 26-29, including keynotes on embedded security and medical devices. ESC Boston offers a Linux/Android track, featuring a session on Android’s Open Accessory Kit, as well as giveaways to “All Access” users of a BeagleBoard-xM board and a Texas Instruments programmable, wireless-enabled eZ430-Chronos sports watch.

Web Browsers

• Google, Mozilla Team Up to Create a Smarter, Action-Based Web

  Google has announced a new set of APIs for its Chrome web browser, which are designed to connect applications and sites across the web. Web Intents, as Google is calling its new meta-website API, allows websites to pass data between each other — for example, to edit a photograph or share a URL with friends.

  Developers at Mozilla have been working on a similar framework for Firefox, and now Google says it will work with Mozilla to develop a single API that works in both web browsers.

• Mozilla

  • The Mozilla Interview: Why Firefox Matters

    Mozilla’s Firefox experienced a pretty rapid turn of fortunes last year and is still dealing with the effects of a changing browser landscape today. The rise of Chrome, a more competitive Microsoft, an increasingly loyal Apple user base, the often-delayed release of Firefox 4, created a perfect storm against Mozilla that is affecting its market share and credibility. Johnathan Nightingale agreed to spend some time with us to talk about the current state of Firefox and its immediate future in a very competitive environment.

  • Firefox Extension for Anonymous Browsing Hits Version 1.0

    There are lots of valid reasons why many people around the globe want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. In many parts of the world, opressive government regulations threaten free speech, and worse, which has produced an extensive list of technologies that people around the world use to beat the Internet censors. Among these, Tor, from the Tor Project, is one of the most powerful and flexible open source solutions for online anonymity. Last summer, we covered one of these solutions, a Firefox extension called HTPPS Everywhere, which leverages Tor for browsing anonymity. Now, there is an official version 1.0 available.

  • Creating Firefox web apps that look like native apps

Databases

• MariaDB Crash Course released

  I am happy to announce that the first MariaDB book is released!

  The book is called MariaDB Crash Course and is written by Ben Forta, who also wrote the MySQL Crash Course book.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice.org: Showdown for Best Open Source Office Suite

  With the release of a new version of LibreOffice this month, it’s a good time to look at the two major open source office suites, LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org, to see what advantages each offers, and which is a better bet for end users.

  Both products are suites of office applications, comprising word process, spreadsheet, presentation graphics, database, drawing, and math tools. Both also spring from the same code base. OpenOffice.org was created by a German company called Star Division, which Sun Microsystems bought in 1999. Originally the suite was called StarOffice, and it was popular in the European market as an alternative to Microsoft Office. After picking it up, Sun changed the name of the product to OpenOffice.org and released its code as open source. The product retained some popularity in the enterprise, partly because of its cross-platform capabilities and no-cost license.

• TLWIR 12: Libreoffice 3.4.2, NASA, and the Asus X101

Openness/Sharing

• Moto: From Dining To Open-Source Software

  Two months ago there was a mention of Moto on Phoronix as being a place for a wonderful (and tasty) high-tech dinner. At the time it was mentioned just for their use of interesting technologies to make wonderful dishes, and partnerships with NASA and other organizations to conduct food research. Come to find out, my favorite American restaurant is also entering the open-source software business. The restaurant is working on some interesting open-source code… In particular, they’re hoping to revolutionize restaurant management software with this project they have been working on, dubbed Moto Matrix.

• Open Source Effort Will Deliver Low-Cost Wi-Fi for All

  One of the great things about open source software is that it doesn’t just bring a wealth of benefits to businesses. Rather, by making low-cost, high-quality software widely available to everyone, it also has the potential to change lives around the world.

• A new way of measuring Openness, from Android to WebKit: The Open Governance Index

  [Much has been said about open source projects – and open source platforms are now powering an ever-increasing share of the mobile market. But what is “open” and how can you measure openness? As part of our new research report (free download), VisionMobile Research Partner Liz Laffan introduces the Open Governance Index – a new approach to measuring the “openness” of software projects, from Android to WebKit]

Standards/Consortia

• OpenGL 4.2 Specification Published With GLSL 4.20

  The good news: Khronos has published version 4.2 of the OpenGL specification in conjunction with the GL Shading Language version 4.20 specification. The bad news? The open-source Linux graphics drivers are falling hopelessly behind in keeping up-to-date with the latest upstream OpenGL releases and what is supported by the proprietary drivers and those for other operating systems.

  The release of OpenGL 4.2 isn’t much of a surprise, it’s coming just around one year after the OpenGL 4.1 specification. The occasion for this release is the SIGGRAPH conference taking place this week in Vancouver, Canada. “The OpenGL 4.2 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.20 update to the OpenGL Shading Language. The OpenGL 4.2 specification contains new features that extend functionality available to developers and enables increased application performance.”

Amazon, Microsoft Data Centers Go Down Without Much Fanfare

It finally happened. We had a fairly significant cloud outage the other day and we didn’t have a lot of hand-wringing about the perils of cloud computing. Could it be that we have finally reached a point where we don’t have to defend the future of cloud computing each time a data center has problems, or is it just that everyone is on vacation in August and nobody was paying attention?

Microsoft gives BPOS customers credit note for latest crash

This is the latest in a series of embarrassing cloud outages for Redmond after a summer of interruptions began in May, but differs from other incidents in that an “Act of God” was responsible for knocking out the service.

Security

• HTTPS Everywhere – no substitute for common sense

• Who Do You Trust with SSL?

Civil Rights

• Secret Identities Online and Defamation

  The Internet has given rise to thousands of online chat forums, where participants can sound off on the issues of the day often shielded by the cloak of anonymity. Anonymous speech can be empowering — whistleblowers depend upon it to safeguard their identity and political participants in some countries face severe repercussions if they speak out publicly — but it also carries the danger of posts that cross the line into defamation without appropriate accountability.

  Striking the balance between protecting anonymous free speech on the one hand and applying defamation laws on the other sits at the heart of a new Ontario Superior Court decision released last week. The case involved postings about Phyllis Morris, the former mayor of Aurora.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

NPC to offer GNU/Linux class this fall

It’s been called the Universal Operating System that can be securely customized to perform any computing task. And this fall, Northland Pioneer College will again be offering classes on the GNU/Linux Operating System using a revised, up-to-date curriculum on Thursday afternoons, 1 to 5 p.m., Aug. 25 through Dec. 8, in the Learning Center, room 133, at the Show Low – White Mountain Campus.

“Learning GNU/Linux gives people options and choices when it comes to using operating systems,” commented instructor Eric Bishop, who also heads NPC Information Services Division. “Linux is a free, open source operating system that is very stable, secure and efficient, with thousands of free programs associated with it. Learning to use Linux also lets you learn more about how computers and operating systems work ‘under the hood,’ in a general sense.”

The wonders of the shell

For those of you too young to know things weren’t all windows and clicks. There used to be a time when you used to control the computer using just the keyboard.

And a great time that was indeed… if you wanted to copy all the .jpg files from a folder you need only but type in a command and it would be done! Now? After you press about a million clicks, do a 2 million drags and watch 10 million internet cats you get to finish the task you set your mind to. Some say it’s easier this way, it makes more sense to the normal user to drag a picture symbolizing a file from one box to another in order to copy/move it and indeed it is easier, but what if you have 10.000 files scattered around a 100.000 file folder?

Loving and Hating Linux

The first reason (and possibly primary reason) is that it is still an operating system that you are using. No operating system has ever worked on all hardware, with all software, or without bugs. This means that at some point you are going to be infuriated or at least disappointed. In my experience, Linux fowls up a lot less often than do Winders or OSX, and as such I use it. I am sure that we have all experienced Xorg issues. This happens more to me now than ever before due to Xorg trying to automagically configure itself. I am also sure that we have all had issues with ALSA at some point. My latest was an issue with HDMI audio conflicting with an onboard audio chip. It was easily solved, but annoying none the less. There are also those times when you have a dependency issue. You might have one version of a library that is required for foo, and then a different version of the same library required for bar, and for some reason the system won’t allow you to have both… annoying, but it can be worked around.

Disney to Produce Penguin Film… Called ‘Tux’.

The film is to be an adaptation of “gritty” Japanese graphic novel ‘Tuxedo Gin’, the storyline of which sees a young street fighter “fall into a coma and learns that he …only has enough karma points to be reincarnated as an animal 15 pounds or less.”

Ignore the speculation, Linux is far from dead

Usually I try not to overdo the Linux evangelism. I’d rather Linux succeeded on its own merits than from the fumbling insights that come from the mouths of believers.

But last month I read an article and it left me feeling a little down. It was titled Is Linux Finished? and the author outlined what he thought were the reasons for the distinct lack of success Linux has had on the desktop.

A lot of it had to do with Apple stealing its niche, the lack of a decent user experience and the confusion that comes with distro fragmentation. It was a good article and each of these points is valid.

Desktop

• Recycle’s Friend, Reuse

  Recycling is something we all deal with, or at least should deal with, when it comes to technology. Old computers, monitors, motherboards and their ilk are full of toxic chemicals that must be disposed of properly. Thankfully, “Being Green” is a trend that hasn’t really lost any steam. As technologists, we understand the need to use less power, recycle old technology and make wise purchasing decisions when it comes to hardware. And, we shouldn’t forget recycle’s buddies reduce and reuse either.

  With modern virtualization, it’s possible to reduce the number of servers we need to buy. Add to that the reduction in power usage with low-power CPUs, and it’s relatively easy to reduce the amount of waste in our server rooms. Unfortunately, it doesn’t eliminate the problem completely. That’s where reuse comes into play. In the photo, you’ll see a clock I received as a Christmas gift. It’s simply the circuit board from some sort of router that has “clock guts” added to it. Geeky yes, but if it’s stuck on my wall, it’s one fewer piece of computer scrap in a landfill.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 3 Episode 15

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 414

• Podcast 90 Interview with Jane Trembath

  Today I am proud to bring you an interview with Jane Trembath from South Africa. Jane is a captain on the Airbus 340 – the first woman pilot in South Africa to command long-range international flights.

• Linux Outlaws 221 – My Internal DNS

• CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.08.05

• Going Linux Aug 05: #146 Listener Feedback

Kernel Space

• RapidDisk, A New Linux RAM Disk Kernel Module

  Released last month was RapidDisk 1.0, which is a Linux kernel module that up to this point has received little attention on the Internet. RapidDisk is a new Linux RAM disk kernel module like the brd and zram modules, but with a different feature-set.

• Linux 3.0.1

• Linux File System Monitoring

  A lot of the embedded systems I work on lately run Linux. I enjoy that, because I’m a long-time UNIX user and I run nothing but Linux on my personal computers and servers these days (well, assuming you count Android as a form of Linux, which I do).

• Graphics Stack

  • X.Org Server 1.11 RC2 Is Released

    Keith Packard has tagged X.Org Server 1.11 RC2. The X.Org Server 1.11 release is imminent and the RC2 marks the end of development except for critical fixes.

  • Nouveau GeForce 400/500 Fermi On Linux 3.1

    Besides boosting the Intel Sandy Bridge performance, the Linux 3.1 kernel is also great for open-source graphics in that it has improved support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 “Fermi” graphics cards via the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. The Linux kernel has already supported kernel mode-setting for these GPUs and then more recently there was 2D/X-Video acceleration as well as 3D acceleration when paired with the Nouveau Gallium3D “NVC0″ driver. The accelerated support though has required manually extracting the graphics processor’s microcode after the GPU was initialized by the proprietary driver. With the Linux 3.1 kernel, Nouveau can generate its own “FUC” microcode to circumvent this problem. In other words, there is now “out of the box” open-source support for NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 graphics cards.

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Display current location on your web page using the SPOT GPS tracker

  • Marble – An Open Source Alternative To Google Earth [Linux]

  • Spreadsheet Awesome: Check Mark Totals

  • Make Google Music Manager work in F15

  • How to use xmacro on Ubuntu

  • From LibreOffice to ePub

  • What is DHCP and how to configure DHCP server in Linux

  • How is booting into runlevel 1 different from single user boots?

  • How To Cut Your Linux PC’s Boot Time in Half With E4rat

  • Merging Video Files

  • Ubuntu 11.04 remove new overlay scroll bar and get fat scroll bar back

  • Check Disk Usage From The Command Line

  • Script of the Week: Cleaning Up Text with sed

  • How to see system services are enable or disable in ubuntu 11.04(Natty Narwhal)

  • Firefox Profile Data Storage: How to Hack it

  • How to Conduct a Linux Server Security Audit

  • Bash, special parameters by examples

• Games

  • Some random FPS engine news

    Fast games for slow summer news weeks… but actually some of these news are a bit older already also :p

    To start out… yes RedEclipse got a (smaller) new release a few days ago, codenamed Supernova (Version 1.1). The release notes can be found in our/their forums, but it plays as great as before (except for the annoying hit sound :p ). Edit: game-play video from one of our forum users.

  • Forget Duke Nuke ‘Em. Look at THIS.

    My wife is a pretty amazing English teach in an amazingly deprived high school. I try and do what I can to help out when I can. I make things for school plays. I’ve painted backgrounds for show choirs. I’ve talked at career days. The thing that never fails to stun me with the students I interact with is the profane lack of technology in their education. When I talk to people who know about such things, it seems that schools either are flush with technology (eg students are issued laptops annually) or they are suffering through school with a War Games tech stack.

    While I was at Southeast Linux Fest a few months ago, I saw two separate talks that led me to come up with the idea that might just help a little with this problem. The first talk was by Leslie Hawthorne about Humanitarian FOSS. One of the people at the talk mentioned a project she’d worked on with the girl scouts where each girl in the class was given a thumb drive with a a live Linux distribution on it. They would boot off of the USB drives, save their work to the USB stick, and when it was done they would take it with them.

  • id Software’s Rage May Not Be Coming To Linux Soon

    The good news out of John Carmack’s QuakeCon 2011 keynote is that the Doom 3 source-code will be released this year following the release of id Software’s Rage game based upon their shiny new id Tech 5 engine. The bad news? The Linux client for the Rage game has an uncertain future.

  • Doom 3 Source-Code To Be Released This Year

    Just as suspected: the source-code to id Software’s Doom 3 game will be publicly released this year!

    This morning I wrote about What Should Linux Gamers Expect From QuakeCon 2011? In there, I mentioned the id Tech 4 engine source release was likely based upon past QuakeCon traditions and John Carmack previously promising the code’s released upon the release of the RAGE game with id Tech 5.

  • The Magnificent Seven (Humble Indie Bundle)

  • Cubosphere: First Beta

    The game reminds of irrlamb and Neverball but is in fact a tile-based puzzle, rather than a free-physics/precision game. It has a simple level editor and 18 visual/audible styles to chose from. Some features of the 200+ levels are lasers, frying blocks, teleporters, switches, elevators and enemies.

  • HGE comes to Mac and Linux (guest post from Ryan Gordon)

    We’ve also seen great improvements, optimizations, and enhancements to all the opened games, across hundreds of patches from dozens of contributors.

  • Linux Game Publishing Is Hitting A Bumpy Road Again

    Linux Game Publishing, the UK-based company that’s ported a number of game clients to Linux but last year had a pretty quiet time (nearly going the way of Loki Software) after their only server went kaput and was offline for months. Earlier this year, LGP said they were working on a new Linux game port, but they failed to comment further.

Desktop Environments

• Approaching the desktop summit

  It’s only one day left until the global KDE and GNOME communities meet at Berlin for the second desktop summit. Hundreds of free software contributors from all over the world, the core of the free desktop community is meeting at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in the middle of the German capital from August 6th to 12th.

• The Linus effect

  On July 26th Linus said he switched to Xfce because he doesn’t like GNOME 3. Guess what happens when someone picked up the news yesterday:

• What is the difference between GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE?

  In Linux, there are so many choices, and this includes the desktop environments and window managers. Four of the most popular desktop environments in Linux are GNOME, KDE, XFCE, and LXDE. All four offer sophisticated point-and-click graphical user interfaces (GUI) which are on par with the desktop environments found in Windows and Mac OS X.

• KDE Draws Up Plans For Wayland In 2012

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Top 5 Plasma Widgets for the KDE Desktop

    With KDE 4.7, the KDE team has managed to create one of the most beautiful desktops out there, and to be honest, it’s even more appealing than Windows 7 or Mac OS X. On the usability front, KDE doesn’t seem to cut corners. Trademark features like Activities and Plasmoids (widgets) are polished to near perfection. Also, since the initial KDE 4 release, a lot of quality community-created widgets and plugins have sprung up, making the KDE workspace more than just an alternative to GNOME 3 or Unity. So, if you’ve just installed KDE on your computer, here are some of the best widgets you can drop on to your desktop and make your friends jealous.

  • RAW image processing with digikam

  • Donations

  • The Plans For KDE Frameworks 5.0 Were Just Announced

  • KDE 5.0 roadmap announced

    Most eyes in the Linux desktop world are on the Berlin Desktop Summit this week, as members of the GNOME and KDE camps come together for a joint technical conference running from August 6-12 at Humboldt University in Berlin. Currently, KDE seems to be making the most strides in the joint event, with the surprise announcement of the KDE 5.0 roadmap, which was revealed by KDE developer Aaron Seigo in his blog Sunday.

  • Important Announcement Coming Today at Desktop Summit

    Today at 17:30 there is a panel presentation here at Berlin Desktop Summit that is unfortunately titled “KDE Platform 4 Roadmap” and the schedule says I’m presenting it. This was submitted prior to the Platform 11 meeting in Randa so it could make the speaking schedule here at the Desktop Summit. At the time I didn’t know what precisely we’d decide on at Platform 11 .. and the title reflects that.

    What I did know was that we would want to communicate the results (whatever they would be) from Platform 11. That is in fact what we will be doing. Better yet, I will be joined by David Faure, Kevin Ottens and Stephen Kelly in doing so.

    Interestingly, however, the presentation will not be about KDE Platform 4. It will be about KDE Frameworks 5.0.

  • Dragon Player 3

  • KDE Having Fun at Desktop Summit 2011

    Friday, 10:00, August 5, 2011. A big group of people was standing a bit lost in the cloakroom of the Humboldt University at Unter den Linden, Berlin. They were the volunteers for the Desktop Summit 2011 – but without guidance and leadership, they were just nervously looking around and talking to each other.

    But at 11:00, Mirko Boehm came in, gathered everyone together and told them what to do! Tables got moved, tape stuck to floors, posters hung up.

  • King of KDistros (Poll Results)

    Alright, thanks to mobile technology, I was able to put together a very quick note to let you know how the King of KDE distros went.

• GNOME Desktop

  • As Linus was saying . . . .

    Until recently, I had several of my lab machines using GNOME — until my hardware and I were relegated to second-class status by being only able to use the GNOME 3 Fallback Mode while the rest of the world went on its merry way using GNOME 3. But in the grand scheme of things, that’s OK: Regular readers of this blog also know that in the recent past I have taken both GNOME 3 and Unity to task for bailing on already experienced users in an effort to dumb down the desktop for those who are new to Linux.

    Of course, the woe I documented in past blogs about it is nothing compared to the choice words Linus Torvalds has for GNOME 3.

  • Testing Gnome 3

  • You’re Living in the Past, Dude!

    At the 2000 Usenix Technical Conference (which was the primary “generalist” conference for Free Software developers in those days), I met Miguel De Icaza for the third time in my life. In those days, he’d just started Helix Code (anyone else remember what Ximian used to be called?) and was still president of the GNOME Foundation. To give you some context: Bonobo was a centerpiece of new and active GNOME development then.

    Out of curiosity and a little excitement about GNOME, I asked Miguel if he could show me how to get the GNOME 1.2 running on my laptop. Miguel agreed to help, quickly taking control of the keyboard and frantically typing and editing my sources.list.

  • Top 10 GNOME Wallpapers

    Wallpapers!! What would we do without them? Here is the ist of top rated Gnome wallpapers which captured the attention of the users of gnome-look.org. What would we do without them??

  • Karen Sandler: Freedom from my heart to the desktop

    This is Karen Sandler, the Gnome Foundation’s new Executive Director, delivering her keynote speech at OSCon 2011. It is by far and away the best explanation of why software freedom matters that I’ve heard in a very long time.

  • So much to do, so little time

    Well, my time here with GNOME is coming to a close. This, of course, doesn’t mean I won’t be contributing to future projects (or maybe even enhancing this one), but it does mean college is on the horizon and my time will be greatly limited by it.

  • Premature bad taste becomes the norm

  • The Earliest Talk About The GTK4 Tool-Kit

  • Dear Gnome: Please listen to your users

    When Gnome 3 was released I pretty much immediately took the plunge and upgraded to it. I initially used the default Gnome Shell for a bit. There were some really big regressions right away. You can’t change your fonts, icon theme, GTK theme… I found a tool called gnome-tweak-tool that does allow changing those things, but I find it annoying that I can’t do it via the default system-settings tool.

Distributions

• The best Linux distro of 2011!

  Fedora, Mint, Arch, Ubuntu, Debian and OpenSUSE go head-to-head – we’ve dropped the six most popular Linux distributions of the day into a cage fight for your affections. Read on to discover which distro comes up top for installation ease, customisation, performance, security and more. Which flavour of Linux gets the gold medal? You might very well be surprised, so read on for all the juicy details…

  In the beginning, Linus created the kernel. The kernel worked (sort of) and was good. Then, in an ever-spiralling Babelesque explosion of code, the world got umpty-ump different Linux distributions, some of which seem to differ from each other only in the colour of their desktop screens.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • August 2011 issue of The PCLinuxOS released

    The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the August 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editors Meemaw and Andrew Strick. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

  • Mandriva 2011 with kernel 3.0

    We prepared unofficial image for Mandriva 2011 RC2 with kernel 3.0 by MIB group. Note: because it is unofficial distro, it destined only for testing purposes. Mandriva 2011 will be with kernel 2.6.38.7, and later, after some period of testing, we will update kernel to 3.0. You may get Mandriva 2011 with 3.0 kernel from here.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo Linux releases 11.2 LiveDVD

    Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• Red Hat Family

  • Top 10 Reasons Why Larry Ellison Dislikes Red Hat

  • Red Hat Certifies 400 Virtualization Professionals

    Red Hat‘s virtualization strategy is gaining momentum. One key indicator: The open source software company has trained 400 professionals on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). But that’s not all. Roger Egan (pictured), VP of North American Channels, has revealed several other milestones to The VAR Guy — including plans for a Cloud Partner Symposium. Here’s the update.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 Features With Desktop, Virtualization, Etc

      Fedora 16 (codenamed Verne) is set to be released at the end of October while the software string freeze and alpha change deadline just passed this week, with the only alpha release being scheduled to take place in mid-August. Fedora 16 is set to continue in Red Hat’s tradition of contributing real innovations to the Linux stack, with some of the new Verne features being talked about in this posting.

      As talked about already, Fedora 16 may use the Btrfs file-system by default, but according to the feature list Wiki page its status is currently at 0%. Other features include automatic multi-seat support, Chrony becoming the default NTP client, firewalld will be the default network firewall solution, and Fedora will finally switch to using the GRUB2 boot-loader rather than legacy GRUB. Also going out the door in Fedora will finally be the HAL daemon with everything being migrated over to UDisks, UPOwer, the UDEV library, etc. Fedora 15 switched over to systemd and with Fedora 16 they will finish up migrating SysVinit scripts over to systemd files.

    • My view of Fedora®

    • Fedora 15 Sometimes Really Suck

• Debian Family

  • People behind Debian: Margarita Manterola, Debian Women member

    When I think about Margarita, I always remember her as a friendly and welcoming person. Like most of the Debian Women members by the way. But she likes to spread some love and organized a Debian Appreciation Day for example.

    I think I met her in real life for the first time at Debconf 6 in Oaxtepec (Mexico). She deeply cares about Debian in general. She has proven it multiple times with her DPL candidacy and by giving talks like Making Debian rule again.

  • Derivatives

    • KNOPPIX 6.7.0 Delivers a Few Surprises

      Once upon a time KNOPPIX was the king of hardware detection and an innovator in live CD technology. Well, time passed and more distribution developers began concentrating on live images and pretty soon remaster applications let anybody with an idea release their own Linux distribution. The Linux kernel itself took most of the hardware detection and configuration burden off developers. KNOPPIX then began declining in popularity and for a while seemed to be morphing into a specialty distribution. Well, I lost track of it about then and didn’t think of it again until yesterday when I heard 6.7.0 was available. I figured I might take a look and see what it’s been up to lately.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Shuttleworth: All your rights are belong to us

        Before I open palm — make that palms — and insert face, let me say that the Ubuntu community’s general mantra of “haters gonna hate” never really works as a valid argument when someone disagrees with what the self-appointed Ubuntu/Canonical leader/founder/Grand Poobah, or any other Ubuntu/Canonical leader, says. It’s a profoundly weak argument that first and foremost makes you sound shallow and stupid. It also makes you sound like you don’t have a reasonable response, as well as sounding like you’re incapable of responding.

      • Making mountains out of molehills

        The DMB grants both Ubuntu Membership and upload rights to (portions of) the Ubuntu archive. Both are assessed rather differently (one community and one somewhat more technical). Most of the current argument is about Membership (the only person the DMB deferred for upload rights was correctly so; it was a Per-Package Uploader application for packages which were not in the archive yet)

      • A Formal Introduction to The Ubuntu Orchestra Project

        Today’s post by Matthew East, coupled with several discussions in IRC and the Mailing Lists have made me realize that we’ve not communicated the Ubuntu Orchestra Project clearly enough to some parts of the Ubuntu Community. Within Ubuntu Server developer circles, I think the project’s goals, design, and implementation are quite well understood. But I now recognize that our community stretches both far and wide, and our messages about Orchestra have not yet reached all corners of the Ubuntu world Here’s an attempt at that now!

      • Ubuntu Membership and Contributions to Upstream Projects

        There has been a lot (perhaps too much) discussion on the ubuntu-devel mailing list about (among other things) to what extent contributions to an upstream project should be taken into account when assessing whether a person’s application for Ubuntu membership should be granted.

        Jonathan Carter has very properly added it to the agenda for discussion by the Community Council at their next meeting.

      • Should Upstream Contributions Count?

        The Ubuntu Community Council will be deciding in a week or so whether upstream or external contributions count for Ubuntu membership & commit privileges. I always thought that all contributions that were for the good of Ubuntu counted.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Released – Changes and Screenshots

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Review | Oneiric Ocelot

        Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Oneiric Ocelot development release is out and available to download, check release notes, download options and what’s new in Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 Here.

        With each release of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot coming out we see a highly impressive development work most of it discussed at Ubuntu UDS from Ubuntu developers and community members that could make the final release of Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot is one of the best distribution will be available at the moment.

      • Ubuntu Photography Guidelines

        The Ubuntu Brand has released guidelines for photography related to Ubuntu and Canonical. You can find the PDF at the bottom of the Ubuntu Brand Guidelines page titled “download the Ubuntu photography guidelines”. The PDF offers some simple Ubuntu style techniques for emphasizing the subject. These photo tips help reflect the Ubuntu brand values of freedom, collaboration, reliability and precision. Download the PDF and check it out!

      • Contributions of Non-Technical People

        In fact, if you run and love Kubuntu, we want and need your creativity, your testing, your bug reports, your corrections on the wiki, your help on artwork, documentation, promotion (like this blog!), your helpful voice in IRC, identica, twitter, Google+ — the sky is the limit! Community work is as important as the code, because people create the love, create the community, create the software.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • A newbie’s report on Kubuntu

          I’ve to confess that I was never fond of KDE. If you ask me ‘why’, then I’ve to tell that may be I’ve started my Linux life with Gnome and it was like ‘love at first sight’! I was introduced with Ubuntu at 2007 and to be frankly, I liked it so much that I never felt to try other distros to give a serious run. I’ve tested Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora – but I’ve not taken them seriously. As a result I became a solely Ubuntu guy. My laptop still runs Ubuntu 10.04 (and I am quite happy with Lucid). This solely Ubuntu-only-background makes me a total newbie in the world of Kubuntu! But why I am using Kubuntu now? Well… after buying the new desktop, I thought to taste Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu, because (in my opinion) unity in Ubuntu is still in its early stage and I do not wanted to install Lucid in my desktop. So I choose Kubuntu Natty Narwhal to give a try. The result? I am an one-month old Kubuntu user!

        • Linux Mint XFCE: Gnome’s heir?

          Regular readers know I’ve switched away from Ubuntu and onto Linux Mint. I think the move away from the standard desktop interface and toward things like Unity and Gnome Shell is a mistake. Linux Mint is still using Gnome 2.32, a smooth and mature interface that suits me fine. But nobody’s doing any more work on the Gnome 2.x environment; the Gnome project is moving in a different direction now, and unless someone forks Gnome 2.32 – someone with deep pockets, to give it credibility and legs – then sooner or later the Gnome-based traditional desktop will have nowhere to go. I don’t know how much longer distros like Mint can hold out and still use Gnome 2.x; I give it a year, 18 months at the outside. So I continue to seek alternatives for when the time comes.

        • Linux Mint: This didn’t go to 11

          Regular readers will remember that I’d moved everything to Linux Mint. Most of the desktop boxes were running Mint 11, but I kept the laptops on Mint 10 because of a power regression in the kernel. It’s not such a big deal if desktop processors burn a little more power, but on a laptop it means short battery life and heat problems.

          Well, the power regression has been solved – or at least there’s a workaround – so I decided to go ahead and move my main laptop to Mint 11.

          I think I left it that way for about two days before moving back to Mint 10.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Embedded: An alternative way to build embedded Linux distributions

  As embedded processors have grown more powerful and feature-rich, the popularity of the Linux operating system in embedded applications has grown in leaps and bounds. Although the fact that Linux is open source and free of licensing fees is one major driver of its popularity, another key driver is the wealth of application software and drivers available as a result of Linux’s widespread usage in the desktop and server arenas.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • $199 Asus X101 targets Linux tablet alternative

    Though bearing some of the hallmarks of a Netbook, the Asus Eee PC X101 will be offered as an alternative to that category of small laptops, according to an Asus blog post.

    Asus spelled out today that the X101 is a departure from the Netbook as we know it. First of all, it’s even thinner and lighter than a traditional Netbook (which is already pretty light and thin to begin with) at 0.69-inches and two pounds, respectively.

Seven Signs that You Have Been Brainwashed by Microsoft

Considering the last events I’ve been able to observe, as well as Mechatotoro’s contributions, I compiled this short list of manifestations of a Microsoft-only mentality, just for fun.

1. You think free/libre software is unreliable and dangerous, but then you download cracked versions of programs and feel proud about it.

2. If your Windows system breaks down, you are able to do all your computing off a Linux live CD, but then you look for a (pirated?) Windows copy and install it.

Despite successes, FLOSS still misunderstood, villianized

Despite increasing evidence that corporations are turning to open source more than ever, there’s also countering evidence that people have a long ways to go before they “get” open source.

The notion that innovation is driving open source adoption now is a theme that’s been woven heavily in my conversations with open source community members these past couple of weeks. More and more I am getting notes about organizations that have never used open source as a methodology before, now starting to deploy it in their in-house development departments or joining in existing FLOSS projects.

Commercial Gains Mean Growing Pains for Open Source Community

Recent conversations at OSCON, which I’ve attended since 2004, as well as observations through talks with vendors, users and developers in open source all indicate a common theme: With commercial successes for open source software come some community growing pains.

This was also illustrated to some extent by the attendance, content and vibe at this year’s OSCON, a good annual check on where commercial open source software stands in its ongoing maturation, evolution and disruption.

Open Source Meets Systems Management

Does open source need corporate backing to succeed?

Much of Android’s success down to Google’s backing, says researcher

Android is one of the most successful projects in the open-source world, but that’s mostly because of Google’s “muscle”, according to one researcher.

Liz Laffan, an analyst at VisionMobile, has attempted to measure the “openness” of several open-source software platforms – ranking Google’s OS in last place.

The transition from “them” to “we”

While a lot of large Free Software projects do have some sort of formal “membership” structure (e.g. for GNOME there is the foundation), in reality being part of a project is more about your mindset. It’s easy for anyone to complain from the outside about something – and then the project is “they”.

NZ Open Source Society elects new president

Egressive owner and open source advocate Dave Lane has been elected president of the New Zealand Open Source Society.

The president, vice president Peter Harrison and other committee members were confirmed at the Society’s annual general meeting late last week.

Linux Australia readies conference code of conduct

Expands anti-harassment policy with Ada Initiative.

Linux Australia has announced plans to introduce a conference code of conduct following a controversial keynote presentation at linux.conf.au (LCA) in January.

A number of conference attendees complained about futurist Mark Pesce’s use of sexual images in his presentation, in breach of LCA’s anti-harassment policy.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Extending our Reach: Many Layers of User Sovereignty

    Today we access the Internet in many ways, with phones and tablets and new devices becoming more prevalent. These devices have new operating systems, new business models, and new opportunities. They also bring new challenges to interoperability and user-sovereignty. How should Mozilla respond? Should Firefox and Gecko be our only tools? Or should we develop other tools?

Public Services/Government

• BR: Government signs up to develop OpenOffice and LibreOffice

  On 1 July 2011, the Brazilian Government signed a letter of intent to work with both The Document Foundation and the Apache OpenOffice.org community to develop the Office Suite platforms maintained by both communities.

Licensing

• A Guide to Open Source Licensing

  If you’re working on or launching an open source project, one of the most basic decisions you must make is which license the project will be released under, and choosing the perfect license is more complex than ever. Over the years, we’ve provided many free guidelines on this topic, but it’s a moving target. In this post, you’ll find our updeated collection of all the things you need to know to make an informed open source license decision.

Programming

• In Search Of… A Few Good Developers

• Rugged Individualism, Community, and Templating Systems

  Consider this: I have at various times in my career written a templating system, an object model, and a test framework. I no longer use nor maintain those projects, and you will not find them in anything other than the Internet’s vast elephant graveyard (if they even exist there).

  These projects are long gone in part because other projects are (now) obviously better and I have exceedingly good taste in predicting the future, but (more seriously) because the value of those projects to the community was far less than the value of competing projects.

  I have the right to publish a new templating system to the CPAN, but without a staggeringly compelling reason to do so (such as that it uses a different technical approach or that it provides the most useful subset of features of an existing system with far fewer requirements or much better resource usage), the community is probably better off if I refrain from doing so.

• Announcing our Code of Conduct and Community Contributed Docs

141 nice fonts of popular Movies, games and Brands

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Police use Flickr to identify London riot

  London has been the scene of utter chaos over the past few days, and last night it hit a new peak when it seemed many parts of the UK capital were under siege, from north to south.

Finance

• The Personality of Goldman Sachs or What’s in the Gold Sack?

• Republican Leaders Are Receiving Greatly Increased Contributions From Wall Street Firms

  Republican consultant Eddie Mahe said he had “no doubt” Wall Street has been betting that the House Republican majority would lead the effort to “repeal or at least modify” the revised financial regulations enacted last year.

• Goldman Sachs ready to bail out California

  Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo are the lead lenders and will pony up $1.5-billion each. The consortium also includes Citigroup, Barclays, JPMorgan, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and US Bank.

• BofA, Goldman Sachs Find State Mortgage Cases Hard to Shake

  A Washington state judge in Seattle said in rulings over the past two months that Bank of America, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and other underwriters can’t cite faulty data from appraisers or expired statutes of limitation to avoid Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle’s claims that there was false information in offering documents for at least $3.9 billion in securities it bought.

• Goldman Sachs rates desk hemorrhages traders

  More than a dozen traders have quit Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s (NYSE:GS – News) North American government bonds and derivatives trading desk in New York in recent months as the bank takes fewer risks and big bonuses for ambitious traders dry up.

  Goldman has been handing out promotions and better pay to its salespeople rather than the traders who manage the bank’s inventory of securities and derivatives, people familiar with the bank’s operations said.

Civil Rights

• ‘U’ team aims to expand digital freedom through Telex program

  According to Wustrow, Telex is a two-part system where users download software that allows Telex stations to act as a proxy site outside of the restricted country. He noted that one major difference between a typical proxy website and Telex is that proxy websites often have only one IP address that needs to be blocked, but Telex will have multiple addresses, making censorship very difficult.

  Wustrow added there are only a handful of undersea cables to China, but Telex stations would be sufficient for the program to work there. Nonetheless, there are still several hurdles to the implementation of this program.

  For example, Wustrow said there is no definitive price, but each Telex station could cost thousands of dollars and the stations would have to be incentivized for Internet Service Providers to install them. He added that in return for installing Telex stations, ISPs could sell the service to users to subsidize costs or the U.S. government could sponsor efforts toward increased Internet freedom.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Opinion: Is economic collapse good for Linux?

Thus, though we may face economic hardships not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s, we can at least look forward to a Linux Renaissance.

Asus Support – Excellent and Linux Friendly

I’d heard stories from fellow Linux users about companies not honoring hardware warranties, unless Windows was reinstalled on the system. It’s wrong, but it does happen. I called up the Asus support line and after jumping through a countless number of automated menus I arrived at someone who could help me. After being walked through a few id-10-t checks the person on the phone agreed with me that the unit needed to be sent to a repair center. It didn’t matter that the system was running Linux, it was a clear hardware issue.

Linux, Linux, everywhere!

Not long ago, I started to realize that Linux is already creeping up on me from all sides. People who have never heard of Linux were raving about it. They were showing me their latest gadgets and telling me how cool they were. After several months of random people going on about their gadgets I did realize that Linux is everywhere and it came upon us from an unusual source. If you haven’t figured it out yet, I am talking about Android which is based on the Linux kernel. A lot of people purchasing their latest phones do not know what Linux is or that Android is based on the Linux kernel. However, they are definitely happy with their latest hardware and the many features Android has. Moreover, Android phones are selling in large quantities and are surpassing Blackberry and iPhone sales. This is amazing and the trend seems to be continuing with excellent and solid phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S2. The Galaxy S2 is a gorgeous phone and it is even better than the iPhone 4. Apple will definitely have to come up with many cool new features for the iPhone 5 to be able to compete with the Android Smartphones.

Evolution of the Operating System

UPDATE SJVN has an article out with a similar theme.

“In the long run, the question isn’t going to be “Which desktop operating system is going to be the winner?” No, it’s going to be, “Which mobile operating system will be the winner.””

I don’t quite agree with that. I see a very diverse ecosystem in the future with many systems working together. There will be a need for “desktop” systems for a long while:

* huge screens just are not mobile…
* there are heavy tasks that just work better with storage and computing power close together…
* thin clients can work with large displays and still be cool, quiet and unobtrusive…
* desktop systems and notebooks can shrink quite a bit if we get rid of huge hard drives, power supplies, and CD drives. I expect a lot of the mobile tech will invade the desktop/notebook space…

see Is XP finally dying or is it the PCs it’s been running on?

Linux Australia sorts out finances, keeps membership free

Australia’s peak body for Linux and open source software, Linux Australia, will change its constitution and financial year arrangement this month and has committed to offering free memberships for anyone interested in the organisation’s programs and events.

Linux Australia is an incorporated organisation in the state of NSW and operates as a non-profit, not a charity.

Windows is Dying… and so are Macintosh and Linux

Writing in ZDnet.com, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has an interesting article. Well, it was interesting to me, and I suspect anyone else interested in the future of computing will enjoy reading it also. Vaughan-Nichols points out that the number of Windows XP computers has now slipped to slightly under 50% of all installed personal computers. Windows Vista remains steady at 10% and Windows 7 has edged up slightly to about 28% of the market. The small remaining percentages comprise Macintosh OS X plus a tiny handful of people who use Linux.

Indemnification assurance for community edition open source

Bristol-based LinuxIT is launching an indemnification programme to underwrite community-based open source software. The company claims to be able to provide organisations with a “guarantee and assurance at zero risk”, no less.

This arguably somewhat questionable claim is achieved by LinuxIT’s process of “verifying open source software” by running it through an accreditation process.

The programme which is backed by an as yet unnamed “leading” global insurance-based financial services provider and a LinuxIT Service Level Agreement (SLA), which the company says enables LinuxIT to fix or replace software that does not work as expected. Cover to the value of £5m is provided.

Desktop

• GNU/Linux on the Server Side Helps ‘Desktop Linux’

  The myths about “desktop Linux” are mostly associated and tied to “easy of use”. Many people, mostly ones with next to zero experience when it comes to GNU/Linux, have blindly decided that the slow growth of GNOME and KDE is due to an inherent problem other than marketing. But perceptions are changing when people discover that they are surrounded by GNU/Linux, even if their own client machine does not run a Free/libre operating system.

• Linux Netbook Review: ZaReason Teo Pro Netbook

  The Teo Pro is yet another netbook running Ubuntu Linux and equipped with the venerable Atom N450. In fact, spec wise the Teo Pro is almost identical to the Terra HD except that the Teo Pro has a 10.1 inch 1024×600 LCD and one less USB port. Everything else in the loaner they sent me is equivalent to the Terra HD. As shipped, my loaner had a Atom N450, Intel NM10 Chipset, Intel GMA 3150 graphics, Intel HD Audio, 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1.3 Megapixel Webcam, 10/100 Ethernet, 2 GB of ram and a 40 GB SSD. The default configuration opts for a 320 GB 5400 RPM hard disk and 1 GB Ram. The SSD makes this netbook a little faster than my normal netbook since it has a set of spinning platters.

• KVM Virtualization: Ready for the Desktop?

  There are almost more virtualization tools out there today than even Wikipedia can count. KVM, however, stands out among them as perhaps the only free, non-commercial and open source hypervisor designed for enterprise-grade performance. And it’s come far in its (comparatively) short life — so far, in fact, that it may be time to consider it as a virtualization solution for the desktop as well as the server.

  KVM, which stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and has nothing to do with KVM switches, is a somewhat younger project than most of its major competitors including VMware’s hypervisors, VirtualBox and Xen. It’s also different from many other virtualization tools because it focuses on deep integration with the kernel itself, theoretically providing performance advantages over hypervisors that exist mainly in userspace.

• 5 great uses for your old Windows computer

  Linux tester. Many Linux users start with an older machine to avoid the shame of buyer’s remorse (or, well, installer’s remorse, anyway). Linux isn’t a resource hog, so even decrepit old machines can usually handle it with grace and style. If you’re curious, it’s incredibly simple to install Ubuntu, and much easier than you would think to actually make a complete transition from Windows.

Audiocasts/Shows

• LB – Episode 70 – Google+ or Minus

• FLOSS Weekly 176: Colin Percival

  We chat with Colin Percival who has managed to put FreeBSD on EC2 and figured out a good way to have secure backups in the cloud.

  Guest: Colin Percival

Kernel Space

• A Look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 3.0

  It was big news when the 3.0 kernel was released at the end of July, but as luck would have it, another fundamental piece of your average distribution is about to bump its own version number up to 3.0 as well: the filesystem hierarchy standard (FHS). If you’re not sure exactly what that means or why you should care, don’t worry. It’s the distros that implement the FHS — when it goes well, all you know is that your system runs smoothly. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing important hidden away in this new release.

• Linux Creator Linus Torvalds and Other Hackers Don Penguin Suits, Tuxedos at Formal Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Linux

• The First Shot Towards GStreamer 1.0

  Back in June I mentioned the plans for GStreamer 1.0 and that work is now beginning to materialize. GStreamer 0.11 has just been officially released as the first development snapshot for what will turn into the notable GStreamer 1.0 release.

• Intel Sandy Bridge Speeds Up On Linux 3.1 Kernel

  Last week the DRM pull went in for the Linux 3.1 kernel. For the Intel DRM graphics driver in the Linux kernel there is frame-buffer compression clean-ups, high color support, ring frequency scaling, shared LLC support, and hang-check module disabling. Compared to the Linux 3.0 kernel, the driver improvements significantly boost the open-source graphics performance for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware.

• Graphics Stack

  • Multiple X Servers For One Graphics Card, Again

    One of the long sought after features of X.Org and the Linux graphics stack has been the ability to run multiple X Servers from a single graphics card. While this wouldn’t be used by many, there are still many interested in seeing this feature request become a reality.

  • A Handful Of Patches Arrive For Wayland

  • NVIDIA 280 Linux Driver Series Becomes Official

  • A Modular Rendering System For ioquake3 Engine

    The ioquake3 game engine, the open-source project built around id Software’s Quake 3 engine release and is used by a number of multi-platform games, has its rendering system now modularized.

    The ioquake3 project has long had asspirations to move to a modular rendering system (see this Wiki page from last uear) in order to modernize this Quake 3 engine adaptation while maintaining compatibility with original Quake 3 content. In particular, developers are interested in modernizing the graphics and content capabilities.

Applications

• Linux Apps That Will Help You Graduate College

  This is the second guest post written by Whitney from Technected. Whitney majored in journalism and has been using Linux ever since. She now works for a large automotive corporation in the Midwest. In her spare time she enjoys playing video games, gardening and watching Dr. Who.

  Linux is a very powerful OS, many people don’t know that. With all the mainstream programs that Microsoft creates, most people remain ignorant of the awesome programs out there for free that are being produced by Linux developers. Many of the apps out there can help you reach your traditional or online degree. Below is a list of 5 that will help you graduate college.

• Learn About The Stars In The Sky With Open Source Program Stellarium

• Google Music Manager now Plays to Ubuntu’s tunes.

• Jokosher: A Completely Kosher Audio Multitool

  Depending on who’s using it, an advanced audio editing application can be either feature-rich or overly stuffed with complicated tools the user has no need for. Jokosher dials complexity down a notch and offers a powerful and easy-to-use multitrack editor. Advanced users may miss certain features, but others will appreciate the straightforward simplicity of Jokosher as well as its great interface.

• Top 5 VLC media player skins

• Best Linux Software Applications for Guitarists and Guitar Enthusiasts

  Whether you’re casually strumming the chords to your first song, or enthralling a head-bobbing crowd with your 20-minute solos, there are a few applications that a guitar lover like you must have on your Linux box. Even though there are countless guitar apps for Windows and Mac, it doesn’t mean that musicians on Linux should be left behind. Remember that the Linux platform has given birth to some of the most prolific songwriters of the century like Maestro Richard Stallman. His masterpiece, the Free Software Song, is still crooned by millions of Linux geeks, getting them through those atrocious weeklong coding marathons. So, there’s no doubt that Linux does have some excellent applications that every guitar player would love to have on his or her computer.

• Proprietary

  • Linux gets a bit of good news on the Netflix front

    But regardless of the Chromium issue, I have to say…how cool is this? The Linux community cries out and the corporate world is actually listening. Of course it also helps that the Netflix engineers are Ubuntu fanatics, so we had them on our side the entire time. It could even be that these two particular engineers have taken this project squarely on their shoulders, just to make it happen. If that is the case — then bravo to them. The Linux community needs more fans like that, in high places, to do this kind of work.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Understanding dpkg’s file overwrite error

  • How to Install Latest Kernel 3.0 on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)

  • How to customize Ubuntu’s Unity desktop environment

  • Customize your Ubuntu 11.04 desktop

  • A simple introduction to fabric

  • 20 Linux Log Files that are Located under /var/log Directory

  • The Amber Tutorial

  • How to write your own pipe menu scripts

  • Image type and size from the Linux command line

  • How To Create an Ebook with OpenOffice.org

  • Coding Copy and Paste Functionality

  • How to Install Gnome 3 In Ubuntu

  • Install GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 11.04

  • Set Penguins Crawling on your Desktop!

  • Configuring Sendmail SMTP server on CentOS & Scientific Linux

  • Icons on menus for Openbox

  • Use Wine to run Windows software on Linux

  • Install Mandriva Desktop 2011 on a btrfs file system

  • Substitution with sed

  • Three Real-Time Animation Methods: Machinima, Digital Puppetry, and Motion Capture

  • Summer Hacking

  • PeaZip – A cross platform, desktop neutral file and archive manager

  • How to (Re-)Compress PDFs with Images for Free

  • A Fast(er) LibreOffice Build

  • please use indexes in your database tables

  • Quick Tip: Disable Certain File Types in digiKam

• Wine

  • Top Windows games that run flawlessly in Ubuntu using Wine

    Even though most games wont run natively on Ubuntu there is still a sizeable number that runs flawlessly on it thanks to the almighty Wine. The Wine app database lists a few games that run flawlessly on Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution for that matter and assigns a rating for them based on precious metals.

• Games

  • live.linuX-gamers.net: Linux games for the portable person

  • Humble Indie Bundle Updated With A New Game !

  • Multiplayer Game Teeworlds 0.6.1 Released for Linux

  • Interview with a 0 A.D. Developer

    With thanks to Constantinos of the greek Linux site OSArena, he sent me a request to publish an interview he did with 0 A.D’s Aviv Sharon.

  • Minetest

  • OpenClonk and Humble Indie Bundle updates.

  • Linux users pay 3x that of Windows users for Humble Indie Bundle 3

    Linux users are a generous lot. Could it be that they get most of their software for free meaning there’s spare cash to buy games and donate to charity at the same time?

    If the sales stats for the latest Humble Indie Bundle 3 are anything to go by then Linux users are willing to pay a lot more for their games. Although in this case it’s as much about giving to charity than it is purchasing some entertainment.

  • Link-Dead, New 2D Multiplayer Action Game Coming to Linux

    Link-Dead is a unique multiplayer-only 2D action game with a team-based realistic side-view combat. The first public alpha of the game has been released under pay-what-you-want model and development is on going on a really fast pace.

  • Doomsday Testin

  • Bundle In A Bundle: HIB2 now in HIB3!

    The Humble Indie Bundle 2 games: Braid, Osmos, Machinarium, Cortex Command and Revenge of the Titans have just been added to Humble Indie Bundle 3. Everyone who purchased Humble Indie Bundle 3 before 10:30am PST today will automatically see the extra games on their download page. New purchasers will have to beat the current average on the site to unlock the extra games.

  • What Should Linux Gamers Expect From QuakeCon 2011?

    QuakeCon, the annual gaming event and massive LAN party hosted by id Software, is about to get started in Dallas, Texas and run through Sunday. At this free public event, there’s usually a variety of interesting announcements made, some of which can impact Linux gamers.

  • 4 of the Best Economy Games for Linux

    If you’re anything like me, sometimes you just crave a particular kind of game. Maybe it’s an FPS, maybe a puzzle game, maybe a new Real Time Strategy. Lately for me, it’s been games of economy. SimCity and Tycoon type games – where you build up your business/city to greatness through clever monetary strategy. As a Linux user that naturally left the question “Are there any good economic games for Linux?” The following should be a helpful (though certainly not exhaustive) guide to a few of the best economic games for Linux.

Desktop Environments

• OpenBox 3.5.0 Window Manager Released

  OpenBox, the window manager originally derived from Blackbox and is used by the LXDE desktop environment and other niche configurations, has just reached its version 3.5 milestone release.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • new Plasma Active repos

  • Shadow and no Oxygen

  • Amarok 2.4.3 “Berlin”

    As you may remember, the last beta release was 2.4.2 beta 1. After that, we did roll a 2.4.2 (final) tarball, but because of some issues which were fixed right after the tag we decided to make another tarball and call it 2.4.3.

  • Kde 4.7 Released And In The Wild

    If you are a 4.6 user who has just upgraded, don’t expect to be aware of major changes the first time you reboot. Some of the core applications have been updated, but most of the work has gone into improving the underlying frameworks. The applications themselves have been shifted to a greater reliance on Akonadi, the PIM storage framework and NEPOMUK, the semantic information database.

    Kontact is the KDE PIM suite that includes email, contacts and appointments. Again, don’t expect to see many apparent differences when using the applications as most of the changes take the form of a switch to Anakondi for data storage. The mail component, Kmail is an example of this as it has been rechristened Kmail 2, although it looks almost identical to the previous version.

  • Modular KDE 4.7.0 arrives for Slackware

    The 4.7.0 release comes in the form of many more tarballs than usual. I needed to find time to re-write the KDE.SlackBuild we use to compile all of the KDE-related packages, and the holiday period was the first time I found some time to think and work on the script. I took the modular X.Org script and modeled the new KDE.SlackBuild after that. The advantage with the new script is that new source tarballs can easily be incorporated into the build framework now, and the new package that would be created from that source takes only a few extra lines of configuration to be added. Unfortunately, writing and testing took a while, and you had to wait for a complete set of packages a little longer.

  • Continuous Integration for KWin

  • New Pup is Born, Dolphin 2.0

    Dolphin, that underappreciated file manager shipped with KDE, has had a hard time. Many users didn’t want it in the first place. Many were upset that it replaced Konqueror as the default file manager. Some have real complaints and will never be happy with it. But those who use Dolphin might be happy with some of the newest changes coming in KDE 4.8.

    Peter Penz today blogged about his latest work on Dolphin and the major improvement he discussed was the “view-engine” for the view mode. Dolphin currently uses Qt’s Interview Framework which might be slow, unstable, and a pain for developers to work with. For these reasons Penz said he will be switching to Itemviews-NG which is said to make things “simpler, faster, and easier to use.”

  • Phonon VLC 0.4.1 – The Rise of Legacy Media

    This thrilling new release of the VLC backend for Phonon features vastly improved subtitle loading, support for it, s3m and xm, as well as greater stability in case of a broken libvlc installation.

  • Try KDE 4.7.0 now

  • Improvements in KOrganizer 4.7

  • KDE 4.7 – You didn’t think you would get off that easily, would you?

  • wetabirific

    Last week, I received a WeTab, hansomely provided into my care by the folks at OpenSLX so that I can track Plasma Active development on that device. Getting it set up was quite straight forward, particularly as the one I received already had firmware that supported booting from external media. Perfect. After a few small glitches related to the release of Plasma Workspaces 4.7, which caused some of the repositories to move around for us, I got the thing up and running. There are still some rough edges, and I’m hoping Sebastian and I can huddle together during the upcoming Berlin Desktop Summit to file some of them off as he probably currently has more experience with the WeTab and Plasma Active than anyone else.

    One result of having the WeTab in my hands is that I’ve been able to start collecting a list of tasks that need attention between now and the 1.0 release of Contour. It’s also giving me great hands-on opportunities with Plasma Active on a device of this form factor.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Visual Identity manual

  • Can GNOME 3 Become the Next Big Open Source UI Contender?

    To my surprise, GNOME Shell in its latest iteration actually worked relatively well. Not only was it stable — more stable, in fact, than the normal Ubuntu 11.04 interface, which has been crashing my Intel Sandy Bridge graphics driver periodically for reasons I’m still trying to track down — but it was also actually usable, a far cry from the last (beta) version of the interface I’d tested.

Distributions

• FOSS, Linux, Distros and Life

  Distros. Fool me once, shame on you. My dear wife and I have come to the realization that distros are willing to throw their users to the curb for any or no reason. Those of you who drive the distro development need to pay more attention to your users. In fact, that is the only thing you should be looking at. I or we shall use what works. Make it hard to set up or hard to install missing whatevers and we will just download and try the other guy’s distro. If we have a distro we like and the community within that distro is rude or unfriendly, well I guess we know where we do not belong. Some of the communities that are distro-specific have become exclusionary to the extreme. They will not play with others. I live in a town of 12,000 or so people. We have 13 different churches, all Christian, and 14 AA groups. So maybe I am wrong, being divisive may be the way of the future? Group hug?

• New Releases

  • SystemRescueCD & Parted Magic update to Linux 3.0

    The developers of the SystemRescueCd and the Parted Magic multi-platform partitioning tool have released new versions of their Linux distributions. Both of the updates are based on the latest 3.0 release of the Linux kernel and offer a number of changes and package updates, such as Firefox 5 and version 0.9.0 of the GNOME Partition Editor (GParted).

    Version 6.4 of Parted Magic has some “major improvements” on systems with Radeon and Mobile4 graphics cards. Other changes include updating Clonezilla to version 1.2.9-19. The developers also note that SMP support was removed from the i486 kernel, and an option to use the NV driver has been added to the failsafe menu due to issues with the Nouveau X.org driver.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Japanese in PCLinuxOS? Of course!

    After having installed PCLinuxOS 2011.6, I must say that I am very pleased with it. Differently from Mandriva 2010.2, I can see videos and listen to MP3 files out of the box and I don’t need to fiddle with the system to mount the partitions where my other Linux distributions are. It seems that everything works as expected. Great!

    But I still had one concern. Although I’m not a power user, for my work, I require a feature that is not very common: a Japanese input method editor. That’s one major area (of the many) where Windows 7 fails miserably; you are expected to pay more to obtain a Japanese-capable system, which is a rip off because regular XP did include a Japanese IME. Oh, well, we are familiar with the “Less-is-more” philosophy underlying Windows…Too bad it doesn’t apply to your pocket

  • Mageia 1

    It’s unfortunate that as venerable a distro as Mandriva ran into some corporate trouble. However, I’ve always been the type that believes you should make lemonade out of lemons and so apparently are the Mageia developers. They have taken a bad situation and turned it into something very positive indeed! Mageia is off to a very good start and I look forward to seeing more releases of this fine distro.

    I particularly like how community-oriented Mageia is; the Mageia developers have made it very easy for users to participate and help develop this distro. That’s a great approach and I think it will reap a lot of dividends for Mageia as the years go by and this distro matures.

  • Time for some news

    As most of you who are following either my twitter or facebook has already noticed, I am working at Intel now, within the Intel Linux Graphics group.

• Red Hat Family

  • Review: CentOS 6.0

    So what’s the deal? CentOS is outwardly identical to Scientific Linux except for four things: branding, lack of boot splash, lack of multimedia codecs included out-of-the-box, and lack of compositing/desktop effects out-of-the-box.

  • Red Hat completes 10 years of Linux Kernel Leadership

    This milestone presents a good opportunity to reflect on what has been an exciting and vibrant period of time

    The recent numbering change in the Linux kernel brings to a close a 10 year history of the prior kernel series. This milestone presents a good opportunity to reflect on what has been an exciting and vibrant period of time – over 10 million lines of code have been added to the Linux kernel. This is a great testament to the power of community. Over time, the contribution levels among companies has fluctuated, however, Red Hat has consistently been among the top employer contributors. The fine folks at LWN in cooperation with several developers have long maintained statistics and reported results.

  • Red Hat Extends Open Source Summer Teaching Program to the Academic Year

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the expansion of its Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE) 2011 that took place in late July in Raleigh, NC. Now in it third year, POSSE is a higher education faculty program that immerses professors in the culture, tools and practices of open source communities. Due to the overwhelming success of this year’s summer weekend workshop, several POSSE activities are scheduled throughout the 2011-2012 North American school year.

  • Fedora

    • Governance and scarcity.

      Recall the friction a year or two ago regarding how to advertise different spins of Fedora on the website, and whether or not the layout would recommend a default spin, or promote one spin as a first-among-equals. Real estate on the front page of fedoraproject.org is a scarce resource, which leads to lots of people debating the most efficient way to allocate it.

• Debian Family

  • Debconf

    I’m very excited about the recent progress on expo.debian.net (a mentors.debian.net replacement), which could help streamline our sponsorship process.

  • Recent improvements with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

    Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was first released with Squeeze in last february. The “technology preview” label indicated, among other things, that it had a number of limitations when compared with what users would expect: missing features, incomplete functionality, etc.

  • Derivatives

    • Aptosid 2011-02: is it any good?

      Aptosid is Debian-based Linux distribution aiming desktops of users wishing to live on cutting edge of technology. It is based on Debian Sid, which is unstable branch. Sid is kind of sandbox where developers can test their ideas before they are moved to Testing and eventually to Stable releases. It means that while Debian as whole is considered by many as rock-solid system, Sid should never be considered as such. And this is a platform for Aptosid.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Software Centre’s New Look

        Few people would argue that the Ubuntu Software Cenre in its current forms needs a makeover. Thankfully it is getting one, although whether or not it will be ready in time for Oneiric’s release in October is a whole different debate.

      • Interview with Em

      • Many Ubuntu Users Still Hate The Unity Desktop

        Two weeks ago on Phoronix it was asked what do you dislike or hate about Ubuntu? This was following a discussion on the Ubuntu development list about Ubuntu developer applicants being asked about what they like the least about Ubuntu. The overwhelming response among Phoronix readers was clear: they still really hate the Unity desktop.

      • Getting to know Ubuntu Software Center

        For all of Ubuntu’s ease of use (and, yes, I do find it easy to use), installing software can be a pain. There are so many ways to do the deed: manually installing software, using apt-get, compiling, using .deb packages. And, of course, my (least) favourite: Synaptic Package Manager).

      • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 226

      • Canonical Sees Seven Opportunities for Ubuntu Partners

        Seeking to promote Ubuntu to resellers and distributors, Canonical is making a surprise appearance this week at CompTIA Breakaway in Washington, D.C. Here, Canonical is outlining seven potential profit opportunities for partners that back Ubuntu, a Linux distribution that has mobile, desktop, server and cloud computing capabilities. Equally important, Canonical is promoting Landscape — a remote management tool — for VARs and MSPs.

      • New game titles in the Ubuntu Software Center

        We’ve recently added a few titles to the Ubuntu Software Center and have been hard at work on getting more diverse applications landed there. BEEP! by Big Fat Alien and Heileen from Hanako Games have recently landed in the Software Center.

      • Ubuntu IVI Remix receives GENIVI Alliance Compliance Approval

      • Unity Facebook App Adds Muti-photo Uploads and Easier Installation

      • What’s Not To Like About Ubuntu?

        Phoronix recently ran a survey, asking users to tell them what they dislike (or hate) about Ubuntu. The results are interesting, but seem to me to be completely predictable to everyone except Canonical themselves. What do users hate the most? Unity, of course. A couple of others hit some of my pet peeves as well – such as the “Not Invented Here” syndrome, which causes Ubuntu to put massive amounts of effort into re-inventing things (often inferior), and their general slowness in updating packages. That slowness extends beyond the inherent delay because they try to make major package updates in conjunction with their own 6-month release cycle, to situations where they really fall significantly behind an upstream package release even after they have made their own 6-month release.

      • The Road to Alpha 3

        All the changes in this week’s desktop team report have landed for the Alpha 3 release of Oneiric that will be out sometime today.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 – behind the scenes with Oneiric Ocelot

        Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 (otherwise known as Oneiric Ocelot) is available today. The sub-cycle between Alpha 2 and 3 has been quite intensive with a number of things taking place, says Dave Walker, Ubuntu Server’s technical lead…

      • Canonical Expands Partnerships with Game Developers

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Arios and gNatty – two interesting remaster of Ubuntu

          Maybe you are disappointed by Unity and looking for something new? But you would not like to go away from the known Ubuntu environment?

          Of course, Ubuntu like any Linux distribution, you can customize the look and the behaviour in the way you want. Depending on the knowledge you have, it will be more or less successfully. Or if you do not have time to adjust, try some of the already finished remaster . You may find some that you will like.
          Arios and gNatty are two remaster of Ubuntu using Ubuntu 11.04 as a basis for the operating system.
          Arios is configured to be an usable distribution, while gNatty it’s just an interesting concept that still needs a lot of work.

Devices/Embedded

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Why the Tablet Craze?

    I made a post last year titled “The Year of the Tablet Computer”. It is now over half way through 2011 and it seems the touch screen craze is far from over. Apple has released the second iteration of their iPad, we are up to our ears in Android tablets from various hardware makers and a Meego tablet or two might still exist before the year is up. I’ve played with the iPad a bit, I’ve used more than a few different Android tablets (I even own one for purposes of developing Bodhi for ARM) and I must say I’m confused what all the hype is about.

  • Tablet for toddlers runs Android 2.3

    A start-up called Vinci is taking pre-orders at Amazon.com for a seven-inch Android 2.3 tablet designed as an educational tool for toddlers. The safety-compliant Vinci Tab is equipped with a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 4GB or 8GB of flash, a seven-inch, 800 x 480 touchscreen, a three-megapixel camera, a wrap-around handle, and a variety of early-learning apps.

Open Source Helps eBay Process $2000 Per Second

The online auction house eBay continuously executes $2,000 worth of transactions a second and, to do so, requires a highly reliable transaction processing environment. EBay recently revealed that a key element of its transaction software is the WSO2 open source enterprise service bus (ESB).

Netatalk returns to open source

NetAFP, the Netatalk developers, have announced that they are to resume open development of Netatalk and have updated the project’s git repository with the latest source. In early July, NetAFP, the Netatalk developers, announced they were only making the source code for Netatalk 2.2.0 available to paying customers. The timing of the move was well chosen as, within weeks of that, Apple released its latest version of Mac OS X, Lion, which uses AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) 3.3. The latest version of AFP mandates support for Replay Cache functionality and this feature is also required by Lion’s Time Machine.

Free Software for Little People: Interview

Right, so I said I would follow up on the last post on this topic by asking a few questions to the comic’s creators, and I have! I dropped them an e-mail, Effy even tranSL:ated the first message for me, sent a few questions and these are their answers. I hope you find it interesting, I’m sure the team behind the comic will be pleased to hear any thoughts or further questions you have in the comments below.

The interview was collaborately answered by: Iris Fernandez and Franco Iacomella (scrip authors); Emmanuel Cerino and Ivan Zigaran (artists).

Events

• OSCON 2011: Open Source has moved from “disruption to default”

  Portland Oregon is (apparently) famous for rain, rose gardens and (now) OSCON, the open source conference now in its 13th year.

  Staged under the banner of O’Reilly technical publishing, this event’s ex-post “content” is now all online, so rather than preview the event, I am going to point to a couple of links now fully live.

• Back from OSCon

Web Browsers

• Web browsers offer more protection than you may think

• Firefox Appears To Handle Lots Of Tabs Better Than Chrome

• Mozilla

  • Mozilla’s Boot 2 Gecko: Who Wants Another Web-Based OS?

    “If this doesn’t show Mozilla has lost their way, frankly I don’t know what does,” said Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. “Remember when Firefox was supposed to be the ‘fast, light’ browser? What happened? I’ll tell ya: They got a bad case of Chrome envy and have been shooting themselves in the foot ever since.”

  • Mozilla Cracking Down On Firefox Crapware Add-Ons

  • Dress Up Your Firefox Search With Harry Potter

  • Mozilla unveils new Firefox interface for Firefox 9 and beyond

  • Extending our Reach — Let’s Talk Gecko

    To fulfill the Mozilla mission, Mozilla needs offerings on new operating systems we find on phones, tablets and elsewhere. These new operating systems and their ecosystems are quite different from the desktop operating systems we’ve been accustomed to. They bring new challenges and new opportunities. To meet these, Mozilla needs to do adapt our current product offerings and to do some new things as well.

  • Add Convenient Print Preview for Firefox

SaaS

• The Subverted GPL

  Just look at how the GPL has been subverted by the client-server model. You are never technically in possession of the software – only the output – so it is apparently exempt from any distribution clauses your license may have. BSD, GPL, doesn’t matter – you can’t get the code. The only one that apparently solves this issue is the AGPL and nobody ever seems to use it. The valued ‘freedoms’ are almost entirely gone with the client-server approach. Want the code to the modifications I have made on this site? Tough. As an end user you still have no rights to the code nor the modifications made. Yet there seems to be little to no attention made to this fact despite the large focus on ‘freedom’. Surely putting two computers in a box with a VNC setup is enough to defeat the GPL entirely given these circumstances? It’s certainly massively against the spirit of the thing but is this ever even discussed? Or is it just GPL, praise, praise, when the actual license is irrelevant?

Databases

• 10 essential MySQL tools for admins

  The MySQL community is a hotbed of free, open source tools to enhance the performance and health of your MySQL systems

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice Developer Glimpse Proves Balance

  Florian Effenberger recently posted statistics of the number of developers contributing to the LibreOffice project. Several months ago, Cedric Bosdonnat offered data on the number of contribution and contributors from the various sources. While Effenberger’s post provides much less detail, it still provides a glimpse into the composition of the growing community.

CMS

• New features for the Mollom module for Drupal

  We have just released new versions of the Mollom module for Drupal 6 and Drupal 7.

• State of Drupal 2011 survey

  The last time I organized a State of Drupal survey was in 2008. The results of the 2008 survey were instrumental in shaping Drupal 7 as well as directing the work of the Drupal Association on drupal.org.

  Now three years later, I created a new survey. The results of this survey will guide thousands of people in the Drupal community over the next two years.

BSD

• FreeBSD 9.0 Goes Into Beta

  It seems that finally hitting the FTP mirrors are the ISO images for the first FreeBSD 9.0 beta. This is the first dramatic update to the FreeBSD operating system in nearly two years since the FreeBSD 8.0 release. FreeBSD 9.0 is officially expected to be released in September.

• PC-BSD Goes Into 9.0 Beta With New Features

  Following the news yesterday that FreeBSD 9.0 Beta 1 is now available, the PC-BSD crew has spun their first 9.0 beta release. Beyond incorporating the updates from FreeBSD 9.0, the PC-BSD 9.0 release is set to carry other desktop-friendly advancements on top.

  Among the PC-BSD 9.0 Beta 1 features are support for multiple window managers, support for meta-pkgs, an improved PBI system, a new AppCafe, an updated installer, network setup GUI improvements, a new system-update utility, a new backup utility, and a new PC-BSD control panel.

• Memory File System in FreeBSD

Public Services/Government

• EU-law on re-use of public sector data may include source code

  Public administrations in the EU facing resistance to their publishing of software as open source, are likePublic administrations in the EU facing resistance to their publishing of software as open source, are likely supported by a European Law, the ‘Directive on the re-use of public sector information’. The PSI-directive, part of member states’ national laws since 2005, obliges public administrations to avoid discrimination between market players, when making information available for re-use. Making source code available as open source is one way to avoid favouritism. ly supported by a European Law, the ‘Directive on the re-use of public sector information’. The PSI-directive, part of member states’ national laws since 2005, obliges public administrations to avoid discrimination between market players, when making information available for re-use. Making source code available as open source is one way to avoid favouritism.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Space Exploration Gets Open Sourced

    Last week, O’Reilly’s OSCON 2011 dished out a couple of courses of open source for space exploration, with NASA discussing its General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT) and Ariel Waldman plugging the concept of “Hacking Space Exploration.” NASA is also bragging about the launch of its open government blog at open.nasa.gov.

Programming

• iTALC – POTM for August

  We are very excited to be honoring the iTALC project as our Project of the Month for August 2011.

• A Blooming Garden of Codenames

• Perl Weekly Issue #1 – August 1, 2011

Health/Nutrition

• Radiation and Smoke in the Workplace

Privacy

• In Defense of Internet Anonymity — Again

  A second flashpoint is the anti-pseudonym policy of the new social networking site Google+. Part of the problem is that Google appears to have been caught by surprise on the issue, and has applied its terms of service inconsistently, banning some users of pseudonyms from all Google services, and restricting others to read only access. There are even rumors that Google is preventing its employees from speaking on the matter, and that a massive internal debate is happening inside Google.

  But equally important is the fact that Google+ is applying the policy so strictly that even long established pseudonyms are rejected, as well as any names that are judged by Google employees to be false. Even the common practice among Chinese and other nationals of assuming an unofficial English name seems to have been rejected by Google in some instances.