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04.16.13

Links 16/4/2013: Xen in Linux Foundation, Fuduntu Overhaul

Posted in News Roundup at 5:21 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Chromebook Pixel LTE arriving today

    The first customers will start getting the Chromebook Pixel LTE today, several weeks after the Wi-Fi-only version was available.

  • You’re Invited: Design the Future of Automotive Infotainment

    Like many of us you are probably using your car almost every single day: commute to work, take the kids to school, run errands, go shopping, or just for fun. You name it. And while spending all this time on the road you may be using the in-vehicle infotainment system built into your ride for navigation, listening to music from the radio, accessing content stored on my mobile device, making phone calls, getting traffic updates and much more. And whether or not you are entirely happy with the solution that the maker has built into your car you may have the one or other idea on how things can be improved. Or maybe you think this is all lame and you can do a much better job. Well, here is your opportunity.

  • Tux moves house… again!

    I’ve written about this already, when I first changed the HDD in my laptop. I moved the same HDD from an HP Compaq C300 to a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 1505. The HDD had 4 operating systems installed: Windows XP, Mageia 1 KDE, Linux Mint XFCE and Debian Squeeze. I made a conclusion at that time that WinXP survived the move the best.

  • Resilient OS v Clunker

    I’m often told by trolls that other OS has better hardware support. Well here’s a comparison where a supported version of that other OS could not survive a hard drive transplant while GNU/Linux laughed.

  • Don’t forget to blame the little guy for screwing Linux over.

    Everyone in the industry and particularly home users like to blame the obvious large targets for Linux never (at least at the time of this writing) quite making it to the average users Desktop in the masses. Many blame Microsoft, Apple, Patents or just anything proprietary in nature.

    However I feel that there is one particular reason, made up of millions of small contributors, of why Linux has truly never landed on the Desktop. Who or what is it you ask? Your local PC shop is just as guilty and equally damaging as any of the large proprietary companies conspiring to hold Linux down.

    They purposely keep Linux off the desktop and out of the picture for end users simply because the “Windows Virus, Adware, Spyware, Malware, Trojan and general shittyness repair money” is just to great, soo… a stable, working, capable, compatible, computer for the masses, is just out of the question.

  • Linux Top 3: Debian’s New Leader, Linux 3.9 and Xen

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • INSIDE Secure NFC Solution Supported In Linux Kernel 3.9 Release
    • QXL KMS Driver To Be Merged For Linux 3.10 Kernel

      David Airlie of Red Hat has pulled in his own QXL KMS/DRM driver into his drm-next Git tree, which means this para-virtual graphics hardware with TTM/GEM support will premiere in the Linux 3.10 kernel.

    • “Very Disruptive” Change Hurts ARM Linux Support

      The Linux kernel is having to remove support for NWFPE and VFP emulation code due to a licensing conflict. Removing NWFPE and VFP from the kernel will effectively render older ARM hardware on Linux useless until a solution is determined.

      Russell King, the maintainer of the ARM code for the Linux kernel, announced this removal on the linux-arm-kernel mailing list. The NWFPE (NetWinder Floating Point Emulator) and VFP (Vector Floating Point) code is for emulating floating-point operations within the kernel. While this code is critical to ARM hardware without hardware floating-point support, the code needs to be dropped due to a licensing conflict.

    • NFC Solution Supported In Linux Kernel 3.9 Release
    • Hisense Mobile, Solarflare and Thomas-Krenn Join Linux Foundation

      The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Hisense Mobile, Solarflare and Thomas-Krenn.AG are joining the organization.

    • Welcome Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project

      The Xen Project is 10 years-old this week, and its contributors have doubled in the last few years. Xen usage continues to grow and today the project is being deployed in public IaaS environments by some of the world’s largest companies.

      Additionally, the Xen Project has adopted mainline kernel development practices and is progressing ever closer to the mainline kernel community. As of Linux kernel version 3.0, Linux can run unmodified as a Xen host or guest

    • Xen become a Linux Foundation collaborative project

      The Linux Foundation has taken over the development of Xen as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Now Xen will be independently funded and will benefit from the collaborative development which will engage some of the biggest names in the IT world.

    • Citrix bequeaths Xen to the Linux Foundation

      In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.

    • Linux Foundation takes over Xen, enlists Amazon in war to rule the cloud
    • Citrix bequeaths Xen to the Linux Foundation

      In an effort to attract a more diverse set of contributors, enterprise software vendor Citrix has donated its open source Xen hypervisor to the Linux Foundation.

      Citrix announced the donation Monday at the Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit, being held this week in San Francisco.

    • Citrix and Industry Leaders Usher in New Era for Open Source Xen
    • Linux Collaboration Summit keynotes stream live

      The Linux Foundation is offering live video streaming of all of the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions to be held Monday, April 15. Day 1 keynotes feature presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Intel, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.

    • Xen becomes a Linux Foundation project

      Xen, Citrix’s popular open-source hypervisor, is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project with the backing of such major technology powers such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Intel.

    • Talks by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Adapteva Underscore Industry Trend Toward Collaboration

      The Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin sees a new trend in the technology industry toward a collaborative development model. Companies are focusing their research and development efforts outward and participating more in open source projects to accelerate innovation and progress, he said in his opening remarks at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.

      It’s no coincidence, then, that the conference kicked off this morning with a warm welcome to the Xen Project, the foundation’s newest collaborative project, which is also celebrating its 10-year anniversary today as a virtualization platform. The announcement comes on the heels of last week’s OpenDaylight software-defined networking project launch.

    • Jon Corbet’s Linux Forecast, Netflix and More from Collaboration Summit
    • 5 Great Quotes of the Day from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit

      Keynote presenters had some interesting things to say at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San Francisco on Monday. Here are some top quotes. What did you take away from the sessions? Please share your favorite quotes and moments in the comments, below.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Intel OpenGL Performance On The Linux 3.9 Kernel

        Our latest benchmarks at Phoronix of the Linux 3.9 kernel are looking at the performance of the Intel DRM driver when handling an Intel Core i7 “Ivy Bridge” processor with HD 4000 graphics. The Intel OpenGL Linux graphics performance with this forthcoming kernel was compared to the earlier Linux 3.8, 3.7, 3.6, and 3.5 kernel releases.

      • Intel Mesa Driver Gets HiZ Support For Haswell

        If running the latest stable components powering the Intel Linux graphics driver (namely the Linux kernel, Mesa, and xf86-video-intel), the open-source graphics support for the forthcoming Haswell processors should be in fairly good shape. However, like Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, it will take some time before the Linux graphics driver is fully-optimized. Fortunately, there’s another newly-enabled Haswell feature to report within Mesa.

      • New AMD Catalyst Beta Supports Linux 3.8, TF2 Fixes

        AMD has released a new Catalyst Linux graphics driver, which supports modern Linux kernel releases while having various other fixes in store too. Some of the OpenGL fixes will help those playing some Linux Steam client games.

      • Bitcoin Mining Comes To Radeon Open-Source OpenCL

        With the increasing popularity as of late with the Bitcoin virtual currency, the open-source Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack has advanced to support Bitcoin mining.

        Tom Stellard of AMD has spent the past few days working on getting the Radeon Gallium3D OpenCL stack in a state where it works to run the “bfgminer” Bitcoin mining application running on the open-source Radeon HD driver. After a few days, he has it working with some new code, but the performance isn’t all that great.

    • Benchmarks

      • Tuning Btrfs vs. F2FS, EXT4, XFS File-Systems

        When earlier this week delivering Btrfs benchmarks with various mount options for tuning the next-generation Linux file-system, some Linux users were hoping to see other file-systems tossed into the test mix too for reference. Here’s those numbers.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments/WMs

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop/GTK

      • GNOME 3.8 Classic for openSUSE 12.3
      • Trying KDE’s File Manager -Dolphin- in GNOME 3.8

        It was a time when the first letter of many programs in Linux was “g” or “k”, to declare if something was made for GNOME or KDE. Back then, KDE programs (made of Qt) was looking awful under GNOME (made of GTK) and vice versa.

        Nowadays with the very improved theming you can hardly understand if an application is written in Qt or GTK or even in another toolkit like Java. I remember when Mark Shuttleworth had talked 3-4 years ago for the development of a common environment in Ubuntu that could genuine run GTK or QT Apps, toolkit-invisible to users.

      • Gnome 3.8 Review… Still Shit!
      • GNOME Photos 3.8.0

        After a year of development, I am happy to announce GNOME Photos 3.8.0. This completes the last unfinished GNOME 3.8 feature – Photos is now the latest in the set of Finding & Reminding applications for GNOME 3.

  • Distributions

    • Specialized Gaming Distros Down and Out?

      Gaming on Linux is fun. A bit geeky, but fun. There is no dearth of free and open-source games for Linux. Some are plain awesome, some come handy when you want to kill time, and some exist just for the purpose of showing to the world that a geek in one corner of the world can build games on their own. The gaming universe is not as large on Linux as what it is on Windows, of course, but we’re getting there, one step at a time.

    • 10 Top Widely Used Linux Distributions of 2012

      Linux is one of the powerful and standard operating system which at present is growing faster and faster in computer operating system planet. It offers excellent performance and speed. Linux is very stable and reliable in terms of usage. It also provides several administrative tools and utilities that help you to manage your system effectively.

    • New Releases

      • [pfSense] 2.0.3 Release Now Available!

        I’m happy to announce the release of pfSense 2.0.3. This is a maintenance release with some bug and security fixes since 2.0.2 release. You can upgrade from any previous release to 2.0.3.

    • Screenshots

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Arch Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Bring in the clones – CentOS and Scientific Linux

        In March 2013 two projects, CentOS and Scientific Linux, released updates to their respective distributions. Both projects provide clones of Enterprise Linux free of cost. As such both projects are important to the Linux ecosystem as they provide a means for users to take advantage of stable, high quality software without the high cost associated with enterprise quality products. While both projects released clones of Enterprise Linux 6.4 and while both projects maintain binary compatibility with their upstream software provider, these projects do carry subtle differences. They may be binary compatible with each other, but each project takes a slightly different approach in their presentation and configuration. With this in mind I would like to talk about what it is like to set up both CentOS and Scientific Linux.

      • Red Hat Launches Open Source OpenStack RDO

        Red Hat is accelerating its involvement with the open source OpenStack cloud platform project with a new community distribution of OpenStack.

      • Red Hat Advances Enterprise OpenStack Distro to Early Adopter Program

        OpenStack is an open source framework for building and managing private, public and hybrid infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. RDO, the name for Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution (which stands for Red Hat Distribution of OpenStack), may not have a name as catchy as the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, but its function will be similar.

        The Fedora community adds new features upstream before they become incorporated in the Linux-based operating system and eventually make their way into Red Hat’s commercially available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). RDO will be a freely available, community-supported distribution of OpenStack that runs on RHEL, Fedora and their derivatives and offers a pure upstream OpenStack experience.

      • JBoss Data Grid 6.1: High Availability, Faster Recovery

        Red Hat this week unveiled JBoss Data Grid 6.1, an update to its in-memory database, with significant new functionality for high availability and disaster recovery. Its first update in nearly a year, Red Hat’s database for large-scale enterprise applications now supports data-center replication across geographically dispersed clusters as well as the ability to perform rolling upgrades without interrupting service.

    • Debian Family

      • Lucas Nussbaum is new Debian leader

        Lucas Nussbaum, an assistant professor of computer science from Universite de Lorraine, is the new leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project.

      • DPL election is over, congratulations Lucas Nussbaum!

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS vs. Ubuntu 13.04 Benchmarks

            For those that may be currently running Ubuntu 12.04.2 as the latest Ubuntu Linux Long-Term Support release but are considering upgrading to Ubuntu 13.04 for better performance, here are benchmarks comparing the two Ubuntu Linux releases when tested on an Apple MacBook Pro and Lenovo ThinkPad. Overall, there’s a few areas where the new Ubuntu Linux release delivers worthwhile performance improvements over the year-old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

          • Enable Different Wallpapers for Each Workspace in Ubuntu 13.04
          • 7 Subtle Unity Changes You Might Not Notice in 13.04

            Ubuntu 13.04 will be released later this month, and whilst many will be focusing on the big bang-whizz changes – like new animation effects, features and app changes, few will give much attention to the subtler changes.

          • The good and bad of Ubuntu 13.04 beta 2
          • No Official pre-press Ubuntu 13.04 CD/DVD will be distributed by Canonical

            But starting from Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail), pre-pressed Ubuntu CD/DVD will only be made available only for LTS release (the next one will be 14.04 LTS ) from this point forward. This is in-line with Canonical policy to only concentrate on supporting Ubuntu LTS.

          • Easily Sign The Ubuntu Code Of Conduct With CoC Signing Assistant

            Signing the Ubuntu Code of Conduct may seem difficult, especially for relatively new Linux users so to make things easier, Marten de Vries has created an application called Code of Conduct Signing Assistant which should make make it easier to sign the Ubuntu Code of Conduct.

          • Ubuntu Software Center Explored

            Over the years, the methods of installing new software onto Linux systems has evolved a great deal. These days, modern distributions use tools like the Ubuntu Software Center to make software installation as simple as point-and-click.

            In this article, I’ll explore the Ubuntu Software Center, it’s earliest beginnings, how the back-end works and where it still needs some fine-tuning for the future.

          • App Ecosystem for Ubuntu Mobile Growing Steadily

          • Flavours and Variants

            • 10 Reasons to Love Lubuntu 12.10
            • The Other Shoe Drops: Founder Announces Retirement, Fuduntu End of Life

              Sadly, following on the heels of that story, Founder +Andrew Wyatt made a formal announcement this morning regarding his planned retirement from active work on and end of life for the Fuduntu project.

            • Fuduntu Linux is closing its doors

              Fuduntu’s last release will be version 2013.3, he added. September 30 will be the last official day of Fuduntu Linux.

            • Fuduntu Team meeting held on April 14, 2013

              On Sunday, April 14, the Fuduntu team held a public meeting on IRC. Many things were discussed, including some issues that have major implications for both the team and community. Among the things discussed were introduction of team members, status of various teams, and the future of Fuduntu.
              The biggest topic discussed was the future of Fuduntu. The team has been striving to bring a stable system to the community and we believe we’ve been able to do that. One of the key aspects of that was using GNOME 2. However, as time has gone by, support for GTK2 has decreased dramatically. With this, apps using GTK2 have been moved to GTK3 and old versions are no longer being maintained for either bugs or security flaws.

            • Fuduntu Linux pivoting to rebase project

              The Fuduntu developers have decided that their current path of producing a GNOME 2 desktop with a Fedora based distribution as a rolling release is becoming technically problematic and have “voted to end-of-life Fuduntu Linux”. Fuduntu originally appeared in 2010 as a fork of Fedora designed for netbooks with power management applets and various optimisations for running on portable devices.The most recent release, Fuduntu 2013.2, appeared on 8 April.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Dedoimedo reviews OpenPandora – Chapter one!

      I rarely review hardware, mostly my own purchases, which usually come in the form of this or that laptop, some desktops, plus an odd phone here and there. Approx. a month back, I was contacted by Michael Mrozek, the CEO of OpenPandora GmbH, and asked to review their Pandora product, the world’s smallest, most powerful micro-gaming computer.

    • ARM-based device developers get SMARC COMs
    • Tiny COM runs Linux, Android on quad-core i.MX6

      CompuLab is shipping a Linux- and Android-ready COM built around the 1.2GHz Freescale i.MX6 processor, giving developers a choice of one, two, or four ARM Cortex-A9 cores. The CM-FX6 measures 75×65 mm, offers up to 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and uses dual 140-pin connectors to supply interfaces like I2C, CAN, SATA, and HDMI.

    • Interesting embedded device opportunity: mobile ALPRs
    • Raspberry Pi Tops 1 Million In Sales

      Raspberry Pi is racking up some major sales. The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced last week that more than one million of the popular Linux-based devices have been sold to date.

      Posting on the company’s blog, the team at Raspberry also announced that it has greatly scaled up production for the devices.

    • Phones

      • Tizen DevCon issues 2013 presentations list v1

        After reviewing more than 160 session proposals, the program committee of Tizen Developers Conference 2013 has published the event’s preliminary list of 45 presentations. The sessions will be organized in three tracks: Tizen project, process, and progress; app development and deployment; and platform and device development.

      • What’s Up Dock?

        If you have followed my column during the past few years, you’ll know that I am a big fan of having a portable Linux environment with me wherever I go. For years, this took the form of small laptops (like the Fujitsu P series) and most recently the Nokia N900, which took the form factor down to pocket size.

        When I got the N900, I thought technology finally had caught up to a dream of mine: the ability to carry my computer in my pocket and, when I’m out walking around, interface with it via the small keyboard and touchscreen. When I get home, I can dock it, and it will expand to a larger display with a proper keyboard and mouse and become my regular computer. The big advantage of this idea is that I can keep my files and environment with me wherever I go.

      • Ballnux

      • Android

        • Best Download Managers For Linux

          Downloading huge amount of files using your web browser can be quite tedious. Many times downloads are interrupted and sometimes, you’ll find that they are slower than usual. One of the worst things, however, when it comes to downloading files using web browsers is that the moment you close the browser or lose the connection, all your downloaded effort goes to waste. This is where download managers come in handy. These small applications are responsible for ensuring that you have an uninterrupted download that can be resumed anytime you want. Moreover, apart from giving you the core features, these tools also let you download your favorite content via proxy and FTP as well.

        • Android phones to top 1B by year-end, Eric Schmidt says
        • Facebook Home And The Promise Of Android

          If you’re an iPhone user, you might be feeling a little left behind, because Facebook launched an application called Facebook Home, touted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the “next version of Facebook.” In fact, you might be feeling this way if you’re an Android user, too. For now, only a handful of select devices can even run Home (officially) — notably missing from the lineup is Google’s Nexus 4, the latest in the lineup of Nexus-branded flagship Android phones — devices that users adopt in particular to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new app releases.

          But Facebook promised that more handsets will be supported in time, as will tablets. Well, only Android ones, that is.

          It’s too soon to say whether Facebook Home will live up to the company’s claims and expectations of becoming the new way people interact with the social network, or whether it will go down only as a notable experiment on the social network’s part. If the latter, it won’t be a major loss to the company, as Facebook will continue to have access to data from a core group of heavy Facebook enthusiasts. It will learn what keeps users engaged, what posts and images catch their eye and their clicks, and, eventually, which advertisements do, too.

        • UDOO Mini PC Single Board Android, Linux, Arduino System Unveiled (video)

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • EOMA-68 cards could lead to upgradeable tablets (and other computers)

        You know how you can upgrade some components in your computer when they start to feel stale instead of going out and buying a whole new PC? That’s a lot harder to do with a laptop than a desktop, and the only “upgrade” most mobile tablets offer is the option to add a microSD card.

        Rhombus Tech wants to change that by developing a platform that lets you swap out the CPU, memory, and other vital components of a tablet (or laptop, or desktop) when you want to upgrade — without requiring you to buy a new display, case, or other components.

      • Windows tablets don’t even rate a blip in the $64 billion tablet market, say report

        The ABI Research report says that an estimated 150 million tablets will ship in 2013, worth an estimated $64 billion. The total number of tablets will grow by a projected 38% over 2012, and the total revenue will grow a projected 28%.

Free Software/Open Source

  • You Use Open Source Tools? The Robot Recruiters Know It — and Like It

    As we’ve reported, the rise of the cloud and Big Data tools is also giving rise to a need for expertise in using these tools. Jobs for people with Linux and Big Data skills are readily available around the world.

    In an interesting spin on this trend, though, there are also some signs emerging that Big Data analysis tools could even match skilled workers up with their ideal jobs in ways that human recruiters can’t. And, these tools may put special emphasis on how savvy job seekers are with open source technology and general computing knowledge.

  • OSI Open Source Community Summit

    The License Clinic for US Federal Agencies is not the only new departure for the Open Source Initiative this May. OSI is also reaching out to a wide spectrum of open source communities with its Open Source Community Summit in Washington DC on May 10 2013, where we’ll be able to gain a much fuller idea of the needs of those communities. Sponsored by Google, Red Hat and Eclipse, and chaired by OSI President Simon Phipps, this is OSI’s first Community Summit.

  • BCS aims to promote open source awareness for females

    BCSWomen is working with BCS Open Source specialist group and Flossie to host a number of one-day career workshops to promote open source development as a second career opportunity.

    These events are part of the organisation’s campaign to advise more women to take up or return to careers in IT, with modern estimates claiming that women account for less than a fifth of ICT managers and 21 per cent of computer analysts.

  • Increasing participation of women in Free and Open Source Software

    Few women have been historically applying for Google Summer of Code, a program in which Google provides stipends for students to work for three months on FOSS projects. Last year, after many efforts by both the Google team and the community to increase the diversity in the program, about 100 of 1200 participants or 8.3% were women, which was a highest level of participation by women yet.

  • BCSWomen & Flossie team to bolster open source female job roles
  • Open-Source Software Maker Races to Funding Deadline

    In a bold experiment, nonprofit Mission software developer Yorba Foundation is bidding for sustainable support through crowdfunding for its open-source email program, Geary.

    Founded in 2009 by Google alumnus Adam Dingle, the Capp Street nonprofit aims to raise $100,000 in the next nine days via a campaign on the funding platform Indiegogo. If the plan works, Yorba’s strategy could blaze a trail for other open-source companies to support the creation of free software.

    “We want to be able to say, ‘Yeah this worked for us, and you should give it a try,’” said Jim Nelson, Yorba’s executive director. “This might be a way for other companies to raise money and keep going.” For now, Yorba gets its financial backing from Dingle.

  • New Open Source Engine on its Way!
  • Open Source Music Streaming Service Napster.fm Released

    When the MP3 format was unleashed onto the relatively young Internet, it was an absolute game changer. It finally made audio files small enough to practically distribute over the Internet, as high-speed connections were still a luxury item for the majority of Internet users. But while it was the MP3 format that made it possible, it was undeniably Napster that brought it to the mass media.

    In 1999, Napster completely changed the way people shared and listened to music; it helped start the trend of abandoning physical media for digital. Unfortunately, it also brought the wrath of the recording industry, and Napster was sued into oblivion after only 2 years.

  • Operating System Features I’d Like to See

    FOSS operating systems are great and I enjoy using and adapting them, but they are missing certain features which could make them even better.

    One issue with FOSS operating systems is the plethora of package managers. Fedora even has two different package managers: apt-get and yum. Slackware has their own version of apt-get that they call slapt-get. The three BSDs use pkgsrc and the Sharp Zaurus used a similar package manager called ipkg. If you use KDE you are probably familiar with kpackage.

  • Events

    • Linux Collaboration Summit keynote videos now available

      Videos from the Linux Collaboration Summit’s day 1 keynote sessions, recorded on April 15, are now available for on-demand streaming. The videos include presentations by Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung, Netflix, Yocto, OpenMAMA, Adapteva, and LWN’s Jon Corbet.

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Chrome OS devices get security updates

        Google Chromebook users running the stable channel of the Chrome OS are getting an update 26.0.1410.57. This update brings some security improvements. But since Chromebooks gets update automatically, you don’t have to do anything. Just keep an eye on the notification bubble and if there is one, restart your machine to keep it updated.

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla Shows Off TowTruck, for Browser-based Collaboration

        Over at Mozilla, they continue to throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Mozilla Labs is out with an early alpha version of TowTruck, a project designed to facilitate Skype-style collaboration online, leveraging new features found in the Firefox and Chrome browsers. In a post announcing the experiment, Mozilla Labs warns that the technology is experimental at this point, but it looks like a very easy way to incorporate real-time collaboration into any website.

  • SaaS/Big Data

    • Rackspace attacks Amazon with new cloudy clones

      Look out, Amazon Web Services. Rackspace is cloning its own cloudy service – and to quote Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady, it’s “comin’ to getcha.”

      Way back when, Rackspace Hosting teamed up with NASA to create the OpenStack community precisely to leverage the smarts and excitement of the open source community to take on the closed and controlled AWS cloud. Now Rackspace will take OpenStack and leverage its own experience in building custom infrastructure to house OpenStack clouds, and deliver it as a service to telecommunication and service provider customers.

    • Rackspace to offer OpenStack deployments for service providers
    • 9 Key Value Stores for Big Data
    • NetApp Unveils a File-Share Service Proposal at OpenStack Summit
    • Who Wrote OpenStack Grizzly

      The open source OpenStack Grizzly cloud platform release debuted the first week of April benefiting from over 480 contributors making over 7,600 updates.

      While the base of contribution is broad, one vendor stands at the top of the list, in terms of number of code commits made. While the initial releases of OpenStack were dominated by code commits from Rackspace and Nebula, for Grizzly, Red Hat now leads the list.

      Red Hat made 836 commits across core OpenStack projects and 1,854 commits across all OpenStack projects. Red Hat developers added 121,632 lines code and remove 87,145 lines of code.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Education

    • Teaching children how to code

      Coding is the language of the future, with the power to create and modify the computer programs and websites that increasingly shape our day-to-day lives. While millions of people in the United States spend hours each day engaged with interactive technologies, relatively few truly understand how they work; and fewer take an active role in developing software and websites.

      Still, some organizations are advocating more be done to teach young people about computer programing and coding. It is no secret that younger generations, born into an age of smartphone apps and near-ubiquitous Internet access, tend to be more enthusiastic and adept at using new technologies than their parents and grandparents. The key word here is “using” technology, as opposed to creating new programs and reimagining existing processes.

    • Lessons from Koha in open source project ownership

      While compiling OSS Watch’s list of Open Source Options for Education, I discovered Koha, an open source Integrated Library System (ILS). I discovered, with some confusion, that there seemed to be several ILS systems called Koha. Investigation into the reason for this uncovered a story which provides valuable lessons for open source project ownership, including branding, trademarks, and conflict resolution.

      Koha started its life in New Zealand (reflected in the name, which is a Māori word meaning reciprocal gift, or a gift with expectations). It was originally commissioned by the Horowhenua Library Trust (HLT), written by Katipo Communications Ltd, and released under the GPL. Crucially, Katipo held the copyright on the Koha code.

  • Business

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Epiphany SDK Insights and Future

      The Epiphany SDK started life as a prototype binutils & GCC port by Alan Lehotsky, which would run code on a Verilator model of the Epiphany chip.

      Embecosm became involved in March 2009, initially providing an implementation of the GNU Debugger. Then over a period of 6 weeks starting that September we upgraded GCC to a commercially robust implementation, eliminating all regression test failures from the C and C++ compilers. This was still before the first silicon had been spun, and with testing against a Verilator model.

    • Stallman Spake

      It’s too much for ordinary consumers, the vast majority of users of IT, to deal with a pile of such issues when moving to Free Software. Over time more manufacturers are supplying drivers for Linux so this issue may well disappear, but in the meantime some compromise must be made in practice. There’s nothing wrong with the principles however. It’s the right way to do IT with shared, re-used, redistributable software because it’s the best quality at the lowest price and it respects the freedom of the users.

    • GNU/Linux is difficult?

      GNU/Linux emerges thanks to the free software ideology, but independently of this ideology, we have a great freedom of choice and decision. For example, customized our operating system according to our preferences, tastes or needs. In Windows we can customize it partially through skins or themes, we can change the window color, transparency, change the login screen, boot screen among other little things. But you set out to change some other aspect in particular? Suppose the taskbar makes you ugly, annoying or maybe want to add some extra functionality. It will be difficult get this directly, that is, that it allows Windows you do beforehand, maybe we can use external programs, most of which are pay and usually, the result only partially mitigates the need that we had. In GNU / Linux this is possible and more so, if you do not like what you see can change completely, if you already bored as seen Gnome you can exchange it for KDE, If KDE does not fill your expectations can change for XFCE. If specific application has not simply what you expect you replace the other. Want to try another version of GNU/Linux? Just download and try it!

    • Boston Marathon bombings

      Thank you to everyone for thinking of us at the Free Software Foundation office in downtown Boston as yesterday’s terrible news unfolded. We appreciate all the concerned emails and queries.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Cabinet Office appoints Open Standards Board to drive open source use

      The Cabinet Office has announced the appointment of an Open Standards Board to oversee the development of a level playing field for open source and proprietary software providers in government.

      Since November, departments have been required to ensure all new IT contracts with software suppliers abide by open standards principles, allowing interoperability and data and document format interoperability. The Cabinet Office central spend and control process is responsible for ensuring departments adhere to the policy when procuring software.

  • Licensing

    • A Dual Model of Open Source License Growth

      Every open source project needs to decide on an open source license. This decision is of high economic relevance: Just which license is the best one to help the project grow and attract a community? The most common question is: Should the project choose a restrictive (reciprocal) license or a more permissive one? As an important step towards answering this question, this paper analyses actual license choice and correlated project growth from ten years of open source projects. It provides closed analytical models and finds that around 2001 a reversal in license choice occurred from restrictive towards

    • Open source cola and the ‘Napster moment’ for the food business

  • Openness/Sharing

  • Programming

    • Funf 0.4 brings under the hood changes to sensor framework

      The developers of the Funf open source Java-based sensor framework for mobile phones have released version 0.4 of their software. Most changes in this version, the developers say, are under the hood and affect the architecture of the framework. Changes include a new pipeline interface, a redesigned configuration process, and changes that mean that Funf now runs as a single service instead of spawning a service for each sensor probe.

    • Benchmarking PHP 5.5 Beta 3: Not Too Much Over 5.4

      PHP 5.5 Beta 3 was released today wotj a few bug-fixes and other minor changes. To complement the PHP benchmarks earlier this week, here are some benchmarks of the forthcoming PHP 5.5.

    • RunRev’s Open Source LiveCode

      RunRev is launching an open source version of its LiveCode application development software. The finance was raised by a Kickstarter campaign earlier in the year.

      LiveCode has achieved a certain amount of success as a paid-for product designed for cross-platform application design, but RunRev wanted more users, so raised $750,000 in a Kickstarter campaign.

    • Generating Reports With Code

      Last week I was running load tests against a new server and needed to produce reports from the results. I wanted to have graphs to show the response time as the test progressed, and thought this would be a good time to try a couple of different methods of creating the reports. The first report was generated with Microsoft Word and Excel, and as I struggled with Excel’s insane copy and paste, and Word’s inane auto layout decisions, the one thought that kept occurring to me was “why does anyone put up with this?” The next step was to break out the power tools with Python and LaTeX.

      I used siege for the load testing, and redirected the output to a file. The siege output gives me a nice baseline to work from, but simply redirecting the output also gives some cruft that needs to be cleaned up. During the first go around with Excel, I needed to open up each file in Vim to clean it up before I could import the data. In the process of cleaning up the files, of course the thought occurred to me that I should automate that task, but I try to avoid unnecessary scripting when I can. Once the graphs were created, they needed to be copied and pasted into the Word document, which I then spent ten minutes trying to get each graph to look uniform. Admitted, I’m not a Word or Excel expert, but I do know that repetitive tasks and document layout are two things that computers do well. I should let them do it.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Intel touts free HTML5 development environment

      Intel launched a free HTML5 Development Environment at IDF in Beijing last week. The tool is said to enable cross-platform development, test, and deployment of apps that can run on multiple device types and operating systems, and which can be distributed through multiple application stores.

      Intel says it’s investing in HTML5 “to help mobile application developers lower total costs and improve time-to-market for cross-platform app development and deployment.”

Leftovers

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