• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• The Future is Now

  So, again, the premise is wrong, that GNU/Linux is at the 1% level. Reality is very different in other parts of the world. GNU/Linux is being promoted/advertised/pushed/sold. Check out Dell’s site in China. Dell has no problem selling GNU/Linux there. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is just unaware of that…

Server

• Calxeda EnergyCore ARMs the Server Market

  To date, ARM-based microprocessors have been used mostly in consumer electronics. Thanks to a new push from ARM vendor Calxeda, ARM will soon find a home in data center servers, too.

• Infoblox Accelerates DNS

  “ISP infrastructure is increasingly being stressed by the advent of smartphones, driving bandwidth requirements higher while also stressing the DNS infrastructure, where even a single smartphone wake-up requires 36 DNS lookups,” Kevin Dickson, vice president of product management at Infoblox told InternetNews.com.

  Inside the Infoblox 4010 is a an Intel Xeon 5650 running at 2.66 GHz with 6 Cores and 4 x 300 GB hard drives and 24 GB of DDR3 RAM. The base operating system is the Infoblox NIOS (network infrastructure operating system) which is built on top off a Linux kernel. For the DNS features, the Infoblox system is based on the open source BIND DNS server, including what Dickson referred to as, “extensive enhancements to add management functionality.”

Kernel Space

• The 2011 Kernel Summit

• LinuxCon Europe Pics Available Now

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Deb and RPM Packages Finally Released for Burster [Play 3D Blender Games in Web Browser]

  • ETC – where the config files lurk

  • Steganography Made Easy in Linux

  • Weekend Project: Ensure a Hassle-Free Linux Upgrade

  • UPnP with People: Open Souomb

    If you buy a “smart” TV or DVR these days, the odds are that it will support UPnP for hassle-free media sharing. Thus devices like TiVos can locate each other and share recordings across the LAN, and a lot of Linux music and video players support connecting to UPnP shares as well. Give it a moment’s thought, however, and you’ll probably ask yourself “does it need a specialized device, or can I turn my existing Linux box into a full-blown UPnP server for my existing content?” Well, good news: not only can you, but it is pretty painless to do.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma Workspaces 4.8

    Having returned from two weeks away in Morocco, things have been hectic and Busy-with-a-capital-B. I’ve been working on some exciting new possibilities for Plasma Active which are not quite at the point that I can speak openly about them, but it’s been taking a fair amount of my time and energy .. and I think it will pay off next year.

  • Nokia to let go Qt ownership

    Nokia would abnegate the ownership of Qt, a cross-platform C++ application framework, shortly. Nokia would comply byopen-governance and would remain as ‘Maintainers of Qt’, said Kalle Karkas, head of Operator Marketing, Nokia, Finland at the third edition of the Nokia Developer Conference 2011 held in Bangalore today. Nokia would continue to invest in Qt and it has been recruiting people in this arena. He added that Nokia is not porting Qt to other platform but the company intends to focus on the developers community.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME Shell Now Works With Software Rendering!

    There’s some great news today: it’s now possible to run the GNOME Shell with Mutter but not having to rely upon any GPU hardware driver! Software rendering is now working with GNOME Shell rather than any fall-back thanks to improvements with Gallium3D’s LLVMpipe.

    Adam Jackson of Red Hat has announced to the world that it’s now possible for everyone to use GNOME Shell, regardless of whether you have a proper 3D hardware driver loaded. Adam says that as of tomorrow, LLVMpipe will no longer be treated as an unsupported driver for Fedora’s Rawhide, which is what will eventually be Fedora 17.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • GParted Live CD 0.10.0-3 Can Detect exFAT

    Clonezilla Live CD maker, Steven Shiau, proudly announced on November 2nd a new stable version of his GParted Live CD operating system for partitioning tasks.

    Being based on the latest build (11-02-2011) of Debian Sid, the new GParted Live CD 0.10.0-3 distribution brings the amazing and improved GParted 0.10.0 application, and a handful of improvements.

  • GParted Live update supports Btrfs resizing

    Version 0.10.0-3 of GParted Live, a small bootable Linux distribution that contains the GParted utility, has been released. GParted, which stands for Gnome PARTition EDitor, is a partition editor application that can be used to create, organise and delete disk partitions via a graphical user interface (GUI). Supported file systems include Btrfs, ext2, ext3, ext4, FAT16 and FAT32, HFS and HFS+, NTFS and others.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Sales Team and Channel Partners: Getting Cozier?

    Red Hat wrapped up a major channel partner conference last week. But the channel chatter continues within the Linux and open source specialist. Indeed, Red Hat is mulling potential ways to make sure the company’s internal sales team works even more closely with channel partners, according to North America Channel Chief Roger Egan. Here’s the update, and a look at how Red Hat plans to accelerate Linux, virtualization, Jboss middleware, cloud and storage sales through the channel.

    First, the sales chatter. Red Hat is exploring ways to ensure the company’s internal sales team has a “neutral” approach to revenue generation — potentially getting rewarded the same fee whether a deal is sold direct or indirect. As that internal chatter continues, Red Hat is making quantifiable progress with its partner program. The company expects to become the world’s first $1 billion open source company this fiscal year. Generally speaking, roughly 50 to 60 percent of Red Hat’s revenues come from partners. And more than 400 people — including 300 channel partners — attended a Red Hat partner conference in Florida last week.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Keynote: The Biggest Enemy Is Yourself

      While the Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening right now in the United States, over in India there is FUDCon, the Fedora conference.

      Kicking off today and running through the start of next week (6 November) is FUDCon India 2011. This conference for users and developers of Fedora is happening in Pune, India. Details on this year’s Fedora India conference can be found on the Fedora Project Wiki.

    • Fedora 16 is gold, but more importantly…

      EDIT: A previous version of this post listed the release as 2011-11-10, it’s actually 2011-11-08, my error! We did not delay two days or anything.

    • Fedora 16 Final Release Declared GOLD!

    • F17 heads up: gnome-shell for everyone!

    • GNOME Shell To Work Without 3D Acceleration In Fedora 17

      That means GNOME Shell will be available for everyone and GNOME Fallback will no longer be required, but this raises a question: will GNOME Fallback still be available (since GNOME Shell will work without 3D acceleration, GNOME Fallback – which exists because until now GNOME Shell didn’t run without 3D acceleration -, doesn’t have a purpose anymore)?

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Hacking the Unity Shell – An Alternative Apps Lens

        (fret not, this is not only a wall of text, there’s a juicy screencast at the end if you make it all the way)

        Me being the maintainer of the applications lens in Unity you might wonder why I am now blogging about an alternative apps lens – let alone why I actually wrote the alternative myself!

      • Put me on a highway and show me a sign

        My favorite quote in the whole thing, and there are many, comes from Ubuntu SABDFL* Mark Shuttleworth: “I fully accept that Unity may not be for you. Then don’t use it. On Ubuntu you can choose Unity, KDE, GNOME, XFCE, and many others.”

        And there you are, folks — certainly a unique concept of “community” in three words: My way or highway. Go ahead and use one of the other ‘buntus if you so desire, since we’re not changing the flagship for anyone or anything.

      • Ubuntu Community mourns the loss of André Gondim

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Review

        Once upon a time, I used to be a Gentoo user and made it a hobby to tweak my computer’s operating system to be as minimalist and high performance as possible. It was great fun and I learned a lot about what was going on with my computer. I knew what each file on my system did because I had directly or indirectly chosen for it to be there. At one point I had five Gentoo machines compiling away.

      • Finally! Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Will Recommend 64-bit

        There’s some good news coming out of the last day of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS developer summit. During a session that’s going on right now, it was decided that the 64-bit version of Ubuntu (beginning with 12.04 Precise) will finally be the recommended version over the 32-bit Ubuntu.

        While Linux was the first operating system to have strong x86_64/AMD64 support, there’s been Ubuntu 64-bit images from the start, and most hardware for several years has supported 64-bit software, Canonical / Ubuntu have always recommended the 32-bit version of Ubuntu over 64-bit (in terms of when going to the download area of Ubuntu.com, etc). With Ubuntu 12.04 next April, this will finally change so that U

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Linux Mint 12 Preview

          In Linux Mint 11 we made the decision to keep Gnome 2.32. The traditional Gnome desktop, although it’s not actively developed by the Gnome development team anymore, is still by far the most popular desktop within the Linux community. As other distributions adopted new desktops such as Unity and Gnome 3, many users felt alienated and consequently migrated to Linux Mint. We recorded a 40% increase in a single month and we’re now quickly catching up with Ubuntu for the number #1 spot within the Linux desktop market.

Devices/Embedded

• Rugged in-vehicle panel PC bristles with wireless options

• Industrial Embedded Computer supports Linux OS, dual CAN.

  Powered by 400 MHz ARM9 CPU, Matrix-522 comes with built-in 64 MB SDRAM, 128 MB NAND Flash, and 2 MB Data Flash for optimal performance in automotive, factory automation, and industrial control system applications. I/O includes 2 LANs, 2 RS-232/422/485 serial ports, 2 USB hosts, and 21 GPIO. Also, dual isolated CAN (Control Area Network) bus 2.0-compliant ports support CANSocket and CANOpen APIs. Fail-proof capabilities for system backup and recovery are also included.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android/Linux Smart Phones Blow Past the Competition

      That’s what we should be seeing in the market for PCs generally but competition is stifled by lock-in of OEMs, retailers and businesses. It’s about time that changed. In Q2, the world shipped 91 million notebook/desktop PCs. Change will come but it’s too slow for me. While FLOSS is taking over the mobile space, it will penetrate the monopoly more slowly, one purchase or installation at a time. In Q2 50 million PCs shipped with “7″.

    • How Andy Rubin kept Android open-source at its heart

      A year ago at Google HQ in Mountain View, Andy Rubin built a mechanical robot arm. “I put a hammer in its hand and connected it to a big Chinese gong. Whenever Android sells 10,000 units, the gong sounds and you can hear it through the whole building. When I designed it, it sounded three times a day: now it does it every three minutes. I really have to reprogram it…”

      Rubin is Google’s head of mobile and the creator of the Android operating system. He’s also a DIY robotics fanatic, in case you hadn’t guessed. At home, he has several remote-controlled helicopters, a retina-scanning entry system (“a great way of managing relations with ex-girlfriends — no problem giving keys back, just an update to the database”), a laser-controlled Segway, and a home cinema where the lights dim when the titles run — all designed and built by him. So naturally, he built another robot to celebrate the success of his most famous creation, Android.

      It’s an unusual way to boast, but Rubin is allowed some bombast. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this spring, the most important trade show worldwide for tablets and smartphones, 90 per cent of the devices unveiled ran Android. In August this year, tech analysis firm Canalys reported that 48 per cent of all smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2011 were Android devices. The nearest competitor was Apple, on 19 per cent. Android overtook Apple’s iOS in 2010 — according to Google, 500,000 Android devices are currently activated every day.

    • Hacking the Google TV Box Without Rooting It, Part 2

  • Ballnux

    • HTC smartphone offers 720p resolution, free Beats headphones

      HTC and Verizon Wireless announced a high-end Android 2.3 phone due Nov. 14 that’s said to be the first U.S. smartphone with “Beats Audio” integration. The HTC Rezound is equipped with a 1.5GHz, dual-core Qualcomm MDM9600 processor, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 4G LTE, and a 4.3-inch 1280 x 720 display, and features lightweight Beats headphones.

    • Review: Samsung Stratosphere nicely melds 4G LTE and hardware QWERTY

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Nook Tablet vs. Kindle Fire

    Barnes & Noble is expected to announce a 7-inch color tablet on November 7th, positioning it head-to-head with Amazon’s recently announced “Kindle Fire.” B&N’s “Nook Tablet” is rumored to have a slightly faster processor, twice the RAM and flash, and a $50 price premium relative to Amazon’s tablet, among other differences.

M$ Contributes to Samba

Chuckle. You know you’re winning when the enemy has to keep you alive… M$’s “partners” using FLOSS prevents M$ from using all its anti-competitive tactics.

Member Spotlight: KeyPoint CTO Explains Bridge Between Text Input and Open Source

Motaparti: At KeyPoint Technologies, we are a team that is passionate about combining linguistics and computing to deliver new experiences for consumers. Our initial focus lies in improving the current text input experiences across all types of connected devices like smart phones, feature phones, tablets, connected TVs and IVI systems. We are a trusted partner for OEMs, platform providers and developers looking to innovate and deliver an enhanced user experience in this area. We are privately owned, with our headquarters in Scotland and offices in India and the US.

The end of (Apache) Harmony

Apache Harmony, the project to produce an open source cleanroom implementation of Java, has been now been dispatched to the Apache Attic where projects are placed when they are discontinued. A vote was taken within the project management committee (PMC), which saw a 20 to 2 majority send the project’s codebase into the loft for storage. The code will reside in the Attic where other developers may continue to view and use it.

The Internet of Things comes to Eclipse

According to a study by Ericsson, by 2020 the world will contain some 50 billion network-enabled devices. Of these, many will be temporary or with low network bandwidth, or restricted in some other manner. RFID tags are a one such example of a restricted device.

Eurotech and IBM Contribute Software to Connect Next Generation of Wireless and Mobile Devices

Events

• Registration for SCALE 10X opens

  LOS ANGELES – The SCALE 10X team announces that registration has opened for the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America To register for SCALE 10X, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org and click on the Registration tab. Admission for SCALE 10X ranges from $10 for an Expo Only Ticket to $60 for a Full Access Pass. The Linux Beginner’s Training Class, a separate admission, is $25.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Forward button to become optional in Firefox

  • Firefox 8 Release Candidate Published for Download

    Mozilla has elevated the most recent Firefox 8 Beta to release candidate status.

  • A walk down Firefox memory lane

    The Principal Designer of Firefox, Alex Faaborg, the man behind almost every icon, button, and visual flourish in Firefox 3, 4, and beyond, is leaving Mozilla. Before departing, though, he has treated us to a list of his proudest UX achievements — including the Awesome Bar and the new Firefox logo — and also his department’s weirdest and most wonderful failures. Have you ever heard of the fluffy pie menu, or the stealth theme for private browsing? I thought not.

  • Knight-Mozilla Announces 2011 News Technology Fellows

    This week I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the opportunities that lie at the intersection of open-source philosophies and journalism. Today the “thinking out loud” stops, and the “making it happen” begins. And that begins with the announcement of the 2011/12 Knight-Mozilla fellows.

  • Call for Ireland to take a lead in the Mozilla and open source communities

    Ireland is well placed to become a leader in the Mozilla and open source communities, according to the inaugural meet up of a Mozilla Ireland group in Dublin’s Odeon on Wednesday.

SaaS

• In the Open Source Cloud Race, Support Will Differentiate the Players

  Open source cloud computing solutions are proliferating, as businesses and organizations demand flexible solutions for deploying public and private cloud applications. Among these solutions, OpenStack remains one of the highest profile examples, with vendors ranging from Hewlett-Packard to Dell to Citrix supporting it. Increasingly, OpenStack will face off with Eucalyptus Systems, which we’ve covered since its inception here at OStatic. In a piece for InfoWorld, Savio Rodrigues makes some good points about why Eucalyptus Systems may win organizations over and outpace OpenStack in the long run.

• OpenNebula profile : Open source Government Cloud Computing

• Why OpenStack will falter

  After reading a recent interview with Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, I’m beginning to reconsider my views on the contest between Eucalyptus and OpenStack becoming the dominant open source cloud platform.

  The vendor attention around OpenStack of late has been nothing short of amazing. Once a project controlled by Rackspace, vendors such as Dell, Citrix Systms, and Hewlett-Packard have joined the OpenStack open source community. Rackspace has given control of the project to the OpenStack foundation, apparently at the behest of large vendors contributing to the project. However, as Mickos states, OpenStack is still a work in progress and not production-ready — yet.

• Cloudera founder’s new project shows Hadoop’s future

  Cloudera founder Christophe Bisciglia launched a new company today called Odiago, whose WibiData product utilizes Hadoop and HBase to let businesses make the most of online user data. The details around investors (Eric Schmidt, Mike Olson and SV Angel) and Bisciglia’s history at Cloudera and Google have made the rounds already, but what’s not as widely known is how WibiData actually works.

Databases

• Danish Government Licenses Basho’s Proprietary Enterprise NoSQL Data Storage Software to Operate Nationwide Medical Prescription Card Program

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice4Kids (OOo4Kids) – What has changed?

  I liked OOo4Kids then and I like it now. You get small, incremental improvements, which is a good thing. But like I wrote earlier, the journey is still long. There’s huge potential here, and it must be tapped. This require larger, bigger, more drastic, and faster changes to make the software the ultimate educational weapon.

  I would recommend completely overhauling the interface in non-Writer utilities and maybe even ditching them altogether, especially if children are not likely to use them. Then, focus most of the effort on making the program as safe and smart to use, with intelligent hints toward efficiency, separation of content and automated tasks.

  Version 1.2 is better than its half-number sibling, but there’s more to be done. I’m pleased overall and still quite optimistic, so I shall surely follow its progress into puberty. With some luck and lots of hard work, this could be the best office suite yet, for all the unintended reasons.

  Thanks to Alexandros for the recommendation!

• VMware out, Twitter in at Java executive committee election

Business

• Email Firm Open-Xchange Anticipates 42 Million Users by Year End

  Open source email and groupware provider Open-Xchange (www.open-xchange.com) announced on Friday at its third annual Open-Xchange Summit that it expects to have more than 42 million users by year end – an increase of 75 percent over the prior year.

• Semi-Open Source

  • Pentaho Announces Extreme Scale In-Memory Analytics

  • SugarCRM Arms Developer Community with More Tools with Newest Version of Sugar 6

    SugarCRM, the world’s fastest growing customer relationship management (CRM) company, today announced the release of Sugar 6.3, a major upgrade to its Community Edition. Since 2004, there have been more than ten million downloads of Sugar and its related projects, delivering value to more than 850,000 people at more than 70,000 organizations worldwide.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation

  Join us, EFF, Demand Progress, and Fight for The Future in opposing the latest round of Internet Blacklist legislation.

Project Releases

• Blog » jQuery 1.7 Released

  Thanks to your help in testing and reporting bugs during the beta period, we believe we have a solid, stable release. If you do find problems, file a bug and be sure to choose jQuery 1.7 in the version selection. Also be sure to provide a jsFiddle test case so we can quickly analyze the problem.

Public Services/Government

• Government publishes open source guidelines

  The Cabinet Office has published an open source procurement toolkit in an effort to increase its adoption in the public sector.

  The toolkit contains information on procuring open source software as well as guides to vendors and what sort of costs are likely to be associated with going down the open source route.

• LinuxIT Supports Cabinet Office Open Source Toolkit

Openness/Sharing

• Four ways open source principles can improve your business

  More than ever, companies are embracing the principles of open source to make major improvements, both internally and externally. Openness, transparency, democratization, and collaboration can be used to make your business a better place to work and create a better culture.

• Open Hardware

  • Open Hardware Journal – First Edition

    Although I Programmer is first and foremost a programming magazine, we can’t ignore the hardware. Open source software has been a well known idea, and something of a success, for decades, open source hardware is relatively new. You can say that open source hardware was born out the of the “maker” movement, but for such an obvious idea it has been slow to take off. The one big notable exception being the Arduino.

    In an effort to popularize the open hardware movement we now have the Open Hardware Journal starting with November 1, 2011 Issue 1. As it says on the cover page you are free to read it, copy it and redistribute it – as long as you don’t charge a fee, of course..

Programming

• Google Web Toolkit and Web Services: The XML Way

• Project Proposal: JFX

The Microsoft way… or the Highway

I finally have to bring this up, as it’s been bothering me for years. At one location, I’m forced to use Microsoft Outlook 2010 for email, because it is all that is supported. Being in IT, I can adjust to various programs, even ones I don’t like. Except that there’s one thing with Outlook 2010 that I cannot stand. When replying to an HTML message, I cannot insert line breaks within the reply text from other users, that is indented to show previous correspondence, while keeping the original text marked so that it is together. In Outlook 2003 I could do this by right-clicking and decreasing the indent as many times as needed which would eventually put in a true line break where I could insert my comments within the reply text from other users. In Outlook 2010, this option is mysteriously gone. I can press the “Decrease Indent” button a million times and the cursor just sits there. Ah, this must be a “new feature” of Outlook 2010. Unfortunately, it is extremely counterproductive. When replying to somebody’s message, I find it very convenient to insert my reply lines within their original message text. This functionality has been around since the early days of email in every email program I’ve used. This way, when the recipient sees my reply, they can see exactly what my reply comments relate to, and their original text is grouped together. This also makes back and forth correspondence much more visible and easier to follow when both the sender and recipient do this. I am not a big fan of including all of my message text in one area, either in the very top or bottom of the message, because it is more work for the me and the recipient to try and figure out what each section of it applies to. It gets messier with the more back and forth correspondences, because there’s reply text above and below the original text from multiple sends back and forth.

Science

• The Emergence of Cognitive Computing

  Exascale computing is also expected to advance by three orders of magnitude over the next decade or so. Having broken the petascale barrier a few years ago, the supercomputing community has its sights set on exascale systems. There are many challenges involved in developing such systems, foremost among them being power consumption.

  Today’s most powerful supercomputers consume roughly between 1 and 3 megawatts per petaflop. It is generally agreed that an exascale-class system must consume no more than 10-20 megawatts, otherwise you would need a whole power plant alongside each such system, and their operating costs would be prohibitively expensive. Thus, the 1000-fold increase in performance from petascale to exascale must be achieved with no more than a 10-fold increase in overall power consumption. This means that just about all components of the system, – including its processor, memory, communications and software, – must be redesigned to achieve the required two order of magnitude improvements in power consumption.

Security

• Chaos Computer Club analyzes government malware

• Pentaho Business Analytics Gets an In-Memory Boost

• Boom! They All Fall Down. M$ Does It Again.

  Yet again we have the ultimate vulnerability discovered in that other OS, all supported versions except the GUI-less 2008. Just viewing a document with a TrueType font in it can give a remote thug complete control of a PC running that other OS.

Finance

• Lessons from the Original Occupation: Gina Ray, Wisconsin State Capitol Police

  As Occupy Wall Street protesters and police face off in large cities and small towns across America, it is worth revisiting the positive policing relationship that was developed between protesters and law enforcement during the “original occupation” of the Wisconsin Capitol in the winter of 2011.

  On February 11, 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced a bill that would limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees, require 100% voter participation in union recertification and end the state’s practice of withholding and reimbursing union dues. The bill was perceived as a death blow to public employee unions and prompted massive, sustained and peaceful protests inside and outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in the winter of 2011.

• Remember, Remember the 5th of November! Bank Transfer Day

  November 5th is Bank Transfer Day, a hopping Facebook campaign urging Americans to move their money out of big national banks and into local banks or credit unions.

• Jean Quan angers Occupy camp’s supporters, rivals

  Hundreds of jobs are being lost, police are being diverted from violent parts of town, some businesses are closing, and others are choosing not to locate in downtown Oakland at all, she said at Thursday’s special City Council meeting.

  Yet at the same meeting, three of Quan’s staunchest supporters urged the council to support the Occupy Oakland encampment. One of them, Don Link, told The Chronicle that they spoke at the meeting on behalf of a group that emerged from Quan’s mayoral campaign and is led by Quan’s husband, Floyd Huen.

Privacy

• Apple demands importer’s customer data

  In its quest to make sure the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 never sees the light of day in Australia, Apple has levelled a legal threat against an Australian tablet importer in an attempt to destroy the devices and obtain the names of those who have purchased one. Unfortunately for Apple, the tablet importer in question has no intention of playing ball.

  Gadget importer Dmavo had been capitalising on the injunction slapped on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in October until last week, when Apple’s high-powered legal team at Freehills hand-delivered a 21-page cease and desist order designed to choke off the supply of the Samsung tablet to Australia.

  The document (PDF) ordered Dmavo to return an undertaking to Freehills, stating first and foremost that the importer would stop selling, importing and disposing of all variations of the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Apple and its lawyers also sought to obtain all of Dmavo’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 units for immediate destruction, as well as the names, addresses and other details of anyone who bought one of the devices from Dmavo. Apple also wanted to find out from which company Dmavo was importing the devices.

• AP Exclusive: CIA tracks revolt by Tweet, Facebook

  In an anonymous industrial park, CIA analysts who jokingly call themselves the “ninja librarians” are mining the mass of information people publish about themselves overseas, tracking everything from common public opinion to revolutions.

  The group’s effort gives the White House a daily snapshot of the world built from tweets, newspaper articles and Facebook updates.

• CIA Following Twitter And Facebook To Analyze Public Opinion, Predict Major Events

Internet/Net Neutrality

• Net Neutrality Consultation: LQDN Denounces Failed Wait-and-See Approach

  Paris, 2nd of November 2011 — La Quadrature du Net publishes today its response1 to the BEREC consultation2 on “transparency and Net Neutrality”. BEREC and the European Commission must move past the failed “wait-and-see” approach championed by Commissioner Neelie Kroes by adopting EU-wide Net neutrality regulation. Citizens can help protect the Internet by responding to the consultation3 and refusing “transparency” as a solution to Net Neutrality violations.

DRM

• The DRM graveyard: A brief history of digital rights management in music

  There are more than a few reasons digital rights management (DRM) has been largely unsuccessful. But the easiest way to explain to a consumer why DRM doesn’t work is to put it in terms he understands: “What happens to the music you paid for if that company changes its mind?” It was one thing when it was a theoretical question. Now it’s a historical one. Rhapsody just had the next in a line of DRM music services to go–this week the company told its users than anyone with RAX files has unil November 7 to back them up in another format or lose them the next time they upgrade their systems.

ACTA

• Over 1 Million Views for “NO to ACTA!” Video! Now, take Action!

  “NO to ACTA!”, the video published by La Quadrature du Net last week, has been viewed more than one million times. It has become the top rated and most viewed this week in Youtube’s “News & Politics” section. Such an impressive welcome illustrates how crucial of a responsibility lies between the hands of the Members of the European Parliament with their upcoming vote on ACTA. It is also an encouraging step towards defeating this dangerous agreement —an effort requiring a broad mobilization among citizens.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Their way or the highway.

It all comes down to control. Not your control, the proprietary companies control. However much control they have over their operating systems the more mon^b^b^b^b^b better quality product they can provide you. That is their theory as far as I can figure out. What that means in real life is that no matter what you wish to do with your proprietary operating system, you have to chose the path they set. That path is generally expensive and to take words from the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, almost, but not quite like a cup of tea.

This means that if you want something or wish to perform some task which is outside the limited bounds the proprietary companies have chosen then you are SOOL. You could think of that last acronym as Simply Out Of Luck but in my mind it is somewhat different :P. The end result is that you either go their way or take the highway.

Then along came Jones. Tall thin Jones…..oops a bit of Ray Stevens slipping in there I actually meant along comes Linux. With Linux you are not limited to a straight and narrow path. You can simply take the path, or method, of achieving what you wish in the manner you prefer. This means that to scratch your left ear you can use your left arm or even your right butt cheek if you so desire, and are flexible enough.

Desktop

• Commodore C64 gets Core i7 engine transplant

  A 21st century revamp of the classic Commodore 64 computer is now offered with Linux Mint 11 running on a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor and 2TB of hard disk storage. Equipped with a classically styled case and “color-matched” keys, the device has modern innards that also include 8GB of RAM, S/PDIF, HDMI, and DVI video outputs, an eSATA port, and wireless networking.

• Android devices act as touchscreens for Windows PCs

  Celio Corporation announced “ScreenSlider,” software that allows Android devices to act as external touchscreen displays for Windows PCs. The company’s technology is also being used in “Prodigy One Pro” automotive head units from Directus, designed to mirror output from a connected Android phone.

• Commercial puts Droid Razr official for November 11 [VIDEO]

• HTC announces the Rezound for Verizon, available November 14

• Boost Mobile shaves $50 off ZTE Warp, now only $199.99

Audiocasts/Shows

• Episode 170: Set the Presets!

• Podcast Season 3 Episode 21

• PerlCritic

  We talk about to Jeffrey Thalhammer about his project, PerlCritic, which looks at Perl Code and gives suggestions about how to make it better.

• The Linux Link Tech Show [Ogg]

Kernel Space

• A sub $200 AMD FirePro benchmarked on Linux

  Workstation graphics cards tend to be significantly more expensive than their desktop counterparts, something the new AMD FirePro V4900 seeks to overcome. The card is available for less than $200 but still comes with the advantages of the FirePro series, workstation application certification, a three-year hardware warranty and greater technical support than with a desktop GPU. Performance wise, the benchmarks that Phoronix ran showed the card to be nicely between the V4800 and V5800 so perhaps not worth immediately running out and upgrading from the previous low end model but definitely worth considering for new machines.

• Kernel Log: more details on the kernel.org hack

  The recent Kernel Summit, LinuxCon Europe and Realtime Workshop events revealed lots of interesting developments from the kernel scene, including a few details of the hack at kernel.org. AMD has released new graphics drivers and there’s a patch to fix serious problems in the RAID 10 code in Linux 3.1.

• Linux Foundation: Will it be your friend or foe?

• Ubuntu: Power Consumption, KVM, Mozilla, Etc

• Open64 Compiler Tuning On AMD Bulldozer FX-8150

Applications

• All About The Nautilus File Manager

• Rodent – Advanced User file manager for Linux systems

  Rodent is fast, small and powerful file manager for the GNU operating system (but it also works in BSD). That’s one way to look at it. Another way is to call it a graphic shell (that’s probably more accurate).

• 5 Essential Linux Applications for NaNoWriMo Participants

  It’s been a couple of days since NaNoWriMo began. For those living under a rock, NaNoWriMo is an annual creative contest wherein participants have to churn out a 50,000 words novel in a short span of 30 days. The event which had over 200,000 participants last year, has gained a huge following among professional writers as well as aspiring ones. In case you’re a Linux user who is taking part in the contest, here are 5 essential applications that will help you get closer to your goal.

• The Best BitTorrent Client for Linux

• Where native Linux app development stands

  As I was reading yet another article about the problems people are having with Unity, I was thinking about how we may be focused on the wrong thing when we fret about how the desktop interface works.

  Shouldn’t we, as a community, be focused on the application ecosystem? Or has the rise of software as a service caused the community to essentially declare this space “done”?

  The article in question was Bruce Byfield’s Linux Magazine blog entry that highlighted a Launchpad bug discussion about one Ubuntu developer’s concern that Canonical was basically disconnected from the Ubuntu community with their constant insistence that the Unity interface not be as configurable as prior interfaces.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Four Hidden Tools in Scribus

  • Online Budget with Gnucash + MySQL + SSH

  • Supercharge WordPress, Part 2

  • Testing the Exit Status of a Command

  • Writing manual pages on Linux

  • Get the disk health status with SMART monitor tools on Debian and Ubuntu Linux

  • Purgeconfig – A safer way to reset configuration files

  • Easily Install Gnome Shell In Ubuntu 11.10 & Newer [Linux]

  • Protect your server with SSHGuard

  • Creating a ebook with LibreOffice Writer Clip to Evernote

  • Gentoo + ZFS on Linux + RAID-Z1 = Awesome

  • Extracting Images from PDF files – Pdfimages

  • ETC – where the config files lurk

  • Linux Command cmp

  • E-sata, solid, and udisks (part 2)

  • Fix for Touchpad Trouble in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Tac and Rev to see files in reverse order

  • Handling timezones in python

  • How To Let Your Wallpapers Rotate With Webilder (Linux Mint 11)

  • How to Color Code Your Terminal in Gnome Shell 3.x

• Games

  • Donation Drive!

    Howdy folks Liam here with some news for you! A couple of projects are looking for help in the way of Donations.

Desktop Environments

• KDE4, LFS: Make GTK Applications Look Like QT4 Applications

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • First Review of Krita 2.4

  • Start Active

    My blog has been rather empty lately. It’s not because I haven’t had anything to report, but due to the fact that many things have happened and all sorts of cool things in Plasma Active’s “Activity world” started appearing that I didn’t have the time to write about them.

  • Kademar 4.9.5 – two-faced surprise from Spain

    Do you like prizes? Yes, most of us do. That’s why I offered prizes to winners of contest which ran on this blog to celebrate its first birthday. Prize for the winner of “social” contest was 8Gb USB stick and CD with any Linux distribution available.
    The choice of the winner was Kademar Linux. It is the distribution based on Debian and Knoppix, created by community in Spanish province Catalonia.

  • Kubuntu Desktop Effects

    Many cool effects and animations are available for the Kubuntu desktop. Here you can get a few ideas for your desktop environment, and see all the options you can try. There are several different ways to zoom and magnify windows or different portions of your desktop. Or you can add effects for many actions, such as window opening and closing, mouse movement, or window switching. From the desktop effects settings window you can also enable desktop compositing which is required for most effects. Even the speed of most animations and effects can be toggled, you have complete control. Good luck creating your own desktop environment!

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 2 Absent from Latest Version of Ubuntu Open Source OS

  • Indicator Applet Ported To GNOME 3, Can Already Be Used In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Classic GNOME 3 Session

    Jason Conti has ported Indicator Applet to GNOME 3. That means that you can now get almost the same classic (fall-back) GNOME 3 session look in Ubuntu 11.10 like in Ubuntu 11.04.

    With this, you’ll be able to use all the applications that come with an Ubuntu Appindicator, Indicator Date/Time, the session indicator, network, Ubuntu Sound Menu, Messaging Menu and even the Global Menu (optional) in the classic (fallback) GNOME 3 session, just like in Unity. However, unlike in Unity, the Global Menu doesn’t hide automatically for maximized windows and there are no buttons on the top panel.

  • Gedit – Dash 0.1

    In an experiment to for alternative “open file” dialogs we started experimenting with the Dash. When you open a new tab you will be greated with the following page. The thumbnails generated skip “comments” and “imports” and try to jump directly to some code or text from your work.

  • GNOME roams to Montreal

    The Montreal Summit 2011 turned out to be a very fun and productive gathering earlier this month of GNOME hackers and developers. With the 3.2 release behind us, there was a lot of discussion about the state of GNOME and its path going forward, reflected both in the technical and non-technical sessions that were held.

Distributions

• Why AUR is part of the Arch Linux success

  If you usually follow some blogs about Linux, especially those on Arch Linux, there is a common word that you are come across often, AUR, acronym of Arch User Repository. You might wonder what does it mean, what does it imply for the distribution, and why it’s so popular for the Arch Linux community. If you asking yourself those questions, this post is for you.

  First, you should keep these two characteristics in mind.

  * Everybody may contribute to AUR.
  * It’s really easy to contribute to AUR.

  AUR is a kind of repository totally public, open to whoever want to contribute to let some resources available to anyone. No ceremonials, agreement or long ritual initiation to submits a package to AUR.

• AV Linux – A Quick Review (With Screenshots)

• SystemRescueCd 2.4.0 Has Linux Kernel 3.1.0

  François Dupoux proudly announced two days ago, November 1st, a major release of his popular SystemRescueCd Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks.

  The SystemRescueCd 2.4.0 Linux Live CD operating system for rescue tasks, includes the latest stable version of the Linux kernel, an updated version of the XOrg Server, Mozilla Firefox, and GParted applications.

• New Releases

  • GParted 0.10.0-3

  • Clonezilla 1.2.11-15

  • ArchBang Linux 2011.11 Is Now Available

    Willensky Aristide proudly announced last night, November 1st, the immediate availability for download or upgrade of the ArchBang 2011.11 operating system.

    ArchBang 2011.11 is a Linux distribution based on the Arch Linux, but with the lightweight Openbox window manager. The new version brings various features, new apps and lots of bugfixes.

  • SystemRescueCd 2.4.0 released

    Three months after 2.3.0 arrived, version 2.4.0 of the SystemRescueCd Linux distribution has been released. Based on the Gentoo LiveCD and using Xfce as its default desktop, the SystemRescueCd is configured as a tool kit for administering or repairing an operating system and recovering data after a system crash. Supported file systems include Ext2, Ext3 and Ext4, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS, VFAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and Btrfs.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat: The Integrated Stack Is Critical

    Embedded virtualisation makes more sense than having a layer of software sitting below the operating system, says Navin Thadani

  • More CentOS pimpage

    There you go. Now, some of you might claim that all of this can be done automatically in some other distributions, with as little as two or three mouse clicks inside the package manager window. True, but some other distributions have the life cycle of a butterfly and will often break in between updates, while CentOS is rock solid. And it will stay around for a long, long while. Did I mention it is very simple and lightweight, too? Plus, if you pay attention, most of what we did is a three-minute job, possibly less than what it takes to achieve the same results in Windows.

    All right, so now you truly have a perfect desktop, with pretty much anything and everything you could possibly need, including the latest software, games, virtualization products, eye-candy and bling-bing, cross-platform support, plugins, and more. Well, I hope you enjoyed this. See you around.

  • Red Hat (RHT) Trading Near $47.82 Support Level

  • Fedora

    • Six Good Reasons to Try Fedora 16

      There are many different Linux distributions, each offering a slightly different flavor of the free and open source operating system.

    • Fedora 16 declared gold

      On Thursday evening (3 November), the Fedora Project announced that the fifth release candidate (RC5) for version 16 of its Linux distribution has been declared gold, noting that “It is a nice, golden, almost… mustard-like color”.

• Debian Family

  • Debian Squeeze on Asus Eee PC 1215B

  • Derivatives

    • Wary Puppy Linux 5.2 review

      The true power of Linux is in its near-infinite variety: no matter what your particular requirement, the chances are that you can find a distribution tailored to your needs. There are Linux distributions aimed at power users, programmers, gamers, people moving from Windows and those with older hardware that just isn’t powerful enough for many modern operating systems.

      It’s this last market that Puppy Linux, a lightweight distribution created by Barry Kauler, targets. Unlike more ‘mainstream’ distributions like Ubuntu or openSUSE, ‘Wary’ Puppy Linux is designed to work on as wide a range of hardware as possible, regardless of its age or specification.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • The Ignored Group of Ubuntu

        This morning in the Community Roundtable, Jono talked about the culture of Ubuntu and how it is changing and morphing. This caused me to think about another group of people who have popped up in the Ubuntu (And open source in general) world.

      • Ubuntu & HP’s project Moonshot

      • A Disturbing Dialog About Ubuntu and Unity

        Curious about how design decisions are made for Ubuntu’s Unity? About how the development team reacts to criticisms of its efforts? If you are, then a moment of unusual — and troubling — clarity emerged last week on Launchpad, Canonical’s development site.

        The moment takes the form of Bug #882274, filed by Tal Liron under the title “Community engagement is broken.” Although other people comment, much of the discussion is between Liron, an active bug-filer, and Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder. Liron writes as an Ubuntu loyalist, mostly succeeding in maintaining his politeness and trying to be constructive, but his frustration and feelings of being ostracized are obvious.

      • Precisely What Version of GNOME Will Ship in Ubuntu 12.04?

      • Ubuntu 11.04 Makes PCWorld ‘Best of 2011′ List

      • Ubuntu 11.10 review: On the right track

      • Ubuntu members over time

      • Next Ubuntu sounds good

      • Ubuntu: Power Consumption, KVM, Mozilla, Etc

        Ubuntu One As Your User Account: Canonical is planning to make it possible to sign into an Ubuntu installation using the Ubuntu One cloud credentials. In that if you sign into an Ubuntu system — whether it’s a desktop or mobile device — you can have immediate access to all of your data stored in Ubuntu’s cloud associated with your single sign-on account.

        Network access would be required, obviously. The plan would be writing a PAM module to authenticate against Ubuntu One, users wouldn’t need to create a local account, easily supports multiple devices, would streamline migrations, and provide other benefits. One of the action items expressed is to even have sign-in support with Facebook. More details can be found on this notes page.

      • Is Unity tearing Ubuntu apart?

      • Ubuntu, the end is near….

        I was a huge ubuntu fan. They got it *right* for a few years there, from 9.10 through 10.10 which I currently run on my netbook and desktops. My son’s machine is still on 10.04, and now I have a problem.

        It seems they just decided that 10.04 is reaching end of life and now I can’t perform updates on his machine. Further, the option to easily upgrade to 10.10 is no longer available in the update manager, they want us all to move to 11.10.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 LTS To Target 750MB Image

        The default ISO size target for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is now 750MB, which rules out burning this Linux distribution to a traditional 700MB CD, but allows for 1GB+ USB flash drives and DVDs. Plus there’s some other news from the Orlando development summit happening this week.

        Back on Wednesday was a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) for “Precise Pangolin” about targeting a 1.5GB DVD image by default. Doubling the available space on the standard Ubuntu disc image would allow for incorporating more software, since with recent releases they have had quite a hard time managing to fit all of their desired packages onto a 700MB image. There’s been optional Ubuntu DVD editions for earlier releases, but the Ubuntu default ISO has always been CD-sized.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Lucid Puppy 5.2.8 review – More goodness

          Praising an operating system over and over is a sure sign of fanboyism, which is punishable by flogging in some countries, or at the very least, leads to ostracization in the higher social circles. But it is truly difficult to find fault with the Puppy Linux, release after release. And while I tested Lucid Puppy not that long ago, I had an urge for more great stuff, so I redid my testing with the latest release, version 5.2.8.

          What can you expect from Puppy? A lot really. And I mean a lot. I had Puppy tested on three separate occasions and it’s only getting better. Sometimes, you have small changes, sometimes big ones, like the brand new kernel based on Ubuntu Lucid and a whole new level of Wireless capability. My last review revealed these tremendous improvements that the major version 5 brought to the table. So let’s what you get with 5.2.8. Perhaps some fancy dessert?

        • Team Work in Open Source Projects

          You know what really helped us get to where we are today though? Team work. The old saying of “many hands make light work” holds true even in the process of software creation. While there is no doubting that I am the face man of the Bodhi project, this enlightening initiative has been a team project from the start. We started off as a small three man team:

          Myself: Packaging Enlightenment and building the ISO image.
          Jason Peel: Graphics and Web design.
          Ken LaBuda: Server setup and upkeep

        • Bye Bye Bodhi

          One website lists ten reasons to use linux my favourites of which are “Linux is easier to use than Windows” and “Linux is fun.” It is day three of the experiment and so far I haven’t installed Linux but I have taken a Dell Vostro 3350 apart about five times. I borrowed this laptop off a fellow comrade in this experiment, Jake B, as I will be sending my own netbook home this coming December.

          Starting off I aimed to install both VectorLinux and Bodhi to compare them. I consider myself a relatively light computer user outside of the office and so comparing two different distributions would give me something to talk about. Alas this choice has come back to bight me in the…

        • Linux Mint 12 to Blend GNOMEs 2 & 3

          Clement Lefebvre posted a preview of the upcoming Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” today. The post listed several noteworthy announcements. However, it wasn’t the news itself that was the most noteable. What seemed most noticeable to me was that Mint possesses what Ubuntu is struggling to recapture and what openSUSE and Fedora are duking it out to earn: user excitement.

          Canonical is trying to recapture the blogger excitement they once enjoyed. openSUSE is trying so hard to gin up some excitement for their upcoming 12.1 release and Fedora is trying to find some for version 16 that just went gold, but again, with lackluster results. I was beginning to think users are just burnt out. And change isn’t such a good word anymore.

Devices/Embedded

• Dev Days 2011 – Qt 4.8, Qt 5.0 and Raspberry Pi

  I spent the first half of last week in a hotel in the outskirts of Munich for Nokia’s Qt Developer Days 2011. This is an annual gathering of the Qt-enlightened, designed to help attendees refresh their skills, upgrade to new ones and hear the gospel from the people who actually write the toolkit. But it’s also a chance to catchup on all the latest Qt gossip.

• Questions remain over $25 Raspberry Pi

  The Raspberry Pi, a $25 working computer the size of a credit card, is almost ready for public consumption. But questions remain.

  The device was first revealed in May, with the brainchild behind it, former games developer David Braben, revealing the specs as a 700MHz ARM11 processor, 128Mb of RAM, OpenGL ES 2.0, USB 2.0, HDMI and Composite outputs, an SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot, and open source software including Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, and Python. In August we saw a demo of the Raspberry Pi working, with it impressively managing to run Quake III.

• Phones

  • Android

    • 5 Best Free Siri Alternatives for Android

    • Samsung outshines Apple in smartphone shipments, market share

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Xoom 2 tablets are faster, thinner, and lighter, says Motorola

    Motorola Mobility updated its Xoom tablet with a 10.1-inch Xoom 2 and an 8.2-inch Xoom 2 Media Edition tablet, each running Android 3.2 on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor. The Wi-Fi only devices are debuting in the U.K. and Ireland, and feature 1280 x 800-pixel screens with splashguard coating, while the 10.1-inch model is 10 percent lighter and 33 percent thinner than the original.

  • Xoom 2 tablets are faster, thinner, and lighter, says Motorola

    Motorola Mobility updated its Xoom tablet with a 10.1-inch Xoom 2 and an 8.2-inch Xoom 2 Media Edition tablet, each running Android 3.2 on a dual-core 1.2GHz processor. The Wi-Fi only devices are debuting in the U.K. and Ireland, and feature 1280 x 800-pixel screens with splashguard coating, while the 10.1-inch model is 10 percent lighter and 33 percent thinner than the original.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Designer Offers a Look at What Wasn’t

    Mozilla’s Principal Designer on Firefox, Alex Faaborg, is leaving the company to “try out design work in an entirely different space.” Before he goes though, Faaborg is sharing some designs from the Mozilla cutting room floor — mockups and design ideas that never quite made it to Firefox.

    Most Firefox users probably don’t know Faaborg by name, but he’s overseen the design of some of the browser’s bigger user interface changes over the years, including the Awesomebar, the move to tabs-on-top, the one-click bookmark system and the revamped icon that launched with Firefox 3.

  • Unleash The Firefox Web Browser Potential

    Firefox has made many improvements over the years and it is constantly evolving. Many new features have been added in the newer versions. Currently you can find Firefox installed by default on most Linux systems. But many users don’t realize there Firefox has several themes and thousands of plug-ins to expand the user experience. So why not take advantage of it? Here you can learn how. For people new to Firefox you will find all of the tools you usually use as well. Firefox has the basic bookmark functions, typical menu setup, customizable toolbars, and multiple tabs for browsing sessions. If you don’t have Firefox on your system you can install with the following commands.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle formally proposes open source JavaFX

• Looking back: LibreOffice Conference in Paris

  First thing I want to say is ‘Thank you!’ to all the people who have been organizing the conference. It was a great experience for me – full of contrasts, inspiration and networking. I was very happy to meet so many of you LibreOffice enthusiasts personally. There have been a lot of detailed descriptions on various topics (e.g. I really liked Christophs post, also check the LibreOffice Planet). I do not want to add much more to these – only one little thing:

Public Services/Government

• Government publishes guidelines to promote open source in the public sector

  The document, entitled All About Open Source, is to be used as part of the “toolkit for procurers” as an introduction to open source software. “Open source is part of a wider focus on lowering barriers to participation, including for SMEs, reducing vendor lock-in, increasing use of open standards, improving competitive tension and reducing the overall costs of government IT,” said the government.

  Mark Taylor, founder of small open source software company Sirius, has worked with the Cabinet Office on the input of the guidelines. “They have been a long time coming, but a lot of thought has gone into them and for that the government should be commended,” he said.

• Open Source News

  Cabinet Office issues guidance on open source

  Glynn’s comments are worth reading, but the background here is that the lip-service that both Labour and Conservative governments have given to open source over the years, while making the UK one of the safest places for proprietary software vendors to do business with the government.

  These are sane documents, but unless they actually connect all the way through to departmental buying decisions they will be as inconsequential as all the previous attempts. Connecting all the way through means tracking purchasing and challenging the results that are discovered. Nothing here gives me confidence that connection will happen.

• Dipping Into the UK Government’s Open Source Procurement Toolkit

  The UK Government has published what it calls its “Open Source Procurement Toolkit”. It’s a sad reflection of how long the open source in government non-story has been going on that at the top of the home page for those documents you find: “The Government first set out its policy on the use of open source in 2004. This was restated in both 2009 and 2010.” And still nothing has happened….

  However, trying to look on the bright side, let’s welcome the documents offered here – not least because they come in two versions: as PDFs and – drumroll – as ODFs. That might seem a small thing, but that alone shows that somebody gets it – that open source in government isn’t just about talking, but about doing. Making document files routinely available in ODF format is an excellent example – so kudos for that, at least.

Programming

• Eclipse Turns 10

• jQuery 1.7 starts on/off switch

  jQuery logo The latest version of the popular jQuery JavaScript framework, version 1.7, unifies the way that JavaScript developers “bind” to events by adding new common .on() and .off() methods. There are a number of existing ways, .bind(), .unbind(), .delegate(), .undelegate(), .live() and .die() which will be superseded by the new .on() and .off() API. The use of the new API is recommended, although the old methods will remain in place for now.

Standards/Consortia

• Collabora Demos An HTML5 Video Editor

  An interesting project that Collabora has been working on lately, which they are now ready to show off, is Witivi. This is a non-linear video editor that was written in HTML5 and works with the WebKit rendering engine.

Slouching Toward Autonomy

In trying to switch away from proprietary services, I have found that there still a lack of good information comparing the different systems out there and giving folks advice on who might be able to help with things like setup or hosting. I really value hearing from other people about what they use and what they find useful but finding this information online still seems to be a struggle.

The autonomo.us wiki seems like the natural place to host or summarize this discussion and to collect and share information useful for those of us slouching (or running) toward autonomy in our use of network services. I invite folks to get involved in improving that already useful resource.

Complexity of Microsoft Exchange bites us again

Recently I’ve been involved with a migration from one Exchange 2010 server to another, and the project is still ongoing at the moment. I’ve written before about how overly complicated Exchange is, when compared to other open source mail server alternatives. I came across more examples of how Exchange and Outlook have caused a large increase in help desk calls, because of features of Exchange that are complex and shouldn’t really be there for an email server.

One Exchange 2010 server is in an old Windows domain, and another Exchange 2010 server is in a new Windows domain. The reason? The domain name is being changed. It was decided to bring up a new domain in parallel, and migrate users over time to the new domain. This is a huge multi-month project, as the more PCs and servers and members of the domain that there are, the more complex a domain change can be. So far, the two Exchange servers are happy and we have them sending and receiving mail to/from each other just fine. But, there are some quirks with Outlook that have caused much grief.

Science

• 520 Days Later: Fake Mars Mission Ready to Return

• Better multithreading offered by Columbia U researchers

  Since world+dog uses multithreaded software, it’s nice to know that someone cares about what goes wrong with it.

  A computer science group from Columbia University says it has a solution to “data races” in multithreaded programs, a common source of bugs and crashes. Its offering, called Peregrine, is the result of work at the Columbia Engineering School led by an assistant professor of computer science called Junfeng Yang.

Finance

• Oligarchy, American Style

  Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.

  So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.

• Wall Street Journal: Where was the CFTC?

  MF Global, the failed firm whose chairman and CEO is Jon Corzine, has already destroyed the wealth of its investors and roiled the banking world. But now we are learning that it may have lost customer funds as well.

  A major Wall Street broker in derivatives markets with $41 billion in assets, MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Monday after Mr. Corzine made disastrous bets on bonds issued by European governments. It initially appeared he was (only) gambling with his firm’s own capital, but a federal official tells the Journal that MF Global has admitted diverting money out of customer accounts, which may be a violation of federal law.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Apple’s patent trollage gets ever more bizarre

  Steve Jobs’ obsession with shutting down Andriod by spending all his company’s profits on hiring patent lawyers is starting to get out of hand.
  A tiny restaurant in Luxembourg named AppleADay which makes “balanced fast food” has had a writ from Jobs’ Mob and ordered to shut its doors.

  The reason is that Jobs’ legal hounds have decided that Apple fan boys are so stupid that they will confuse a small bistro with an Apple store. The fear is that they will buy a sandwich thinking it is the latest slimmed down Air and will complain when they try to plug it in and it does not go.

  Apple lawyers may have a point, anyone who is dumb enough to buy an iPhone 4S, which is identical to an iPhone 4, might have some problems with identification. But the rest of the universe, which can tie up its collective shoe laces, should be able to tell the difference between a sandwich bar and an Apple shop.
  One of the owners of the restuarant told IT World that all the outfit wanted to do was create bistro menues of fast food that’s healthy. Local authorities gave the name their approval. The logo looks more like the Georgia Peach logo than the Apple computer logo.

• Apple wants a German cafe to stop using this logo

  The owner of Apfelkind, Christin Römer, registered the logo with the fashion and service industry in Munich this June. In the letter from Apple’s lawyers, they claimed that the logo could cause confusion with Apple’s global brand.

  The café’ (below) is advertised as an establishment for “children, coffee, and cake.” Its website describes it as a place where parents can relax over a cup of coffee, while their children are occupied in a playroom that features painting. Their menu contains several apple-laden snacks and beverages, such as apples with red cocoa cream, sugar apples, and apple blossom tea.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Yet Another Misinformed Swipe At Open Source and Linux

Dominating the consumer desktop has not been a point of focus for the Linux community for years. Red Hat, a huge public company focused on Linux, doesn’t even make it a priority. At least Gualtieri concedes that over 60 percent of servers on the Internet run Linux, but he doesn’t even discuss embedded Linux, or technologies that have flourished as offshoots of Linux.

Server

• Deutsche Borse implements 10GB Juniper switches on Linux trade platforms

  Deutsche Borse, the German stock exchange based in Frankfurt, has implemented 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches from supplier Juniper Networks on its Linux-based trading platforms.

  The stock exchange said the new switches will be resilient and will help slash trading round trip messaging latency and process market data for co-locating traders on its Eurex derivatives and Xetra cash markets.

Kernel Space

• Graphics Stack

  • ATI X.Org Driver Sees Significant Update

Applications

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Setting Up Network RAID1 With DRBD On Ubuntu 11.10

  • How I backup my WordPress sites

  • Automatic installation of Debian Squeeze from a USB flash drive

  • Protect your server with SSHGuard

  • Learn Linux, 302 (Mixed environments): NetBIOS and WINS

  • Set up Oneiric PVHVM at Xen 4.1.2 Ubuntu Oneiric Dom0 (3.1.0-030100-generic)

  • Two Decades of Excellence: Vim Turns 20!

• Games

  • New Games Available in Ubuntu 11.04 and 10.10

    Canonical added a couple of days ago a selection of games from the MumboJumbo software publisher, available for purchase only via Ubuntu Software Center.

    The games from MumboJumbo include 7 Wonders: Magical Mystery Tour (jewel game), Chainz Galazy (link-matching game), Unlikely Suspects (mystery game), and Midnight Mysteries 3 Devil on the Mississippi (adventure game).

  • New port of open source FreeCiv game now available for Android.

  • 2 new games added to the latest Humble

  • Tank Fighting Game ‘Digitanks’ Released for Linux [64bit only]

  • New Halloween Trailer and Livestream Footage of ‘Salem’ [Upcoming MMO for Linux]

  • Awesome Gameplay Footage and Hands on Impressions : Ignite [Racing Game for Linux]

  • Steam on PCLinuxOS

Desktop Environments

• Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

  A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE 3.5 fork Trinity updated

    One year since the last update, the Trinity Project has released version 3.5.13 of its desktop environment. Trinity is a fork of the last stable snapshot of the 3.5.x branch of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), KDE 3.5.10 from August 2008, that has been enhanced with additional features and is intended to be compatible with more recent hardware.

Distributions

• Scientific Linux, openSUSE, Ubuntu Tests

  Up for viewing today are benchmarks of Scientific Linux 6.1, openSUSE 11.4, Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS, and Ubuntu 11.10. This is the latest in the series of Ubuntu 11.10 benchmarks after looking at the power consumption, boot speed, performance relative to Sabayon 7, and virtualization performance.

• New Releases

  • IPFire 2.11

  • OLPC 11.3.0

  • Announcements concerning Scientific Linux

    Scientific Linux Live CD/DVD 5.7 can now be downloaded for 32 and 64 bit:

    ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/livecd/57/i386
    ftp://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/livecd/57/x86_64

  • IPFire open source firewall improves OpenVPN support

    The IPFire project has released version 2.11 of its open source firewall. IPFire is a Linux server distribution that can be booted from a CD or USB drive, or installed to a computer’s internal drive.

    According to Project Leader and developer Michael Tremer, IPFire 2.11 is a major update that includes a new option to create net-to-net virtual private networks (VPNs) using OpenVPN. Previously, it was only possible to create “roadwarrior networks” using OpenVPN. Recently updated documentation about OpenVPN on IPFire can be found on the project’s wiki.

• Red Hat Family

  • The Emirates Group Uses Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Middleware to Build Powerful Open Travel Platform

  • Fedora

    • Fedora Wants To Simplify the Linux Filesystem

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Mark is right, and Mark is wrong

        The second was a comparison of Unity, and to an extent GNOME 3, to the Edsel; comparing those desktop environment releases to how Ford had built up an enormous curiosity around this new “E-car” in 1957 — a car of the future — they were developing amid a shroud of secrecy before revealing to the world, well, the Edsel — which nearly everyone hated once they saw what Ford’s idea for the “future” was.

        I wish I could remember the third one. It didn’t get far and it was just kind of ramblin’ — that’s R-A-M-B-L-I-N-apostrophe.

      • Ubuntu One cloud storage: Staying for the long haul?

      • Ubuntu Plans To Make It Easier To Hookup With Users

        While the latest bold attempt by Ubuntu is to put it on TVs and phones in the next two years, this new social effort isn’t to build a full-blown social network to compete with (or replace) the likes of Google+ and Facebook. What this new community/social effort is about is just making it easy to find Ubuntu users and Ubuntu events within your geographic area. The idea has been brewing for over one year, but due to devoting resources towards designing the Unity desktop, this idea was largely postponed until now.

      • Leadership Summit Part Two Today

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Sick of Unity in Ubuntu 11.10? Give Xubuntu a try

          A few weeks ago, we took a look at Ubuntu 11.10 and observed that its default desktop, Unity, was much improved in this popular Linux distribution.

          Regardless, it seems that some people still dislike the Unity. Well, dislike is a bit mild — some readers wrote in stating that absolutely hate it and that sentiment has gained some traction here and there on the Internet. It seems that Canonical — the organization responsible for Ubuntu Linux — aren’t ones to shy away from controversy.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi close to shipping $25 schools computer

  The cheap Linux-based computer for schools, Raspberry Pi, looks to be getting closer to reality with the news that the foundation behind it has ordered sufficient parts to make the first 10,000 units.

  The Foundation reacted to premature reports that it had produced 10,000 completed Raspberry Pi computers by making clear that what had been ordered were “parts kits,” not complete devices.

• ‘World’s smallest’ SDR radio runs Linux

  Epiq Solutions announced what it claims is the world’s smallest commercially available software defined radio (SDR). The 4.6 x 2.2 x 0.9-inch, four-ounce Matchstiq incorporates a broadband (28MHz) RF transceiver supporting 300MHz to 3.8GHz frequencies, an onboard GPS receiver, and an Iveia Atlas-I-LPe module integrating a Texas Instruments DM3730 processor and a Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA.

• Phones

  • Android

    • IT People should just say no to clueless reporters….

      I originally wrote this after Paul Thurrott wrote a ridiculous article (http://www.windowsitpro.com/content1?topic=android-140400&catpath=google1) about all that is wrong with Android. After writing it, I felt better but I realized he isn’t the only one with this messed up perception of corporate life. I have been consulting and supporting companies in the area of IT operations for my entire 16 year career. I have worked for a vary diverse set of companies from GE and Chrysler to an Internet Startup to Mom and Pop companies and everything in between. While they all have their own issues and odd behaviors, they always have a few things in common. IT is always a drain on resources that no one wants to fund. The IT staff always has to do more with less than they had last year. Finally, they are all expected to figure out how to do the next big thing.

      [...]

      So the next time Mr. Thurrott or anyone in the press wants to talk about life as an IT Professional he or she should try being one for a while. For now though, go back to doing what you do best. Be a great reviewer and tell me what great things I have too look forward to from all of my favorite vendors. Leave the heavy lifting and worrying about how to protect corporate assets to the people who do that for a living.

    • Android Navi-X media streaming app arrives

      All Media Online (Amo) has recently released the Android market’s first app exclusively devoted to streaming multimedia to Android smartphones and tablets via Navi-X, an extensive, open source, community supported, media indexing web-service.

    • Ice Cream Sandwich confirmed open-source coming in weeks

    • Google: Android 4.0 to be open sourced in “coming weeks”

      Google will make its Android 4.0 dubbed “Ice Cream Sandwich” available to the open source community in the coming weeks and is designed to fuel Google’s big push in both the smartphone and tablet war against Apple. Google’s planned purchase of Motorola’s Mobility unit — the most successful Android smartphone and tablet supplier — will also likely help if it ultimately musters government approval

    • What Would Concern Me About Android if I Worked for Google

      The growth of the Android platform undoubtedly masks some of its shortcomings. As Chris DiBona summarized, “the only thing that really matters is how many of these we ship…There is a linear relationship between the number of phones you ship and the number of developers.”

    • HTC does it again, record Q3 earnings thanks to Android

      HTC is one of the leading smartphone manufacturers in the world. HTC phones feature amazing build-quality along with top-notch software and hardware. We reported HTC’s Q1 earnings a long time ago where we were shocked by their amazing performance, recording an almost 200% growth in revenue (thanks to Android).

    • Android found all over PC World’s Top 100 Best Products of 2011

    • Microsoft updates Bing app for Android and iOS, not Windows Phone 7

      If I hadn’t read it on Microsoft’s own Bing blog, I wouldn’t have believed it. The Microsoft Bing team has just released the new Bing for Mobile app for iPhone and Android… but not for Windows Phone 7 devices.

      Wow. Just wow.

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • Kid-friendly Android tablet features drop-resistant cover

    Karuma announced a seven-inch Android 2.3 tablet designed for kids. The PlayBase is equipped with a 1.2GHz processor, 1GB of DDR3 RAM, 8GB of storage, and an 800 x 600-pixel capacitive screen protected by a shock-absorbent silicone cover that can be folded back to use as a stand, says the company.

  • It’s official: New Nook Color tablet launching Nov. 7

    As we reported last week, rumor had it Barnes & Noble would be launching its next-generation, Android-powered Nook Color tablet e-reader on November 7. Now it’s become official, with Barnes & Noble sending out invites to the media for an event that morning in New York.

  • Motorola Intros XOOM 2, XOOM 2 Media Edition for UK, Ireland

  • Motorola Xoom 2: Second time’s the charm?

    The smaller Xoom 2 Media Edition is geared more toward entertainment. The screen offers a 178-degree viewing angle to let more than one person watch movies or videos at the same time. Motorola claims a 20 percent improvement in graphics performance and has added virtual surround sound, turning the Media Edition into a gaming device. This model can also double as a remote control for TVs and other equipment courtesy of a pre-loaded remote-control app. Battery life is rated at only around six hours per charge.

  • Ubuntu on tablet PCs by 2014

    Canonical grande fromage Mark Shuttleworth has said that the Ubuntu open source operating system will be available on tablet PCs by 2014. At this time it is also thought that Ubuntu for smartphones and “smart” televisions will also be available.

Open source vs. proprietary software

Evercube: the beautiful 5TB open source home storage server

Massive amounts of storage are becoming increasingly important to companies providing cloud-based services. For home users, networked attach storage (NAS) is available from a number of manufacturers, and gives you the option of storing all your digital content in one giant storage area accessible to all your devices over a network connection.

Choosing which NAS to invest in can be tough, though. Some use their own software that is less than great, others have limited storage and/or upgrade potential. Most of them don’t look great either, being just a plastic box and flashing LEDs you’d rather not have on display in a room.

IBM Open Sources Messaging Client for Embedded Devices

Events

• Guest Post: Apache in Space

  The ApacheCon NA 2011 conference is rapidly approaching. The event takes place November 7 to 11 at the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver, Canada. Registration for the event is now open, with discounts available. In conjuction with ApacheCon NA 2011, OStatic is running a series of guest posts from movers and shakers in the Apache community. In this latest guest post, three officials from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) introduce OODT (Object-Oriented Data Technology), an open source middleware suite for working with and managing data-intensive scientific applications. It’s used at JPL and overseen by the Apache Software Foundation.

SaaS

• Hortonworks launches Apache Hadoop based platform

• Hortonworks Introduces Open-Source Hortonworks Platform

  Hortonworks recently introduced the open-source Hortonworks Data platform to mark their entry into software space. Hortonworks is a company formed from Yahoo! this past June.

  Considered a minor business move by the company, as compared to Cloudera, the provider of Apache Hadoop and mega-vendors like Oracle, EMC and also IBM which have their own plans for Hadoop, Hortonworks will need to put forth more effort and not rely on only name recognition alone.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – How to Proceed on the Copyright Issue

  Monday’s filings were all about how to proceed on the copyright issue. That is, proposing what determinations the court needs to make with respect to copyright protection afforded Oracle before it can assess whether Google has infringed.

• Office Suite Update

  Apple and Microsoft haven’t issued press releases about LibreOffice of course. Rumors on the street are that both companies are less than happy with the progress that The Document Foundation has made.

  While LibreOffice is not totally comparable to Microsoft Office, in that it doesn’t have matching applications for all functions, it does give a solid, inexpensive option. It works beautifully on Microsoft Windows, and is often used by offices which have large archives of documents saved in different versions of the Word file format, because it often is more compatible with Microsoft Office, than Microsoft Office.

• Oracle formally proposes open source JavaFX

  At the recent JavaOne conference, Oracle had said that it intended to open source JavaFX. Now Oracle is formally proposing that the JavaFX user interface toolkit be open sourced under the OpenJDK project and is looking for it to be incorporated into Java 9. Oracle’s Richard Bair made the proposal on the OpenJDK mailing list, saying the company had talked about it for a long time, “but finally (finally!) we’re ready to act on it”. JavaFX was originally created by Sun as a standalone technology with its own scripting language, but since Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, it has been revamped and repositioned as a general Java user interface toolkit with a modern architecture, supporting features such as hardware acceleration and CSS styling.

• Oracle reveals open source JavaFX plans

Project Releases

• Logback reaches 1.0.0

  The Logback project has announced that its Java logging system that picks up where log4j left off has reached version 1.0.0. There are no big changes from previous releases of Logback, according to lead developer Ceki Gülcü.

Public Services/Government

• Cabinet Office publishes open source procurement toolkit

  The Cabinet Office has published an open source procurement toolkit for the public sector on its website.

  It said the purpose is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.

• Cabinet Office publishes open source procurement toolkit

  It said the purpose is to ensure that there is a level playing field for open source and proprietary software and that some of the myths associated with open source are dispelled.

• Open source buying toolkit published by UK Cabinet Office

  A fifth document, CESG guidance on Open Source, is only available to users with a gsi.gov.uk email address, but should address the issues which caused problems, now resolved, for Bristol City Council’s open source plans. The purpose of the toolkit it to help level the playing field for public sector open source acquisition. The procurement advice note points out that procurement rules need to compare total cost of ownership (TCO), but that where that cost is the same between open source and proprietary solutions, the open source solution should be preferred. This is because of open source’s inherent flexibility, an attribute that isn’t encapsulated by TCO calculations.

Openness/Sharing

• The power shift effect of open government

  The second CityCamp Colorado started off with Tom Downey and Stephanie O’Malley from the City of Denver setting the stage for the day’s theme: enhancing access to government. Held at the Jefferson County Administration and Courts Facility on October 28, 2011, more than 70 people gathered to participate, learn, and advance the open government movement.

  Tom Downey, Director of Excise and Licensing for the city and county of Denver, is excited about the spread of open government. He said the beauty of a movement like CityCamp is that the organization is flat, decisions are made democratically, and things can get done and move forward.

• The power of open-source cancer research

  This is the question that cancer researcher, Jay Bradner and his colleagues have focused on in their research, and they think they may have found the answer: a molecule, which they call JQ1. But unlike the corporatocracy and its minions, which operate in secrecy, Dr Bradner and his colleagues chose to do something different. Engaging in an enlightened social experiment, they shared the news of this molecule by publishing their findings — and they mailed samples to 40 other labs to work with. In short, they open-sourced the information about this molecule and they crowd-sourced the testing and research.

• Open Compute Project Gains Momentum

  From the racks to the roof, the Open Compute Project (OCP) is trying to break the mold to improve and redesign everything we take for granted as “industry standard” in the data center world. Its goal is to use open source community thinking to effect changes to the server hardware, design of the racks and even the building itself in much the same way the Linux community of developers changed the paradigm in the software realm. On Oct. 27th, the OCP held its second summit in New York City. In fact, Red Hat was there and formally announced it was joining and would be contributing to the OCP.

• Open Access/Content

  • UNESCO recommends open educational resources

    The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and the Commonwealth educational organisation, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), have published guidelines on the use of open educational resources in higher education. The 20-page Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (OER) in Higher EducationPDF document argues that the number of students is set to rise from the current 165 million to around 260 million in 2025, but that this will not be matched by a corresponding rise in expenditure.

• Open Hardware

  • Open Hardware Journal

  • BeagleBone: The $89 Open Source Hardware Platform From BeagleBoard

    The all new BeagleBone has been dished out by the BaegleBoard.org as an open source Hardware platform, announced the organisation.

    According to the developers, the new BeagleBone comes as a pretty low cost, hardware hacker oriented, and expandable variant of the original BeagleBoard. Fan boys can get their hands on the new device for $89 only.

Programming

• Improving your Project’s Visibility at SourceForge

  Over the last months we’ve been analyzing SourceForge historical data, looking for trends and correlations. We’ve found factors that can help project administrators to get both more downloads and more visibility.

• libabc

• Open Source Eclipse Turns 10: Mike Milinkovich Looks Back at a ‘Novel Idea’

  It’s hard to believe, but it has been a decade since the Eclipse platform was first made available under an open source software license. In November 2001, IBM open sourced an internal project focused on creating a common component framework for developers (and coughed up $40 million to get the ball rolling).

Apple will have an Iphone 4S battery software fix soon

FRUIT THEMED GADGET FLOGGER Apple will release a fix soon for the
Iphone 4S battery problems that are plaguing its users.

It’s taken some time for the company to acknowledge the problems,
which as with antennagate were discovered by users and not mentioned
in all the fanfare surrounding the handset’s launch.

Finance

• Goldman Sachs v. Occupy Wall Street: A Greg Palast Investigation

• Lessons from the Original Occupation: Gina Ray, Wisconsin State Capitol Police

  As Occupy Wall Street protesters and police face off in large cities and small towns across America, it is worth revisiting the positive policing relationship that was developed between protesters and law enforcement during the “original occupation” of the Wisconsin Capitol in the winter of 2011.

  On February 11, 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced a bill that would limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees, require 100% voter participation in union recertification and end the state’s practice of withholding and reimbursing union dues. The bill was perceived as a death blow to public employee unions and prompted massive, sustained and peaceful protests inside and outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in the winter of 2011.

• NYSE Technologies All Set For Open-Source Data Middleware

• NYSE switches middleware application interface to open source

Civil Rights

• 18 Arrested in Wisconsin Assembly for Using Cameras; Guns Still Allowed

  Eighteen people were arrested Tuesday for using cameras in the Wisconsin Assembly gallery, including the editor of The Progressive magazine, Matt Rothschild.

  Rothschild and others had gone to the capitol to protest a series of arrests in recent weeks of individuals who carried signs or took photos or video in defiance of an Assembly ban.

  “We ought to have a right to take a picture,” Rothschild said.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Ed Bott, Apologist for M$, Does it Again

  I paraphrase for the situation: Every PC that is shipped with our booting key is a small victory; every PC that is shipped without is a small defeat. Total victory is the universal adoption of our standards by OEMs, as this is an important step towards victory for M$ itself: “A computer on every desk and in every home running M$’s software.”

  Good try, Ed, but I’m not buying it. Building in anything specific to the OS of a monopolist is dangerous. M$ has shown for decades that it doesn’t do anything that doesn’t bolster the monopoly. You should know better.

  On the other hand, OEMs don’t really love M$ and I expect most of them will provide some kind of kill switch for the lock-in but it will be more work to migrate more PCs to the light.

Server

• HP launches ARM-based blade servers with Linux support

  HP launched its Redstone server range using low-power processors from both Intel and ARM vendor Calxeda. HP claims Redstone servers are designed for testing and proof-of-concept, presumably the concept that it can produce ARM-based servers.

  The Calxeda Energycore processors in HP’s Redstone servers are 32-bit processors designed for massively parallel workloads with an 80Gbits/s crossbar between processors. Calxeda claims that when the chip is mated to 4GB of RAM the whole setup consumes just 5W under load and idles at 0.5W.

• Need a Reliable Server?

  Netcraft’s latest report gives some clues. The world’s most demanding hosting companies run GNU/Linux. Of the top 42 most reliable hosting companies,

  * 2 run F5 Big IP,
  * 5 run FreeBSD,
  * 8 run that other OS, and
  * 15 run GNU/Linux.

• October 2011 Web Server Survey

  Across the million busiest sites Apache and Microsoft each lose market share this month whilst nginx and Google see small increases.

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds: Secure Boot Is Good; But Can Be Used In Bad Ways

  It’s true that secure boot can be used for horribly, horribly bad things but using that as an argument against its existence at all is I think a bit naive and not necessarily right. Because if you do things right then it’s a really good thing. I would like my own machine to have the option to not boot any kernel, or boot loader, that is not signed by this signature.

• Linus Torvalds: Steve Jobs Was An Exceptional CEO

• Linus Torvalds: Why Linux Is Not Successful On Desktops

• Linus Torvalds: Open Source Is Also About Spreading, Distributing Vision

• Linus Torvalds: Google with Android has really been very successful

• Linus Torvalds: I Don’t Have A Facebook Account, Google Plus Just Works Better For Me

• Which Is Linus Torvalds’ Native Language: Finnish or Swedish?

• Exclusive Interview With Linus Torvalds At LinuxCon Europe 2011

Applications

• Two decades of productivity: Vim’s 20th anniversary

  The Vim text editor was first released to the public on November 2, 1991—exactly 20 years ago today. Although it was originally designed as a vi clone for the Amiga, it was soon ported to other platforms and eventually grew to become the most popular vi-compatible text editor. It is still actively developed and widely used across several operating systems.

  In this article, we will take a brief look back at the history of vi and its descendants, leading up to the creation of Vim. We will also explore some of the compelling technical features that continue to make Vim relevant today.

• Cheese Goes Great With Webcam Hams

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to Recover Deleted Files in Linux

• Games

  • Voxatron, the new Indie game at HIB

    The organizers of Humble Indie Bundle today announced a new initiative on humblebundle.com, which allows anyone to buy Voxatron, an unreleased indie game for the PC at the price that you want.

    Voxatron, it’s at this time in Alpha stage, this game is a platform shooter retro-style, with more than 20 rich areas of enemies to defeat. The game is available for Windows PC, Linux and Mac, DRM-free, and with the guarantee that all future updates will be completely free.

  • Infos: The Humble Voxatron Debut (+ contest)

  • Two New Games Added to Latest Humble Bundle

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE’s November Updates Improve Nepomuk Stability

    November 2, 2011. Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. These updates are the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.7 series. 4.7.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.7 series and are recommended updates for everyone running 4.7.0 or earlier versions. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come. The October updates contain many performance improvements and bugfixes for applications using the Nepomuk semantic framework.

  • Trinity Does New Release To Let KDE 3.5 Live Om

    While KDE 4.0 has been around for nearly four years (and most complaints regarding the initial KDE4 fallout have been addressed) and the last KDE 3.5 stable snapshot (v3.5.10) came three years ago, the Trinity Desktop Environment has issued an official release today to keep the KDE 3.5 desktop living.

    The Trinity Desktop Environment is designed to pick up where KDE 3.5 left off in keeping up with the KDE 3.5 branch development. There’s been bug-fixes, new features, and other work to make KDE 3.5 more relevant in today’s world. The version released today is Trinity 3.5.13.

  • The Grass has Always been Greener on the other Side of the Fence

    Now to my actual blog post: I appreciate the idea of the Trinity developers to bring back the KDE 3.5 desktop experience to those users who really want it. This is a great offer. Personally I doubt that the Trinity project is doing the effort in the right approach. Instead of just porting Kicker and KDesktop to Qt4/KDE4 they forked everything and the kitchen sink. I rather doubt that a team which is smaller than the KWin team is able to maintain not only KWin but also every other part of KDE 3.5 and now also Qt 3.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • An interview with Equalis, a Scilab based business

  • SystemRescueCd 2.4.0

• Gentoo Family

  • 10 Reasons Why I Love Sabayon Linux

• Red Hat Family

  • Fedora

    • Bugside manners

    • Fedora to simplify filesystem hierarchy

      Since 1979 (or thereabouts), Linux and UNIX-like operating systems have followed a particular, if arcane, way of organizing files. Now the Fedora Project is proposing a plan that will drastically change the way this filesystem hierarchy stores binary applications… if they can work out the potential kinks.

      Specifically, the developers in the Fedora Project are proposing to move all executable files into the /usr/bin directory and their libraries into /usr/lib or /usr/lib64, as needed.

• Debian Family

  • DebConf12 Nicaragua dates confirmed

    The Debian Project, the team behind the free Debian operating system, has confirmed the dates and venue for its next annual conference, DebConf12.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu 11.10: Looks Kind of Cool But Who Is It For?

        I decided to try out Ubuntu 11.10 on my Thinkpad T43. It was actually my first time using Unity, although I had used the Ubuntu Netbook Edition on a netbook, and I knew the two had similar UIs. This isn’t going to be a huge, in-depth thing because I don’t see how anyone is going to touch the Ars Technica review of 11.10 (DarkDuck’s Unity vs. GNOME3 review is also quite good).

      • Ubuntu Eyes Mobile Market

      • Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux will battle for mobile developers

        Canonical, which has great ambitions to extend its Ubuntu Linux to such devices as smartphones and tablets, is prepared to reach out to developers to get them to build the applications necessary to make the platform successful. But the company will have its work cut out for it, given that established providers on the market have a substantial head start.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • A little love for Linux Mint.

        • A tale of broken love to Kubuntu 11.10

        • Pinguy OS – A Fully loaded Ubuntu respin which should suit new Linux users..

Devices/Embedded

• Britain’s $25 computer is coming by Christmas

  Earlier this year British games pioneer David Braben surprised many people with the first appearance of the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, open source computer aimed at children that he was helping to develop.

  Now, six months on from that initial blitz of publicity, he says that it’s almost ready to go on sale for the first time. A finished version is due by the end of 2011, he told GigaOM, specifically aimed at programmers.

• Jungo Launches Automotive Connectivity Middleware for Linux-based Infotainment Systems

• Phones

  • Android

    • Rear-seat touchscreen computer runs Android 2.3

      VizuaLogic announced a rear seat entertainment (RSE) touchscreen computer that runs Android 2.3. Integrated into a car’s front headrest, the “SmartLogic Android Rear Seat Entertainment Package” is equipped with a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a seven-inch capacitive touchscreen, plus Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IR, USB, microSD, and HDMI connections.

An interview with Equalis, a Scilab based business

Equalis supports all these needs by providing a complete Scilab support programs including: training, deployment, real-time support and consulting. Equalis also drives the Scilab product development roadmap to meet customer needs by accelerating bug fixes and including feedback on the strategic product roadmap. Additionally, Equalis also develops and supports exclusive premier software features and application modules to augment the baseline platform to meet its customers’ specialized needs.

SaaS

• http://www.muktware.com/news/2855

Semi-Open Source

• Zarafa to unveil free web meeting plug-in

  Messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa is set to unveil a new web meeting plug-in for its groupware product. According to the company, the free plug-in for the Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) currently supports up to three users, works regardless of each user’s email client or platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), and does not require registration.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Nominations are open for the 14th annual Free Software Awards

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project today announced the opening of nominations for the 14th annual Free Software Awards.

Programming

• Eclipse is celebrating its 10th Birthday

  It is just a decade since IBM released the Eclipse project under an open source licence and the Eclipse Consortium, consisting of IBM, Borland,Rational, Suse, TogetherSoft, was announced.

Standards/Consortia

• Have your HTML5 and native app too

• A browser to resolve mobile app development confusion?

  I read with interest the recent announcement by AppMobi that they are producing a browser for Apple iOS and eventually Android that will go beyond the basic HTML5 capabilities.

Windows 7 finally beats XP, or does it?

According to the StatCounter analysis Windows 7 overtook XP in the United States in April 2011 and in Europe in July. However, in Asia Windows XP still retains a clear lead at 55% in October compared to 36% for Windows 7.

[...]

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample of over 15 billion page views per month (4 billion in the US) from their network of more than three million websites. NetMarketShare data collection network has over 40,000 websites, and counts unique visitors once for visit for day. In summary, NetMarketShare’s data is compiled from approximately 160 million unique visits per month.

What that means is that StatCounter counts all page views while NetMarketShare looks at single site visits. That in turn imples that very active users of a particular operating system would weigh more heavily on StatCounter’s numbers.

Finance

• “OCCUPY WALL STREET” to Occupy WBAI

  A new show on WBAI starts this Wednesday: OCCUPY WALL STREET RADIO. From the streets to airwaves, the movement that began five weeks ago as a Day Of Rage takes to the airwaves on the only station that broadcasts the voice of the 99%. The initial Occupy Wall Street Radio airs Wednesday October 26th, from 6:30 to 8 PM. Going forward, the show can be heard Monday through Friday from 6:30 to 7 PM. The show will offer a regular check in for the latest breaking news from the streets. Hear the voices, the heart, the soul of this 99% growing and now global movement.

• People’s Trial Of Goldman Sachs By Occupy Wall Street

  Taking their inspiration from the Bertrand Russell public trials of U.S. government officials held during the Vietnam War, the proceedings will include expert analysis by Cornell West and Chris Hedges, as well as testimony from individuals directly affected by Goldman Sachs’ policies.

Intellectual Monopolies

• What CIOs Need to Know about Intellectual Property Law

  While nearly every CIO should worry about IP issues, there are exceptions. Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, a founding partner of top technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove, explains that if you’re CIO of, say, a government agency, there is “little, if anything” to get worked up over. Such a CIO likely never has to worry about her agency being sued by anyone, nor will she be selling products to others.

  That’s also the case for CIOs of most non-profits, or at least smaller ones. “Having some degree of oversight by a lawyer should cover just about everything they would need to know, because their exposure to the outside world might be limited to a Web site,” says Updegrove. “As long as they ensure that all proprietary software has been paid for and is not being used in violation of its terms, there should be little exposure and therefore no need for much knowledge.”

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Whats good for the Goose should be good for the Gander

In the end my question to the open source community is why is this acceptable for ARM hardware? Why do you continue to rejoice about every new Android device that gets released riddled with closed source modules that are next to impossible to make work under actual Linux.

Just as many of you would be upset if you where told that desktop (or laptop) you bought had to keep it’s default operating system I am more than a little annoyed that a good deal of the ARM hardware out there comes with this stipulation attached.

Tablets, Phones, Everything: Linux Everywhere?

Technology people are often pictured as being quiet, shy or antisocial, but any suggestion that they are backward in coming forward should be dispelled by the peculiar traditions of the developer event. As the whoops and bellows ring out, it becomes clear that they have just been saving it up.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 235 – Unleash the Ball Clamp!

Kernel Space

• Ubuntu 11.10: Xen vs. KVM vs. VirtualBox

• In Conversation: Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation’s Executive Director Jim Zemlin sat down with The H’s Editor-in-Chief at LinuxCon Europe to talk about the embedded initiative, the purpose of the Foundation, Linux desktop leadership and what applications he’d like to see on Linux.

• Graphics Stack

  • Linux Hybrid Graphics Will Be A Mess For A While

    Most of you know this already, but: hybrid graphics, the technology concept of having dual GPUs (generally a low-power IGP and a high-performance discrete GPU) and being able to seamlessly switch between them depending upon load and battery life, is a mess under Linux. It will continue to be a mess for the near-term.

    The matter of Linux hybrid graphics support was brought up today during one of the morning sessions at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Simply put, there isn’t much Canonical will be doing in the near-term to better support this technology (then again they aren’t a company known for their upstream engineering work), but they do hold out hope for the longer-term that there will be improvements.

  • MPEG4 Part 2 In Gallium3D VDPAU State Tracker

  • A Guide To Hacking With EGL & KMS

Applications

• Popular Linux Video Transcoder Gets Updated

  Transmageddon, a popular open-source video transcoder for Linux that’s built atop GStreamer, has seen its first major update in more than one year.

  Transmageddon 0.20 is this new release tagged by Christian Schaller. This release took a while in part due to having to work out bugs in GStreamer and waiting for a new python-gstreamer release, which has now occurred with version 0.10.22.

• Transmageddon video transcoder for Linux updated

• Gedit – Dash

• CommandLineFu: Amazing Collection Of Command Line Gems [Linux & Mac]

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Enable Compiz Desktop Cube in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Unity

  • How To: Remove White Dots From LightDM Greeter On Ubuntu 11.10

  • The Linux Command tac

  • The Painless Way to Ditch Your Old Windows XP for a More Secure Linux

  • Multimedia (MP3, MPEG-4, AVI, DiVX, etc.) support in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot)

  • Understanding the cat Command

  • [How To] Add Skype to The Ubuntu Messaging Menu

  • How To Upgrade Fedora Linux Easily

  • Tips to help you move faster using shell history commands

  • How to Install GNOME Themes in Ubuntu 11.10

  • CentOS Change Timezone

  • Removing all i386 packages from CentOS 5 x86_64 server

  • Builtin Commands

  • How to Install and Manage GNOME Shell Themes in Ubuntu 11.10 Using Extension?

  • Mount –bind – like symlinks only better!

  • Gnome Shell Focus Effects Extension

  • Taking back the old scrollbars in Ubuntu

  • Disable Lock Screen After Suspend in Ubuntu 11.10

  • How To Make Your Own (Almost) Chromebook

  • Builtin Commands

  • How to Install GNOME Themes in Ubuntu 11.10

  • Writing stanalone programs with EGL and KMS (updated)

  • Setting Up Network RAID1 With DRBD On Ubuntu 11.10

  • Running SugarCRM Community Edition On Nginx (LEMP) on Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04

• Games

  • Mumbo Jumbo Games Land in Ubuntu Software Centre

    A selection of game titles from software publisher MumboJumbo have been made available for purchase through the Ubuntu Software Center.

  • Doom 3 Source Code Packaged and Tested, Almost Near Final Release

    Two months back, John Carmack, Founder and Technical Director, id Software announced that soon Doom 3 code will be open sourced. Now he confirmed through a recent tweet that everything has been tested and packaged and source code release of Doom 3 can happen anytime now, its just awaiting final clearance from lawyers.

  • Doom 3 Source Code Is About Ready To Go

  • Doom 3 source code ‘packaged and tested,’ waiting on legal OK

Desktop Environments

• A Word on Productivity and Linux…

  As the end of this semester comes close, I’ve found myself progressively busier. I’ve even neglected my blog about the experiences I have with Linux…

  Then, I noticed something: Why is it that I’m so busy and why I haven’t written anything here?

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Release Notes for Trinity v3.5.13

• GNOME Desktop

  • 8 Things I did After Installing GNOME Shell in Brand New Ubuntu 11.10

    GNOME Shell is GNOME foundation’s official shell for GNOME 3.0 and as we have seen in so many posts before, GNOME Shell is an incredibly good alternative for Canonical’s Unity UI which became the default Ubuntu interface starting from Natty Narwhal release. The least you can say is, now you have two unique interfaces to choose from instead of plain vanilla GNOME. Top things to do after installing GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10.

Distributions

• Best Linux distributions for hardware detection and older hardware

  Jack Wallen responds to a question from a long-time Linux fan about small distributions and hardware support. Here is Jack’s advice on lightweight distributions.

• Linux from Scratch: A Cautionary Tale, Part 1

  LFS needs an existing Linux environment. Don’t try and use unetbootin on the LFS liveCD (I used lfslivecd-x86_64-6.3-r2145-min.iso to get started, but there is a newer revision 2160 available on one of the mirrors.) unetbootin in this configuration is just a bag of hurt and you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get your root volume to work, so just burn a CD.

  If I was building LFS again I’d have started from a stable Debian base or other Linux distribution where I’m comfortable and have network access – there are a number of reasons below I suggest this, but you really want your host system kernel to be 2.6.25 or higher.

  Make sure to have all the patches from linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter03/patches.html are downloaded and in a location you can access from your host distribution. USB sticks are OK for this if you don’t have network access (mount the stick, and then copy the patches and packages to the sources directory). Use DownThemAll or a similar mass downloading application/extension on the patches page to save time and grief.

• Does Software Availability Dictate the Best Distro?

  Once upon a time, Linux enthusiasts were forced to compile the software they needed. It was the only option available. While the act of compiling software was itself not so bad, the need to chase down dependencies was a deal breaker for many Linux newcomers.

  These days however, package management for most Linux distributions has made any sort of software compiling something most people can safely avoid.

  As I was pondering these changes to the Linux world, this got me wondering: do most Linux users really prefer one kind of package management over the other? In this article, I hope to shed some light on this once and for all.

• New Releases

  • Linux From Scratch (LFS) 7.0 has been released!

  • Alpine 2.3.0 released

  • AV Linux 5.0.2 Released!

  • ALT Linux 6.0: Simply Linux and KDesktop

    ALT Linux 6.0.0, an independently-developed Russian Linux distribution, has been released. The new version comes in two editions – “Simply Linux”, which is an installable live medium featuring the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment, and KDesktop, which is a live and installation DVD image centred around the KDE 4.6.5 desktop. Both editions are built on top of the Linux kernel 3.0.3 and include X.Org Server 1.10.3 and LibreOffice 3.4.2. Other features of this release include hybrid ISO image that can be used either as a DVD image or transferred to a bootable USB drive, GRUB 2 as the default bootloader, simplified installation of third-party applications, and seamless integration with the Dropbox cloud storage system.

• Gentoo Family

  • Gentoo (A.K.A. “Compiling!”)

    For this version of the experiment I have chosen to try my hand at installing Gentoo. Gentoo, for those who don’t know, or who weren’t following Jake’s posts during the original experiment, is a fully customizable distribution where you have to compile and install all of your applications from source code downloads. Thankfully they do offer some excellent package management tools, Portage in particular, that help automate this process.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Recognizes Emergent as the Public Sector Partner of the Year

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 16 beta

    • Fedora 16 Release Candidate 1 Arrives Late

    • Looking ahead to Fedora 16

      I happen to prefer Fedora as my Linux distro. While I usually install the “alpha” and “beta” releases on a USB flash drive, and test-drive it there, I haven’t been able to do that with Fedora 16 yet. The installer for the test releases had a bug that prevented me from making the flash drive bootable. This has been fixed with an updated installer (which has been tweaked at least twice since) but too late for me to test it out here.

    • Fedora considers moving all binaries to /usr/bin/

      Fedora Project developers are proposing to move all executable files and libraries used by them to the /usr/ directory from Fedora 17 onwards and essentially dispensing with /bin/, /lib/, /lib64/ and /sbin/. Fedora 17 is due for release in May 2012. The change would mean that virtually all operating system components would be stored on one volume/partition, optionally mounted as read-only, which could be used by multiple computers simultaneously. It would also simplify the creation of snapshots. Snapshots allow the restoration of a previous file system state following installation of an update which proves problematic.

    • Fedora 16 is Coming With Big Changes

      Fedora Linux is always pushing the bleeding edge, and has evolved into a versatile, flexible distro with something for everyone, for little old ladies with netbooks to students to powerhouse enterprises. Fedora 16, Verne, is due to be released November 8, 2011, so let’s take a sneak peek at what’s inside.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Debian, with a hint of Mint

      People familiar with Linux Mint’s other editions may miss the extras which come from the Ubuntu base. For instance, the Debian edition doesn’t appear to support PPAs or the Ubuntu One services. Though it’s not likely to make a big difference one way or the other, the Ubuntu-based editions of Linux Mint coming out later this year will have a few thousand extra packages in their software repositories compared to Linux Mint “Debian”. So there is a slight downgrade in features in exchange for the rolling Debian base. Having said that, my week with Mint’s Debian edition was a pretty rewarding experience. I ran into a package conflict right away, but aside from that and the keyboard issue it was smooth sailing. Also, the Mint desktop in this edition is just as polished and as easy-to-use as the Ubuntu-based editions. On my hardware everything was detected and worked straight out of the gate and it’s nice to have the low-resource usage of Debian combined with the useful collection of drivers, firmware and codecs that come with Mint. My feeling is that people who already use Mint probably won’t find any benefit in switching to the Debian base, unless they’re quite taken with the rolling-release model. However, users of other rolling release distributions and other Debian-based operating systems will probably enjoy the convenience and friendliness that comes with the Mint experience.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Glimpse Into 11.10 Shell Edition

        Still a lot of work needs to be done but it is coming along.

      • Ubuntu Desktop Designers: ‘Unity Should Be Configurable’

        Ever since Ubuntu 11.04, the lack of the ability to configure many aspects of the new Unity interface has been pointed out and questioned widely.

        Today, at the “Meet Ubuntu Desktop Designers” session in the Ubuntu Developer Summit being held in Orlando, Florida, members of the Canonical design team clarified that they never intended Unity to not be configurable; instead, it is very much on their radar.

      • Is Ubuntu Linux Too Late to the Mobile Game?

        Canonical certainly delivered some exciting news this week when it announced that its Ubuntu Linux distribution is on the way to tablets, smartphones, and TVs.

      • How Will Ubuntu Succeed In the Mobile Platform Game of Thrones?

        News surfaced yesterday that Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, will bring its Linux-based platform to mobile devices sometime within the next several years. The popular desktop browser alternative has long been thought to be a good candidate for tablet devices but ZDNet reports that the company would like to take it to smartphones and smart TVs as well.

        Canonical is entering a complex ecosystem. Creating a new platform for mobile devices is more than just rallying developers to the cause (that certainly does not hurt). Commercial uptake has a lot to do with what the original equipment manufacturers and mobile carriers want and how they can implement a platform. As we have seen with Android, that is a tangled web to weave.

      • Canonical preps Ubuntu for smartphone debut in 2014

      • Leadership @ UDS

      • GNOME 2 Absent from Latest Version of Ubuntu Open Source OS

        I’ve used both Unity and GNOME Shell plenty in the past, and I like them both. In fact, I prefer Unity on my netbook, since it makes more efficient use of the tiny screen. But on my desktop, where I’m not so worried about the economy of pixels, I always felt more at home with the sleek plainness of GNOME 2.

        But on Ubuntu 11.10, GNOME 2 is nowhere to be found. Unlike in earlier Ubuntu releases, Unity is the only desktop environment installed by default. The Internet is peppered with instructions for “reverting” to GNOME 2 on Ubuntu 11.10; however, they merely explain how to install a package called gnome-session-fallback, which is not actually GNOME 2 but a half-baked build of GNOME Shell dressed up in its predecessor’s clothing. It doesn’t work well at all.

      • Ubuntu Linux to Join the Mobile Race

      • Ubuntu Versus Android for Phones and Tablets

      • Ubuntu Wants to Be on Your Phones, Tablets and TVs

      • Canonical preps Ubuntu for mobile devcies

      • Virtualization with KVM on Ubuntu Server

      • Why Ubuntu Smartphones Could Make Lots of Sense

      • Two for Oneiric

        I am not a big fan of Unity, not because it is poorly designed, but because it doesn’t make it easy for users to configure it to their liking. In fact, the dock itself is immovable, attached permanently to the left side of the screen, even though many people would prefer it at the bottom, and right-handed users might find it more natural on the right side. This rigidity is a dramatic departure from the Gnome 2.x desktop, which let users put their desktop elements—launchers, folders and widgets—almost anywhere they pleased.

      • Virtualization with KVM on Ubuntu Server

      • Ubuntu On Stuff, KVM On ARM A15, GLPROXY

        Besides talking about how hybrid graphics on Linux are a mess, there were many other topics talked about on this first day of the Ubuntu 12.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

        Below is some of what happened (and my thoughts) on a few of the interesting events.

Devices/Embedded

• Xilinx Launches General Open Source Linux Support and Developer Community

• Phones

  • Android

    • Android voice assistant shootout

      In the absence of anything shiny, the hoi polloi and the media focused on Siri as the The Big Idea at the iPhone 4S launch. Android has supported basic voice commands for ages, but there are now a number of Siri-wannabes in the Market. But are they of any use other than as a bit of mild amusement?

      That depends on the use you put them to. Asking your phone “how many inches in a kilometre” or “what’s the capital of Paraguay” verbally is a darned sight easier than searching for the information in the conventional manner.

    • Sky Go for Android launching ‘in coming months’

      Sky Go for Android devices will launch “in the coming months” a spokesperson has confirmed to TechRadar.

      Sky Go has been a huge hit for Sky – amalgamating its on demand services and proving popular not only on computers but also on iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad.

    • Half of Britain now owns a smartphone

      Almost half of the UK population now owns a smartphone, and Google’s OS, Android, is leading the race.

    • Why Android Could Reach 70% Market Share in 2012

      The carriers will keep pushing smartphones to their customers, and most of the time that smartphone will be an Android smartphone, especially for people who want inexpensive contract plans. The carriers push of smartphones plus the ever lower low-end smartphone prices should help Android completely and undeniably dominate the market in 2012.

    • HTC takes top smartphone spot in U.S. according to Q3 data from Canalys

      Samsung blew past Apple and Nokia in the third quarter to become the No. 1 smartphone vendor in the world, but another emerging smartphone vendor stole the top spot in the U.S. according to a new report. Market research firm Canalys on Monday released country-level smartphone shipment estimates and according to its figures, HTC shipped 5.7 million own-brand smartphones and another 700,000 T-Mobile-branded handsets in the U.S.

    • Top Free Android Email Tools

    • ATandT unveils two 4.5-inch, dual-core Android phones for 4G LTE network

      AT&T will launch its first two smartphones supporting its 4G Long-Term Evolution (LTE) service on Nov. 6. The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket is a larger (4.5 inches) and faster (1.5GHz) version of AT&T’s earlier Galaxy S II offering, and the HTC Vivid features a 1.2GHz processor, 4.5-inch screen, and dual cameras, one of which is an eight-megapixel model.

    • Samsung Galaxy Note likely to be announced for India this week

• Sub-notebooks/Tablets

  • HP TouchPad booting MeeGo Linux (Two dead platforms – together at last)

  • HP TouchPad Returns to Best Buy

    Hewlett Packard’s webOS-based TouchPad tablet is back from the dead again and hitting Best Buy store shelves this week. Starting Tuesday on BestBuy.com you can pick up the 32GB version of the TouchPad for $150 with the purchase of a new HP or Compaq PC. Alternatively, you can pick up the webOS tablet alone for $600. The tablet will be available at Best Buy retail locations starting Friday. You can find complete details on Best Buy’s TouchPad deal page.

Wall Street Won’t Share the Wealth, But It Will Share the Code

NYSE Technologies is the IT division of NYSE Euronext, the company that operates the New York Stock Exchange and various other exchanges across the globe. In essence, it provides tech services to the financial outfits that use these exchanges — investment banks and hedge funds and other trading firms.

For years, it has charged these companies to stream market data through an online interface it calls MAMA (Middleware Agnostic Messaging API). MAMA has been in use since the middle of the last decade, letting banks and funds tap into an NYSE software platform that streams data from more than 200 global markets.

OpenMAMA Offers Open-Source Messaging

NYSE Technologies Offers Middleware as Open Source

Events

• Draw quickly: Deadline for SCALE contest is Friday

• Digium And Open Source Community Release Asterisk 10 At AstriCon

  Digium, Inc., the Asterisk Company, and the Asterisk open source community, recently released Asterisk 10. Asterisk is a communications platform that allows developers to create powerful business phone systems and unified communications solutions. Since its introduction 12 years ago, Asterisk has been used, free of charge, in nearly every country of the world to power telephone and other communications systems. It has been downloaded millions of times, including two million last year alone, establishing Asterisk as the most popular open source telephony engine.

• Digium And Open Source Community Release Asterisk 10 At AstriCon

• Digium updates open source UC platform; BroadSoft unveils new product line

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • The Fickle Fate of Firefox

    In various geek circles, most of the smart money has turned away from Firefox and toward the Chrome browser. I must admit that I’m getting a little tired of Firefox since it now handles files on my main Vista writing machine poorly—or at least version 3.6.23 handles them poorly. The details are boring but let’s just say there are idiosyncrasies that force me to use Chrome in too many instances.

  • Mozilla puts Firefox on a memory diet

    Firefox’s single largest consumer of RAM, its JavaScript engine SpiderMonkey, is going on the mother of all diets. At any one time, SpiderMonkey’s memory footprint can be over 50% of Firefox’s total usage — the JavaScript on the ExtremeTech homepage, for example, uses no less than 115MB of memory — and slipstreaming SpiderMonkey is by far the best change that Mozilla can make to keep Firefox on the desktop svelte and competitive with Chrome and IE, and Firefox on Android less sluggish.

SaaS

• Hortonworks Delivers Preview of its Hadoop-based Big Data Platform

  Hortonworks officials have predicted that half of the world’s data will be processed by Apache Hadoop within five years, and the company claims to be focused on accelerating the development and usage of Hadoop.

• HortonWorks Hones a Hadoop Distribution

• MarkLogic Ties Its Database to Hadoop for ‘Big Data’ Support

  You can add MarkLogic to the growing list of database vendors rushing to embrace the open-source Hadoop programming framework for large-scale data processing.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Status quo on the Foundation, October 2011

  It has been a while since I have blogged about the Foundation status, but the Steering Committee have been very active on this topic in the meantime. Now that we are handing over to the new Board of Directors, it is good to document where we have reached.

• Document Foundation still not a foundation

  The members of the Steering Committee are among those who have been elected to serve on the new Board of Directors.

CMS

• Supercharge WordPress

Semi-Open Source

• CFEngine 3 Nova Unveiled

• Pentaho 4.1 includes new in-memory analytics capabilities

  Pentaho has released version 4.1 of its open source Business Intelligence (BI) suite and analytics software. Available both as a Community Edition and a commercial Enterprise Edition, the update includes “major” data analysis performance, scalability and reliability improvements, as well as support for distributed in-memory caching systems.

Funding

• Appcelerator gets $15M for open source mobile platform

  Open source app development platform Appcelerator announced Tuesday that it has raised $15 million in a round of funding led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital, and Red Hat, with participation from existing investors eBay, Sierra Ventures, and Storm Ventures. The new round brings Appcelerator’s total raised to $31.5 million.

  With over 30,000 apps and 30 million devices in its portfolio, Appcelerator has laid claim to the title of the largest mobile app development platform for the Apple and Android marketplaces.

• Modo Labs Closes $4M Venture Capital Investment to Accelerate Adoption of its Mobile Solutions by Universities and Enterprises

  Modo Labs(TM), a leading provider of open source content delivery solutions for mobile platforms and devices, today announced the company has closed a $4M investment from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures. Modo Labs will use the new funds to accelerate market adoption for its mobile solutions, which are based on its open source Kurogo(TM) mobile platform.

• Mobile open source startup Modo Labs lands $4M

BSD

• The OpenBSD 5.0 Release

• OpenBSD 5.0 reveals MAD-themed release

  The OpenBSD Foundation has released version 5.0 of the popular operating system and has made it available for download – or for purchase via CD if you want the bonus party pack.

• OpenBSD 5.0 released

  OpenBSD 5.0 includes the GNOME 2.32.2, KDE 3.5.10 and Xfce 4.8.0 desktop environments. It also contains a number of new and updated packages including versions 3.5.19, 3.6.18 and 5.0 of the Firefox web browser, PHP 5.2.17 and 5.3.6, LibreOffice 3.4.1, and Chromium 12. The release includes September’s release of OpenSSH 5.9.

Public Services/Government

• Portuguese government orders Open Sauce on older computers

  The Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) has told school boards across the country that it will not be shelling out huge amounts of dosh for Microsoft software this year.

  It wants schools to keep their old computers and install free Linux software instead as part of an austerity measure.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • Modular open source kit offers Arduino compatibility

    A startup called Upgrade Industries has developed a modular motherboard kit with an open source design that aims to improve upon the Arduino concept. The BoardX kit lacks a processor or any required operating system, but provides a breadboard system for stacking circuit boards, including an available, Arduino-compatible Atmel Atmega AVR module.

  • New £56 open-source hardware runs full Linux OS

  • BeagleBone: A hacker oriented version of the Beagleboard

  • Insert Coin: BoardX is an open-source, modular motherboard for prolific prototypers

Programming

• C development on Linux – C and other programming languages – II.

• Open source Eclipse group aims to standardize M2M communications

  Sierra Wireless and the Eclipse Foundation announced an Eclipse working group to define an open development standard for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Together with founding members IBM and Eurotech, the M2M Industry Working Group will establish an integrated development environment for M2M networks, as well as a Linux-based, lightweight communications protocol, based in part on Sierra Wireless’ Koneki project and the Lua scripting language.

• Industry Leaders Join to Provide Open Source Tools and Protocols to Simplify Development of M2M Solutions

• Rescue in sight for BerliOS OSS repository

4G – A Brief Discussion Of Its Usefulness

The first question that comes to mind for a person with a completely nontechnical background is ‘what is 4G?’ There have been several levels of up-gradation you have seen in the mobile phones available in the market since it was launched. The variations have been available not only in the designs and looks of the phones but also in the engineering and technology with which they are made. This has initiated various changes in their features and functionalities.

Apple: It’s time to leave Neverland

Post-Jobs, Apple must exist in a world of constantly improving commodity technology being created by its competitors and enterprises seeking next generation, integrated mobile and desktop solutions that the company is not currently offering: Products which are arguably more open and can more easily attract the partners needed to create solutions.

And it should go without saying that Apple cannot compete by continuing to use the intimidation tactics of its departed founder, no matter how many tens of billions it has in its expansive larders.

People Cannot Buy Large Expensive Computers Even if They Wanted Them

iPhone 4S Battery Woes: Where is the Outrage?

Column: The iPhone 4S battery problem

iPhone 4S battery issue reminiscent of ‘antennagate’

Apple a digital vampire, says The Who star

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend has launched a bitter attack on Apple, claiming that the iTunes Music Store is a ‘digital vampire.’

The ageing mod-rocker likened Apple’s download platform to the failed Northern Rock building society and says the store is ‘bleeding dry’ and failing to support up-and-coming musicians.

Finance

• Did Corzine’s risk taking cripple MF Global?

  In early April, Jon Corzine was in a tough spot. MF Global, the company he had run for the previous year, was about to post a fourth-quarter loss, marking its fourth successive fiscal year of red ink.

  For the former Goldman Sachs chief, it was a setback to his efforts to turn MF Global around. He had just announced a plan for the bank to boost trading risk by holding more assets on its books, both to help customers and to bet on markets.

• Free Speech For People goes to Occupy Wall Street

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Anti-Spam Law in Limbo as Lobby Groups Seek New Exceptions

  Last December, the government celebrated passing eight bills into law, including the long-delayed anti-spam bill. Years after a national task force recommended enacting anti-spam legislation, the Canadian bill finally established strict rules for electronic marketing and safeguards against the installation of unwanted software programs on personal computers, all backed by tough multi-million dollar penalties.

ACTA

• European Parliament releases “nonexistent” coordinators’ minutes on ACTA

  The European Parliament’s register released the International Trade (INTA) committee’s coordinators’ minutes on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement). Prior to the release, the Parliament’s services denied the existence of these minutes four times. Only after the FFII provided proof that the documents do exist, the Parliament released them. The minutes document illegal decisions.

  On 21 June 2011, the coordinators of the INTA committee decided to ask the Parliament’s legal service an opinion on ACTA. (pdf) This decision was illegal for two reasons. First, the ACTA text had already been published, the discussion should have taken place in public. Second, coordinators can prepare decisions, not take them.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• Trying New Things: Ubuntu 11.10 Made Me Do It.

  My primary desktop system is a Dell 745 with 6GB of RAM and Intel Core 2 1.86 Ghz processors. For Windows 7 that same kind of PC is pretty slow, but for Linux it snaps right along.

Kernel Space

• Linux Foundation Launches OpenMAMA Project

  Several financial services firms are teaming up to launch the OpenMAMA project to deliver a new open-source messaging API, according to the Linux Foundation.

• New OpenMAMA project releases open source middleware messaging spec

  NYSE Technologies and several financial services firms have launched the OpenMAMA project to deliver an open-source messaging API for financial services and telecommunivations. OpenMAMA 1.1 for x86-based Linux platforms has been released, and additional messaging middleware for high-volume, high-speed transactions on Linux and other platforms will follow, according to the Linux Foundation.

• OpenMAMA 1.1 for Linux on x86 Systems Released

• Graphics Stack

  • xf86-video-intel 2.17 Release Candidate

    Chris Wilson has taken a break from his Sunday hacking on the SNA acceleration architecture to put out the first release candidate for the upcoming xf86-video-intel 2.17.0 release.

    The xf86-video-intel 2.17 release isn’t going to be terribly exciting, since much of the interesting developments happen within Intel’s kernel DRM and Mesa components, but there are a couple of fixes in this upcoming driver.

  • AMD Catalyst 11.10 Linux Driver Released

    On the last day of the month, AMD has released Catalyst 11.10 as their October 2011 proprietary Linux driver update.

    AMD Catalyst 11.10 / fglrx 8.90 series has “early look” Ubuntu 11.10 support (even though it’s been in since the fglrx 8.89 series), production-rated support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7, and 2D performance improvements for the AMD Brazos platform.

Applications

• Proprietary

  • Skype Uses DMCA To Remove Reverse-Engineered Code

    It appears as if Skype has taken action to contain the information that is posted on the skype-open-source blog, which posts progress on a Skype reverse engineering project.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Zareason Teo Pro Netbook and Verison 4G Hotpot on Debian Linux

  • Backup and Restore Installed Software in Sabayon Linux

  • Installing Windows Software With Wine (Linux Mint 11)

  • How To Configure A pfSense 2.0 Cluster Using CARP

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10

• Games

  • The Humble Voxatron
    Debut

    Pay what you want. Voxatron will cost $15, but we’re letting you set the price!

  • The Humble Voxatron Bundle

  • Meet Voxatron In The Latest Humble Bundle [Pay What You Want For Voxatron With The Latest Humble Bundle]

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Coverage From The Qt Developer Days In Munich

    For those that weren’t present at the Qt Developer Days 2011 in Munich this past week, here’s some of the content that’s now available online from this conference that marked the beginning of the Qt Project.

  • KDE Commit-Digest for 23rd October 2011

  • Goodbye Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook and ARM

    Kate Stewart announced on October 28th that thr Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook and ARM editions reached EOL (End of Life) on October 29th, 2011.

    The ARM and Netbook editions of Lucid Lynx were released 18 months ago, on April 29th, 2010. Since then, it received important security updates and critical fixes.

    On October 29th, 2011, Canonical stopped supporting the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook Edition and the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) ARM Edition.

Distributions

• Linux light – SliTaz GNU/Linux and SliTaz-Aircrack-ng

  Once upon a time there was DSL (Damn Small Linux) which provided a full workable system in a 50 MB image. I used to have it on a small tertiary partition for repair and rescue tasks on my main systems. It was never or at least very rarely needed as I recall, but I liked the pre-set radio stations in XMMS and the backgrounds and conky config in DSL, so I ended up running it more and more over Zenwalk 2.6, which at the time was using a very half-baked early XFCE 4.4, if only to listen to internet radio on a geeky minimalistic looking box.

  DSL is no more and has been superceded by TinyCore, which is only 10 MB in size. If that is too minimal for you there is another option, SliTaz GNU/Linux. It is a small distribution based in Switzerland that at exactly 30 MB in size sits somewhere in the middle and comes in French and English by default. You choose your language after booting. It´s been around for a while, I had a look at their 1.0 release in 2008 and was impressed. It is mainly intended as a live system but can be installed to hard drive. For being this small it includes a load of functionality, the Lighttpd web server for instance which makes it perfect for loading from USB stick or CD and running a website from memory.

• New Releases

  • Berry 1.12

  • Linux From Scratch Version 7.0 released

    The Linux From Scratch (LFS) project has released Version 7.0 of its manual for building a custom Linux installation. The new version of these step-by-step instructions uses more recent components than previous editions – for example the recently introduced version 3.1 of the Linux kernel, the fairly recent GCC version 4.6.1, and the Glibc 2.14.1. The new LFS also explains how to set up a “/run” directory in the root directory using tmpfs, an approach taken by various distributions for several months.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva Linux 2011.0

    There’s a lot to like about Mandriva 2011.0. The user interface has been tweaked and simplified, documentation and supporting services have continued to improve and clever ideas such as Timeline make it well worth experimenting with – at the very least by enthusiasts with virtual machines.

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat (RHT) Could Break Through $53.33 Resistance Level

    Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT) closed Friday’s trading session at $51.86. In the past year, the stock has hit a 52-week low of $31.77 and 52-week high of $52.00. Red Hat (RHT) stock has been showing support around $49.19 and resistance in the $53.33 range.

  • Gloves off in NYSE: Red Hat trading tech face-off

    It was a bit perplexing when two weeks ago, apropos of nothing, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat affirmed its commitment to the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) messaging integration software that is at the heart of its Enterprise MRG-Messaging variant of the Linux stack it sells. Now we know why.

    This morning, the Linux Foundation and a bunch of important financial services giants that make use of such messaging software have backed an alternative project, launched today, called OpenMAMA.

  • Why OpenMAMA is the Future of Open Source

    OpenMAMA is an effort to standardize and simplify the MAMA APIs that have been in use since at least 2002. The basic idea behind have an open source implementation of MAMA is to have a level-set, a baseline implementation that is used to promote interoperability. The financial industry, especially stock exchanges like the NYSE are not strangers to Linux. The Big Board itself has been running on Red Hat since at least 2008. There has also been collaboration among financial services vendors as part of the AMPQ messaging standard too.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu on phones, tablets, TV’s and smart screens everywhere

        By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.

        Unity, the desktop interface in today’s Ubuntu 11.10, was designed with this specific vision in mind. While the interface for each form factor is shaped appropriately, Unity’s core elements are arranged in exactly the way we need to create coherence across all of those devices. This was the origin of the name Unity – a single core interface framework, that scales across all screens, and supports all toolkits.

      • Unity Integration to Run Deeper in Ubuntu 12.04

        As UDS continues over in Florida, USA thoughts have turned on how to make integration between applications and the Unity desktop better.

      • Ubuntu 12.04 will Focus on Power Users, Efforts to Bring Ubuntu to Phones,Tablets and TVs by 14.04 LTS

        In opening keynote address of Ubutnu Developer Summit (UDS), Mark Shuttleworth said that lots of efforts will be put this cycle to make Ubuntu more power users friendly. Emphasis will be on improving multi-tasking, multi-monitor support and other features for power users.

        With 12.04 LTS, the support will also be extended to 5 years which has been 3 years until now for LTS releases. Also a more streamlined desktop experience will be delivered to corporate users who deploy Ubuntu at mass scale.

        Mark also talked about some plans for the next 14.04 LTS release, due in 2 years. He said that there will be efforts to deliver the core Unity platform to a range of devices that include smartphones, tablets and TVs.

      • Ubuntu Software Centre 12.04 Gets Discussed

        Plans for improving the performance and start-up time for Ubuntu’s Software Centre in 12.04 have been discussed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

      • Shuttleworth Misses the Point Yet Again

        I can’t speak for everyone, but I can at least speak for myself. I am not “too cool” to use something that looks “slick” (I mean comon, have you seen Enlightenment).

        What I’m not about to use though is something that was clearly designed for a touch screen on my computer that has a 15+inch monitor driven by a keyboard and mouse. I’m not about to use something that is resource greedy. And I most certainly not about to use something that makes most all the choices for me about how my desktop should be laid out. I’m the one that is going to be using my computer – so how about I get to choose how the GUI works best for me?

      • Shuttleworth: Linux Power Users Aren’t too Cool for Unity

        Mark Shuttleworth makes no apologies for the Ubuntu Unity Linux desktop interface, in fact he sees it as the foundation for his company’s platform strategy as the company moves beyond desktops, servers and the cloud.

        Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu Linux, delivered a keynote address today at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), reminding the Ubuntu faithful of the progress made this past year. He also delivered his vision for the road ahead, which involved leveraging Unity to bring Unity to multiple types of smart screens including phones and tablets.

      • [Ubuntu Fridge Update]

      • Ubuntu 14.04 will be a smartphone and tablet OS. So what?

        n a recent blog entry, Mark Shuttleworth, owner of Canonical and the de facto leader of Ubuntu development, announced that future versions of the OS will be optimized for tablets and smartphones. By spring 2013 (assuming the company keeps to its rigid release schedule), version 14.04 LTS “will power tablets, phones, and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server, and the cloud.”

        Shuttleworth’s ambitions are certainly timely. While it has become apparent that Linux will never challenge Windows’ core constituency of desktop and laptops, the definition of what constitutes a computing platform is expanding at an enormous rate thanks to continued advances in smartphone and tablet capabilities. Android and iOS have already established themselves as clear challengers to the Windows paradigm while ARM is threatening the x86 portion of the vaunted Wintel Alliance. Even more importantly, this is scarcely an idea the Canonical owner jotted down half-baked. Ubuntu’s Unity GUI, writes Shuttleworth, was specifically designed to scale across a wide range of devices from small touch screens to desktops, and to provide a consistent operating environment across all of them.

      • Will Ubuntu Mobile Kill The Desktop?

        Mark Shuttleworth, the optimistic leader of Ubuntu, has shared his ‘next’ big plan and it has everything to do with the markets where Linux is already strong — non desktop markets.

      • Ubuntu for smartphones, tablets and TVs

      • Shuttleworth: Ubuntu is heading to phones and tablets

      • Ubuntu Linux eyes tablet territory

      • Can Ubuntu Linux win on smartphones and tablets?

        Mark Shuttleworth is as close as Linux has ever had to Steve Jobs. He has vision, he’s articulate, and he can move an audience. But, can he move a market that’s in love with Android phones and Apple iPad tablets to give Ubuntu a chance? I think he has a shot.

        I’ve known for over a year that Ubuntu was going to try for the smartphone and tablet market, so when Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth told me he was going to expand to devices, I wasn’t surprised. Technically, Ubuntu, and its parent company, Canonical, have the chops to do it.

      • Ubuntu Linux to Hit Tablets, Phones, TVs in the Nick of Time?

      • Canonical to Expand Ubuntu for Smartphones, Tablets

      • Ubuntu Linux looks beyond the desktop to phones, tablets, TVs

      • Ubuntu Plans Move to Smartphones, Tablets, TVs

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Xubuntu 11.10 and my Netbook

          October saw the release of the latest version of the Ubuntu family and that includes Xubuntu, the Xfce edition. I’ve just installed Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook and the experience was rather good.

          The netbook in question is an eMachines (Acer) model eM350. The specs are: 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1GB of memory and a 160GB hard drive. I’d been using it for a couple of months with the default installation of Windows XP.

        • Kubuntu + Realtek card – slow network performance

        • Thanks Kubuntu and Canonical!

          So several weeks back, the wonderful Kubuntu folks, on behalf of Canonical, supplied a tablet to help me test modifications I’ve been making to allow Bangarang to be more touch friendly. Bangarang was shipped with Plasma Active One with some very basic modifications to help make it at least tolerable on a touch device. I’ve spent a little more time trying to improve the touch mode and the supplied tablet has made it so much easier for testing.

Devices/Embedded

• New $89 Open-source Hardware Runs Full Linux OS

  An open-source hardware group on Monday announced a US$89 credit-card sized motherboard based on an ARM processor that could be used for robotics, gaming and medical devices.

  BeagleBoard’s BeagleBone development board is targeted at the open-source hardware community, which includes hobbyists and engineers writing code for hardware with open-source specifications. Some BeagleBoard projects include bringing Linux-based Android and Ubuntu operating systems to its hardware.

• $89 dev board includes Cortex-A8 CPU, Ethernet, JTAG

  BeagleBoard.org announced a new open-platform, hobbyist-focused development board — priced at just $89 and equipped with a Linux distro that boots in ten seconds. The BeagleBone offers an ARM Cortex-A8 processor running at 720MHz, 256MB of RAM, two 46-pin expansion connectors, a USB host port and multipurpose device port, on-chip Ethernet, and a microSD slot.

• Phones

  • $100 Atrix 2 is a smartphone bargain, review says

    Motorola’s Atrix 2 is well worth its $100 on-contract price, at a time when some Android smartphones are selling for $300, says this eWEEK review. Dual-core, 1GHz performance, a 4.3-inch qHD display, and a responsive eight-megapixel camera offer good value, and an extra $300 brings you the nifty Lapdock 100 accessory.

  • Never say die: why HP should open up webOS instead of killing it

    HP announced last week that it will keep its PC division instead of spinning it off as the company had previously discussed. The future of the company’s mobile strategy and the fate of the webOS platform remain unclear, however.

  • Android

    • Amazon Brings Prime TV Programs To Android Devices

    • Can Google Tame The Samsung Monster It Created?

      First, Samsung has Intel (INTC) as a partner in this effort. Intel is desperate to find a way out of ARM’s hammerlock in the mobile space, and this may be its best chance. It should work seriously to make this work, especially after the Nokia debacle. DigitalTrends says Intel is dedicated to mobile Linux.

      Second, there is Samsung’s size. Samsung is now bigger than Apple (AAPL) in smart phones based on shipments. It’s starting on true innovations like flexible screens. The company has motivation to improve margins at the unit because it’s not doing as well in chips and TVs as it hoped.

    • Open source retro RPG called Andor’s Trail, gets a rather large update

Events

• LinuxCon Europe Wrap-Up

  The first-ever LinuxCon Europe wrapped up on Friday October 28 in Prague. The LinuxCon portion of the week was just one part of a combined schedule that also incorporated Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE) 2011, the Linux Kernel Summit (LKS), and the GStreamer Conference.

  By all accounts the event was a success, attracting more than 800 attendees — a number that threatened to overflow the meeting rooms of a few of the more popular sessions. In fact, the far-greater-than-expected turnout already prompted the Linux Foundation (LF) to look for a larger venue for the 2012 conference. The co-location of LKS and ELCE meant that a lot of talks dealt with the kernel itself (file systems, device drivers, kernel module development, etc.) and with embedded development, but there was plenty of other content as well — desktop environments, databases, license questions, and more.

Web Browsers

• Midori: One Of The Most Lightweight Browsers Around [Linux & Windows]

  We’ve had browser wars back when Netscape was still the king. Today, it’s Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all battling it out to see who’s top dog. There are plenty of different categories where they are being compared, such as speed, memory efficiency, functionality/features, and more.

SaaS

• Rackspace Doubles Down On Open Source Process

  Open source has been vital in creating the cloud. The open source process allowed many companies to use what began as Google’s (GOOG) MapReduce, evolving it into things like Hadoop (originally a Yahoo (YHOO) project), entire cloud stacks like Red Hat’s (RHT) OpenShift, and services like Amazon’s (AMZN) EC2 in relatively short order.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• LibreOffice extensions and templates site now live

  Following a six-week public beta, The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced that the project’s new extensions and templates repositories for LibreOffice are now online. In a post on the TDF blog, Florian Effenberger, a member of the Foundation’s Board of Directors, says that the sites are just “one of the many community efforts at the LibreOffice project”, adding that the repositories will “benefit of millions of LibreOffice and free office users worldwide”.

• Oracle v. Google – Opposing Positions (to Motions)

  Last Friday was the day for both parties to get their negative mojo on as they each filed oppositions to the motions of the other. The three motions addressed are:

  * Google’s motion that it not be held liable for patent damages occuring prior to July 20, 2010 (see, Google Files Motion for Partial SJ on Oracle’s Failure to Mark);

  * Google’s motion to strike two “rebuttal” damages reports (of Oracle) by Dr. Kenneth Serwin (see, Google Loses Lindholm Email Battle); and

  * Oracle’s motion to exclude portions of the expert reports (of Google) of Gregory K. Leonard and Alan J. Cox (see, Google Loses Lindholm Email Battle)

Healthcare

• GNU Health 1.4.1 released

  GNU Solidario is happy to announce the release of GNU Health 1.4.1, in which we have incorporated support for PyPI, the Python Package Index Digg this article

Licensing

• Ruby 1.9.3 arrives with licence change

  The Ruby development team announced the release of version 1.9.3 of its open source programming language. Described as basically being “an implementation-improved version of Ruby 1.9.2″, the first release of the new stable series of Ruby improves library loading performance and brings changes to the Ruby licence.

• Ruby project ditches GPL in favour of BSD

Open Hardware

• Meet BeagleBone, the new $89 open source hardware platform, giving electronic enthusiasts a smaller, friendlier and more affordable treat

Standards/Consortia

• MobiUs Accelerates Mobile HTML5 Development, Aims to Kill Mobile Flash

• Sencha Announces Cloud Environment for Mobile Web HTML5 Developers

• Native JavaScript H.264 decoder offers compelling demo of JS performance

  Mozilla developer Michael Bebenita has released a JavaScript-based H.264 decoder that is intended to run natively in Web browsers. The decoder, which can display video at 30 frames per second on conventional hardware, is yet another compelling demonstration of JavaScript’s performance potential.

  JavaScript creator Brendan Eich included a demonstration of the H.264 decoder—codenamed Broadway—during a presentation at the ACM’s annual OOPSLA conference. The demonstration attracted some attention, prompting the developers to publish the source code.

Health/Nutrition

• Insurers Want Obama to Defy Law So They Can Continue Keeping You In The Dark

  If you have no idea what you’re paying good money for when you enroll in a health insurance plan, there’s a good reason for that: insurers profit from your ignorance. And they’re waging an intense, behind-the-scenes campaign to keep you in the dark.

  In my first appearance before Congress after leaving the insurance industry, I told members of the Senate Commerce Committee that insurers intentionally make it all but impossible for consumers to
  find out in advance of buying a policy exactly what is covered and what isn’t, and how much they’ll be on the hook for if they get sick or injured. Insurers are quite willing to provide you with slick marketing materials about their policies, but those materials are notoriously skimpy when it comes to useful information. And the documents they provide after you enroll are so dense that few of us can understand them.

Finance

• Joyce Will Be Back at GoldmanSachs666.com Monday

  I know you join me in welcoming her back with her on target posts relating to our core job of exposing Goldman Sachs as to their many actions which contributed to our current financial crisis and to the economic demise of our great middle class.

  GoldmanSachs666 is a non monetized site which has run from day one by volunteers such as Joyce. We welcome and appreciate the efforts made by her and the many others who have participated over the past few years of our existence.

• We are the 99%

• Goldman Sachs Sued By Hedge Fund For Knowingly Selling Toxic Mortgage-Backed Investments

  The Basis Fund filed a similar suit against Goldman in June 2010, but a U.S. district court dismissed the suit in July since the Australian hedge fund was not able to prove that its purchases from Goldman were made in the United States. Basis filed its lawsuit on Thursday to the New York County Supreme Court, rather than in the federal court system, in order to sidestep that complaint.

  Basis lost $67 million in its dealings with Goldman Sachs in 2007, according to Lewis: Eleven million dollars from a $12 million investment in Point Pleasant and another $56 million out of a subsequent $81 million investment in Timberwolf. The hedge fund is suing for an additional $1 billion in punitive damages, because they say Goldman practiced systemic fraud as it tried to unload $1 billion in Timberwolf on unsuspecting customers.

  Lewis said that Basis plans to use the discovery process in order to dig up more information about Goldman’s development and marketing of the Point Pleasant and Timberwolf securities. They said they plan to look at internal emails; investigate Goldman’s dealings with Greywolf, a firm with Goldman ties that helped select Timberwolf’s underlying assets; probe the ratings agencies that stamped Timberwolf with a AAA rating; and ask Goldman executives to testify in court.

Civil Rights

• Positive Policing From Wisconsin’s “Original Occupation”

  After two tours of duty in Iraq, 24-year-old Wisconsin native Scott Olsen managed to escape unscathed and with seven medals for valor. But Olsen was critically injured in an Occupy Oakland march last week by a police projectile. According to eyewitnesses, Olsen was acting as a human barrier between unarmed civilians and Oakland police in riot gear who were charged with keeping a public park cleared for sanitation purposes.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Desktop

• My life with a Linux Desktop in the Corporate World…

  When I recently changed jobs I was given the opportunity to build my dream machine and put what ever OS “I thought would be best”. Several of my counterparts were running Linux or dual booting between Linux and Windows. In my new position, I will mainly be supporting the IBM Tivoli family of security products. Most of these applications run on Linux and the ones that don’t, run on Windows in a VM just fine. So I was all set and ready to begin. The first question was which distro?

• I am soo Tired of the Endless Desktop Flame Wars – Can we Please all Stop This?

  The biggest asset of FLOSS is choices for the user. One of the essential aims of the FSF through the GPL is to grant the user rights that enable them to have choices. The right to modify software enables people to fork and to create different directions. The ensuing competition fosters an environment of innovation. This distinguishes us positively from Apple and Microsoft.

  I have been sitting on the sidelines about this topic for a long time. I remember the discussions about the original license of the Qt libraries (which were and are an iintegral part of the KDE desktop) that led to the commencement of the Gnome project – Interestingly, today some Gnome applications use Mono with its patent problems, while Qt is now licensed with FSF promoted GPL licenses.

• Multiple OS a challenge

  On the other hand, there are other ways to get access to that program, without necessarily having to shut everything down and rebooting.

  Depending on which is your main operating software, there are software solutions that allow you to access programs from other operating systems from within your current setup.

Kernel Space

• Intel SNA Acceleration Architecture Continues To Mature

• Comarch Becomes a Silver Member of The Linux Foundation

• Graphics Stack

  • VA-API Update Brings Minor Enhancements

    The VA-API library, libva, and the Intel VA-API driver have been updated with some minor enhancements.

    The update to the VA-API v1.0.15 library itself has API fixes, auto-generated Debian packaging support, refinements to the VA helper utilities, and has various fixes.

Applications

• It’s Last.fm-tastic!

• Popular Linux Video Transcoder Gets Updated

  Transmageddon, a popular open-source video transcoder for Linux that’s built atop GStreamer, has seen its first major update in more than one year.

  Transmageddon 0.20 is this new release tagged by Christian Schaller. This release took a while in part due to having to work out bugs in GStreamer and waiting for a new python-gstreamer release, which has now occurred with version 0.10.22.

• Xplico a network forensic analysis tool

• Proprietary

  • It May Be A While For WebM In Adobe’s Flash

  • Skype Bans Reverse-Engineering of Skype Protocol ["Epycs" Open-Source Code & Application With Support for Skype Messaging & Features Being Blocked]

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Complete Arch Linux Installation, Part 2: Graphical User Interface & Packages

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 11.10

  • jQuery and Ajax Error Detection and Handling

  • Automatic CentOS 6.0 Installation With Kickstart

• Games

  • Amnesia 75% off Halloween sale

    So that brings the price down to £3.30, a cracking price for a great native linux game! You will also get an additional 40% off if you buy the Penumbra collection costing an additional £1.98, so thats £5.28 for 4 really scary linux games.

Desktop Environments

• ASUS X101-EU17-BK 10.1-Inch Netbook (Black) Review

  The Asus X101-EU17-BK is 10inch netbook that belongs to the Eee PC family. It is powered by an Intel Atom N435 processor and comes with 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Even though it is similar to the other 10inch netbooks in the Eee PC family, its bundled operating system is what sets it apart. The X101-Eu17 runs on the MeeGo OS developed by Intel. It is a Linux based OS that was developed especially for netbooks. Thanks to this, this OS is designed to run fast on the limited resources that netbooks offer. Its user interface is also designed to be easy to work with on the small netbook screens.

• GNOME Desktop

  • What People Are Saying About GNOME [Part 2]

    A few days ago I shared the first one thousand comments about the GNOME desktop from the 2011 GNOME User Survey. Here’s now the next set of one thousand comments concerning the state of GNOME in the eyes of end-users.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 171

    · Announced Distro: openSUSE 12.1 RC1
    · Announced Distro: m23 rock 11.4
    · Announced Distro: Chakra GNU/Linux 2011.10.26
    · Announced Distro: CAELinux 2011

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat and Telstra Partner to Bring Enterprise Solutions to the Cloud

    Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Telstra, Australia’s leading telecommunications and information services company, has extended its partnership with Red Hat to enable expanded choice for enterprise customers in the cloud.

• Debian Family

  • Derivatives

    • Review: Kubuntu 11.10

      This was supposed to be a review of the new Ubuntu release (Oneiric Ocelot), however the only thing the new Ubuntu did not do to me was jump out kick me in the head. From an incomplete upgrade because I was running Dropbox, a UI that fails miserably in being a useful User Interface (UI) and the going out of its way to trash the whole system while trying to get 2 screens working made me believe that after 2 releases, Unity is still not ready for prime time.

      Instead, I decided to look at Kubuntu, the Ubuntu varient using the KDE desktop. Previous attempts at Kubuntu left me slightly cold. I love KDE, and I liked the KDE3 version, however previous Kubuntu versions lacked the full power of Ubuntu and lacked that polish that I wanted for a operating system.

      Not anymore. If anything, Kubuntu has leaped ahead of the parent distro, with a full and vibrant desktop with all the graphic elements switched on, and having a user interface (UI) that does not actively work against the user.

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • Ubuntu Linux heads to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

        Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will announce at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, FL, that they will be taking Ubuntu Linux to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.

      • Ubuntu 11.10: Looks Kind of Cool But Who Is It For?

        I decided to try out Ubuntu 11.10 on my Thinkpad T43. It was actually my first time using Unity, although I had used the Ubuntu Netbook Edition on a netbook, and I knew the two had similar UIs. This isn’t going to be a huge, in-depth thing because I don’t see how anyone is going to touch the Ars Technica review of 11.10 (DarkDuck’s Unity vs. GNOME3 review is also quite good).

      • Vodafone Webbook review: cheap and cheerful Ubuntu netbook

        Cellular network operator Vodacom recently launched a netbook, the Vodafone Webbook, that, at R1 499, it hopes will give South Africans an affordable entry into personal computing. TechCentral put the Webbook through its paces.

        The computer, which runs the Ubuntu Linux operating system — specifically Ubuntu 10.04, code-named Lucid Lynx — has a 10-inch LCD screen, 512MB RAM, and 4GB of flash storage.

        It sports an 800MHz Freescale iMX515 processor that is based on the ARM Cortex-A8. It also includes a low-end webcam — centred above the screen — and a built-in microphone for Skype calling.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Android

    • Popular Android Games

    • Top Free Android Email Tools

    • Top 5 Android Launchers Worth Trying Out

    • Google TV update adds Android Market

      Google has announced that it soon plans to release an update for its Google TV platform that will improve the underlying OS and provide several new features. Originally announced in May 2010, Google TV is the company’s open source Android platform for TVs and set-top boxes. Since first being introduced, however, it has received considerable criticism for the features it initially lacked: notably, access to the Android Market and support for installing additional applications.

    • 6 Cool Video Streaming Apps for Your Android Device

Particle Code Platform May Go Open-Source

Particle Code, a software platform that allows game/application developers to easily target multiple operating systems and mobile devices, may not only be gaining Linux support but could also become an open-source development platform if there’s sufficient interest.

Particle Code was acquired a few days back by its competitor, Appcelerator. The acquisition appears to mostly be about picking up the Particle Code engineering talent with their vast experience in making games/applications cross-platform in one pleasant sweep.

Juniper Embraces OpenFlow

The emerging OpenFlow approach to building programmable, scalable networks is continuing to gain traction. The latest vendor to jump into the fray is Juniper Networks with a Software Development Kit (SDK) that enables Juniper users to try out OpenFlow.

SaaS

• Internap Takes OpenStack Public Cloud To The People

• Java Hosting Platform Jelastic Adds NGINX

Education

• EDUCAUSE takeaway #2: Open source is alive and well

  I, like about 4 million other people in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast, am sitting here without power. My 4G card just died, but should be able to charge enough off my laptop in the next few minutes to at least post this piece once I finish writing it. The power outage, though inconvenient, is at least forcing me to sit in one place long enough to reflect back on the mid-October EDUCAUSE conference, from which I’ve only had time to give you one takeaway (essentially that learning management systems are everywhere, but Pearson’s new Google Apps-integrated LMS isn’t nearly as big a deal as most of us initially thought).

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • Open core or dual licensing? The example of MySQL

    It has been suggested that Oracle might be planning to move MySQL away from dual licensing to an open core model. Richard Hillesley takes us through the arguments, and the pros and cons of these different models.

    Projects do not thrive when there are ambivalences and ambiguities around the ownership of the code that makes up the project, as can be seen from the fallout among the various projects that Oracle inherited through its purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Public Services/Government

• Government of Portugal is Cutting Funding to M$

  Until this year, the central government of Portugal has paid for M$’s software licensing for schools. This year that will end and schools will either have to pay out of their own meager budget or choose FLOSS.

Openness/Sharing

• Cable Green, director of learning at Creative Commons, on the obviousness of open policies

  Cable Green, director of learning at Creative Commons, gave the final morning’s opening keynote at the 2011 Open Education Conference on the seeming obviousness of open policy as a necessity for education.

  “I’m interested in the policies that prevent us from providing an education to anyone in the world who might want one,” Green said. That worldwide demand for education outpaces our ability to meet it.

• Open-Source Software Exhibit Models Human Motion

  OpenSim, open-source software that is designed to accurately model human motion, is on display at The Leonardo, a science and technology museum in Salt Lake City. Designed by Scott Delp, PhD, a professor of bioengineering, mechanical engineering, and orthopedic surgery at Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif, OpenSim was created to help medical professionals and bioengineers study, diagnose, and correct abnormalities in how people move.

As iPhone 4S battery suckage spreads, fixes appear

Ever since the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 were released earlier this month, early adopters have flooded the web with complaints about reduced battery life and overheating handsets. But now a few solutions have emerged from multiple sources – but not from Apple, unfortunately.

“So… is this going to be considered ‘Battery-gate’ or ‘Suck-gate’?” asked one commenter to Chris Breen’s Macworld article, “Troubleshooting a battery-sucking iPhone 4S”.

Canonical: Mobile OEMs are going to love our Linux

Ubuntu, the free and user-friendly Mac-a-like flavour of Linux, will be targeted at mobile phones, tablets and smart TVs.
The new OS could chew into Google’s Android market share, although it’s not expected to hit devices until April 2014, Mark Shuttleworth (founder of Ubuntu developer Canonical) said in an interview ahead of a speech at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Florida.

After completing the next version of Linux Ubuntu for desktop, Canonical will start to focus on making a mobile Ubuntu, ready to ship by version 14.04 due in April 2014.

9 Incredible Tech-Themed Halloween Costumes

Finance

• Alan Grayson Gets Standing Ovation While Bill Maher Panel Mocks Occupy Wall Street ‘Hippies’

  One would think that the anti-corporatist ideals of the Occupy Wall Street movement would receive some safe harbor on Real Time with Bill Maher, and one would be correct that their ideology gelled entirely with the audience. But before Alan Grayson passionately stood up as a spokesman for their cause, the panel spent a fair amount of time mocking the group ruthlessly, for their “bongo drums,” disorganization, and incoherence.

• Occupy San Francisco: the teenager who was refused cancer treatment

  As Miran Istina puts it, she has been living on borrowed time since she was 14. Diagnosed with cancer, she was given just months to live after her health insurer refused to provide her with life-saving surgery.

  Now 18, Istina, from the city of Sisters in Oregon, has spent the past three weeks living in a tent at the Occupy San Francisco protest and says she will stay there indefinitely, despite her illness.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

How to Convince Your Friends to Use Linux Without Being a Jerk

Linux is one of the most secure and stable operating systems around, and yet, its user base hasn’t really grown as everyone expected it to. There are many reasons for this, and we won’t go into those right now. However, if you, like any other Linux user, are disappointed by the current market share stats, we can tell you some simple tips that will help you convince your Windows or Mac-crazy friends into using Linux.

Now, many Linux users have already tried to coax their friends and family members to try out this popular and newbie-friendly distro called Ubuntu. A select few have succeeded and many have failed. So here, we will give you some important tips to help you spread the word about Linux without sounding like that arrogant nerd who has nothing but contempt for Windows or Mac.

What’s Popular In The Linux World This Year

Now being in Orlando for the UDS-P summit, but with the event not officially getting underway until Monday (beginning with Mark’s keynote where something will be announced), there’s time to catch up on a few things (especially as the beer is crap and the weather is less than ideal for VFR flight at the moment). In deciding what to write about next, I was looking at the most popular Phoronix stories from this calendar year.

Kernel Space

• Linux 3.2 Is Still Looking To Be Power Hungry

  The PCI subsystem pull for the Linux 3.2 kernel was published on Friday evening. If you were hoping it would rework PCI-E ASPM (Active-State Power Management) to be more like the Windows implementation or for more PCI drivers to be setting the bits directly to support it (effectively white-listing drivers/hardware), it didn’t happen yet.

• Graphics Stack

  • The DRM Pull Request For Linux 3.2 Kernel

    There’s a new driver to the DRM subsystem in Linux 3.2 and it’s the Samsung Exynos SoC driver. This DRM driver is only for the Exynos 4210 SoC at the moment. It supports kernel mode-setting, but doesn’t expose any 2D/3D hardware acceleration or any user-space interfaces. Samsung doesn’t have a full open-source driver stack for this ARM SoC, so the capabilities of this driver just come down to mode-setting in the kernel right now. Samsung has been working on this driver for a while.

  • 2011 Linux Graphics Survey Results

    In September the 2011 Linux Graphics Survey came to an end, but due to Oktoberfest, AMD Bulldozer Linux testing, OpenBenchmarking.org developments, and other matters, I didn’t have time to look at the survey results until this weekend when getting ready for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Here’s the 2011 results looking at what Linux desktop end-users are running when it comes to graphics cards and drivers as well as their key concerns.

Applications

• Ekiga – open source SoftPhone, Video Conferencing and Instant Messenger

  Ekiga did not start as a simple instant messaging software but as GnomeMeeting – a Linux alternative to Netmeeting. One of the purposes of Netmeeting was video chatting between people. What was less noticed is that it was compatible with the H.323 standar and thus interoperable with professional videoconferencing environments. Ekiga is still the only client available on GNU/Linux software and able to communicate with H.323 hardware.

• Guake Terminal Emulator

• CommandLineFu: Amazing Collection Of Command Line Gems [Linux & Mac]

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Dialog Recording with Audacity and a USB Microphone

  • » Loop mount iso files without being root

  • Configuration Settings and Shortcuts in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) – Efficiency Boosters

  • How to Get Wireless to Connect Automatically in Sabayon Linux

  • Complete Arch Linux Installation, Part 1: Install & Configure Arch

  • BIOS and Firmware Updates Using Dell Linux Repository

  • CentOS 6 Channel Bonding

  • The Comprehensive LAMP Guide—Part 3 (PHP)

  • Cloud Computing Course #4: Creating A Virtual Machine

  • GoAccess – Visual apache/Nginx log analyzer

  • Understanding the cat Command

  • How to Create a Custom Arch Linux Distro

• Games

  • ‘Mega Games Pack’ Lets You Install and Play Hundreds of Free Games on Ubuntu

  • Wakfu: New Trailer Reveals Official Launch Date

    Tactical MMORPG Wakfu, Sequel to the incredibly successful Dofus, finally gets an official release date after a long period of beta testing. A brand new Trailer reveals thast it launches February 2012.

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3.3.1 Development Release

    It never stops ! Here comes the first development release of the 3.3 development cycle. We are off to a slow start, with most features still
    on the drawing board or in early development. Expect things to become more exciting in the next development release. But for now, we want you to download, compile and test this release.

    [...]

    This release is a snapshot of early development code.

  • GNOME 3.3.1 Development Release Is Here

  • Gnome User Survey

    Phoronix recently hosted a near Gnome User Survey, which surprised me, given Gnome Developers’ general “We know what’s best, bug off” attitude.

Distributions

• Zentyal Linux, a usable Linux Server

• Jolicloud “personal cloud” for PC, iOS, Android coming soon

  Jolicloud Personal Cloud

  Jolicloud is getting ready to roll out a new cloud-based service that the company says will offer a new way to interact with all of your online services from one place — and that place can be a web browser, smartphone app or tablet app.

  When Jolicloud first launched, the company made an operating system for netbooks based on Ubuntu Linux. The “cloud” part of the name signified two things: the ability to “install” web apps to your desktop so you could launch them quickly just like native Linux applications, and a social element that let you share your recent activity with your peers.

• Red Hat Family

  • Ubuntu, Red Hat Take Stand On Microsoft’ Secure Boot Lockdown

    Microsoft stirred the bee’s hive by announcing new requirements for manufacturers who want to ship Windows 8 systems, including a feature called ‘Secure Boot’. It means only Windows 8 will be able to run on that hardware, locking GNU/Linux out, shutting all windows on Linux on these computers.

  • Secure Boot and your choice for Linux

    Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu together with Red Hat, have weighed into the controversy surrounding the so called Secure Boot setup that requires OEMs to lock down your BIOS allowing only “approved” software to boot from it. This is of course being pushed by Microsoft.

  • Feeding the trolls

    A few years ago I got up on stage and briefly talked about how the Linux community contained far too many people who were willing to engage in entirely inappropriate behaviour, how this discouraged people from getting involved and how we weren’t very good at standing up against that sort of behaviour. Despite doing this in front of several hundred people, and despite the video of me doing so then being uploaded to the internet, this got me a sum total of:

    * No death threats
    * No discussion about any of my physical attributes or lack thereof
    * No stalkers
    * No accusations that I was selling out the Linux community
    * No accusations that I was a traitor to my gender
    * No real negative feedback at all[1]

  • Red Hat, The Linux Foundation and Canonical Publish White Paper on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

  • Will Rise Of Cloud Computing Push Red Hat Higher?

    Today we’ll look at Red Hat (RHT), a leading provider of open source operating systems based on Linux. The rise of cloud computing has been increasing demand for Red Hat’s open source solutions, which are often less expensive than comparable offerings from Microsoft and other rivals.

  • Red Hat, Cisco Partner to Bring Open Source to the Cloud

    Cisco and Red Hat offer RHEL with FlexPod: FlexPod, as you might remember, is the NetApp/Cisco virtualization project, essentially a blueprint for deploying a pre-configured interoperable virtualization environment specifically designed for scalability. Now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be part of that mix, and will be part of Cisco’s Validated Design (CVD) program. Ideally, Red Hat now has another avenue to find its way into enterprise data centers, potentially even through Cisco VARs. In addition to the CVD induction, Red Hat will also be made compatible with Secure Separation, a process that ensures secure “separate multi-tenant environments for non-virtualized workloads, alongside virtualized ones.”

  • Fedora

    • VMWare Player on Fedora 16

• Debian Family

  • Debian joins Dropbox’s officially supported platforms along with Fedora and Ubuntu

    If you checkout Dropbox’s Linux download page, you will see that Debian packages are provided. Up to a few days ago, they only provided packages for Ubuntu and Fedora.

  • Derivatives

    • Canonical/Ubuntu

      • End of support for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) Netbook and ARM – 2011/10/29

        Ubuntu announced the 10.04 Netbook Edition and Ubuntu for ARM products 18 months ago, on April 29, 2010. At that time, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 18 months for these specific products.

      • Ubuntu Unity Experience

        I’ve come to enjoy launching and switching between applications via the Launcher. Making the distinction between running and not running applications less important and having stable targets for the most common applications is nice. But only as long as it’s about single window applications, as having to juggle windows after using the launcher just feels like a hassle. The single top bar switching between title and menu is great with maximized windows. This is barely enough to tolerate the shortcomings.

      • Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot review – Damn good

        Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot has a silly name, but it is a very decent and polished product.

      • Ubuntu LTS support period getting extended starting Ubuntu 12.04

      • Dell bundles Ubuntu Linux on PCs in China

      • Canonical, Dell bring Ubuntu laptops to 220 Chinese retail stores

      • Canonical Changes OEM Strategy to Reflect New Customer Base

        What do you do when your partners also become some of your most important customers? That’s a challenge Canonical executives grappled with recently as they moved to restructure Canonical’s relationship with OEMs. Here’s what’s changed at the company, and what it means for the open source channel.

        As Canonical CEO Jane Silber pointed out in a recent blog post, OEM partnerships have been key to distributing Canonical’s main product, the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. Agreements with server manufacturers in particular have helped Ubuntu gain a significant presence on enterprise machines.

      • Flavours and Variants

        • Review: Kubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”

          That’s where my time with Kubuntu ended. Barring a few Rekonq crashes which could be fixed by Mozilla Firefox, Kubuntu is absolutely amazing. It is stable, polished, and really, really fast. Plus, it brings with it the benefits of a familiar interface (compared to Ubuntu’s Unity) along with the large package selection and the PPA system of Ubuntu. I would strongly recommend that newbies try this, and if the trend of improvements is an indicator for future versions, I might just consider installing Kubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” on my laptop as my main distribution, now that I know that it will be supported for 5 years. It, along with Linux Mint, Chakra, #!, and Pardus, is now a contender. Bravo Kubuntu!

        • Xubuntu 11.10: go, little ‘Buntu, go!

Devices/Embedded

• Xilinx Launches Open Source Linux Support and Developer Community at ARM TechCon for Zynq-7000 Extensible Processing Platform

  Xilinx Adds Open Source Linux Support as Xilinx Continues to Build out Development Model for its ARM Processor-Based Programmable SoC

• Phones

  • Android

    • Exclusive: First Pictures of the DROID4 by Motorola

      Keyboard lovers, get ready – the DROID4 by Motorola is coming and according to our sources, has the best slideout they have “ever seen on a smartphone.” In this set of glamour shots we received, you can get a taste for what’s to come which means ultra-thin slider with DROID RAZR styling and wait for it….4G LTE. You asked for it and Moto appears to have made it.

    • Motorola announces Q3 financial results: Smartphones selling like hotcakes, tablets… not so much

      Motorola Mobility recently announced third-quarter 2011 financial results, posting net revenues of $3.3 billion, up 11 percent from third quarter 2010. Mobile device revenue came in at $2.4 billion, up 20 percent from Q3 of last year. Motorola smartphones have been flying off shelves, with 4.8 million smartphones shipped in Q3 of 2011, up 1 million from Q3 of last year. On the flip side, Motorola’s XOOM tablet hasn’t been doing so well, with only 100,000 XOOM’s shipped in Q3 (apple ships that many iPads a day). There’s also a few tidbits in there about the Motorola/Google merger, with around 18 million in expenses going towards the merger, which will seek stockholder approval on November 17th. The merger will also require antitrust clearances in the U.S., by the European Commission, and in Canada, China, Israel, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey.

    • An Update on Google TV

      The Google TV platform contributes to this evolution by enabling new content creators to add to the programming you already enjoy on your TV. Given so much choice, we’re committed to delivering the best way to discover and engage with the high-quality entertainment on your television, whether that comes from your cable or satellite provider (DISH, Comcast, DIRECTV, etc.) or from the Web (YouTube, Netflix, and thousands more). The initial version of Google TV wasn’t perfect, but launching it gave us the opportunity to learn. These are still early days, and we’re working hard to move forward with each update.

    • Hacking the Google TV Box Without Rooting It

      I’ve long held the opinion that the most effective way to get Internet-based content onto a TV is to simply hook a laptop up to the flat screen with an HDMI cable. The laptop acts as an oversized remote control. You get a full Flash-based Web browser, hard drive and keyboard on your TV.

    • Top 5 Word Games For Android

    • Hands on: Motorola Atrix 2 review

      The original Motorola Atrix smartphone was a powerful device that doubled as a pseudo laptop or AV centre – you could connect it to an HDTV in your living room or the LCD on your desk and run a Linux variant with full keyboard and mouse.

Following the open source (and beer) trail through Europe

Before I follow up with a story on Nokia Qt’s news of the Qt platform now moving to a completely pure open source status, I thought I would also make mention of LinuxCon as I had to select just one from the two events and chose to have my beer German flavoured this year with Qt.

LinuxCon will reportedly feature a keynote/Q&A held between Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman about the kernel and 20 years of Linux.

So 20 years in as we are, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will detail the biggest challenges we still now face and what the next 20 years looks like. While Chairman Emeritus at the IBM Academy of Technology, Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger will present “Linux – A Short Retrospective and an Opinion on the Future”.

Events

• Design a logo for SCALE 10X, win a trip to LA!

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox Feeds The Mouth That Bites It; Starts To Bing

    The only reason we have Firefox today is because Microsoft used their signature anti-competitive business practice to butcher Netscape. Google helped Firefox to generate revenue so as to create a competitor to Microsoft’s fossilized Internet Explorer and bring the Web to the highway.

    Firefox used Google as its default search engine. The open source browser signed a deal with Microsoft recently to also use Bing as a search option.

    Just today the open source browser announced another deal to feed the hand that bites it. The Mozilla foundation has announced a version of Firefox with Bing as the default search engine.

    Microsoft is an abusive monopoly which kept all other players out of the PC business. When Linux emerged as a contender they started attacking all Linux players over unknown patent issues which Linus Torvalds called bogus.

  • Bing Filters LibreOffice And Linux, Yet Firefox Goes In Bed

    Firefox, which was created from the ashes of Netscape, which was burned down by none other than Microsoft, is now going in bed with the same Microsoft. The interesting point is Microsoft’s Bing gives out ‘confusing’ results.

    We did a test and searched for Open Source Office Suite. The results were obvious for any user. You must see OpenOffice and LibreOffice as top results. When we Googled. We got the expected Results.

  • Mozilla’s Brendan Eich on JavaScript – and Microsoft Buying Netscape

    It seems so long ago now, but for those of us lucky enough (and old enough) to have been there, the launch of Netscape’s 0.9 version of its Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994 was clearly the beginning of a new era. For a few years, Netscape was the centre of the Internet universe – it’s home page was the first you checked each morning for news about what was happening on this strange new Web thing that the company was doing so much to define.

    Of course, Netscape went from Net hero to zero remarkably rapidly, but its influence is still felt in multiple ways. Perhaps most importantly, Netscape Navigator gave rise to Mozilla and thus Firefox. It also gave us JavaScript. Or rather, Netscape’s Brendan Eich gave us JavaScript. Eich is not so well known as some of his colleagues around that time, and that’s a pity, because he was one of the key figures in this formative time. Today he is CTO of Mozilla.

    A few weeks ago I met up with him, and we looked back at the amazing ride the Web – and he – has had since the founding of Netscape. What follows is the first part of that interview, dealing with the birth of JavaScript and the origins of Mozilla. Next week the story will look at Firefox and more recent developments.

SaaS

• Internap Debuts World’s First OpenStack-based Public Cloud

• Karmasphere Announces Quick-Start Hadoop Virtual Appliance for Developing Analytics on IBM InfoSphere BigInsights

• Jaspersoft Announces New Hadoop-Based Big Data Analytics Solution

• Why We Moved Off The Cloud

  Cloud computing is often positioned as a solution to scalability problems. In fact, it seems like almost every day I read a blog post about a company moving infrastructure to the cloud. At Mixpanel, we did the opposite. I’m writing this post to explain why and maybe even encourage some other startups to consider the alternative.

  First though, I wanted to write a short bit about the advantages of cloud servers since they are ideal for some use cases.

  * Low initial costs. Specifically, you can get a cloud server for less than $20. Even the cheapest dedicated servers (and I wouldn’t recommend the cheapest) will cost more than $50. For new companies, this can make a difference.
  * Fast deployment times and hourly billing.If you have variable traffic and you’re not having problems scaling your data persistence layer, you can fairly easy spin up and spin down servers quickly in response to usage patterns. It’s worth pointing out that I specifically mean variable traffic rather than growing traffic. From purely an ease of deployment standpoint, handling even quickly growing traffic is fairly easy on both cloud and dedicated platforms.

  * Cheap CPU performance.If your application is purely CPU bound, then you can end up with great price/performance ratios. Most cloud servers allow a single small node on a physical server to use more than its fair share of CPU resources if they are otherwise underutilized — and they often are. One of the last bits of our infrastructure still on the cloud is CPU bound and even though we pay for very small Rackspace cloud servers, we get the performance of dedicated hardware.

• Clouds, open source, and new network models: Part 3

• Open Compute Project Aims to Bring Open Source Standards to Data Center Technology

Databases

• Percona Makes High Availability Easier with New MySQL Cluster Support Option

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Oracle v. Google – Oracle On Copyright

  Yesterday’s filings of significance all came from Oracle, beginning with a letter to the judge disagreeing with Google’s request that certain copyright issues be disposed of by the judge before the trial commences. (566 [PDF; Text]) Google had suggested that the following issues related to Oracle’s copyright infringement claims were a matter of law and should be decided by the court before the commencement of the trial to make the trial proceed more efficiently:

• October wrap-up

  I would like to come back shortly on two of the announcements we made, regarding the porting of the LibreOffice platform (not the interface) to iOS and Android, as well as LibreOffice OnLine. While these two projects are at various stages of completion and have different requirements they help to show not just the vitality of our community, they also shed some light on how we manage to embrace a bazaar-like approach to development and think about what I call our “development ecology” (which some could really translate into development strategy, but I think it’s more subtler than that). What you see through our online office suite project and platform porting announcements is that we are taking some great care in doing something paradoxal with respect to our stated intent to change the codebase as much as possible: we keep our codebase intact. Note that we do change, upgrade, clear and trim the codebase, but we do adopt a singular codebase approach where the code used in LibreOffice OnLine, and the underlying code on iOS and Android will essentially be the same than the one inside the LibreOffice Desktop suite. In other words, we do not release a product here and something completely different there, even if in the future, a specific work on the interface for tablets will have to be made (we won’t use the existing interface on these as it would not make sense).

Business

• Nexenta Systems and Zmanda Release Next Generation Backup and Recovery Solution

• Digium and Open Source Community Release Asterisk 10 at AstriCon

  Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, and the Asterisk open source community, today released Asterisk 10. Asterisk is a communications platform that allows developers to create powerful business phone systems and unified communications solutions. Since its introduction 12 years ago, Asterisk has been used, free of charge, in nearly every country of the world to power telephone and other communications systems. It has been downloaded millions of times, including two million last year alone, establishing Asterisk as the most popular open source telephony engine.

• Can Open Source Asterisk Find Its Place in the IP PBX Space?

  The VAR Guy continues to ask the question: Can Digium and its open source IP PBX technology Asterisk make inroads in the telecom space? Now that Asterisk 10 has been released, more signs are pointing to yes. Read on for the feature list of Asterisk 10, and a little perspective on how it could shape the VoIP world …

• Actuate Announces Mobile BI Solutions for Android

• Semi-Open Source

  • Alfresco DevCon 2011: Transactional Content Management with WeWebU OpenWorkdesk

  • Zenoss Open Source IT Management: Disrupting IBM, HP, CA & BMC?

  • XTIVIA, Inc. Expands Open Source Solutions to Include the Alfresco Platform

    LogoZenoss, the open source server and network monitoring software provider, says 2011 revenues grew 300 percent year over year (YoY). The company claims IT service providers increasingly opt for Zenoss rather than management platforms from IBM, HP, CA Technologies and BMC. Anecdotal evidence suggests Zenoss’s annual revenues will easily exceed $10 million in 2011. But is Zenoss really disrupting the Big 4 IT management software providers?

Funding

• Hadapt Secures $9.5MM Series A Financing

  Hadapt, creator of the first big data platform to integrate Hadoop with a structured data store to allow for high performance analytics across both structured and unstructured data, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A round of financing led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Bessemer Venture Partners. Matthew Howard, general partner at NVP, and Felda Hardymon, partner at Bessemer, have joined Hadapt’s Board of Directors.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• FSF: Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

  My problems with the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been simplistically condensed to either being a knee-jerk reaction to anything the FSF has to say, or else part of a broader conspiracy to hate all free software.

Licensing

• Why I (A/L)GPL

  In the Python world the GPL is frequently frowned on, with most people preferring to use a more permissive license such as BSD, MIT, or Python’s. It’s understandable then when people get angry because I’ve licensed Lamson under the GPL. Many people just hate the license, since they feel it goes contrary to the spirit of Python.

  However, I’d like to explain why I use the GPL after decades of writing open source software and after a couple of “successful” projects. These are my reasons for using it, and only apply to me and what I want to do with my software from now on. You are free to your own opinions and choices, and I hope you’ll respect mine.

  [...]

  I use the GPL to keep you honest. You now have to tell your bosses you’re using my gear. And it will scare the piss out of them. Good. Because I have a solution to that too.

• Justifying the commercial license for open source

  It was the late summer of 2008 that I found myself sat listening to Sun Microsystem’s then CEO Jonathan Schwartz explain how the open source model would work for customers in practice. Sat as I was at the last JavaOne conference before Oracle’s acquisition of the Java innovators, Schwartz said something like:

  “Hey, the software is free. When you want the services that go with it, we’ll be there to provide them for you.” For ‘provide’ you can obviously take it that he meant ‘sell’ of course.

  So how do companies now continue to justify the open source model and validate their option to sell a commercially provided service, support and maintenance package in this space?

Openness/Sharing

• Making It Real: Next Steps for the Open Compute Project

  When we announced the initiation of the Open Compute Project earlier this year, we posed an audacious question to the industry: What if hardware were open?The benefits, if we could make it work, were clear enough: More openness and collaboration would likely mean a faster pace of innovation in infrastructure technology, greater accessibility to the best possible technology for us all, more efficiency in scale computing and a reduced environmental impact through the sharing of best practices.

• 50 Companies Team to Create Open Source EV

  The StreetScooter is a $7,000 EV with a 74 mph top speed and an 80-mile range. It relies on leased batteries and uses a heat pump for heating and air conditioning, and shipping company DHL has already ordered 3,500 of them — but the most interesting thing about the vehicle is how it came to be.

• OpenSim open-source software from Stanford accurately models human motion

  There are 640 muscles in the human body, or maybe it is 639. Or maybe it is 850. Or 656. It all depends on whom you ask. In any case, it is a lot. Stanford bioengineer Scott Delp knows; he has programmed almost every one into his latest work, OpenSim, a software application that helps medical professionals and bioengineers study, diagnose and correct abnormalities in how people move.

• How R&D is going open-source

Programming

• Serendipity 1.6 integrates jQuery and updates plug-ins

  Serendipity logo Version 1.6 of the open source Serendipity blogging software has been released. The new update includes the jQuery framework so that plug-in and template authors can “provide extended functionality to the frontend” and, like plug-ins, templates can now also use config-groups.

• 5 Reasons to Learn a Programming Language

• Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career Advice

  Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things: Businesses do things for irrational and political reasons all the time (see below), but in the main they converge on doing things which increase revenue or reduce costs. Status in well-run businesses generally is awarded to people who successfully take credit for doing one of these things. (That can, but does not necessarily, entail actually doing them.) The person who has decided to bring on one more engineer is not doing it because they love having a geek around the room, they are doing it because adding the geek allows them to complete a project (or projects) which will add revenue or decrease costs. Producing beautiful software is not a goal. Solving complex technical problems is not a goal. Writing bug-free code is not a goal. Using sexy programming languages is not a goal. Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

• IP and License Clean for Eclipse Foundation

  Over the past couple of months the Hudson community has been working hard to ensure that its source code and libraries are IP and license clean in order to pass the stringent entry requirements of the Eclipse Foundation. I spoke briefly about this at my Hudson session at JavaOne and the response was so enthusiastic that I feel I need to bring the facts to a wider audience through this blog.

  The Hudson code that is moving to Eclipse is made up of its core components and plugins for SSH-Slaves, Git and Subversion. The initial upload was made up of around 1700 Java files, 125 XML files, 600 Jelly files and some 3700 property files. The core elements (core, UITest and UpdateCenter) have now been approved and are around 8 of the external libraries but there is still some way to go. Each license is checked by both Eclipse’s automated system and by hand.

Standards/Consortia

• Sencha Previews Sencha.io, Delivers The First HTML5 Mobile Cloud

• Sencha Raises $15 Million in Series B Funding Led By Jafco Ventures

Security

• Virus Scanning on Linux

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• The Great American False Dilemma: Austerity vs. Stimulus

  It’s quite clear that advocates on both sides of the current debate truly believe that the US can return to a growth path. Equally, they share an assumption that the supply of energy will adhere to a shift in the supply curve, which means simply that more supply or substitutes will be brought to market if the price level is sustained at high enough levels.

Finance

• Bringing Europe’s cultural treasures to a new generation

  If these assets are made digital and put online, we can bring them to a wider audience, and preserve them for the next generation. They can have applications in education, tourism, or as a source for further art. They can be used by developers and for online exhibitions to which members of the public can contribute. And they can boost our growth and jobs, including in the creative sector which represents 3.3% of our GDP.

  Europeana is the focal point for all these efforts. It already holds 19 million digital items – from Principia Mathematica to Het Meisje met de Parel. Check out the site now and explore our cultural heritage!