• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Growth of Linux Visiting Wikipedia

Linux

* February 2011 – 2.47%
* February 2010 – 1.65%

Change = +.82% Rate of growth = +50%

Google

• How to make Google good again

  One of the key aspects of the latter has been its support for open source, which has been at the heart of Google’s infrastructure from the earliest days. Its adoption of free software played an important part in allowing the company to offer a range of free services – search, email, video content etc. – that could scale globally, Something that would have been much harder for a startup to achieve with traditional licensed software, where costs would have risen far more steeply.

Applications

• Dbmail? A great Open Source email system, especially for LAMP/MySql administrators

  A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about how I may build an advanced search utility for my own email archive. One way to make complex queries on the archive seemed to be to put it all into a relational database. Since the Dbmail system stores email in that way, I asked its developers and Harald Reindl (an email administrator at The Lounge who already uses Dbmail: I found him in the PostFix Mailing list archives) if Dbmail could be used in that way.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Minecraft Installer Script – install Minecraft in Ubuntu Completely with one click

  • HOWTO: Chainload Grub2 into Chameleon

  • Command-T for Vim on Fedora (missing ruby.h errors)

  • Simple file Encryption and Decryption using encryption key

  • Characters of Linux character drivers | Part 4

  • How To Install And Play Angry Birds On Ubuntu Linux

  • How To Manipulate PDFs with PDF Chain [Linux]

  • Book Review: Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook 162

  • Information, please

  • Managing source code with Mercurial

• Wine

  • Wine 1.3.18 Adds Support For XI2 Raw Mouse Events

    Following last week’s release of the stable Wine 1.2.3, it’s now time for a new development snapshot of Wine 1.3. The Wine 1.3.18 is a particularly interesting release since it finally takes advantage of raw mouse events with X Input 2.

  • What’s Up With TransGaming’s GameTree Linux?

    At the beginning of January, TransGaming rolled out GameTree Linux. GameTree Linux is basically the successor to their Cedega Technology that in turn formerly was known as WineX and was based upon an early X11-licensed version of Wine. Cedega hasn’t been updated in a long time prior to this announcement and its support has fallen behind that of CodeWeaver’s CrossOver software and upstream Wine in many regards, but unfortunately, GameTree Linux hasn’t yet improved the situation at all.

• Games

  • Frozenbyte Might Release Shadowgrounds Series Source Code

    The ability to talk with the Frozenbyte developers via the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle chat has granted me another mini interview and a few insights of things to come…
    Here is another mini interview I’ve made with Niina from Frozenbyte…

  • Looks Like Source-Engine Garry’s Mod On Linux

    It looks like Garry’s Mod, the sandbox physics game built atop the Source Engine that began as a Half-Life 2 mod, is working on Linux. Garry Newman himself explicitly mentions the Linux code is now compiling.

  • Humble Bundle Does it a Third Time, 5 Great Indie Games at ‘Pay What You Want’ Price!

    Humble Bundle is back with its collection of Indie games once again. The latest Humble Frozenbyte Bundle comes with 5 indie games with the usual pay what you want offer which means, you can purchase the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle for the price you decide. Not only that, you can even choose exactly how your purchase is divided: Between Frozenbyte, the Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF), or the Child’s Play Charity.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma Active: Vendor Interaction

    This is the final entry in a series of five posts covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. In this closing article, we look at the track that aims to help bring out work to actual hardware.

    On Monday, I will be writing a quick overview of some of the “big picture” goals and aspirations represented in Plasma Active, and on Friday of next week I will be sharing a preview of a new interaction feature that I’ve only referred to cryptically as “SLC” so far. Today, however, I hope you enjoy the outline of the fifth track in Plasma Active: Vendor Interaction.

  • Contour brings a context-sensitive interface to KDE Plasma Active

    As KDE developers continue to build the device-independent Plasma Active Linux environment, other pieces of the UI puzzle are falling into place as well. Pieces like Contour, which the team bills as a “context-sensitive user interface that adapts to…current activities and behavioral patterns of the user.”

    As you can see in the screenshot, part of what Contour does is recommend additional actions based upon what it thinks you’re doing at any given time. By taking a look at a number of different sources of data — like GPS coordinates, accelerometer data, time and date, ambient sound and light, recently accessed files, and recent user actions, Contour will attempt to adjust the device’s UI to automatically meet a user’s needs.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Expands Cloud Computing Partnership With NTT Communications

  • CentOS 5.6 Gnome Desktop Review

    This distribution is built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is an excellent choice for small server implementations or businesses.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora: virt-manager with SPICE support coming in Fedora 15

      I’ve been keeping up with the virtualization related developments in the upcoming Fedora 15… but even if I weren’t… Fedora offers a fedora-virt-preview repository that makes it easy to ckeck out the new stuff on Fedora 14.

      Adding SPICE support to virt-manager is one of the upcoming features in Fedora 15 and as of 2011-03-28 it appears to be 100% done. I decided to use the fedora-virt-preview repository to check it out on my Fedora 14 workstation.

• Debian Family

  • SimplyMepis Shaping Up – 11.0 RC 2 Released

    SimplyMepis 11.0 RC 2 was released last week and the annoying thing about that project is that their release announcements say nothing about the release. So, if one wants to keep up they have to download each developmental release and test it. So, I did.

    The basic look and feel hasn’t changed since my last test. It’s possible it could receive an update before final. What I did notice soon after boot was that the graphic driver setup assistant is gone. It was inoperative my last test, but it’s completely gone now. Instructions in the Mepis Manual have the user going back to the old-fashioned manual procedure. This isn’t a big deal for most of us old goats, but for a distribution known for being “user-friendly,” this isn’t a plus. Will it be back before final?

    Fortunately, I didn’t have to play around with any settings or boot flags to get a graphical desktop. The boot to blank locked-up screen was somewhat fixed last test, but I did have to talk it into a graphical interface.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu: The Gateway Linux

      Yesterday I upgraded my personal laptop (well, one of them) from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.4 beta 2. I have a knack for finding bugs, but this time the upgrade was smooth sailing. I was reminded of what my friend said when I first installed Ubuntu for her: This feels like a really expensive system.

    • An Ubuntu Adventure: The DELL Latitude 2120

    • The New Look of the Ubuntu 11.04 Server Installer!

      With Natty Beta2, the Ubuntu 11.04 Server Installer received a little bit of the same aubergine love that the Ubuntu Desktop has enjoyed now for the last few releases. Moving away from that 1980s MSDOS/PCDOS VGA blue look, the our Server installer now sports a distinctively Ubuntu color scheme!

    • An Ubuntu Adventure: The DELL Latitude 2120

      In a previous post I described the certification release of Ubuntu pre-install for the Dell Latitude 2120. This post seems to have drawn some interest on the process from both internally in Canonical and externally. I decided that I needed to experience myself what a user buying a Certified “Pre-Installed only” system would go through from buying the system to getting the bespoke image from the manufacturer and ultimately upgrading to the latest “stock” Ubuntu release. The Dell Latitude 2120 seemed like a good companion for this adventure.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • An Arch User Trying Out Kubuntu 11.04

        Hopefully the final release of Kubuntu 11.04 is as good as it is in its current beta. Since I used to be a huge fan of Kubuntu before its downward spiral that caused it to become bland, I’m actually quite happy to say that this release is shaping up to be the best in over two and a half years. Considering that all of my hardware is detected and works great, the developers must have tweaked something to make this happen. I would really like to know what it was they did, though my guess is they probably included the next generation of Intel drivers into the current kernel. Good job!

      • My Kubuntu Natty Opinions

        Like I said, overall I am really impressed with what I am seeing here.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • MeeGo sees interest from others after Nokia shift

      Technology firms such as LG Electronics are moving toward adopting the Linux-based MeeGo operating system after Nokia abandoned it, one of the project’s leaders said.

• Tablets

  • Tablets are changing the way consumers engage with content

    In order to better understand how people are using tablets we ran a survey of over 1,400 tablet users and found that:

    * 68% of tablet users spend at least 1 hour a day on their tablet
    * 77% of respondents report that their desktop/laptop usage decreased after they started using a tablet
    * 82% of respondents said they primarily use their tablet at home

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Firefox needs heavy hitter Linux power

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Improved CSV file compatibility in OOo 3.4 Beta

  CSV (plain text) files are a popular way of exchanging data with a broad range different programs. But whereever different programs are involved, there’s some disagreement about the details. One such detail is the presence of quotes (text delimiter character) around fields. The usual consensus (spelled out, for example, in RFC 4180) is that fields “may or may not” be enclosed in quotes.

  As long as the field delimiter doesn’t occur in numbers (for example as decimal separator), it can be useful to quote all text content, so the distinction between text and numbers is preserved. See issue 37856 for an example. This is what Calc CSV export has always done, and with the new import options in 3.3, we can optionally make use of that distinction when importing.

Programming

• if…then…else

56% of Peoples’ 1st Wikipedia Edits Are Good

If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you’d have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better.

Finance

• The Real Housewives of Wall Street

  America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we’re broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year’s retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

• Cohan: ‘The Goldman Way’ involves the importance of making money at nearly all costs

• Large Financial Institutions: Panel at INET’s Bretton Woods Conference (6 of 7)

• Goldman Sachs misled Congress after duping clients, Senate panel chairman says

  Goldman Sachs misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.

• Banks Falling Early as Mortgage Shenanigans Laid Bare — Goldman, DB Hit Hard

  The big banks look to be setting up for another weak day, after a Senate panel divulged salty emails from employees at Goldman Sachs (GS) and other top financial institutions detailing their efforts to dump doomed mortgage securities in the laps of investors.

• Criminal Charges Loom For Goldman Sachs After Scathing Senate Report

  A Senate panel released a damning report accusing the likes of Goldman Sachs of engaging in massive conflicts of interest, contaminating the U.S. financial system with toxic mortgages and undermining public trust in U.S. markets in the months leading up to the financial crisis.

• Goldman Sachs Misled Congress, Duped Clients, Levin Says

  Goldman Sachs Group Inc. misled clients and Congress about the firm’s bets on securities tied to the housing market, the chairman of the U.S. Senate panel that investigated the causes of the financial crisis said.

• Senator Levin Says He’ll Refer Goldman Testimony From Last Year’s Congressional Hearing To The DOJ For Possible Perjury Charges

  We can’t say we’re surprised that a Senate report released yesterday, that details what caused the financial crisis, focuses on Goldman Sachs. A lot.

  The findings of a two-year analysis “trains much of its ire on Goldman Sachs, which Sen. Levin said deceived some clients by betting against home loans in 2006 and 2007, while simultaneously selling mortgage securities,” the WSJ reported.

• Senator Levin Claims Goldman Execs Perjured Themselves Before Congress on Mortgage Testimony

• Taibbi and Spitzer on Goldman Sachs

Privacy

• Well-Meaning “Privacy Bill of Rights” Wouldn’t Stop Online Tracking

  On Tuesday, Senators John McCain and John Kerry introduced the long-awaited Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights, a sweeping bill that covers online and offline data collection, retention, use, and dissemination practices. Unfortunately, the bill may fall short of what’s needed to protect our privacy.

  This bill fails to address many of the issues surrounding pervasive online tracking that have been raised by privacy advocates, explored in the Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series, and highlighted by the FTC’s recent Privacy Report. The bill’s most glaring defect is its emphasis on regulation of information use and sharing, rather than on the collection of data in the first place. For example, the bill would allow a user to opt out of third-party ad targeting based on tracking – but not third-party tracking. The consumer choice provisions in Section 202 apply only to data use—not collection—unless that data is both “sensitive” and “personally identifiable.” Moreover, Part III of the bill, which imposes lax limits on collection, cannot be enforced by state Attorneys General. This is backwards: the privacy risk is not in consumers seeing targeted advertisements, but in the unchecked accumulation and storage of data about consumers’ online activities. Collecting and retaining data on consumers can create a rich repository of information – which leaves consumer data vulnerable to a data breach as well as creating an unnecessary enticement for government investigators, civil litigants and even malicious hackers.

Civil Rights

• When fund-raising is a crime

  IN THE odd way these things work in China, word has trickled out that on April 7th an appeal court in Zhejiang, a famously entrepreneurial coastal province, conducted a five-hour hearing on a death sentence handed down to Wu Ying, a prominent 29-year-old businesswoman, on fraud charges. Before her arrest Ms Wu had seemed to personify the miraculous business success that could be achieved by people from even the most humble background in modern China.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• Osama bin Laden Getting Faster Internet Than You Have: Pakistan’s 50Mbps Future

  While America’s heartland is being wired for 3Mbps DSL service, residents in Pakistan are getting ready for speeds up to 50Mbps thanks to a major broadband expansion in the country.

  Pakistan’s PTCL, the country’s state-controlled phone company, is working on a major upgrade to bonded VDSL2, the next generation of DSL, which can deliver more than five times the top speed of the country’s highest level of service, at a construction cost of just $200-300 per home passed.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Facebook Sues FriendFinder, Peeved Over FacebookOfSex.com Website

  Facebook has filed a few different trademark lawsuits against sites it doesn’t approve of, like Teachbook and humor site Lamebook. Some of those cases might be considered close calls legally, and both of those sites are still up. But now a much bigger company is messing with Facebook’s name: adult social networking company FriendFinder Networks, which has launched a (very NSFW) website called FacebookOfSex.com.

• Copyrights

  • EU copyright extention

    Remember the Cliff Richard directive proposal for a copyright extention of sound recordings also known as 2008/0157(COD)? The extention was fiercely debated in the European Parliament and by consumer groups. Our MEPs adopted a plenary report and then… Then our EU-Council with all the member states at the table went into wait-and-see mode. They noticed that the Commission proposition was quite a bit over the top. Meanwhile we have a new parliament, the Lisbon Treaty regime, a new Council. Now it’s back on the agenda, just before the children born when the Commission started to draft its proposal enter school, rumours say Hungary suddenly changed its mind in the Council, we learn from an alarmist Boingboing call to action, that we, the people are asked by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow to

    1. Phone our MEP

    2. MEP does for us ???

    3. Win!

  • YouTube to require ‘tutorials’ for copyright offenders

    Google Inc.’s online video behemoth YouTube toughened its enforcement of copyright laws, requiring violators to attend “copyright school” and pass a test before they can resume uploading videos to the site.

    The changes come amid calls — both in Hollywood and in Congress — that YouTube do more to combat piracy. Google General Counsel Kent Walker recently defended the search giant’s commitment to content protection in testimony this month before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on intellectual property.

  • Spotify: Not so free as it was

    It seems that the original licensing deals which enabled Spotify to get off the ground a couple of years ago are coming to an end – and some of the labels in some European countries are getting restless about how much of their content is being given away for free, with minimal fees in return. Yes, 15% of Spotify’s users are now paying customers, but as the service grows, millions of tracks are being played for nothing.

  • Scottish election: Pirate Party UK profile

    With no known founder, the Pirate Party UK is rather more unconventional than traditional electoral offerings.

    The UK group is part of an international movement of Pirate Parties, which lobbies against copyright and software patent laws.

    The very first party was founded in Sweden in 2006.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

YouView mandates Linux, HD content encryption

YouView has posted the technical specifications set-top box and TV makers will need to follow in order to support the would-be standard IPTV platform.

The specs will please punters who favour the Linux operating system – it’s the mandated OS for YouView-compatible devices – but will annoy anyone who hopes to shift recorded HD content onto their computers or Nas boxes.

For hardware companies, the key product ‘must haves’ include 10/100Mb/s Ethernet – 802.11n Wi-Fi is optional; WPA and/or WPA 2 must be used – at least 320GB of hard drive capacity, 30GB of which will be reseved for material pushed to the device by content providers; 512MB of memory; two USB 2.0 ports; DVB-T and DVB-T2 tuners; HDMI 1.3 output; and an RGB Scart connector.

Desktop

• The inevitable…My return to Windows

  Last time I tried to use Windows, there was a blackout, so I, logically, got a black screen asking me if I wanted to boot Windows normally, or with the last configuration that had worked, etc. I selected “normal” and saw with hope the XP logo…but the computer rebooted unexpectedly and threw me again to the same black screen. “OK, let’s go ‘last good config’ this time,” I mumbled and chose. And XP, for its part, chose to do something wonderful: it got me into a cute loop and refused to start. Isn’t that wonderful? I have been using my PC all this time without even knowing that Windows XP had fried! Thus, my return to Windows was colored by the inevitable reminder of its many weaknesses.

• Mageia Beta1 in pictures

  I would venture to say that not only is Mageia promising as a distro, but that it will also fulfill the dream of keeping the Mandrake/Mandriva legacy alive. I, for one, will save a partition for Mageia.

• System76 Serval Professional Sandy Bridge

  The past few months on Phoronix and OpenBenchmarking.org you may have noticed several Intel Core i7 “Sandy Bridge” mobile benchmarks. This Linux mobile SNB testing was being done from a System76 Serval Professional notebook. Here is a look at this Linux-friendly notebook that ships with Ubuntu 10.10.

• Joli OS 1.2 review – the best gets even better…

  Jolicloud, the leading cloud-based netbook and ‘recycling’ OS, has undergone another point release to address problems and add features. Russell Barnes reveals all…

Audiocasts/Shows

• Podcast Season 3 Episode 7

  In this episode: Gnome 3.0 has been released while Nokia takes back its Symbian operating system. Red Hat is approaching $1b in revenue and Groklaw is calling it a day. Share in our discoveries, hear our responses to your emails and letters and join us in welcoming a new member to the team.

• # The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 398

Kernel Space

• Linux – Is It Still Standing Strong?

  Windows has been predominantly the OS of choice for most of us. Linux too has been around and it has struggled on the desktop space. Things haven’t turned out as well as Linux hoped. I have been on both sides for long periods of time. There is no denying Linux’s success on the server side of things. Many expected Linux to be an easy replacement for Windows, but for a number of reasons, it hasn’t been so.

  [...]

  If all of the popular mobile and tablet OS’ are offshoots of the Linux framework, and if we go by figures, Linux could very well be much bigger than Windows.

• Torvalds Honored by Gaggle of Lawyers

  Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux and hero to many Open Source users, might not be the first person one might think would be honored by an organization of lawyers, but that’s exactly what’s happening. The International Technology Law Association will award Torvalds its ITechLaw Achievement Award at their upcoming 40th anniversary celebration.

Applications

• Universe studying Linux supercomputer powered up

  The University of Portsmouth has deployed what is being branded as a “cost effective” high performance computer (HPC) to analyse data from telescopes around the world, and simulate and test current theories about the universe.

  The Dell-based computer will enable the University’s scientists to analyse the very large volumes of data needed for their research much faster than conventional systems.

  [...]

  10TB of NFS storage

• 8 Of The Coolest Brushes For The Gimp

  Like almost any piece of software with rudimentary drawing capability, Gimp includes simple brushes like squares, circles, and fuzzy circles. While they get you by for many basic needs, there’s a lot more you can do. Everything from flowers and vines to flames and bubbles can be created by brushes, and today we’re going to show you some of the coolest ones out there.

• GIMP 2.7.2 – new official development release!

  About an hour ago the developers have released a long-awaited new development release which is another step towards GIMP 2.8. GIMP 2.7.2 comes with all the changes that were made after GIMP 2.7.1 was released in June 2010. There’s really a LOT of new stuff. The new release comprises layer groups (which were introduced after 2.7.1), an almost done text-on-canvas feature, the all-new brush engine and of course the new single window mode.

• The Force Is With The Gimp!

  As I’ve mentioned in the blog before, I use The Gimp for all my photo editing. I use it exclusively when creating/editing all my cartoon features.

  The Gimp is every bit as powerful as other graphics applications and absolutely free! You can download Gimp for Windows or Mac. If you decide to give Linux a try, The Gimp, in most cases, is already installed. If not, it’s an easy matter of downloading and installing via the particular Linux distribution’s repository.

• Best Free and Open Source System Cloning Solutions for Linux

  If you have worked as a system administrator at an enterprise, you might be familiar with Norton or Symantec Ghost, a great network-enabled system cloning solution. It allows you to create an image of a computer’s hard drive and store it to a location on your network. If the computer in question has a failure you can restore it from the image and be back in business pretty quickly and easily. Although this may not always be a solution that small organizations use often, it is quite popular with larger ones.

  Symantec Ghost is a commercial software and comes with a pretty hefty price tag. However, there are several free alternatives for it in the open source world. Let’s take a look at a few of my favorite ones.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Emacs Editor – 11 Tips For The Road To Mastery

  • Batch convert images with Imagemagick

  • UI Application for checking websites and HTML documents for broken links – linkchecker

  • DIY : How to Create Portable Ubuntu: Carry a Spare OS

  • A Few More Shell Basics

  • Make Enlightenment E17 desktop aware of new applications

  • Set Up Hot Corners, Edge Flipping In Ubuntu With Brightside [Without Compiz]

  • Anycast: The Loophole

  • NFSv4 Really Rocks if You Can Get It Working

  • How to make ssh to Ubuntu servers less frustrating

  • Privileges Commands ” su & sudo “

  • 10 things you probably did not know about SELinux.. #5

  • Use xsel to copy text between CLI and GUI

• Games

  • 5Zombies games on Linux

    The games that i’ll show to you in this article are: Atom zombie smasher, violetland, Ultimate Zombie Fighters, project zomboid and Zombpocalypse, have a good day with them !

  • Bundle #3 Just Did $500k USD; Here’s A Contest

    In the first 24 hours of the Humble Indie “Frozenbyte” Bundle going live, it surpassed $250k USD in sales, but since then the pace has slowed down a bit. It just crossed $500k USD with just under 100,000 unit sales. The average purchase price is $5.12 USD while Linux users on average continue to offer an average amount of $11.72, which is significantly above the $4 Windows price or $6 Mac OS X user-set pricing.

  • The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

    The folks over at HumbleBundle are currently running their third amazing game sale. It’s a package deal from Frozenbyte, a Finnish game developer, that contains several computer games. What makes the sale amazing? Several things:
    All Games Are Linux Compatible

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma Active: Operating Systems

    This is the fourth in a series of five daily blog entries covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. Today we’ll be looking at how we plan to distribute the fruits of our labor for use on devices. As we will discover, this is rather new ground for a KDE initiative. It will bring many challenges, but also open new opportunities.

• GNOME Desktop

  • V. 3 – You Can’t Go GNOME Again

    Now that Canonical has adopted Unity for its next Ubuntu release, it seems likely that no desktop environment in history has ever launched to as much scrutiny as the new GNOME 3.

    Indeed, the GNOME project’s latest contender made its long-awaited debut last week, and the reviews have been coming fast and furious ever since.

  • Unity environment in good shape, on track for Ubuntu 11.04

    In an ongoing mailing list thread, the Ubuntu Technical Board is discussing whether the new Unity environment is a suitable default for the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 release, codenamed Natty Narwhal. The prevailing view seems to be that Unity is still on track, but there are a number of technical issues that are still being addressed.

    Unity is a new user interface shell and window management system that is designed to improve Ubuntu’s ease of use and visual sophistication. A previous version of Unity served as the netbook user experience in Ubuntu 10.10. The plan for 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal, is to ship the much-improved new version of Unity as the standard user experience across desktop and netbook form factors.

  • GNOME 3 Double Fail

    So GNOME 3 was released. I don’t know why, but my excitement levels were quite low, until today when I pushed myself into trying it out. Rather than installing the new version on top of some other distro running GNOME 2, I decided to get the intended experience by downloading one of the “official” systems on the GNOME 3 webpage. There were two options: openSUSE and Fedora. As I haven’t checked on openSUSE for quite a while now, I chose it.

  • My First Impression of Gnome 3 and Unity for Linux

    There’s been a lot of hype and angst and discussion in the world of Linux lately. Actually, for several months; since Mark Shuttleworth announced that when Ubuntu 11.04 is released at the end of April it would use Unity as the default desktop manager, instead of Gnome 3. And we’ve also been gearing up for the release this week of Gnome 3, and Gnome Shell, which is the new GUI for Gnome.

Distributions

• New Releases

  • Chakra 2011.04-ms5

  • OpenFiler 2.99

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat Cache Move Sparks Standards Spat

    By introducing a Java specification for its own Infinispan data grid technology, open-source software provider Red Hat has generated a lively debate within the ranks of the JCP (Java Community Process) over the best way to add distributed caching to enterprise Java.

  • CentOS 5.6 Finally Arrives: Is It Suitable for Business Use?

    CentOS has been a valuable part of the Linux ecosystem for some time. It’s even been beneficial to Red Hat by helping it maintain its status as the de facto enterprise Linux, without competing too fiercely for support dollars. But the extreme delays in the release of updates for 5.x and the total absence of 6.0 after almost six months gives me little confidence in the CentOS project as it’s run today. It’s neither a community project in any real sense, nor suitable for enterprise or even small business use. It doesn’t have to remain that way, but as it stands now it’s not good business sense to rely on the project even if it costs nothing in support fees.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 15: Back in the game!

      Gnome 3 feels very sleek, unobtrusive, extremely solid, and intuitive. There may be (deliberate) functional omisions through its design mandate, but give it time – a few things feel more natural after a few hours of using the environment. Such as the lack of a maximize button… For a start, I’ve been a KDE user for the last 3 years, and I’ve always used the ‘drag-to-edge’ function for doing this. And this behavior just feels `right’.

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Beta 2 Released

      Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 2 has been released today that brings many new updates and fixes. This is the last beta before the final Ubuntu11.04 release on April 28. There will be no release candidate.

    • 5 Out Of 11 Participants Crashed Unity In Canonical’s Study

      Today the results of the Default Desktop User Testing for Ubuntu 11.04 was published by Canonical’s Rick Spencer. The test was done using 11 participants from different backgrounds to test the new Unity interface that that Ubuntu 11.04 will have.

    • What Are Mac & Windows Users Saying About Unity?

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 2 Released: Test and Report!

    • Ubuntu ‘Unity’ Desktop Environment Second Impressions

      A couple of days after the first beta was released of Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), I posted my “First Impressions” on what I thought of Canonical’s ‘Unity’ desktop environment after some light usage. At that time, all of my experience was limited to a notebook that I only use for the lightest of duties, so with 11.04 beta 2 just released, I decided to install the OS on my home machine and take it, and Unity in general, for a real spin.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Bodhi 1.0

        Since this is a 1.0 release, there’s no “what’s new” to include. However, here are a few more details about what Bodhi Linux is based on and what it includes.

        Based on Ubuntu 10.04
        Enlightenment .16
        Kernel 2.6.35

Devices/Embedded

• Tablets

  • Kogan goes Linux crazy with Android devices, Ubuntu netbook

    Kogan’s new netbook with Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity pre-loaded

    Kogan’s new netbook with Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity pre-loaded

    * Kogan’s new netbook with Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity pre-loaded
    * Kogan’s leap of faith with Unity
    * Android on TV with Kogan’s new PVR
    * The new Kogan budget tablet PC also runs Android 2.2

    View all images

    After becoming famous more than two years ago for promising to bring an Android smartphone to the Australian market, Kogan Technologies has released and Android tablet, PVR and new notebooks running Ubuntu Linux.

    Unfortunately the original Agora handset was a flop, but the new range of Agora devices are tangible and for sale on Kogan’s website from today.

Synchronization sucks!

One of my biggest pet-peeves in the free software world hit me again. Whenever I asked my friends what are their biggest blockers against switching to Linux, I get two questions. The first one is “Will my Word documents work? Will I get something equivalent to MS Office?” And I am happy to say that I can point to Libre/OpenOffice and with a kind help from our friends in Redmont, I usually can persuade them that we have a good alternative here.

Events

• The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit: A Recap

  Last week, The Linux Foundation held its 5th Annual Linux Collaboration Summit which included a number of events and announcements. A new High Availability working group was formed, the Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 specification was released, a 20th Anniversary Video Contest was unveiled, and Yocto Project Release 1.0 became available. Here are the details.

• LinuxCon Lineup Reflects Reach of Linux

  Today we announced our keynote speaker line up for this year’s LinuxCon North America set in beautiful Vancouver, BC in August. I am especially proud of this year’s slate as I believe it captures the current Linux zeitgeist.

  Enterprise Linux? We have the CEO of the largest and most successful Linux and open source company, Red Hat, opening up the conference.

• The Linux Foundation Announces LinuxCon North America Keynote Speakers and 20th Anniversary Gala

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Ride the Firefox development wave with Aurora pre-release builds

    Mozilla has announced the launch of Aurora, a new Firefox release channel that is intended to open up experimental Firefox features to a broader audience of testers. The Aurora channel will serve up a stream of Firefox builds that are less fragile than the nightly builds but not as stable as official pre-releases.

    Mozilla is transitioning to shorter release cycles and a more incremental development model. The organization aims to deliver three more major Firefox releases this year, bringing the open source Web browser’s version number up to 7. As we explained in our previous coverage of Mozilla’s 2011 roadmap, the transition will require much more intensive testing throughout the development cycle.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice.org 3.4 Beta available for download

  we are happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 3.4 Beta is now ready for download.

  This Beta Release is available in English and 69 additional languages which can be installed as language packs (localizations are still ongoing).

• Oracle orphans OpenOffice offering

  Oracle will no longer be offering the paid-for version of Oracle OpenOffice and the development of the open-source version at OpenOffice.org will be a purely community-driven project, the company has said.

  Oracle announced the plans to hand development of the software to a community-based process on Friday.

• Oracle: OpenOffice.org to become “a Community-based Project”

  Oracle has announced that it intends OpenOffice.org to become a “purely community-based open source project” and that it plans to no longer offer a commercial version of OpenOffice. Edward Screven, Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends “working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.”

• Oracle licensing: just say no

• Real or imagined? Open source contributions from Oracle

  Oracle likes to demonstrate. More specifically, Oracle tries hard to demonstrate commitment to open source in its various manifestations since its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Let’s Play With GNU Screen

  Many GNU/Linux users spend time working at the command line. The GNU Screen utility can be of great use if you work with multiple shells at a time. We could also call Screen the “virtual terminal manager”. It allows you to handle multiple shell sessions within a single window/console, and view multiple sessions at the same time too. If this sounds interesting, read on!

  The Screen utility is provided by the GNU Foundation; take a look at www.gnu.org/software/screen/ for more details. It comes pre-installed in most Linux distros—if not, you can use sudo apt-get install screen (or your distro’s package manager) to install it from the distro’s package repositories. I‘m using Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit, which has Screen pre-installed—version 4.00.03jw4.

Project Releases

• Blender 2.57

  The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.57. This is the first stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work.

  We name this version “Stable” not only because it’s mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.

Licensing

• Open Source Licenses: Greater Rights, Different Responsibilities

  The goal isn’t to eradicate open source software from the organization — it’s to use it properly in the pursuit of the company’s goals. The legal department should be part of the group that is applying the policy, and assessing and monitoring its effectiveness, but there should be equal stakeholders in engineering/development and IT, so the policy is not viewed as merely an onerous legal requirement.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • File Transfers Over 1Gbit/s Ethernet: SSD vs. HDD

    As mentioned a couple times recently in our news and content, we’re in the process of completely overhauling our suite for motherboard testing, to help assure that we’re delivering the more relevant data possible. Taking into account the fact that not all NICs are built equal, one introduction we’ll be making is Ethernet testing, to see which integrated card will deliver you the best networking experience.

Could 7-year-old emails halve Zuckerberg’s Facebook stake?

Zuckerberg’s Goodfellas

Anybody who got sucked into the glamour/darkness of the Facebook story that culminated in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network movie will probably be familiar with the name Paul Ceglia.

Ceglia is the guy who filed a lawsuit last August claiming that he owns 50 percent of Facebook and, therefore, is entitled to 50 percent of the revenue. There were, however, reasons to seriously doubt Ceglia’s claims. Facebook has understandably been keen to hammer the point that Ceglia is a convicted felon who allegedly defrauded customers of his wood pellet company of $200,000. Being a convicted fraudster doesn’t look good when attempting to convince a court that you are owed billions of dollars. Then there is the fact that Ceglia waited a full seven years before filing his suit, by which time, of course, his potential winnings had sky-rocketed. On first glance, Ceglia appears to be a small-time con man gambling on one big payout.

Health/Nutrition

• Biofuels transport targets are unethical, inquiry finds

  The legal requirement to put biofuels in petrol and diesel sold in the UK and Europe is unethical because their production violates human rights and damages the environment, a major new inquiry has concluded.

  “Biofuels are one of the only renewable alternatives we have for transport fuels, but current policies and targets that encourage their uptake have backfired badly,” said Prof Joyce Tait, at Edinburgh University, who chaired the 18-month inquiry by the independent Nuffield Council on Bioethics (NCB). “The rapid expansion of biofuels production in the developing world has led to problems such as deforestation and the displacement of indigenous people.”

Finance

• Banks to Pay Victims of Botched Foreclosures in Settlement With Regulators

  The 14 largest U.S. mortgage servicers must pay back homeowners for losses from foreclosures or loans that were mishandled in the wake of the housing collapse, the first of a set of sanctions regulators are seeking against the companies.

  The settlement announced today between servicers and banking regulators could help the U.S. Justice Department determine the size and scope of fines for the flawed practices, regulators said.

  Officials from the Justice department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and 10 state attorneys general met with banks today, the second such meeting to negotiate a global settlement, Associate U.S. Attorney General Tom Perrelli said. The group is discussing potential fines and whether servicers should be required to reduce the principal on some home loans.

• VOICES: Right-to-work law brings falling wages, 80-hour weeks

  Right to work came to Louisiana in 1976 and drastically changed my family’s work for the worse. I am a third-generation member of the Operating Engineers, Local 406 in Lake Charles. My grandfather, great-uncle, father, brother, cousins, and I have all worked in the heavy equipment industry. While previous generations ran a wide range of equipment (dozers, draglines, and cranes), my father, brother, and I have only worked with large, heavy-lift cranes.

Privacy

• The Two Johns Strike a Note for Data Privacy

  Data privacy is one of the hot legal issues of the day. Companies can not gather enough information about consumers’ interests and spending habits.

  But one-time political foes John Kerry and John McCain are trying to put some limits on secretive data gathering.

  The Johns yesterday filed the august-sounding Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011.

Civil Rights

• ICE Redefines Detainment For Wikileaks Helper: You’re Not Being Detained, You Just Can’t Leave

  Earlier this year, we wrote about computer security expert, Tor developer and Wikileaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, who was regularly being detained and intimidated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials each time he (a US citizen) traveled into the country. If you follow Jacob’s Twitter feed, you get detailed descriptions each time he flies back into the country of the hassles he has to go through. Every time he’s detained and never once given an explanation for why or what is being searched for. He’s often lied to and frequently told that it’s a “random” search. He certainly knows enough that he wipes all of his electronic equipment before traveling across the border.

  In the latest case, upon returning from a conference in Europe by flying into Houston, Appelbaum again asked his detainers why he was being detained, and was once again not given a straight answer. He knows that there’s something on the screen that they pull up on their computers, but they refuse to provide him with any info. This time, they even went so far as to redefine detainment, telling him that he wasn’t being detained, but that he just couldn’t go until they were done with him. Perhaps he should send Homeland Security a copy of a dictionary with the definition of “detained” highlighted.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• T-Mobile’s ‘new’ unlimited plan, now with more throttling

  Despite being in the midst of a $39 billion merger with AT&T, T-Mobile is still moving forward with business as usual. The carrier announced Thursday a new cheaper unlimited plan, however with some important caveats, including throttling for heavy data users.

  The plan will cost $79.99 per month, and included unlimited voice, data, and text and picture messaging. On average, the carrier says subscribers will save up to $350 yearly when compared to competitors’ plans. Customers will only have a limited time to to sign up for the new plan, although an end date was not provided. Both new and existing customers will be eligible.

• Net Neutrality: An Encouraging Report From the French Parliament

  The trans-partisan parliamentary mission led by Laure de la Raudière and Corinne Erhel just released its report on Net neutrality. This encouraging report calls for preserving the Internet’s universality and protecting end-users’ fundamental freedoms, and should be considered a template for other European public authorities. That said, while this document offers an important reflection on the evolution of our legal framework to protect fundamental rights and foster the digital economy, it must be followed by actions. La Quadrature du Net publishes an unofficial translation of the report’s introduction.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • European Court of Justice To Outlaw Internet Filtering; Esp. For Copyright Enforcement

    Today, the European Court of Justice gave a preliminary opinion that will have far-reaching implications in the fight against overaggressive copyright monopoly abusers. It is not a final verdict, but the Advocate General’s position; the Court generally follows this. The Advocate General says that no ISP can be required to filter the Internet, and particularly not to enforce the copyright monopoly.

  • Filtering the Net for Copyright Runs Counter to Fundamental Rights

    Today, the advocate general of the European Court of Justice rendered his conclusions in the Scarlet/SABAM case, in which a Belgian judge ordered an Internet access provider to filter its subscribers’ communications to block unauthorized transmissions of copyrighted works. He concludes that such filtering measures are way too restrictive of freedom of expression and privacy, thereby reasserting the importance of fundamental rights online and stressing the disproportionate character of filtering measures to enforce copyright on the Internet. This should compel the EU Commission to revise its copyright enforcement strategy, as it undertakes the revision of the anti-sharing IPRED directive.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Understanding Linux Market Share for March

63% use Debian, 18% are found to use an assortment of other Linux Desktop, closely followed by 15%using Fedora / Red Hat

Desktop

• Zorin OS Finds a Home on Rotatable Notebook

  An email arrived earlier today announcing the new Zorin PC. Just as it sounds, it’s a computer shipping with Zorin OS. Kyrill Zorin said, “Zorin OS is our Linux distro that aims to be the gateway to Linux for Windows users to grow the popularity of Linux. We have recently launched the Zorin PC’s website and are now taking pre-orders.”

• Linux – How I Got Here… and Where I’m Headed

  I started my Linux Adventure a bit late in life. I’ve always had an interest in all things technical. My career for the majority of my working life was as an electronics technician (component level repair). I had aspirations at one time of gaining an engineering degree in electronics; other paths were taken, though.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Free as in Freedom: Episode 0x0D: NDAs

  This episode is a recording of Karen’s talk, Sign on the Dotted Line: NDAs, Employment Agreements and Free and Open Source Software from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit.

• FLOSS Weekly 161: Selenium

  Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Randi Harper

  Selenium is a suite of tools used to automate web app testing across many platforms.

Kernel Space

• Ubuntu 11.04 gets automatic Epson printer driver download

• Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.39 (Part 1) – Network drivers and infrastructure

  The addition of ipset support makes it easier to run a firewall, as it means that only one table needs to be modified in order to block a specific IP address. The situation with regard to drivers for WLAN chips continues to improve, with Ralink and Realtek now actively involved in developing the Linux kernel drivers.

• Twenty Years of Linux according to Linus Torvalds

  SJVN: “What’s Linux real birthday?” You’re the proud papa, when do you think it was? When you sent out the newsgroup post to the Minix newsgroup? When you sent out the 0.01 release to a few friends?

  LT: I think both of them are valid birthdays.

• Hibernate Problem Fixed

• Graphics Stack

  • NVIDIA Pre-Releases A New Linux Driver

    The NVIDIA crew working on their proprietary Linux driver have just pre-released a new build, NVIDIA 270.41.03. This Linux driver update mainly adds support for a number of new GeForce / Quadro GPUs.

    The list of newly supported hardware is huge: GeForce GT 520, GeForce GT 525M, GeForce GT 520M, GeForce GT 445M, GeForce GT 530, GeForce 405, GeForce GTX 590, GeForce GTX 550 Ti, GeForce GT 420, GeForce GT 440, GeForce GTX 470M, GeForce GTX 485M, GeForce GT 550M, GeForce GT 555M, NVS 4200M, Quadro 1000M, and Quadro 2000M.

Applications

• 10 Linux applications that should be easier to use

  After using and covering the Linux operating system for more than a decade, I have seen plenty of applications come and go. Many of the applications that go are those that wind up either too broken to work or that lack the features users need. The applications that stay are solid, reliable, up to date, and offer plenty of user-friendly features. And user-friendliness is the key for modern Linux — especially on the desktop.

• hotssh – Graphical interface to secure shell

• Instructionals/Technical

  • UNIX / Linux: 7 Practical PS Command Examples for Process Monitoring

  • Inkscape Tutorial – L-System Fractals

  • More 1337 for your Slackware-13.37 release

  • Create jigsaw puzzle from pictures with Picpuz

  • Redundancy and flexibility with RAID1+LVM

  • Configure hidden preferences in Claws Mail with Clawsker

  • Such a profound question..

  • WordPress, Themes, htaccess and me

  • Synapse – Application Launcher

  • Convert mp4 video to avi video

  • Use free with ‘-s’ option to get a continuous update of memory usage info

  • Self-Encrypting Hard Disks

    I travel a lot with my laptop, and it can contain private information that shouldn’t get disclosed if it’s ever lost or stolen. For this reason, I’ve been using various types of disk encryption over the years, such as Ubuntu’s encrypted home directory feature, to reasonably assure that my data remains private.

• Games

  • Free Multiplayer Shooter ‘Teeworlds’ 0.6.0 Released

    One of the most addictive online shooter for Linux, ‘Teeworlds’ 0.6.0 has been released that brings many new features and fixes.

    Teeworlds is a retro, cartoon-themed shooter where up to 16 players fight each other online. The game have huge fan following with hundreds of players playing the game daily.

  • Family Farm Linux Demo Available

    Hammerware has released a demo version of their game family Farm for Linux. They have said the release date will be April 15th for the final product. Family farm is currently available to pre-order with 20% off at €11.99.

  • Linux Gaming Weekend – Urban Terror primer

  • A Review of Red Eclipse, Free and Open Source FPS

    The number of truly free and open source games available for download is small in general, but in terms of genre, first-person shooters (FPS) have plenty of representation. This is largely due to the 3D engines that have been released into the free software community, which lend themselves well to FPS games. The Cube Engine 2 is one such 3D system, and Red Eclipse is the latest FPS to utilize it. Version 1.0 of Red Eclipse was just released a few weeks ago, and I decided to give it a try. It is free to download for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and Windows

Desktop Environments

• How do we make a stand? Revolution

  This post is not intended to represent complete ideas or possible solutions. It is rather a post relating to the thoughts that I have had concerning the upcoming changes in Gnome 3, Ubuntu Unity and KDE 4.6.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • A taste of things to come

    Finally, for the first time I’ll meet in person with Nuno in a couple of days, and we’ll take this opportunity to revisit (and hopefully improve) the last few UI elements with which he is not so happy today. In the process of doing so, we will notably incorporate some quite useful input from Dolphin dev, Peter Penz.

  • Bluetile Keeps My App Windows Nice and Neat

    Sometimes the number of choices the Linux operating system provides can be overwhelming. I am starting to look at other options for my preferred desktop environment as GNOME 3 and KDE 4 go in directions that might be unsettling to my computing routine. One obscure yet interesting replacement candidate is Bluetile.

  • Plasma Active: Active Apps

    This is the third in a series of five daily blog entries covering the various tracks in the Plasma Active initiative. Today we’ll be looking at a concept we call “Active Apps”. Where Plasma Quick is mostly (though not entirely) about infrastructure and Contour is a project with a Plan(tm), Active Apps is where we are really looking to the broader community of developers, designers and dreamers to help Plasma Active achieve its full potential.

    [...]

    If you are unsure if your app is “ready” for Plasma Active, it won’t hurt to ask for feedback and start a discussion. We have many months, several sprints and conferences and a major KDE release day in the summer between now and the first Plasma Active release.

  • Re-live the Camp KDE experience!

    Well, Camp KDE 2011 has come and gone. Some of you attended in person. Others may have listened to the live audio stream in Amarok. Maybe you missed it completely, but fear not! Because while time travel is not yet feasible, all of the talks were recorded and are posted for your viewing and listening pleasure. In addition, we have a bunch of interviews with the organizers, speakers, and attendees.

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3 – Best Ever Ubuntu Linux Desktop Environment for Easy Computing

    Wow, I’m dazed with geek-pleasure right now. I just saw the latest screenshots of GNOME 3 Linux Desktop emailed by my brother-in-law in Europe. He is a certified linuxhead and he was the first one to inform me that GNOME 3 is now finally available for download. He raved and showed me his new GNOME 3-draped Ubuntu 10.4 laptop and I can only say – Wow, this new Gnome 3 update looks like an iPad 2 iOS screen! I might as well post my Gnome 3 review after testing this new Linux desktop environment, I said to myself so here it is (plus new features).

  • gnome-panel is dead, long live gnome-panel!

Distributions

• PackageKit Progress on Foresight

  For a while Foresight Linux users had no graphical interface for managing their systems packages and/or updates, mainly because the development for the conary backend fell out of scope and our radar (this is a nicer way to say that we didn’t have someone to maintain it). But thanks to the work of zodman, jesse and others PackageKit is making its way back to our desktop.

• Reviews

  • Zenwalk 7 review

    Zenwalk is a desktop-oriented Linux distribution originally based on Slackware. The latest stable release is Zenwalk 7. It was made available for download on March 25, 2011, roughly ten months from the last prior stable release – Zenwalk 6.4. The Zenwalk project makes four editions available – The Standard Edition, Core Edition, GNOME Edition, and the Openbox Edition. This article presents a detailed review of the Standard Edition.

• New Releases

  • Lançamento do Epidemic 3.2

  • 4/12/2011: Parted Magic 6.0

  • Parted Magic 6.0 Gets a New Booting System

    Parted Magic 6.0 has been released. The latest update gets a new major version number, due to some underlying, structural changes, and comes with a number of updated, as well as downgraded, packages.

    Several changes have been implemented which should make booting significantly more reliable. Many booting issues should be fixed now, though, since this is a new system, others may have creeped in.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Long time no post..

    However, to resurrect this blog with something fancy, why not posting a screenshot of how my Mandriva 2011 desktop currently looks like?

• Red Hat Family

  • Project Ceylon – Red Hat builds Java replacement

    Red Hat is developing a new Java Virtual Machine-based programming language intended to overcome the limitations of Java itself. Unveiled earlier this week by lead developer Gavin King at a conference in China, the effort is known as Project Ceylon.

  • Is CentOS 5.6 Better Than 5.5?

    Because of its nature, it is very clear that CentOS is mostly oriented to server market. But CentOS can also be used on desktop computers and laptops.

  • Fedora

    • Sitting in stunned silence

      Fedora Core 5′s Bordeaux — a wine region in France, but also a comic book character — begat Fedora Core 6′s Zod, another comic book character. One of my favorites is Fedora 11′s Leonidas — which comes from Fedora 10′s Cambridge (Cambridge is a ship in the Navy, and so is Leonidas) — because it allowed some fun with the name with “300″ memes. Ubuntu? THIS! IS! FEDORA!

      As an aside, it’s unfortunate that Barona was not chosen as the Fedora 16 name, which would lend itself to rewriting the lyrics to The Knack’s “My Sharona.” Such are the things that go into consideration in Fedora circles regarding what name to choose in the ranked voting.

• Debian Family

  • Debian on a ThinkPad Edge 15

    All my notebooks till today have been ThinkPads from the T series, sadly Lenovo decided (or, maybe, were persuaded) to go with nVidia GPUs for their current designs (T5xx). That’s sad, because nVidia doesn’t cooperate with the FLOSS world. I still wanted a ThinkPad with up-to-date parts. That left me with the Edge series, which is designed to be the bridge between consumer and business models. After some searching I settled on the NVLJ6GE model (the last two letters just indicate, that this is the “German” variant). The key specs are Intel Core i5-480M, 4096 MB RAM, AMD Mobility Radeon HD 5145, Intel WLAN module and a non-glare display.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Certification: Programme Guide

      We have recently created a few bits of public documentation that I wanted to share with you. The first is a general guide to the certification programme. It explains what we are aiming to achieve and what our processes are. This can be found at:

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Turnkey Linux Uses Ubuntu as a Foundation

        Turnkey Linux Hub 1.0 provides cloud hosting and backup capabilities for the Web application software appliances offered by the Turnkey Linux project.

        [...]

        Turnkey Linux is an excellent option for individuals or organizations looking to test drive and deploy open-source Web applications covered by the project. It would serve well as a platform for building Web applications atop popular open-source stacks: There are appliances available for generic LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), Ruby on Rails and Django stacks, among others.

      • Elementary ‘Jupiter’ – A Slick, Easy-To-Use Operating System [Linux]

        Looking for a beautiful, functional operating system? Check out the first Elementary Jupiter OS. This Linux-based operating system is designed from the ground up to stay out of your way so you can simply use your computer. Whether you’re a long-time Linux user or a complete beginner to open source operating systems, Elementary’s elegance is impressive and more than worth checking out.

Devices/Embedded

• Phones

  • My Linux Phones (from 2005 – present)

    It is common knowledge amongst my friends that I am a Linux gadget freak, especially in regards to mobile phones. I have been using Linux-based mobile phones for nearly 6 years now. I was an early fan of the Motorola Linux phones owning 4 of them along the way. I have owned 2 iPhones in the past before selling them and one Windows Mobile-based phone as well. None of them equalled to my love affair with Linux phones.

    For me, a mobile phone must be able to take good pictures, and recently, make some good video shots including night scenes. My mobile phones have helped me come up with the content for many of my postings at SaigonNezumi.com.

  • WebOS 2.1 – Give It a Spin with Emulation Through the WebOS SDK!

    It seems like only yesterday that Palm announced its brand new Linux-based WebOS and Palm Pre, ready to shake up the world with awesomeness and Linux in a little package. They matched that announcement up with a nifty little SDK that emulated the entire OS in VirtualBox, and was released as a .deb package for Ubuntu. Someone even posted a HOWTO on the Linux Journal web site about it!

  • Android

    • Sony Ericsson stirs debate with own Android Market channel

      Sony Ericsson created a minor controversy on Wednesday with the launch of its own brand-specific channel in Android Market. The category both includes official apps but also recommended titles and occasional exclusives. It will also be used as a sales pitch area and will be a “highlighted market space” for chosen developers’ apps.

How To Successfully Earn a Living with FOSS

Here’s the most typical scenario. You fight a fierce battle, and migrate your entire organisation to FOSS. After a few initial hiccups, you’ve got all systems and people humming along just fine. One fine day, you decide it’s time to move on in your career. Once you’re out of the organisation, it takes just a few seconds for everyone to gleefully reformat everything and go back to their slavery under proprietary software. You just shrug your shoulders and try not to think about it.

Events

• Open Source Think Tank 2011: Understanding the Present and Predicting the Future

  We had a great time and the discussion was vigorous! The last year has continued the expansion of open source use, confirmed recently by Laurie Wurster’s March 2011 article in the Harvard Business Review http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=619. In particular, Android has been spectacularly successful and was a significant factor in Nokia’s recent failures in the handset market. The new Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, described Nokia as being on a “burning platform” and identified Android as one of the major sources of their problems.

• Tech conference coming to Boston

  Leaders of the technology industry will come together in Boston next month for the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World.

  Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), a leading provider of open source solutions, says customers, partners, visionary thinkers, technologists and open source enthusiasts will take part in a series of discussions to learn, network and explore open source. The full agenda is available here.

• An open-source geek-out, Latin American style

  A few years back, Argentina’s government looked at mandating the use of all open-source software in its offices, largely to save on software costs.

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • News and Notes from the Mozilla Creative Team

    The Creative team here at Mozilla has been growing rapidly lately, so it feels like a good time to share a quick update on who we are and what we’re doing.

    [...]

    The group includes two veteran Mozillians…

  • Firefox 5 And 6 On Track: First Aurora Release Posted

    Mozilla has taken the first major step in its new browser release schedule and transitioned Firefox 5 from its initial mozilla-central to the new aurora channel where the browser will be brought up to beta status.

  • About:me Firefox addon – View a visual pattern of your Internet activities

    Since, its an experimental prototype of an upcoming firefox feature(Yep! this is what it says under the developer comments :D), I shouldn’t expect much. But this comment seems to be a few months old. I wonder why it wasn’t included in Firefox 4 but it indeed deservers to be an integral feature.

  • The Firefox Home Tab

    Many of the mockups of Firefox’s new interface, dating all the way back to August 2009, have featured a small home tab. But up until now, I haven’t had a chance to explain the various ideas surrounding Home, elaborate how it fits into our broader cross platform and cross device strategy, and answer some really basic questions, like what will happen if the user has already customized their home page.

  • Firefox 5, 6 Available For Download

    Firefox 5 has been moved into the aurora release channel, the second of a total of four release stages. Firefox 6 alpha 1 has been moved to mozilla-central and is available for download.

    Mozilla currently labels the Aurora releases in fact as “Aurora” browsers with a new logo and the mozilla-central versions as “Nightlies”, also with a new logo. The transitions appear to be mainly testing the new rapid release cycle procedure and there isn’t much to see for Firefox users yet. Firefox 4 will get the 4.0.1 (Macaw) security update in May before we will see any changes in the preview releases of Firefox 5. Among the key changes will apparently be the integration of the Home button, which will be built into Firefox as an app tab that will hide the Home desktop application for Firefox.

  • Mozilla Will Let You Try Out The Latest Firefox 5 Features Today — Here’s How To Get It

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Gnash and Epiphany

  Long story short, the proprietary Adobe Flash was blacklisted in the GNOME 3.x releases of Epiphany because it uses Gtk+ 2.x (or 1.x) while Epiphany uses Gtk+ 3.x. An unwanted side effect of this is that it also disables Gnash, depriving me of my daily dosage of Youtube, Rebecca Black and crappy, obscure Bollywood songs.

Government

• Open source and the sluggish UK public sector

  Another suggestion is to spend more time explaining the benefits of open source. “A desktop refresh doesn’t have to mean a Windows upgrade,” Silber says. Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal agrees that education is key. “There is still a perception that Linux isn’t ready for frontline use. This is nonsense. Linux is ready. It’s the project managers who are not,” he says.

Licensing

• Official Linux(R) Licence

  The Sabayon Foundation has just had an official sub-license granted for our use of Linux(R) as part of “Sabayon Linux” & “SabayonLinux”, covering goods and services on every corner of the planet (including Antarctica!).

Programming

• if…then

Finance

• US Senate May Move to Enact Internet Sales Tax

  According to Cnet, one US Senator is preparing to introduce legislation that would radically alter online commerce. The bill would end the ability of Americans to buy goods from online retailers free from state sales tax. Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois is expected to present the bill shortly after the Easter recess.

Civil Rights

• RIM CEO terminates BBC Click interview

  Mike Lazaridis the co-CEO of Research In Motion, the Canadian firm behind the Blackberry, refuses to answer a question about problems the company has had in India and the Middle East.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• 18 months on, industry divided on effectiveness of CRTC net neutrality policy

  Nearly 18 months since the CRTC adopted its Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) policy, industry experts are divided on its effectiveness in securing net neutrality.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • Law to fight internet piracy passed

    It was supported by all parties except the Greens and independent MPs Chris Carter and Hone Harawira.

  • Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Ballnux

• HTC Sensation smartphone runs on latest dual-core Snapdragon

  HTC announced a 4.3-inch, dual-core 1.2GHz Android phone — initially heading for T-Mobile and Vodafone before going global. The HTC Sensation features a unique, contoured display, 768MB RAM, a full range of wireless features, a new HTC Watch video service, and an updated version of the HTC Sense featuring a “active lockscreen.”

Applications

• Viewnior Image Viewer

• 10 of the Best Free Linux Earth Science Software

  Earth science (also known as geoscience) is the focus of understanding the sciences related to the planet Earth. It includes a wide range of fields such as geology, geography, geophysics, meteorology, oceanography, and glaciology. Some people are surprised to learn that astronomy is also regarded to be an earth science. Geology is generally considered to be the primary earth science.

  Earth scientists plays an important role in helping nations minimise risks that are posed by climate change and natural disasters (such as floods, tornados, hurricanes, and earthquakes).

• Music Production in Linux 2

• Proprietary

  • Professional Quality CAD on Linux with DraftSight

    DraftSight builds are available in both Debian and RPM packages on the product’s home page. The beta weighs in at a beefy 68.8 MB, with a prodigious list of dependencies, but it is a real, native Linux application and not a WINE port. The dependencies are standard GUI fare — Freetype, Cairo, GTK+, D-Bus, and so forth, so any up-to-date system should have no trouble installing it. Still, it might have been nice to have the dependencies listed on the web site, although that is par for the course — Dassault’s DraftSight site has an annoying habit of providing the majority of its content (including the FAQ and Getting Started Guide) as downloadable PDFs rather than simple HTML.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.4

  • Stopping Runaway Applications in Linux

Desktop Environments

• GNOME Desktop

  • Have Some Cheese with that Webcam

    Since the launch of Linux Magazine TV (LMTV) in February of this year, my interest in video has increased beyond any reasonable limits. I’m obsessed with video and our efforts in this new area for us. For weeks I’ve tried to find a way to use my new Panasonic HM-TA1 pocket video camera for new LMTV entries and my own projects. Last week I discovered Cheese Webcam Booth (Cheese), which is the topic of this week’s article. Using Cheese is intuitive and closely resembles the Apple iPad2 Photo Booth app. The difference in price between Cheese (free) and Photo Booth ($499+ for the iPad2) is significant, which definitely gives you something to smile about.

Distributions

• Debian Family

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Would you like to help with maps.ubuntu.com?

      Looking for a way to get involved in the Ubuntu Community? Ahmed Kamal of Ubuntu Community Team at Canonical as posted a call for help for anyone who want to Help Shape Ubuntu.Maps.Com.

    • Natty In The Final Stretch: A Retrospective

Devices/Embedded

• A 300ms BeagleBoard boot?

  Make Linux Software posted a video showing the “fastest ever embedded Linux boot.” The video shows a BeagleBoard equipped with a 720MHz TI OMAP3530 processor booting Linux 2.6.32 in an impressive 300 milliseconds from boot loader to shell — although the jury is out on just how useful the stripped-down 1.5MB image might be.

• TI launches open source project supporting its wireless chips

  Texas Instruments (TI) announced an “OpenLink” project, which has released a battery-optimized, open source Linux wireless driver stack for mobile devices. The initial release will support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM communications on TI’s WiLink WL1271/3 and WL1281/3 chips, running on the ARM Cortex-based BeagleBoard and PandaBoard boards under Ubuntu, MeeGo, and Android, says the company.

• Phones

  • Android

    • Best Alternative Web Browsers for Android

      The web browser portion of the Android market is one of the most fiercely competitive markets since all users at one point or another need to browse the Internet on their devices. Although Android ships with a default web browser, the increasing demands users place on surfing the Internet has lead to the launch of more advanced browsers that offer added features and usability.

Events

• Community Leadership Summit 2011 Announced

  “I am excited for this, the third Community Leadership Summit – the last two events have been a great success, and this year is sure to be the best event yet for bringing together community leaders to share best practice in a truly independent environment” – Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager and Founder of the Community Leadership Summit

Project Releases

• nginx-1.0.0 stable version has been released.

• Google releases open source code for hash functions

  Google has announced the availability of two open source hash functions for producing 64- and 128-bit hash values from strings. The company states that these functions are suitable for such applications as hash tables – eg. indexing a database – but are not suitable for cryptography.

Programming

• Until Loop

• Understanding the for Loop

Newspapers and Social Media: Still Not Really Getting It

Many traditional media entities have embraced social-media services like Twitter and Facebook and blogs — at least to some extent — as tools for reporting and journalism, using them to publish and curate news reports. But newspapers in particular seem to have a hard time accepting the “social” part of these tools, at least when it comes to letting their journalists engage with readers as human beings. A case in point is the new social-media policy introduced at a major newspaper in Canada, which tells its staff not to express personal opinions — even on their personal accounts or pages — and not to engage with readers in the comments.

What is legitimate “newsgathering” and what is “piracy”?

Zunguzungu’s got an excellent, nuanced piece on the creation and attribution of value in newsgathering and reporting. Zz reminds us that the current arrangement is perfect arbitrary and contingent: no underlying universal principle reifies certain news-related activities (writing the story), ascribes no ownership stake to other activities (sources quoted and unquoted, tipoffs, references); and damns yet another set of activities (curating, aggregating and commenting upon the news).

Why Paying Bribes Should Be Legal

You head down to the local government office to pick up your check. But when you get there, the clerk says you can’t have the refund — unless you pay him a bribe. So you pay the bribe, and the clerk gives you your refund.

Both you and the clerk have just committed a crime, according to Indian law.

Kaushik Basu, chief economic adviser to India’s Ministry of Finance, wants to change that.

Trust Obama?

Last week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) tried to get the Senate to adopt candidate Barack Obama’s core principle of presidential warmaking powers.

Paul added an amendment to a bill that would adopt as the “sense of the Senate” the following quote from candidate Obama: “The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile Hit With Dumbest Antitrust Lawsuit Ever

We just wrote about how Max Davis, who’s trying to create a silly and totally pointless compulsory licensing system for MMS content was more or less laughed out of court in the lawsuit he filed against the mobile operators, claiming that they were running illegal P2P file sharing programs in the form of their MMS capabilities. It apparently took him all of a few days to come up with a new, perhaps even more ridiculous strategy: he’s suing AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and TracFone for supposed antitrust violations over the same basic issues. Once again, it seems clear that this is an incredibly weak (and almost certainly unproductive) attempt at getting these companies to agree to his pointless licensing scheme.

Science

• Space Junk Threat Will Grow for Astronauts and Satellites

  Fast-moving chunks of space debris zipped uncomfortably close to the International Space Station twice in the past week — cosmic close calls that will likely become more common over the next several years, experts predict.

  For one thing, after 50 years of spaceflight there is just more junk up there than there used to be, sharing space with vehicles and their human crews. And this debris can snowball — as when satellites collide, spawning thousands of new pieces of orbiting junk.

• SpaceX Unveils Plan for World’s Most Powerful Private Rocket

  Private spaceship maker SpaceX announced plans Tuesday (April 5) for a new heavy-lift rocket, a vehicle that would be the most powerful commercial rocket ever built and haul much heavier loads than the company’s previous boosters.

Health/Nutrition

• What’s Worse Than ‘Ruinous’?

  In 2003 Paul Ryan was one of 207 Republicans in the House of Representatives who voted for the Medicare prescription drug benefit championed by President George W. Bush—a reckless expansion of a huge program that was already heading for bankruptcy. Yesterday Ryan, who now chairs the House Budget Committee, did partial penance for that budget-busting blunder with a plan that includes ambitious Medicare reforms as well as $5.8 trillion in spending cuts during the next decade.

  At a time when Democrats and Republicans are squabbling over whether to cut $33 billion or $61 billion in spending this year—neither of which would make much of a dent in a deficit that is expected to hit $1.6 trillion—Ryan’s plan may seem breathtakingly bold. But while it is admirably forthright in some respects, it dodges several important questions. It’s too bad there is no opposing party to keep the Republicans fiscally honest.

• CTIA cites First Amendment protection of radiation levels

  The CTIA is arguing that a San Francisco ordinance demanding radiation levels be displayed on phone packaging breaches the First Amendment of the US constitution, and is thus illegal.

  Speaking to CNET, the wireless telecommunications organisation claimed that forcing shops to reveal the specific absorption rate (SAR) of phone handsets infringes on the retailers right to free speech by compelling them to mention it. The ordinance requires all San Francisco retailers to provide the information at the point of sale, though it hasn’t yet come in to force.

• CTIA argues SF cell phone law violates First Amendment

  San Francisco’s board of supervisors has agreed to put its Right-to-Know Ordinance under further review after the wireless industry’s lobbying arm claimed the legislation infringes on the First Amendment rights of cell phone retailers.

  In an interview with CNET, CTIA spokesman John Walls said the city cannot force retailers to distribute materials that warn consumers about the possible negative effects of cell phone radiation. “You can’t compel speech,” he said. “Telling retailers to give out that information violates the First Amendment.”

Security

• Popular open source DHCP program open to hack attacks

• Interpol chief calls for global electronic identity card system

  The head of INTERPOL has emphasized the need for a globally verifiable electronic identity card (e-ID) system for migrant workers at an international forum on citizen ID projects, e-passports, and border control management.

  Speaking at the fourth Annual EMEA ID WORLD summit, INTERPOL Secretary General Ronald K. Noble said that regulating migration levels and managing borders presented security challenges for countries and for the world that INTERPOL was ideally-placed to help address.

• WordPress update fixes security flaws

Defence/Police/Aggression

• TSA chief defends body scanners

  Transportation Security Administration administrator John Pistole defended controversial full-body scanning techniques that have endured withering criticism from Republican leaders in Congress.

  Speaking at a Department of Homeland Security conference in Washington Friday, Pistole said the body scanners that have attracted attention in recent months were TSA’s best option for preventing non-metallic explosive devices.

• Appeals Court Strengthens Warrantless Searches at Border

  The authorities may seize laptops, cameras and other digital devices at the U.S. border without a warrant, and scour through them for days hundreds of miles away, a federal appeals court ruled.

  The 2-1 decision (.pdf) Wednesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes as the government is increasingly invoking its broad, warrantless search-and-seizure powers at the U.S. border to probe the digital lives of travelers.

  Under the “border search exception” of United States law, international travelers, including U.S. citizens, can be searched without a warrant as they enter the country. Under the Obama administration, law enforcement agents have aggressively used this power to search travelers’ laptops, sometimes copying the hard drive before returning the computer to its owner.

Cablegate

• In The End, Secret Hold On Whistleblower Protection Narrowed Down To Two Senators

  Back in January, we noted the somewhat ironic fact that a US Senator had put a “secret hold” on a bill to protect government whistleblowers. We wondered if someone would blow the whistle and out that Senator. Thankfully, the folks from On the Media stepped up, and set up a project to find out who put that secret hold on the bill. Last we had checked in, they had narrowed it down to three possible Senators: Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions and James Risch.

Finance

• Man who made coins found guilty

  In September 2008, Bernard von NotHaus donned prison stripes at the Silver Summit at the Best Western Coeur d’Alene Inn.

  Von NotHaus, 67, was at the summit pitching his own “Liberty Dollar” coins, but dressed the part of a convict to stick a symbolic finger in the eye of the federal authorities. They had seized records, dies for casting coins, and Liberty Dollars from three Coeur d’Alene businesses linked to his currency. Sunshine Minting Inc. in Coeur d’Alene made coins for von NotHaus.

• Oh What a Lovely Budget Item

  When Bill Kristol endorsed America’s intervention in Libya, the Weekly Standard editor was being completely consistent with everything else he has said about American foreign policy. He just wasn’t being consistent with his pose as a proponent of fiscal restraint. It’s bracing to watch Kristol twirl so easily from denouncing “the Democrats’ orgy of spending” and complaining about Republicans who “don’t have a credible plan to deal with the debt or the deficit” to jubilating that the president “didn’t shrink from defending the use of force.” But the pundit’s gyrations can’t obscure a basic reality: You can pay your bills or you can be a global policeman, but you can’t do both. Not in 2011.

  According to ABC, the cost of Obama’s kinetic spending reached $600 million in its first week. The Pentagon estimates that the total could reach $800 million by the end of September, and the Pentagon just might be lowballing. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has told The National Journal that the price tag could “easily pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things go.” And if things don’t go well…

Censorship

• Google Found Liable For Autocomplete Suggestions In Italy

  Here’s yet another ridiculously bad ruling for search engines in Italy. Glyn Moody points us to the news of a blog post by a lawyer involved in the case (against Google) who is happy that his side prevailed and that Google is liable for search autocomplete suggestions. The case involved someone who was upset that doing a Google search on his name popped up “con man” (“truffatore”) and “fraud” (“truffa”) as autocomplete Google search suggestions. We’ve seen similar cases elsewhere, and France has (most of the time) also ruled against Google.

  Of course, this is ridiculous for a variety of reasons. Google is not “creating” this content. It’s accurately suggesting results based on what users are searching. Clearly, people are searching on this particular individual along with the two terms. That’s not Google’s fault. Yet Google is liable for it?

Civil Rights

• Is The FBI Lying To Congress About Its Abuses Of The Patriot Act?

  As we go through this brief extension in three of the more controversial provisions of the Patriot Act, which give law enforcement tremendous leeway in spying on people with very little oversight, there have been some hearings about those provisions. At a recent Senate Judiciary Hearing about this, FBI director Robert Mueller was asked if any of the three provisions had been found to be abused. Mueller responded, “I’m not aware of any.” However, as the EFF notes, it has clear evidence of the roving wiretap being abused, which it found via some FOIA documents. Tellingly, when it requested info about Patriot Act violations, it received heavily redacted info. However, via a different FOIA request, it received other information that, when combined with the first FOIA request, reveals a clear abuse by the FBI.

  [...]

  This raises some pretty serious questions.

DRM

• The Terror of Customer Expectations

  That particular war has already been lost, pretty much. Conventional wisdom among the tech savvy is that DRM is bad, and few of the indies use it. Nontechnical ebook buyers will figure it out when they decide to move to another reader system and can’t take their purchases with them. (The ebook business is so new that most people are still on their first reader and their first forty or fifty ebooks.) The day will come in the next few years when Big Print will be a lot less big, and competing against a lot more ebook publishers who have long understood that DRM does no one any good.

Intellectual Monopolies

• “Big Content” Is Strangling American Innovation

  Innovation has emerged as a key means by which the US can pull itself out of this lackluster economy. In the State of the Union, President Obama referred to China and India as new threats to America’s position as the world’s leading innovator. But the threats are not just external. One of the greatest threats to the US’s ability to innovate lies within: specifically, with the music and movie business. These Big Content businesses are attempting to protect themselves from change so aggressively that they risk damaging America’s position as a world leader in innovation.

• Lawmakers tell Google to do more on antipiracy

  WASHINGTON–The tone of a congressional hearing held today on antipiracy was set early when Rep. Bob Goodlatte suggested that Google was falling short in its antipiracy efforts.

• Senator Leahy Ignores Serious First Amendment Concerns With COICA

  Seeing as he’s a Senator, it would help if he were familiar with the law. As such, he would know that (1) copyright infringement is not “theft,” and (2) yes, the First Amendment protects all kinds of speech, even speech made by criminals and (3) the Free Speech issues that many of us are concerned with are the takedowns of legitimate non-infringing content, which we’ve seen happen repeatedly by Homeland Security — which is the type of program Leahy is looking to expand with COICA.

• Geist: Canadian-backed report says music, movie, and software piracy is a market failure, not a legal one

  Trademark and copyright holders frequently characterize piracy as a legal failure, arguing that tougher laws and increased enforcement are needed to stem infringing activity. But a new global study on piracy, backed by Canada’s International Development Research Centre, comes to a different conclusion. Following several years of independent investigation in six emerging economies, the report concludes that piracy is chiefly a product of a market failure, not a legal one.

  The Social Science Research Council launched the study in 2006, identifying partner institutions in South Africa, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Bolivia, and India to better understand the market for media piracy such as music, movies, and software. The result is the most comprehensive analysis of piracy to date.

• FDA, KV Pharma Bend A Bit To Public Pressure; Lower Makena Costs, Allow Competing Drugs To Remain… For Now

  We’ve been discussing how the FDA has been systematically banning drugs that have been on the market for years, and retroactively granting monopolies to particular pharmaceutical firms. The case that’s drawn the most attention is that of Makena, a drug to prevent early childbirth which is provided on the market by a bunch of different firms, and was competitively priced around $10/dose. Yet, after the FDA stepped in and gave a monopoly to KV Pharmaceutical under the economically-clueless belief that this would help make the drug “more available,” there was a massive public backlash when people discovered KV would increase the price of the drug from $10 to $1,500.

• Copyrights

  • Why Chris Dodd Is Doing Everything Wrong With The MPAA

    We’ve certainly suggested that Chris Dodd was making a big mistake by focusing on the MPAA’s old talking points in his new role as chief of that lobbying organization. Rather than leading Hollywood to a future of new business models and smarter embrace of what consumers want, he’s kicked things off by being anti-consumer, anti-technology and a supporter of previous policies that have failed massively. It’s not exactly a recipe for success.

  • Parade Of Strawmen Dominate House Hearing About Online Infringement

    We’ve already mentioned how the House’s Hearing on: “Promoting Investment and Protecting Commerce Online: Legitimate Sites v. Parasites” turned into something of a bitchfest at Google for not waving a magic wand and stopping infringement. However, I also wanted to look at the prepared statements of the four participants, which seemed to overflow with ridiculous strawmen.

    First up, we have esteemed and respected First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who (it is always said) defended the NY Times in the Pentagon Papers case many years ago. While Abrams is widely respected, it feels like lately he’s been getting quite sloppy in his thinking. Late last year, he published a piece trying to differentiate Wikileaks from the NY Times/Pentagon Papers situation, and was widely criticized for getting many of his facts wrong — undermining his entire argument.

  • Tenenbaum Appeal Heard: Is It Okay To Make Someone Pay $675,000 For Downloading 30 Songs?

    The latest in the ongoing trial of Joel Tenenbaum, the student who was found guilty of sharing 30 songs online, and told to pay $675,000 for it, until the judge unilaterraly reduced the amount to $67,500. As we noted at the time, it really seemed like Tenenbaum had horrifically bad legal counsel, in the form of Harvard law professor Charlie Nesson, who still seems more focused on making the case a circus, rather than focusing in on the key issues. That does not, however, mean there aren’t key issues here, with the big one being the appropriate standards for determining how much one should have to pay if found guilty of file sharing.

    The appeal was just heard on Monday, and you can listen to the oral arguments (mp3) from the court’s website. It’s definitely an interesting hearing and worth listening to. As with most appeals court situations, the bulk of the work is done in the briefs that were filed prior to the hearing, and which everyone is familiar with. The oral hearings get right to the point and drill down on where the panel of judges has questions.

  • Rick James Estate Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Universal Music Over Digital Revenue

    The estate of Rick James, best known for his song “Super Freak,” filed a proposed class action lawsuit on Friday against Universal Music Group over money owed from digital downloads and ringtones.

    The new class action lawsuit comes in wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to review a case initiated by Eminem’s former Detroit-based producing partners, F.B.T. Productions, which won a lower 9th Circuit ruling last September deeming digital music to be more akin to a license than a physical sale of music. The distinction is important: Copyright owners get a 50% share on royalties from licenses but only about a 12-20% royalty rate from sales.

  • Groups slam online piracy efforts

    A coalition of progressive activists and conservative bloggers slammed the bipartisan push to crack down on online piracy backed by organized labor and the entertainment industry on Monday, calling it an encroachment on freedom of speech.

    Lawmakers from both parties are scheduled to hold a press conference at the Capitol Monday, where they are expected to renew their push for new online piracy laws that give feds greater authority to shut down sites that host or link to pirated content.

    The effort will likely resemble the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), which was introduced by Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and passed the committee last year. The White House has backed the effort and recommended stiffer penalties for online piracy convictions.

  • TV Site Sued For Linking To Completely Legal Videos

    There are thousands of sites that link to video on the Internet and it’s becoming increasingly common for them to be threatened by rightsholders when they link to unauthorized content. However, things have gone a stage further as a site is now being sued by a copyright group for linking to completely legal content provided by official sources.

  • Forwarding a Sentence-Long Message from a Listserv = Copyright Infringement?

    So argued Kenneth M. Stern, a California lawyer; no dice, said the district court in Stern v. Does (C.D. Cal., decided Feb. 10, 2011 but just now made available on Westlaw). No dice, said the court, concluding that the message lacked the modicum of creativity required for copyright protection — because it was so short and dictated by functional considerations — and that the copying was a fair use. Both conclusions seem right to me, though the fair use conclusion is especially clear, given the utter lack of any likely effect on the value of plaintiff’s work.

  • CRIA Watches Massive Music Piracy Crisis Devastate Unknown Band

    During the last couple of weeks a heated debate has sprung up around the claimed massive music piracy of a relatively unknown band. One Soul Thrust currently have just 176 followers on Twitter yet according to their manager the group is being destroyed by the pirating masses who have, to date, downloaded their debut album 100,000 times. With the CRIA apparently supporting the band’s position, it’s time to investigate.

  • As Expected, MPAA Sues Movie Streaming Site That Uses Connected DVD Players

    When Zediva launched, we already knew it was going to face a legal fight from the MPAA and the movie studios. The company lets people stream movies they want to see, but tries to get around the legal licensing issues by only streaming directly from internet connected DVD players, playing legitimately acquired DVDs. Their argument is that it’s really no different than renting a movie and bringing it to your own DVD player. And, perhaps, the Cablevision ruling in the US on remote DVRs gives them some support for their position. But, there was no way the industry was going to just let this go by without any sort of fight. And, so, the MPAA has now sued the company claiming that it’s a “sham,” and that Zediva is running an illegal video-on-demand service without the proper licenses. In some ways, this case could also impact the attempts by cloud music players to stream legitimate content without a license as well.

  • Movie studios sue DVD streaming site Zediva

    The movie studios have seen the online movie rental service Zediva and filed their thumbs-down review of the site in federal court Monday, asking for monetary damages and an immediate shutdown.

    Zediva.com, which officially launched in mid-March, rents new release movies without permission from the studios by letting its customers rent a DVD player and disc from afar. Only one person can rent a given disc at a time. That, the company argues, puts it in the same legal bucket as a traditional video rental store.

  • Exploit Turns Anti-Piracy Agency Site Into The Pirate Bay

    Hadopi, the French agency charged with handling file-sharers’ copyright digressions, has once again been shamed by a copyright-related blunder. The agency which mandates that all citizens secure their networks to keep out freeloading pirates, has a surprisingly unsecure site itself. Ironically enough, the vulnerability allowed outsiders to change the search engine of the Hadopi site into that of The Pirate Bay.

  • The IP Maximalist’s Guide To Making It Big

  Techdirt talks a lot about how to make money in the music biz without actually selling music. Consider this an improvement. With these instructions, you’ll hardly have to produce any music at all, and if you do, you won’t have to go through all that time-intensive and “extremely expensive” production/promotion stuff.

  • Google Books, Fair Uses, and “Copyright” as Misnomer

  • US Government’s ‘Pirate’ Domain Seizures Failed Miserably

    Over the past several months a series of domain name seizures by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made headlines across the Internet.

    Under the flag of “Operation In Our Sites” the authorities shut down a dozen file-sharing and streaming sites, as well as close to 80 sites selling counterfeit goods. After two months of silence on the domain seizure front, the MPAA has now applauded the US authorities for their “successful” enforcement efforts.

  • Music Industry Will Force Licenses on Amazon Cloud Player — or Else

    Amazon’s decision to launch its new Cloud Player without securing additional music licenses has been described as a “bold move” by many observers. It takes serious guts for Amazon to simply declare that it doesn’t need licenses — especially when even casual observers know the music industry thinks otherwise.

  • Porn Company Says You Owe $25k If Content In Your Account Ends Up Pirated… Even If You Prove You Were Hacked [Updated]

    Liberty Media/Corbin Fisher continues its somewhat aggressive attempts to blame everyone but itself for failing to put in place a better business model. Remember, we just noted the bizarre claim that it made in the mass infringement lawsuit it filed that anyone who did not secure their internet routers to block all infringing material was negligent. In the comments to that post, someone pointed out that the company also had recently changed its terms of service to say that if anyone with an account had content from that account end up pirated, the user owed $25,000 even if they could prove that the account was hacked…

  • Filmmakers’ unfair argument against ‘fair use’

  • ACTA

    • ‘Death Of ACTA’ Song Taken Down In Copyright Claim

      You may recall last fall we wrote about one of Dan Bull’s excellent tracks commenting on copyright issues, called Death Of ACTA.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Kernel Space

• ITechLaw to Hold 40th Anniversary Celebration in San Francisco

  Accepting the award on Torvalds’ behalf will be conference keynote speaker Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin works with the world’s largest technology companies, including Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Nokia and others, to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.

• Linux 2.6.39-rc3

• Graphics Stack

  • Sapphire Radeon HD 5830 Extreme

    Here is our look at this new graphics card with accompanying Linux benchmarks.

Applications

• Linphone- An Open source SIP phone for desktop & mobile

• Seven Free Security Tools for Linux

  One of the big advantages of using Linux is that its security tends to be so much better than that of the competing alternatives. That’s due in large part to the way Linux assigns permissions, but it’s also certainly true that the open source operating system is targeted by malware writers far less frequently than Windows is, in particular, simply because it’s less widely used and so much more diverse.

  [...]

  There are, of course, countless other security tools for Linux out there, many of them excellent as well.

• Proprietary

  • Make your Speed Dial look great with Opera Barracuda

    Opera 11.10 aka Barracuda has been released today. With the new, more flexible Speed Dial your favorite sites are better looking than ever. Speed Dial automatically uses website logos and lets Web developers make content tailored for speed dial. And in Opera 11.10 you can add as many sites to Speed Dial as you like.

  • Opera 11.10 Goes Gold, Now Ready for Download

    Opera Software today announced the final release of Opera 11.10, an incremental update with a barrel full of subtle changes. Perhaps the biggest one is a revamped and faster Turbo that’s up to four times as fast as before, the Norwegian browser maker claims. Part of the secret sauce in the recipe for faster Turbo is the added support for Google’s WebP image format, which provides lossy compression for photographic images.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • How to install Gnome3 on ubuntu 11.04 (Natty)/Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick)

  • A Substitute Remote Control

  • Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Awesome New Plymouth Theme!

  • How To Customize Unity Launcher

  • 8 Linux Commands That Will Save Your Day

• Games

  • An Open-Source MMORPG Using The Unigine Engine

    Project Bossanova has high hopes to develop “the first 3D game built especially with Linux as the first priority. It will set the standard in gameplay, graphics, compatibility, community integration and more.” In addition, they plan to have the game, now announced as RunServer’s MMT, to be open-source. This is an MMOPRG game and it’s being built using the Unigine Engine.

  • Humble Frozenbyte Bundle: Don’t be left out in the cold

    For the next 14 days, you can get Wolfire Games’ freshly-released Humble Frozenbyte Bundle! Like the first two bundles, you pay what you want to download five independent, DRM-free, cross-platform computer games, and choose to divide your money between the game developers, Child’s Play, and EFF. The Frozenbyte Bundle includes Trine, Shadowgrounds Survivor, the unpublished game Splot, and gaming prototype Jackclaw, in which you get to rampage through a city, throw cars, and generally cause mayhem.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • KDE Spain announces Akademy-es 2011

    KDE Spain is organizing Akademy-es 2011, the annual meeting of KDE users and contributors in Barcelona, Spain from May 20th through May 22nd. Akademy-es is an important event in the KDE calendar. Attendance and the technical quality of papers have increased significantly during each of the previous events.

    New this year, Akademy-es will take place in two different locations. The events of each day are designed to fit ideally with the surroundings. On Friday, Akademy-es will be held at the North Campus of the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, and weekend activities will be at The School of Sant Marc de Sarrià.

  • Testing Plasma Active

    The default desktop opens with a shaded cover that is actually a desktop lock. You can drag that away to unlock and reveal these “plasma strips” that are for KDE widgets. One is an RSS feeds list and another is a weather widget. Clicking on a feed title opens the article or post in Firefox – one might expect Konqueror. You can drag the strips with your mouse cursor as a whole to reveal any additional strips that didn’t fit on the display. You can add more widget strips by clicking the “plus sign” at the end of widget strips. On each strip is a configuration icon that can be clicked on to reveal another configuration icon and a quit icons. If you drag the original configuration icon to the newly spawned configuration icon that opens the configuration dialog for that particular widget. Using the handle at the bottom of the screen will drag the whole strip containment out of sight to reveal an almost normal appearing desktop.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Ubuntu Unity vs. GNOME 3: Which is Better?

    GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s soon-to-be released Unity are the first GNOME desktops designed from the start with usability principles in mind. Not that releases in the GNOME 2 series ignored usability, but in GNOME 2, usability was an addition to the desktop, comparable to adding the foundation after the house was built.

    Whether you use GNOME 3 or Unity will probably depend on your distribution’s choice. But assuming you have a choice, which should you use? Suggesting an answer is hard, because in many ways the two are distinctly similar in design, with the differences largely in the details.

  • GNOME3 on Ubuntu Natty: the first impressions

  • Gnome3 from a XFCE user’s perspective.

Distributions

• Red Hat Family

  • NYSE and Deutsche Borse merger chiefs size up single Red Hat Linux trading platform

    The New York Stock Exchange and Deutsche Borse are planning a move to a single cash equities trading platform, understood to be based on Red Hat Linux, in a crucial step towards saving €79 million (£64 million) in annual IT costs and delivering robust, fast messaging.

    If the merger goes ahead, the exchanges will also integrate “complementary” derivatives businesses, and combine their US options platforms. The savings represent 26 percent of the €300 million total planned cost cuts, which also include more efficient clearing and market operations.

  • Fedora

    • Results of Fedora 16 Release Name Voting

      Votes :: Name
      ——————————-
      2204 :: Verne
      1662 :: Beefy Miracle
      1522 :: Omoto
      1241 :: Nepia
      1207 :: Bonnet
      1157 :: Barona
      908 :: Llullaillaco
      845 :: Legation
      607 :: Mt. Orne

    • Fedora 16 will not be a Beefy Miracle

      The Fedora community has voted on the name for the next major release of this Linux distribution.

      There were some 2,204 votes cast for the winner…

      Verne

      Yes, Verne.

• Debian Family

  • Knoppix 2011 6.4 Review

    Generally because Knoppix is meant to be used as a live CD too much customization will not always be necessary.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Goodbye Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

    • So long 8.04 Hardy Heron – You have a special place in my computing history.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ Awesome New Plymouth Theme!

    • Ubuntu Becomes First OS To Get Automatic Epson Printer Drivers

    • Canonical To Drop Support For Ubuntu 9.10

      With an announcement on the security mailing list, Canonical has confirmed that support for Ubuntu 9.10 will cease on April 29 2011. This came as no surprise as it adheres to the expected support cycle of a .10 Ubuntu release, and 9.10 is now 18 months old.

      The recommended upgrade path from 9.10 is to Ubuntu 10.4. 10.04 is a long term support (LTS) release, and support will end on April 2013. Note that, according to official Ubuntu documentation, it’s not possible to skip a release version when upgrading. So, it’s not possible to go straight from 9.10 to 10.10. It is possible to upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 and then to 10.10. That’s quite a lot to go through, and personally, I’d be tempted to make a fresh install and migrate the user data.

    • Look what we built together, a retrospective on Unity bitesize bugs.

      This cycle we started off determined to make it easy for anyone who wanted to contribute to Ubuntu Unity to have no roadblocks in their way. We concentrated on making our work processes as smooth and easy as possible. We had Q+A sessions in IRC, Ask Me Anythings on Reddit, and regular status reports so that anyone who wanted to dive in this cycle could grab Unity and fix a bug.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Moonstruck with…
        MoonOS

        Should Linux users try Moon? Since it is more of a creative spin-off of Ubuntu, and not a completely self-made distro, it really is more a matter of taste, computing style, and personal preference than functionality or utility. Former and current Mac users looking for an easy to use, friendly distro with a familiar interface can find refuge in MoonOS to ease any transition pains they might experience in swapping to Linux. Of course, like Ubuntu, MoonOS is an excellent beginner’s distro, and it will provide most of the tools a former Windows user may be looking for in Linux. Even those who are tired with Ubuntu and wish to try a different approach will discover Moon to be just as easy as – if not easier than – Ubuntu with its Docky alternative. MoonOS’ default theme is arguably more attractive, although whether Moon’s green is more likable than Ubuntu’s brown is a purely subjective matter. Also, all Ubuntu users have to do is change their default appearance, and the argument ceases to exist.
        Finally, more experienced users could decide that Moon does not meet their advanced needs, and Ubuntu fans and Linux veterans may be annoyed by Docky and unimpressed with the original artwork. Nevertheless, with its alternative take on Ubuntu and its colorful, customizable Docky, MoonOS remains easy enough for anyone to use and interesting enough for even a dedicated Linux user to try.

Devices/Embedded

• Renesas Electronics Joins Linux Foundation

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Renesas Electronics Corporation is its newest member.

  Renesas is a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, including microcontrollers (MCUs), systems-on-chip (SoC) solutions and a broad range of analog and power devices. The Japan-based company is aggressively investing in the areas of next-generation automotives, mobile phones, set-top boxes and other increasingly sophisticated electronics that are running Linux. For example, Renesas recently announced new SoCs for next-generation mobile phones and for dashboard-mounted car navigation systems, respectively, that support advanced human machine interfaces (HMI).

• Phones

  • Android

    • Zomg! HTC Bigger Than Nokia and RIM By Market Cap Thanks to Android

      According to All Things Digital, HTC is currently bigger than Nokia in terms of market caps by about $1.04 billion and RIM by $5 billion. This according to Robert Chen is due to “a very unique business model and ecosystem strategy.”

Events

• LinuxFest Northwest Schedule Finalized

  LinuxFest Northwest, held in Bellingham, Washington April 30- May 1, 2011, announces finalized schedule of events.

Web Browsers

• Flock browser fails to fly at Zynga

  I’ve never been a fan of Flock, the ‘social’ web browser. Personally, I’ve long argued that Flock is little more than an overlay.

  At first Flock was an overlay of social add-ons to Firefox, then it moved to Chrome.

• Mozilla

  • Even As Firefox 4 Performance Problems Loom, Firefox 5 is Coming

    Mozilla is doing an admirable job of helping users get the most out of Firefox 4, including posting lists of add-ons that can lead to performance problems. But its rapid release cycle is new, and it remains to be seen–especially since previous Firefox development proceeded much more slowly–if Mozilla is ready to follow the cycle that it has announced.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Desktop Publishing Software With OpenOffice

  Recently I was asked by a family member to set them up with a copy of Publisher. Apparently, they weren’t aware of the cost involved in purchasing this software, so I suggested we look into some free alternatives that might better meet their needs. After some thought, I remembered that Microsoft Publisher is just Word with a few additional bells and whistles at the user’s disposal. And remembering that most desktop publishing software is a bit overwhelming for most folks, I instead chose to make due with OpenOffice Writer. Why not simply choose Serif PagePlus Starter Edition? Honestly, as great as the software is, there is just too much going on. At this point, I might as well have suggested Scribus. No, keeping things limited to drawing tables and inserting images was where it’s at. But this leaves us with the need to get some decent clip art inserted into Writer so that it’s ready to go.

Business

• Semi-Open Source

  • The H Half Hour: Talend, Open Core and Community

    Ross Turk is the new director of community at Talend , a company that’s not afraid to say they use an open core model. In this H Half Hour, The H asks Turk about how the open core model works at Talend and how the company is building a community around its data transformation and management tools.

Funding

• VC funding for OSS-related vendors in Q1

  Venture capital funding for open source software-related vendors declined 14% in the first quarter. According to our preliminary figures, OSS-related vendors raised $79.8m in Q1, compared to $92.5m a year ago.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• Stallman weighs pros and cons of digital inclusion

  Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement and the GNU Project, spoke Monday on the benefits and threats of digital inclusion in society.

  Stallman defines digital inclusion as the creation of an inclusive information society in which all people have access to information and communication technology.

Openness/Sharing

• Sage Bionetworks is the Latest Open Biotechnology Effort

  Slowly but surely, biology and biotechnology efforts that follow open source principles are improving, and as they mature, they could have a profound effect on healthcare, longevity, disease control, and much more. Biotechnology reporter Luke Zimmerman’s latest dispatch on the work of Sage Bionetworks founder Stephen Friend offers a case in point. With gene sequencing efforts going on all around the world–but mostly going on in silos, where information is not shared in optimal ways–Friend is convinced that shared data could bring on huge advances in biotechnology. His is only one of several promising efforts in this area.

• Open Data

  • Got Data?

    What platform versions are being downloaded? What geographies is your service popular in? Which APIs are being consumed? What progamming languages are most popular? From web analytics of your documentation to user activation data, you can answer these questions. But this isn’t happening at present.

Programming

• Python Tutorial – Dictionaries, Hovercraft, Eels

• Adobe Extends Flash Builder for Mobile and PHP

Standards/Consortia

• Press Releases: Open Standards law approved in Portugal

  The Portuguese Parliament approved on the 6th of April 2011 a Law for the adoption of Open Standards on public IT systems. This law represents the consensus reached by the represented parties following two proposals submitted by PCP and BE, that were discussed and merged on the Working Group that produced the final text.

• Standardization Roadmap for Electric Drive Vehicles Called for at ANSI Workshop

  Nearly 120 stakeholders and another 34 webinar attendees gathered for the April 5-6 ANSI Workshop: Standards and Codes for Electric Drive Vehicles in Bethesda, MD, to examine the standards and conformance activities needed to drive the safe, effective, and large-scale deployment of electric drive vehicles (EDV).

• Europarl in Strassbourg pushes for interoperability

  Here I extracted a few quotes from the European Parliament resolution of 6 April 2011 on a Single Market for Enterprises and Growth which show its special emphasis on improving interoperability conditions for the single market. Strassbourg sents a clear message.

• Has the Battle for the Digital Car Been Won?

  This week a new consortium was launched that may signal who will finally own the last great, unclaimed consumer computing platform – the automobile. The new organization is the Car Connectivity Consortium, and the winner is . . . well, we’ll come back to that a little later. Suffice it to say for now that the fifteen year battle to control the digital future of the automobile could be at an end, and that its resolution may tell us something about the future of the digital desktop as well.

Dumbest Lawsuit Ever? HuffPo Sued By Bloggers Who Agreed To Work For Free… But Now Claim They Were Slaves

We may have set a new low for idiotic lawsuits. Jonathan Tasini, a freelance reporter who was famously involved in a lawsuit with the NY Times, concerning copyrights on a database of freelancer articles, is now suing the Huffington Post for not paying him while he wrote for it by choice. The basis of the lawsuit is the already discussed fact that a bunch of folks who blogged for the Huffington Post are stupidly upset that Arianna Huffington sold her site to AOL for $315 million, and that they didn’t get any of the money. Of course, they didn’t invest their money in the site. They held no equity and, most importantly, they wrote for the site for free by choice. If they didn’t like the “deal”, they shouldn’t have done it.

AOL, Arianna Huffington Hit with Class Action Suit

Huffington Post bloggers who think they ought to get paid for their volunteer writing have been litigating their case in the court of public opinion. Now they’re taking it to a real one.

Today, a group of bloggers led by union organizer and journalist Jonathan Tasini filed a class-action suit against the Huffington Post, founder Arianna Huffington, and AOL, which acquired the news-and-blogs site in February.

Health/Nutrition

• The Debate Over Privatizing Medicare: Can Anyone Say $20.5 Trillion?

  The NYT has a front page story on the debate over Representative Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare. The article is an entirely in the form of he said/she said, providing readers with absolutely no information that would allow them to assess the arguments over the plan. This is especially important since the article reports that changes like those in the Ryan plan are necessary to control costs.

• Pay Attention to the Insurers Behind Paul Ryan’s Curtain

  Democrats who think Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues have foolishly wrapped their arms around the third rail of American politics by proposing to hand the Medicare program to private insurers will themselves look foolish if they take for granted that the public will always be on their side.

• “Revere America”: Another Conduit for a Super-Wealthy Family to Influence Elections

  Miles C. CollierOn March 23, 2011 a group called Revere America issued a dire-sounding PRNewswire press release titled, “Americans Fear Loss of Freedom on Anniversary of Health Care Reform Law.” It warned that “a majority” of Americans view health care reform as “a threat to their freedom” and cited a poll by Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies to prove it. The release came well after Revere America had spent $2.5 million on attack ads in the 2010 mid-term elections to defeat Democratic candidates in two states — New York and New Hampshire — who had voted in favor of health care reform. Just prior to the mid-term elections, in the autumn of 2010, Revere America ran a a slew of false and misleading attack ads against the health care reform bill that erroneously called health reform “government-run healthcare” (a Republican and insurance industry buzz-phrase). The ads said that the new law will result in higher costs and longer waits in doctors’ offices. In another false claim aimed at inducing fear, the ads told viewers that “your right to keep your own doctor may be taken away.”

• The Front Group Hall of Shame Gets a New Inductee

  Today will go down in the public relations history books as the day health insurers and their allies began a coordinated campaign to ensure that the health care reform law is implemented in ways that will benefit them way more than the rest of us. Today is the day they plan to launch their brand new front group — drum roll, please — the Choice and Competition Coalition (CCC). But first, a bit of context.

Cablegate

• WikiLeaks is the method we use towards our goal of a more just society: Assange

  In India, after the initial stunned reaction, the tone of the official response to our publication of the India Cables was set by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh questioning or disputing in Parliament the authenticity of the cables and what the U.S. Embassy and consulates were reporting back to the State Department. Here’s what he actually said in the Lok Sabha, our House of Commons, on March 18. He said the government “cannot confirm the veracity, contents or even the existence of such communication.” This seems to have set the Indian government apart from the rest of the governments, the rest of the world, at the receiving end, doesn’t it?

  Yes, it does.

  Have you come across this reaction anywhere else?

  We have not come across this reaction and that reaction disturbed me. Because Hillary Clinton had been involved in informing the Indian government, in December [2010], as well as many other governments, that this was coming. There has been no question as to the credibility of any document we have ever published in the last four years, let alone the [U.S. Embassy] cables — which have been authenticated by the very aggressive action of the State Department towards us and by hundreds of journalists from the most reputable institutions across the world.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

• Calif. sets nation’s highest renewable power goals

  Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed legislation requiring California utilities to get one-third of their power from renewable sources, giving the state the most aggressive alternative energy mandate in the U.S.

• Studies Say Natural Gas Has Its Own Environmental Problems

  Natural gas, with its reputation as a linchpin in the effort to wean the nation off dirtier fossil fuels and reduce global warming, may not be as clean over all as its proponents say.

• Gas Prices Rise, and Economists Seek Tipping Point

  Gas prices are approaching record highs, but so far most Americans do not appear to be drastically cutting back their driving or even their spending as they did in 2008.

• Fracking Insiders Score Big in New Gas Bill, But Americans Not Told the True Costs of Massive Drilling Plan

  Corporate insiders peddling the claim that drilling for methane gas will solve America’s energy needs just scored big in Washington — and for these insiders fracking for gas is very lucrative business. House Resolution 1380, given the feel-good moniker of the “New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act ” or “NAT GAS Act,” was announced on Wednesday, April 6, in the U. S. House of Representatives. The bill is 24-pages long and rewards the fracking industry with tax credits and products to help “drive” consumption. The bigger the vehicle, the more tax credits given.

Finance

• Soros Says Moral Hazard Looms; Volcker Says Banks Can Fail

  Moral hazard in the financial system “looms larger than ever before,” even after the Dodd- Frank law gave U.S. federal agencies tools to regulate institutions that may be deemed too big to fail, said billionaire investor George Soros.

  “The evidence is overwhelming that the first priority of the authorities is to prevent a market collapse, and everything else has to take second place,” Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management LLC, said yesterday at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire.

• David Harvey’s Crisis of Capitalism, Animated

• Who Wants a Voucher?

  In yesterday’s post, I compared two ways of solving the long-term Medicare deficit: (a) increasing payroll taxes and keeping Medicare’s current structure or (b) keeping payroll taxes where they are and converting Medicare into a voucher program. As a person who will need health insurance in retirement, I prefer (a), but others could differ.

• Oil price tumbles on supplies and Goldman pullback

  Oil dropped to the lowest level this month on Tuesday as energy experts said the world will remain flush with surplus oil this year despite the loss of Libya’s exports and increased demand from Japan.

  Oil was also pushed down after Goldman Sachs warned investors that the price had already topped its second-quarter forecast and is due for a “substantial pullback” in the near term. Traders took special notice of Goldman’s warning because the investment bank is considered a big player in oil markets, and it’s known for bullish price forecasts.

• Paul Ryan’s slasher novel

  The fiscal savior of this country will be the person who persuades us to bite the bullet: Accept some pain now to remain prosperous later. That person will not be Rep. Paul Ryan.

  The reviewers agree: The Path to Prosperity, aka the Republican budget proposal for 2012 that was released a week ago by the House Budget Committee — which Ryan chairs — is one helluva read. To liberals, it’s the nightmare of a madman with an ax chasing you down a long hallway. To conservatives, it’s a sweet dream of wonderland, where angels dine on Heritage Foundation press releases. Right or wrong, it is said, Ryan has at last set the stage for an honest debate about government spending and the federal deficit.

• Obama first to put tax increases on budget table

  Higher taxes have been missing from the fierce budget battle that nearly shut down the federal government. But President Barack Obama is about to put them on the table – at least a modest version that he had pushed before and then rested on the shelf.

• Wonkbook: Obama to back Simpson-Bowles

  It’s been a little unclear what, exactly, President Obama could say on Wednesday that would count as a new plan for long-term deficit reduction. His pledge to avoid raising taxes on people making less than $250,000 means most taxes are off the table. The Affordable Care Act means most of his health-care reform ideas have already passed into law. The five-year non-security discretionary spending freeze got announced in his 2012 budget proposal, and though you could imagine defense cuts entering the picture, the White House hasn’t seemed eager to go down that road. That leaves tax reform and Social Security, neither of which the administration would be interested in attempting alone.

• California Dings MERS

  California bankruptcy court Denies US Bank as trustee relief from stay; Court says recording is required BEFORE foreclosure, not after.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

• Fake “Handwriting” Boosts Junk Mail Open Rate

  Fool junk mail recipients once, and then Fake penkeep fooling them over and over again. That’s the hope of a Virginia-based direct mail marketing company that has developed a specialized machine that makes junk mail envelopes look like they have been hand-written.

• FOX “News” Bids Glenn Beck Adieu

  On April 6, 2011, FOX News announced it would help Beck “transition” into other ventures, which include for-air projects and FOX News’ websites. What the press release did not mention was the successful campaign against Beck initiated by Color of Change, an organization rooted in equal political access for people of color.

• Railroad CEO Charged With Giving $50,000 in Illegal Contributions to Scott Walker

  The Wisconsin state elections board and Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office have revealed a money laundering scheme involving illegal contributions to Scott Walker’s campaign committee by the head of Wisconsin & Southern Railroad Company.

  The months-long investigation found that William Gardner, the CEO and president of Wisconsin & Southern Railroad (WSOR), instructed employees to make political campaign contributions for the 2010 elections and then reimbursed those donations from WSOR’s corporate account. Through this money-laundering scheme WSOR spent a total of $53,800 on political contributions in the 2010 election cycle, vastly exceeding the $10,000 per person (or per corporation) limit required by Wisconsin law; Gardner used corporate funds to reimburse 11 contributions from himself, his girlfriend, his daughter, and several employees. The majority of that spending, nearly $50,000, went towards the Friends of Scott Walker campaign committee.

Censorship

• Silence from the website blocking Working Group

  Yesterday Ed Vaizey’s website blocking ‘Working Group’ met to discuss a plans for a voluntary scheme to block access to websites accused of infringing copyright. It’s an idea that has caused quite a stir; 2,000 people have so far written to their MPs and the terms ‘The Great Firewall of Britain’ and ‘Hadrian’s Firewall’ were coined on Twitter

• Nominet talks about domain suspensions

  Nominet’s discussions about domain suspensions started yesterday. Over 3,000 sites have so far been ‘suspended’ at the request of the Police. This has been taking place without any formal procedure, although an appeals mechanism has handled 12 complaints, of which 9 were upheld.

• On Google and censorship

  Hugo Roy asked my thoughts about the recent case of Google’s employees being convicted in Italy for a video that has been online a few months on Google Video (now YouTube).

  I have already said so by and large, microblogged extensively on that. My opinion is that the decision is a shame for my Country.

  [...]

  Google, as soon as it was informed of the problem, took the content down and possibly thought it was over.

  Not quite, as the Prosecutor in Milan, where Google is based in Italy and where the content was allegedly put online, decided to indict four Google executives. Recently the Court of Milan decided that the executives have violated Italian Data Protection Law and convicted them.

  This is what I have learned from public sources, I hope I have not reported them inaccurately. I have no direct knowledge of the facts.

  [...]

  Filtering == censorship

  It is impossible to put enough people in line to watch, inspect, report of each and any video that is uploaded. Too much information is put online per second, period.

  So the solution for the Prosecutor seems to be “you are doing this in China, you can do this here”. What Google is doing there is censorship. So we want censorship here too.

Privacy

• Why internet privacy matters

  Over the last couple of days, I’ve blogged a bit about the proposed legislation that came to be known as Bill C-52 in the last session of Parliament. (See: Canadian police state legislation needs closer examination, and Conservative majority would pass lawful access within 100 days. Also check out Michael Geist’s excellent post: The Conservatives Commitment to Internet Surveillance.) Bill C-52 fell off the order paper when the 40th Parliament was dissolved for the current election, but I think it really needs to be extensively discussed in the current election. (I should note that this is not necessarily a partisan issue, since it was originally proposed by the Liberals many elections ago.)

• Is Facebook More Dangerous Than Microsoft Windows?

  The company which has Microsoft, the creator of the world most insecure software products, as a partial owner [Microsoft has $250 million invested in Facebook and holds stakes in the company] can’t stay safer. Facebook, the social brokering site, continues to put users data and critical information at risk.

  The company which harvested Gmail users data but refused to give them access to their own Facebook data to sync it with their Google account continues to put that sensitive data at risk.

Civil Rights

• China accuses US of human rights double standards

  Beijing has a doctrine of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, but the State Council Information Office releases an annual report on the US human rights record as a riposte to Washington’s criticisms. The document says it underlines the hypocrisy of the US and “its malicious design to pursue hegemony under the pretext of human rights”.

  Last week the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, criticised China’s “worsening” record – citing the detention of artist Ai Weiwei and others – as she released the annual state department survey of the human rights situation around the world. An introduction to the Chinese document, by the state news agency Xinhua, said the report was “full of distortions” and the US “turned a blind eye to its own terrible human rights situation”.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• Voting For a Free and Open Wireless Internet

  Next Tuesday, April 12th, the EU Parliament Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) will hold a major vote for the future of wireless communications in the European Union. By amending the radio spectrum policy programme proposed by the European Commission, Members of the Parliament have an opportunity to boost wireless Internet access. By encouraging shared and unlicensed uses of the spectrum, they can create the next generation of WiFi networks that will improve access to the Internet in urban as well as rural communities, and launch the next wave of innovation in mobile communications. But the risk is for Europe to give in to media or telecoms corporations who would like to control the airwaves – a public resource. La Quadrature calls on EU citizens and NGOs to step into this important debate on the future of our communications system, which forms the structure of our democratic societies.

• Voting For a Free and Open Wireless Internet

  The Industry Committee of the European Parliament has adopted amendments to the EU Spectrum Policy Programme allowing for a free use of airwaves for citizens, which will lead to the development of the next generations of free wireless Internet communications (“next generation WiFi”). This vote is encouraging and must be confirmed in plenary, despite the pressure that broadcasters and telecoms industries will inevitably put on the European Parliament to keep airwaves under control.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • A Challenge To Chris Castle – Chris – Who Do You Really Serve?

    Chris Castle is a Lawyer who specializes in the Music Industry. Of the many lawyers who weigh in on copyright issues, Chris is the one I have the most respect for. Chris admits up front that he has a strong economic interest in the issue, unlike Barry Sookman, James Gannon, or Richard Owens, who pretend that they do all of their writing out of the goodness of their hearts.

  • A Comment Addressed to Chris Castle

    Chris Castle is a Music Industry Lawyer. I classify Chris as an honest lawyer, he has his opinions, and he’s quite willing to admit that his opinions are biased by his employment.

  • iPod Tax Fight Conceals Another Consumer Copyright Fee Hike

    The Conservatives have launched another campaign over the iPod Tax today complete with website, video and Twitter account. I posted a lengthy account of the claims last December (short version – the Liberals on record now as opposing, the earlier record is open to debate), but the issue keeps returning. Given the attention to the issue, it is worth noting that Bill C-32, the Conservatives own copyright bill, would likely have led to a doubling of the fees that Canadians pay on blank CDs. Alternatively, it would have led to a dramatic reduction in revenues for Canadian artists. The reason stems from the government’s commitment to ratify the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet treaties and the legal requirements found in those treaties.

  • European Copyright Law: Collusion for the Control of the Net

    In the coming days, a college meeting of the European Commissioners will take place to decide the future of European copyright policy. This revision takes place in conditions that raise severe concerns from a democratic perspective and put fundamental rights at risk, especially when it comes to the Internet.

  • Colorado Judge Is Seething At Righthaven—And He’s Handling All Their Cases

    Controversial copyright-enforcement company Righthaven was already catching a lot of flak for its lawsuit against Brian Hill. Denver alt-weekly Westword was eagerly reporting that its biggest competitor, The Denver Post, was trying to make extra cash off its photos and articles—by working with Righthaven to sue a 20-year-old, chronically ill, mildly autistic hobby blogger. Now Righthaven has dropped that case. But the same Colorado judge who showed little patience for Righthaven’s tactics in the Hill case is overseeing dozens of other Righthaven cases.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

The War With Microsoft Is Over and Linux Won?

When laptop sales overtook desktops, “Microsoft didn’t care,” Hudson pointed out. “Either one meant the sale of a Windows OS, and often other software.”

The switch to “mobile-everything,” on the other hand, “is already having a huge impact, because in most cases it marks the loss of another customer to Apple or Linux.

“Maybe it’s not the year of linux on the desktop, but it’s also not the year of Windows on mobile devices, and it never will be,” Hudson concluded. “Mobile is where the growth is, for both business and the consumer, and that market is being divvied up between Apple and Linux, with Linux dominating.”

Server

• 10,000 Core Computer Proves Cloud Scalability

Kernel Space

• Carrier Grade Linux 5 Finalized

  The Linux Foundation this week officially released the Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 specification (CGL).

  CGL provides a set of specifications which helps to define the requirements of carrier and network equipment vendors. The CGL 5 specification is the first major revision since CGL 4.0 was released in February of 2007.

  The new CGL 5.0 specifications have been available in draft form for months, and vendors including MontaVisa and Wind River have already released products that will support the new specification.

• The Major Open-Source ATI Improvements Over Two Years

• systemd for Administrators, Part VII

Applications

• 25 things you can do with VLC!

  VLC is beyond doubts the most popular open source, cross-platform media player and multi-media framework written by VideoLAN projects. VLC player is small in size,vlc-logo
  just about 17 Mb and immensely powerful! In this post we will explore the player and list 20+ things you can do with VLC player.

• Best Browsers for Linux

  With each passing day, I find myself more amazed at the level of innovation shown from within the browser community. Both open source and closed source browsers on the Linux desktop manage to extend browser functionality far beyond the usual. This has proven both exciting and problematic. Exciting in the sense that we can now do more than ever thought previously with our browsers, yet problematic in that we have more moving parts that malfunction us.

  In this article, I’ll highlight the best browsers for the Linux platform and offer some additional thoughts on how they have made an impact on our lives.

• The Top 5 Portable Apps For Linux

  Most of us know about portable apps for Windows, and how useful they can be sometimes. It’s great to simply have your favorite programs and add-ons with you, especially in the case of browsers. However, portable Linux apps have been nonexistent, at least until now. Lately a decent collection of Linux portable apps have showed up, and are now worth mentioning for those who want to try them out.

  [...]

  Whenever you’re on the go, it’s very important that you can take notes and keep track of them. Gnote is a great choice because it’s lightweight and doesn’t have Mono as a dependency. It’s easy to use, has lots of formatting and organizational features, and doesn’t take up much space. It’s your best bet to jot down those sudden ideas.

• Introducing Mixbus And The Ardour3 Alpha

  Mixbus (Figure 1) is a version of Ardour2 for Linux and OSX that replaces Ardour’s native mixer with one designed by the Harrison company, a manufacturer of professional audio mixing boards. Harrison consoles have been used to mix the soundtracks for many popular movies – see the advertisements on the site – and their products can be found in major broadcast, film, and audio post-production studios, as well as in live performance venues. Mixbus has been designed to emulate the best features of an analog mixer with the added value of Ardour’s audio capabilities and Harrison’s unique DSP core. Indeed, current Ardour users will find familiar territory in the Mixbus recorder/editor and a whole new world in the mixer section.

• UMPlayer – Another Feature Packed Cross-Platform Media Player

  There’s no shortage of quality free media players to entertain your eyes and ears, regardless of your computer or operating system. With cracking cost-free solutions like VLC (often considered the king of media players) and iTunes alternative JetAudio, you really shouldn’t be paying for this sort of software.

  Universal Media Player, or UMPlayer for short, is yet another addition to the media player category which uses the MPlayer backend to chew through any media you give it. The app promises to play everything and integrates various web services into one desktop solution.

• Proprietary

  • Opera 11.10 Near Release Final As RCs Come At A Furious Pace

    The bugs are dying at an incredible pace in Norway today, as the Opera Desktop Team has put forth another release candidate, these last few coming with point numbers! The latest, and 2nd for this very long spring day, is RC 4.1, which brings lots of presentation bugs to an end.

• Instructionals/Technical

  • quick web based php script to check replication status of MySQL

  • Weekend Project: Creating Qt Interfaces with GIMP

  • amon.so: Hijacking System Calls For Hardening PHP – Debian Lenny And Squeeze

  • How to compile Linux kernel – Tutorial

• Games

  • Two Classic Games Developed Using Sed

    For a comprehensive tutorial on sed, check out the Introduction and Tutorial of sed by Bruce Barnett.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • plasma active quick

    The Plasma Quick initiative aims to take libplasma, which is the underlying infrastructure for Plasma based applications, and make it an even better solution for devices that it already is.

  • KDE’s New Project for Portable Devices

    Key KDE developers have been blogging about new projects aimed towards portable devices. As Aaron Seigo says, “In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors.” For us mortals, that means an interface for smartphones, tablets, and handhelds.

• GNOME Desktop

  • Pidgin and GNOME3

  • Journey of a new GNOME 3 Debian packager

    With all the buzz around GNOME 3, I really wanted to try it out for real on my main laptop. It usually runs Debian Unstable but that’s not enough in this case, GNOME 3 is not fully packaged yet and it’s only in experimental for now.

  • GNOME 3: Shocking changes for Linux lovers

    For those that prefer a “dock” approach to launching apps, the GNOME Shell has that option covered as well, just add your favorites to the dock and click to launch. The dock is also an easy way to switch between open apps.

  • Review: GNOME 3

    GNOME 3 Shell seems a lot more mature and usable than it did two months ago, while GNOME 3 fallback mode presents a compelling traditional alternative to GNOME 3 Shell.

Distributions

• CTKArch – The Other Arch-based Distribution Using Openbox

  CTKArch is a distribution, or perhaps more a spin, based on Arch Linux that is using Openbox as default window manager. It’s minimal in size, if you believe that anything under CD size is minimal these days, and seems to be designed first and foremost to run from CD or USB as a live system, so it has a lot in common with ArchBang. Only a few days ago, 7th April, v. 0.7 was released into the wilderness of the Linux distribution jungle. I had toyed with 0.6 on and off for a few weeks and thus am in the position to make a few observations.

• Reviews

  • Foresight Linux 2.5 review

• Red Hat Family

  • Red Hat’s Future Linux Desktop

    That will be changing in 2012 with the reintroduction of a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments (SPICE)-based virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

  • CentOS 5.6: A Free Powerhouse for Web Servers

    Last summer, in fact, it was named the most popular Linux distribution in that area, with almost 30 percent of the Linux server market.

  • CentOS 5.6 brings the Ext4 filesystem mainstream

    LINUX DISTRIBUTION CentOS has released a major update following in the footsteps of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, which has been updated to version 5.6.

    CentOS is a community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and follows the same versioning scheme as RHEL, with both distributions now on version 5.6. CentOS is essentially a free version of RHEL built with the same packages as Red Hat’s commercially supported version but without the Red Hat branding.

    While Red Hat released RHEL 5.6 in January, it has taken a few months for the CentOS lads to get around to removing all the necessary branding to avoid infringing Red Hat’s licences. However the delay has been made worse by having to split effort between CentOS 5.6 and CentOS 6.

• Debian Family

  • Reviews: First look at CrunchBang Linux 10

    . My conclusion is CrunchBang appears to be a good tool, I just haven’t found any task for it.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 11.04: Small issues, big win

      For the last few months, on nearly every site I blog for, I have been saying that Ubuntu 11.04 was going to be a big setback for Ubuntu. This “setback” was mostly due to Canonical’s decision to use Unity as the default desktop. This decision sidestepped GNOME and GNOME 3 all together. Well, after using Ubuntu 11.04 beta 1 for a few weeks now, I have to say I was wrong. Although there are a few weak spots in the release, this beta release has gone a long way to showing me that Ubuntu hasn’t fallen off the tracks, jumped the shark, or is about to lose it’s way. In fact, Ubuntu 11.04 will remain king of Linux for new users as far as I can see.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 beta testers divided over Unity

      In the short time since the release of Ubuntu 11.04 beta, the OS has received mixed reviews. Some testers say it is the worst Ubuntu beta release ever, while others say they are impressed by its new features.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 beta review – Natty Narwhal’s naughty but nice…

      The new Unity interface is surprisingly usable. Of course, it does have some rough edges and power users may find it limiting in many ways. Still, we think that the new interface has great potential and is already good enough for day-to-day computing. Naturally, Ubuntu 11.04 is more than just a fresh interface, and the new version brings a slew of other updates and improvements that make it a solid release indeed.

    • Natty Not-quite

      Not to say i hate everything about it. I like the speed, and it looks great. The new app launcher is excellent so far despite one or two crashes. The idea of a dock isn’t horrible, but i’d like more control over it, not some hidden options in the Compiz settings.
      And a final note for anyone who’s going to troll… get used to articles like this as Linux becomes more popular… it’s called constructive criticism, and i noticed the Linux community often doesn’t take it very well. This is just an opinion, you’re free to po

    • Ubuntu 8.04 reaches end-of-life on May 12 2011

      Ubuntu announced its 8.04 Desktop release almost 36 months ago, on April 24, 2008. For the LTS Desktop releases, Ubuntu committed to ongoing security and critical fixes for a period of 36 months. The support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop will reach end of life on Thursday, May 12, 2011. At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop.

    • Demystifying Unity’s Graphics Hardware Requirements

      As I read the reviews of Unity that have started to appear around the web, I see there is a concern regarding the graphics hardware support for Unity. Some users are concerned that Unity will not run on their hardware, and so they will have to use Unity 2D instead. Let me tell you about the choices we made.

      As time goes, hardware becomes old and obsolete. This is very much true for GPUs. The rate of graphics advance over the last 10 years has been impressive. What was great 5 years ago isn’t enough to run all types of real-time 3D graphics programs anymore. For Unity we looked at the visual effects we wanted to do and the level of performance we wanted to achieve. To minimize the number of draw calls per frame in Unity, we needed GPUs to have support for frame buffer objects. With frame buffer objects support, we render only the parts of the interface that need to be updated and leave the rest untouched. For rendering, we wanted to have flexibility and the best visual results possible. So we decided to require ARB vertex and fragment support.

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Changes – New Unity Update Brings Options for Adjusting Launcher Behavior

    • Natty Narwhal T Shirts now available in Canonical store

Devices/Embedded

• Yocto 1.0 integrates OpenEmbedded and Linaro code

  The Linux Foundation announced the availability of the Yocto Project Release 1.0, which includes a version of OpenEmbedded’s bitbake build system, major improvements to its developer interface, and Linaro technology for improved ARM support. The Linux Foundation also announced new Yocto Steering Group members Dell and Mentor Graphics to help oversee the embedded Linux standardization project.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Nokia: What’s Missing from this Picture?

      But what strikes me is that these do not address what is, for me, the central question: why does Nokia need Qt in the long term – that is, beyond the short-term requirement to “harvest additional value” from the platform, as Nokia put it so charmingly? Until that question is answered, I remain pessimistic about the long-term effects of Nokia’s moves on Qt and open source in general – however many refutations the company issues on other points.

    • Nokia’s Not-so-cute Qt Move

      And if Qt has no future, why on earth would Nokia continue to invest money and people in producing the open source version that would be commercialised by someone else? Surely it is bound to pass the open source side across to Digia at some point, or maybe to some other party, although it’s hard to see who would want to pick up the non-commercial part of Qt when the money-making aspect resides elsewhere.

    • HTC Climbs Past Nokia in Market Cap

  • Android

    • Google confirms Chrome OS tablet code

      Google is baking specifications for a tablet based on its Chrome OS into its open source Linux code, the company confirmed. Meanwhile Google flattened its executive structure, promoting Android creator Andy Rubin and others to senior vice president roles, and has also acquired Pushlife, makers of an iTunes-like music app for Android.

    • Google confirms Chrome OS tablet code

    • LinkedIn for Android ships as Google updates Apps for security

      LinkedIn released the final LinkedIn for Android 1.0 app to help professionals view and manage LinkedIn connections. In other enterprise-related Android news, Google upgraded its security and device management programs for Android with three Google Apps updates, including a Device Policy update, a Google Apps Lookup app, and a Honeycomb tablet encryption feature.

    • Entry level Android numbers to increase tenfold in 2011

      A report today from Taiwanese Digitimes shows some explosive estimates for $150 and cheaper, contract free Android phones. Specifically, the paper says it expects to see 20-25 million entry level Android devices ship in 2011, up from 2.5-3 million in 2010.

• OLPC

  • Peru to Open OLPC Factories, Will Distribute 1 Millionth XO Laptop by End of 2011

    Alan Garcia, the President of Peru, just announced that the country will be handing out their one millionth XO laptop by the end of this year and will soon be building manufacturing facilities to build the laptops locally. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program created the XO laptop as an inexpensive tool for children around the world to learn with. The OLPC program in Peru has a goal to have laptops in 100% of the country’s public primary schools by the end of 2011.

• Tablets

  • Acer 10.1-inch tablet pre-orderable for $450

    Housed in aluminum, the Iconia Tab A500 includes Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth connectivity, but for now foregoes either 3G access or the need for a wireless carrier contract. The tablet is said to offer 10 hours of battery life, but measures 10.24 x 6.97 x 0.52 inches and weighs 1.69 pounds, making it heftier than the iPad 2′s 1.33 pounds and 9.5 x 7.31 x 0.34-inch frame.

  • Microsoft Could Lose More Than Consumer Market To Tablets

Bitcoin gains an open source client

A Google engineer has released an open source Java client for Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency that may eventually revolutionize online transactions.

Open Source Biology Deserves a Shot

Gene sequencing has gotten incredibly fast and cheap, and researchers around the world are pouring huge volumes of genomic data onto their private servers, in the hope they will sift through it all to make groundbreaking discoveries. Should so much genomic data be so closely guarded, or should it be poured into a free and open database that all scientists share?

Web Browsers

• Mozilla

  • Why Firefox Rapid Release Schedule Is a Bad Idea

    Mozilla has committed to a more aggressive release schedule for the Firefox Web browser. There were nearly three years between the launch of Firefox 3 and Firefox 4, but Firefox 5 is expected to be introduced in a matter of months at the end of June. There are some benefits to the rapid release schedule, but also some potential pitfalls.

  • First Firefox 4 update coming on April 26

    Mozilla has announced that it will release the first update for Firefox 4 on April 26, about a month after the original release, back in March 22.

    New with this release is that Mozilla will start using code names (somehow related to the main branch codename, in this case Tumucumaque) for udpates as well, as a way to help developers that follow Firefox development closely, more clearly understand what is coming when.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• OpenOffice.org 3.0: Italian OpenOffice.org FAQ Updated

Healthcare

• VA Electronic Health Record Open Source Custodial Agent

  The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is seeking to establish a Custodial Agent (CA) that will facilitate the establishment and operations of an Electronic Health Records (EHR) Open Source software development ecosystem and define the relationship between and interactions among developers, users, vendors and service providers.

• Open Source in Good Health and Vice Versa
  Good

  Last week I wrote about the UK government’s “new” IT strategy, which is designed in part to avoid some of the costly mistakes of the past. And as far as the latter go, there aren’t many bigger or costlier than the NHS National Programme for Information Technology (NpfIT).

  Now, some of us might say that one of the reasons this was such a disaster was that it did just about everything wrong: it was imposed unilaterally from the top, and built around huge slabs of proprietary code – but you’d expect me to say that. So here’s someone else opining much the same, slightly more politely:

Business

• Tasting the Delights of OrangeHRM

  Since free software was originally created by hackers for hackers, it’s no wonder that the first programs they created were tools – things like Emacs – and something to run them on – GNU/Linux. The second generation applications were key infrastructural elements – Web servers, databases etc., while more recently, we’ve seen the rise of applications like enterprise content management and CRM, as open source moves closer to the end users.

  But one class of software that seemed totally absent was that for managing human resources – HRM apps. I thought this was something of a lack, but that would be filled in due course. It turns out that it was filled quite some time ago – 2006, to be precise – and that I somehow overlooked the open source OrangeHRM product completely since then. To remedy this, I met up with Sujee Saparamadu, the CEO and cofounder of the company, to catch up on the subject.

Programming

• OSS is about access to the code

  I have a kind of a fetish – the idea that source code, even old or extremely specific for a single use, may be useful for a long time. Not only for porting to some other, strange platform, but for issues like prior art in software patents, for getting inspiration for techniques or simply because you don’t know when it may be of use. For this reason, I try to create public access archives of source code I manage to get my hands on, especially when such codes may require a written license to acquire, but may then later be redistributed.

Standards/Consortia

• An alert to governments about Open Standards

  There are two undeniable facts in the information technology industry today, which often end up being forgotten in our day by day activities:

  Corporations are monopolistic by nature and technological dependence is at the base of the information technology industry economic model.

Google speeds up the Web with SPDY

Network engineers and hard-core Web architects know that HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), the data transfer method used by the Web, isn’t the most efficient data transfer protocol around. So, back in November 2009, Google started working on a faster replacement: SPDY, pronounced “speedy.” And, now, if you’re using the Chrome Web browser, and visiting Google Web sites, you can see SPDY in action according to Conceivably Tech.

Autocompletion brings liability

I would be falsely modest if I said that I am not proud that our pleadings have been entirely endorsed by a panel of three highly authoritative judges. The facts are simple and very well described in the order. Basically, typing in the Google search field “Name Surname” of my client, the autocompletion and the “suggested searches” (now “related searches”) offered to complete it with “con man” (“truffatore”) and “fraud” (“truffa”), which caused a lot of trouble to the client, who has a pulic image both as an entrepeneur and provider of educational services in the field of personal finance. Google argued that it could not be held liable because it is a hosting provider, but we showed that this is content produced by them (and by the way, they do filter out certain content, including terms that are know to be used to distribute copyright infringing material), although through automated means. Therefore in this case the search engine cannot avail itself of the safe harbour provision of the Ecommerce Directive.

Google loses autocomplete defamation case in Italy

Cablegate

• Julian Assange extended interview

  JULIAN ASSANGE: We have increased our publishing since late last year when my present difficulties began to include over 63 media organisations from around the world. We have now published over 7,000 US Embassy cables relating to Cablegate, so, yes, we’re continuing on. Even when I was in prison for 10 days we continued publishing.

Finance

• DC. lawyer charged in multimillion-dollar insider trading scheme

  By mid-March, as the government tells it, Matthew H. Kluger knew the FBI was closing in.

  As a lawyer for three of the nation’s premier corporate law firms, most recently in the Washington office of Wilson Sonsini, he had allegedly stolen secrets that yielded tens of millions of dollars of insider trading profits. Now he was trying to eliminate the evidence.

Privacy

• Pandora, other app makers subpoenaed over user data collection

  A federal grand jury has opened an investigation into mobile apps and what kind of personal data they might transmit about users, Pandora has revealed. The streaming music company recently amended its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to note that it had been subpoenaed to produce documents about its user data collection on Android and iOS devices, which the company believes is related to an industry-wide probe into how mobile apps capitalize on user information.

• Net giants challenge French data law

  Google and Facebook are among a group of net heavyweights taking the French government to court this week.

  The legal challenge has been brought by The French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC) and relates to government plans to keep web users’ personal data for a year.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• Court rejects suit over Net-neutrality rules

  A federal appeals court on Monday rejected as “premature” a lawsuit by Verizon and MetroPCS challenging the Federal Communications Commission’s pending rules aimed at keeping Internet service providers from blocking access to certain websites or applications. The decision, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, is a first-round victory for the FCC and its chairman, Julius Genachowski. But the real battle over the agency’s attempt to regulate broadband providers has barely begun. Several broadband companies, and some consumer advocacy and public interest groups, are likely to return to court this year to challenge aspects of the rules. Edward McFadden, a Verizon spokesman, said Monday that the company intended to refile its lawsuit this year. The House will take up a joint resolution condemning the new Internet access rules this week.

DRM

• SCEA and George Hotz Reach Settlement!

  Here’s the joint statement. There is a permanent injunction, but no admission of wrongdoing by Hotz, who, as he said from day one, was never trying to enable piracy. I commend SCEA for taking this step, and I mean that sincerely.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Ethics of Intellectual Monopolies: the Video

• Legality of Human Gene Patents Questioned

  WASHINGTON—A U.S. federal appeals panel, hearing a case over Myriad Genetics Inc. patents for identifying breast- and ovarian-cancer risk, Monday probed whether it makes sense to continue allowing the patenting of human gene sequencing.

• Under the U.S. Supreme Court: Can you patent the building blocks of life?

  A relatively quiet but intense struggle in the federal courts will decide under what conditions a company can patent the building blocks of life — or in some cases the building blocks of death — for profit.

  The struggle almost certainly will reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

  For now, those fighting the case are waiting for a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, which decides intellectual property issues.

• ORGANIC FARMERS AND SEED SELLERS SUE MONSANTO TO PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM PATENTS ON GENETICALLY MODIFIED SEED: Preemptive Action Seeks Ruling That Would Prohibit Monsanto From Suing Organic Farmers and Seed Growers If Contaminated By Roundup Ready Seed

  On behalf of 60 family farmers, seed businesses and organic agricultural organizations, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) filed suit today against Monsanto Company to challenge the chemical giant’s patents on genetically modified seed. The organic plaintiffs were forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement should they ever become contaminated by Monsanto’s genetically modified seed, something Monsanto has done to others in the past.

• OSS is about access to the code

  And Sheen is also getting into the intellectual-property game. According to a variety of news reports, Sheen has filed trademark applications on 22 of his catchphrases, including the expressions “Duh, Winning,” “Vatican Assassin,” and “Tiger Blood.” Click here for the NY Post story.

• Newspapers

  • Finally Calling Time on Piracy FUD

    Last week I got in a bit of an argument with Adam Thierer, Randy Picker, and others about the New York Times paywall. I think a paywall is a bad business strategy, but my opposition to paywalls is mostly a matter of (as I tweeted to Adam) “personal principle rather than business advice.” Adam seemed confused by that statement, so let me see if I can elaborate.

  • UK Newspapers Confirm Digital Death-Wish

    I thought I had plumbed the depths of the UK newspaper industry’s stupidity when it came to digital. The idea that putting up paywalls in any way strengthens the readership, reputation and brand of a publication was so far off the mark that I thought it was not possible to go beyond it in sheer wrong-headedness.

• Copyrights

  • How Rigorous Will the RAND Report Be?

    So, how can we little people – the ones that are actually paying for all this work, but that are never allowed to provide any input – head off this danger of a biased, misleading report emerging from RAND Corporation?

    I think the only way is to starting making noises about the fact that it *might* be biased and misleading, so that those preparing it at RAND Corporation know that we are watching them like proverbial hawks, and that we will assuredly tear their methodology to pieces when it comes out, and will thus be certain to find – and brandish – the slightest lack of rigour or bias therein.

    Got that, RAND Corporation people? Excellent.

  • Piracy is not Counterfeiting: Updating IPRED

    As the Report from the European Commission to the European Parliament rightly says: “this initial evaluation of the effectiveness of the Directive comes at the right time.” The world of digital content is evolving so quickly that the current form of IPRED is sadly out of date, and urgently needs to be re-thought in the light of new evidence in this field.

    The Report goes on to make the following comment: “Several studies carried out by international organisations and industry have shown that infringements of intellectual property rights have reached a significant level, with certain of these goods posing a danger to consumers’ health and safety.” This statement requires closer analysis.

  • Finally Calling Time on Piracy FUD

    One of the striking features of reports purporting to estimate the “damage” caused by piracy – both of software and content – is that without exception, as far as I can tell, their numbers and methodology simply do not withstand close scrutiny.

    The trouble is, when it’s a question of lone voices like mine or even that of Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, probably the most dogged debunker of piracy FUD, the content industries can ignore such posts, presumably in the belief that our quick analyses somehow don’t count.

  • Judge to copyright troll: your “business model” isn’t my problem

    Ars Technica freelancer Eriq Gardner was recently sued over a photo that appeared in a piece he wrote for us last year. The flimsy lawsuit was quickly dismissed, but the company behind it lives on—and has sued 50+ people in Colorado for their use of the same photo. Now, the federal judge overseeing all these cases has made it clear that he sees through the company’s “lawsuit as revenue generation” strategy, and that he’s not interested in enabling it. Righthaven is already backing down.

  • Viacom Appeal: YouTube Hits Back, Says It’s A Good Net Citizen

    Last year, Viacom (NYSE: VIA) appealed its loss in its copyright lawsuit against YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), and the video-sharing site has now filed a reply (embedded below) to Viacom’s arguments. Many of the arguments in the 107-page brief repeat what was argued in the courts below, but it’s interesting to observe the tone set in the opening pages of the brief. YouTube takes its time before getting to the legal points, showing that it’s really a good corporate citizen of the internet.

  • Lawsuit Against YouTube Threatens Global Growth of Political Speech

    San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of advocacy groups have asked a federal appeals court to reject attempts to thwart federal copyright law and saddle online communities with new litigation fears in the appeal of Viacom v. YouTube.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux Outlaws 200 – Winning! Podcast Production Special

• 2011 Show Notes · Going Linux Podcast

  For each episode, we provide the show in both mp3 and ogg audio formats, and we post extensive show notes. You can download any episode from the direct links below, or you can play it in your browser with a flash player. You can also receive the podcast automatically if you have software like iTunes, Amarok, Rhythmbox or gPodder.

  [...]

  April 10: #135 – Listener Feedback

Kernel Space

• Before Somebody Else Mentions It – “Story of Linux” Video For Linux’s 20th Anniversary

  The actual anniversary isn’t until August of this year, but heck, making noise about Linux throughout spring and summer doesn’t sound like a bad idea. So the Linux Foundation made this nifty little dry-erase animation…

• Happy anniversary, Linux

  The Linux Foundation is kicking off a year long celebration of the 20th anniversary of Linux and they want all community members to participate. Here’s how: submit a video that demonstrates the impact of the operating system on computing, business and/or culture over the last 20 years, today or into the future. The videos will be judged by community rankings as well as celebrity judge, Linus Torvalds.

• The Birth of Linux: How Linux Got Started

  In a way, Linux got its start before Linus ever sat down to start work on the kernel. Specifically, the foundation that made the kernel possible was kicked off in September of 1983 when Richard M. Stallman announced the GNU Project with the words “Free Unix!” to a Unix “wizards” newsgroup. The announcement may also have included the first recursive acronym (GNU’s Not Unix) and set off a bunch of confusion about what Stallman meant by free.

• Isolating Your Linux Systems – How Sharing Operating Systems Can Put Holes in Your PCI Compliance

  PCI compliance is all about protecting your core servers, and you can’t be careful enough when you go about this. Protecting your servers is all about guarding key components from the rest of your online systems, and most important of all, perhaps, is isolating the server that you use for crucial credit card data from the rest of the systems on your network. This is really the heart and soul of PCI compliance. Now I’m sure that the team you have in charge of security and PCI compliance has set up a Linux based system for your core servers. However, it’s very unlikely that every system on your network uses Linux. Under such circumstances, every system that does not use Linux is a potential threat to the security of your network and to integrity of your PCI compliance.

Applications

• Upgrade Your Life: Amazing free software

  Who says good software has to be expensive … or cost money at all? This week on Upgrade Your Life, Yahoo! News’ Becky Worley shows how to save hundreds of dollars, with free alternatives to pricey PC and Mac software packages.

• Music Production in Linux 4

• Plop Boot Manager

  Recently, I setup a bootable Linux USB key, to act as a portable OS. On the laptop I’m using as my test machine, boot to USB is unavailable in the BIOS. I was happy to find “Plop Boot Manager,” it is a great program that allows me to boot my test machine (an old Dell laptop) from my Linux USB key. The following is from the Plop web site:

  “The Plop Boot Manager is a small program to boot different operating systems. The boot manager has a builtin ide cdrom and usb driver to access those hardware without the help/need of a bios. You can boot the operating systems from harddisk, floppy, CD/DVD or from USB. You can start the boot manager from floppy, CD, network and there are many more ways to start the boot manager. You can install the boot manager on your harddisk. There is no extra partition required for the boot manager.”

• 5 of the Best Free Linux Disk Encryption Tools

  The importance of security should never be underestimated. The consequences of losing data can be disastrous for any organisation. For example, the loss of a single unencrypted laptop may have huge repercussions. This could include breaching data protection legislation with the risk of a significant fine, a loss in the confidence of an organisation, as well as the risk that sensitive data may fall into the hands of a competitor or third party with malicious intent.

• Launch Virtual Apps Directly from your Linux Desktop

  Test it out in a terminal to make sure it works OK. Please note that it will take a wee while to launch if the VM isn’t already running. Once it’s running, it will launch immediately. Once it’s working OK, you can create a launcher in your favourite dock or launching app. I won’t be able to explain how to do that for the countless number of launchers out there. But almost all have a field to put in the command to be run when you click the launcher icon. Put the above command (customised for your situation of course) in that “command” field.

• Proprietary

  • [Opera] Barracuda Release Candidate 3.11

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Basic tasks for new Linux users

  • Network UPS Tools (NUT) For USB UPSs On CentOS 5.5

  • 9 Best practices to secure your Linux Desktop & Server | Including installation & Configuration

  • Attempt to manage Fedora 15 KVM Server via Gnome 3 shell

  • How to Install GNOME 3 on Ubuntu 11.04

  • Installing Nginx With PHP5 (And PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On OpenSUSE 11.4

  • How To Create Amazing Text and Font Effects in Gimp 2.6

  • GNOME3 iso by fcrozat and ATI radeon driver… a quick easy fix!

  • Free and Open Source network access control (NAC) system – PacketFence

  • How to precisely find the amount of memory or RAM being used by Firefox

  • How To Disable The Overlay Scrollbars In Ubuntu 11.04 [Quick Tip]

  • Taking video snapshots quickly: KDE VLC Snapper

• Games

  • An Open-Source MMORPG Using The Unigine Engine

    Project Bossanova has high hopes to develop “the first 3D game built especially with Linux as the first priority. It will set the standard in gameplay, graphics, compatibility, community integration and more.” In addition, they plan to have the game, now announced as RunServer’s MMT, to be open-source. This is an MMOPRG game and it’s being built using the Unigine Engine.

    Project Bossanova itself is not a game but they’re simply trying to focus on and sponsor a game who’s primary focus is on Linux support. The game they chose is RunServer’s MMT, which was first shown off at the Game Developers’ Conference 2009 in Moscow. It’s built using our favorite game engine, the Unigine Engine. RunServer also integrates their own middle-ware code.

  • Miegakure – A Puzzle Platform In Four Dimensions

    This game is about exploring the consequences of being able to move in four spatial dimensions. It plays like a regular three-dimensional platformer, but at the press of a button one of the dimensions is exchanged with the fourth dimension, allowing for four-dimensional movement.

    Think about a two-dimensional character living on a horizontal, flat two-dimensional plane. To this character, height would be a foreign concept. A number of actions we three-dimensional beings take for granted feel like absolute magic to this two-dimensional character.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • active routes

    Both Sebastian and Marco have now blogged about Plasma Active, and we’re working on getting more presentable information on what we’re working towards put together.

    In a nutshell, Plasma Active is about getting the KDE Platform with Plasma providing a compelling user interface ready for and available on hardware devices outside the usual laptop and desktop form factors. While we continue to do a pretty good job on our traditional turf, we have work ahead of us if we wish to realize the dream of covering as much of the device spectrum as possible.

  • KDE SC 4.6.2 Is Available for Ubuntu and Fedora Users

    The KDE team has just announced on April 6th the second maintenance release for KDE Software Compilation 4.6. This is a minor update, focusing on bug fixing and translation updates.

    KDE Software Compilation 4.6.2 is the second in a series of monthly bug fixing releases to the KDE Software Compilation 4.6 series and it brings various translation updates and improvements. Everyone should update their existing KDE SC machines running version 4.6.1 or earlier (see a short tutorial below).

  • Clementine Steadily Improving – PPA for Ubuntu Maverick, Natty Updated

  • New Features in digiKam 2.0: Face Recognition

    Face recognition has been one of the most requested digiKam features, and the latest version of the photo management application provides this functionality.

    As the name suggests, the face recognition functionality can be used to find photos containing faces and attach face tags to persons in photos. This lets you quickly locate all photos of a specific person using digiKam filtering capabilities.

  • KDE Commit Digest for 3 April 2011

• GNOME Desktop

  • GNOME 3: From an end-user’s perspective

    Released just a few days ago, GNOME 3 is the latest major version of the GNOME desktop environment. If you are currently running a GNOME-based Linux or BSD distribution, you are probably using version 2.30 or 2.32, but that should change in the upcoming release cycle when many of the distributions will be shipping with GNOME 3 as the default. So while we wait, this article will attempt to give you an idea of what to expect. Rather than discuss the difference between old and new GNOME from the development angle, the article presents information from a lay user’s perspective. Can I find my away around the new desktop without consulting a manual or documentation?

  • GNOME 3 rocks!

    Following the release of GNOME 3.0, the world has been celebrating GNOME 3 here and there starting from April 6th: 141 registered GNOME 3 release parties spreading over 47 countries according to this wiki page. Being on the GNOME.Asia committee for 4 years already, I am happy to see that 43% (61 parties) of the release parties are from Asia (in 15 countries), India actually organizing the most (20% i.e. 29 parties in total), followed by Greater China (9% i.e. 12 parties in total). That makes me feel that all those efforts and time spent on GNOME.Asia are starting to bear fruit.

Distributions

• Slackware 13.37

  slackToday we have a guest article By: Guillermo Garron from Go2linux, i really like his site so if you don’t know it i really suggest you to go and ckeck it.

• 3 Linux Distros That You Might Never Want to Try

  Linux-based distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, and openSUSE have completely revolutionized the traditional desktop. However, there are some distributions that don’t quite match the standards that these Distrowatch-toppers have set. Here’s a look at 3 such Linux distributions, that you’ll never want to try.

• New Releases

  • SystemRescueCd 2.1.0

  • PC-BSD 20110405

  • An ArchLinux-based lightweight desktop system [0.7] – CTKArch 0.7 released

• Red Hat Family

  • [CentOS-announce] Release for CentOS-5.6 i386 and x86_64

    We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of CentOS-5.6 for i386 and x86_64 Architectures.

    CentOS-5.6 is based on the upstream release EL 5.6 and includes packages from all variants including Server and Client. All upstream repositories have been combined into one, to make it easier for end users to work with.

  • CentOS 5.6 is released! Upgrade now from CentOS 5.5 to 5.6

  • Old Good(?) Style

    I recently wrote about Linux distributive which was derived from Red Hat once Red Hat became commercial. But Fedora is not the only derivative in there!
    As long as Red Hat is still open source software, anyone can use their source code for own purposes. That’s the way how CentOS was born.

  • Fedora

    • Fedora 15 Beta RC1 Available Now!

• Debian Family

  • Do I Have Bad Karma for Debian?

    Do I have bad karma to run Debian? I have 6 posts about Debian so far, and only one of them relates to full success, where I was able to run a full-power Debian on my laptop. Maybe I myself and Debian are just creatures of different worlds and we cannot live together?

  • Do I Have Bad Karma for Debian?

    Do I have bad karma to run Debian? I have 6 posts about Debian so far, and only one of them relates to full success, where I was able to run a full-power Debian on my laptop. Maybe I myself and Debian are just creatures of different worlds and we cannot live together?

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Meet the ubuntu (or rather unity) menu; will you call this an innovation?

      The ubuntu desktop never stops to amuse and never stops to innovate. The ubuntu unity packs in with load full of features and one never stops to wonder how much thought have been gone into come up with all those ideas, if only some efforts was also put into the planning and implementation of those nice ideas. Many times I felt that the developers are are so immersed with developing features that they fail to step back and think how to go about the implementation and thus fail to attain the best possible implementation of those features. Instead of as a feature many of these innovations appear to be as an annoyance or a bug.

    • How I use the Unity Dash

    • To be Unity or not to be Unity. That is the question.

      Finally one Canonical employee and community member ‘Jorge Castro’ replied well to the above Unity usability myth. He also made a screencast of his desktop running Natty to demo how Unity will do multitasking well.

      Meanwhile Ubuntu fans have created another Ubuntu derivative. Unlike other Ubuntu based distros which are painted with some other theme flavor, this one sports the DE most of the community wants. It is an unofficial Ubuntu derivative which is going to ship with the stock Gnome 3.0. So, users now have the choice to use the official Unity Ubuntu or unofficial Gnome 3 Ubuntu.

    • Knowledge-Sharing on Agenda During Ubuntu App Developer Week

      Have an idea for a great Linux application that’s missing from the 30,000+ downloads in the Ubuntu repositories? Or just interested in learning some programming pointers? If you answered yes, the latest and greatest Ubuntu App Developer Week, which starts Monday, April 11, 2011, is for you. Keep reading for details…

    • Ubuntu App Developer Week Enabling and Inspiring Developers

      Ubuntu App Developer Week, will take place in online in the #ubuntu-classroom and #ubuntu-classroom-chat IRC channels on April 11-15, 2011 from 16:00 to 21:00 UTC each day.

      David Planella of the Ubuntu Community Team at Canonical says “Our goal is to give all attendees a taste of the wide variety of tools on the Ubuntu platform that can be used to create awesome applications, and to showcase some applications that have been created and explain how they were put together.”

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Elementary OS – Distro Review

        It’s been awhile since I had the time to install another distribution and really put it through it’s paces enough to write a full review of it. After crying wolf about a lack of information on the Elementary OS website, I felt I owed it to their team to give the disc a (free) download and put their OS through it’s paces.

      • Linux Mint XFCE Released and Linux Mint F.A.Q.!

      • Review: Linux Mint Xfce 201104

        Just over 2 weeks ago, I wrote about how Linux Mint is moving the Xfce edition to a Debian base. Well, a few days ago, they released the official Linux Mint Xfce 201104.
        For those of you who didn’t read that post, in short, Linux Mint Xfce is now Debian-based instead of Ubuntu-based. The developers had a few things to say about this: (1) the desktop will be faster and lighter on resources (114 MB of RAM at idle, 177 MB of RAM with Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice Writer, and LibreOffice Calc open all at the same time), (2) the Xfce edition will now include more mainstream applications like Rhythmbox instead of Exaile, and (3) the Xfce edition, being based on Debian Testing, will be a rolling-release branch. All these things sounded very exciting to me, so I decided to try it out.

Devices/Embedded

• In praise of the D-Link Boxee Box

  Following several months of use, and one major firmware update, DeviceGuru is now ready to relate our experience with using the D-Link Boxee Box. Despite seeming a bit more like a late-stage beta than a fully-released product, the device has gradually taken over command and control of our non-DVD TV watching experience.

• Phones

  • Android

    • AMD Jumping on the Android Bandwagon

      It was only a matter of time before AMD followed Nvidia’s lead and finally jumped onto the Android bandwagon, as the company is now recruiting engineers to create chipset drivers for Android. According to unnamed sources, the nation’s second largest CPU manufacturer is now looking to offer notebook and tablet partners chipset solutions supporting Google’s popular mobile platform.

Events

• I left my Linux in San Francisco (for this week)

  The 5th annual Linux Collaboration Summit is happening this week in San Francisco. This summit gathers core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today.

• Announcements from the 5th Annual Linux Collaboration Summit

  The Linux Foundation kicked off the 5th Annual Linux Collaboration Summit with four announcements: the formation of the new High Availability working group, the release of the Carrier Grade Linux 5.0 specification, Yocto Project Release 1.0 availability, and the 20th Anniversary Video Contest.

Databases

• The Drizzle tale: a fork that’s growing

  Nearly three years ago, when open source hacker Brian Aker created a fork of MySQL it did not look like anything that was much needed – at the time Sun owned MySQL and the popular database software looked to have a bright future.

CMS

• Drupal Open Source News Website Blottr and The Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg

  As (Free/Open Souce Software) user generated news website continues to gain ever increasing authority in political circles, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has entered his views on the Alternative Vote pre-referendum poll on http://www.blottr.com, and put forward his position for readers.

Project Releases

• Open source Horde groupware reaches version 4

  After nearly three years of development the fourth generation of the Horde open source e-mail and groupware suite was released this week bringing with it a more modern code base and social networking features.

  The core of Horde includes the Horde Application Framework, and PHP Web application framework that is used to develop the family of groupware applications for messaging, time keeping and contact management, among others.

  Horde 4 makes more use of the PHP Extension and Application Repository and installing and updating Horde apps has been simplified with its own PEAR server.

Openness/Sharing

• Open Hardware

  • ARM versus Intel: a successful stratagem for RISC or grist for CISC’s tricks?

    ARM and its licensees are striving to expand their overall market presence by tackling Intel’s x86 in servers and client desktop and laptop computers. Intel has responded by attacking ARM on its own turf: handsets, tablets, and the like.

Programming

• Understanding The While Loop

• Pretty Python Plotting With CairoPlot

• Beginning Shell Scripting

  Today, we’re going to learn how to write a script that you can run from the command line that will actually do stuff. It’s a very simple script, so don’t expect anything spectacular. I was wondering what I could use as an example script for this lesson when I remembered a question someone at LinuxQuestions.org asked the other day about how to tell which users are currently logged into a Linux system. Let’s make a little script to give us that information.

• Bash for loop with files containing white space

Defence/Police/Aggression

• Why Are Visa Applicants Forced To Travel To Mexico’s Most Dangerous City?

  Almost anyone who wants to come to the U.S. — either as a visitor or a resident — has to physically visit a U.S. consulate in their country of origin to apply for a visa and undergo an interview by an Embassy officer. In Mexico, those applying for U.S residency can only do so at one location: the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juárez — where over 3,000 people were killed in 2010 alone.

Finance

• Annals of C-suite dysfunction, Goldman Sachs edition

  Ian McGugan has a good review of Bill Cohan’s huge new book on Goldman Sachs which includes an intriguing quote about how Bob Rubin “encouraged a culture of undisciplined risk taking” — something which goes directly against the reputation he’s spent many years cultivating. It comes from Chapter 15, which starts in the dangerous year of 1994 and which is full of juicy gossip about the very human frailties of the people running Goldman.

• Still Standing

  There’s something endearing about Lloyd Blankfein. Born in the Bronx in 1954 and reared in a Brooklyn public-housing project, he hawked hot dogs at ­Yankee Stadium, dodged gangs, studied hard and didn’t know much about how the other half lived. “I always thought that a prep school was what some people went to after high school to prepare themselves for ­college,” he later said. At Harvard, he was “shunned” by the social clubs, worked in the cafeteria, watched “Star Trek” and hit the books. He went on to Harvard Law School, smoked too much, got fat, got married and got a job.

  More than three decades later, through dint of hard work and shrewd judgment, Mr. Blankfein is at the helm of Goldman Sachs, the most powerful bank on what’s left of Wall Street—a position that has made him a wealthy man. In any normal ­estimation, his story would be something to ­emulate, even ­celebrate.

• Book Review: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

  The Good: Wide access to associates and ex-employees; Cohan offers the most human portrayal of the firm yet.

  The Bad: For all Cohan’s research, no surprise explanation of how Goldman makes so much money year after year

  The Bottom Line: Goldman Sachs may be only slightly smarter and faster than rivals, but that may be all that matters.

• The next housing shock

  As more and more Americans face mortgage foreclosure, banks’ crucial ownership documents for the properties are often unclear and are sometimes even bogus, a condition that’s causing lawsuits and hampering an already weak housing market. Scott Pelley reports.

• Goldman Sachs chief Blankfein was ‘stunned’ by SEC lawsuit: extract from Money and Power

  Wall Street has always been a dangerous place. Firms have been going in and out of business ever since speculators first gathered under a buttonwood tree near the southern tip of Manhattan in the late 18th century.

  Despite the ongoing risks, during great swaths of its mostly charmed 142 years, Goldman Sachs has been both envied and feared for having the best talent, the best clients and the best political connections, and for its ability to alchemise them into extreme profitability and market prowess.

Privacy

• Social Networking and Geeks

  The latest craze in hiring an IT person is by a prospective employer looking at an applicants Facebook or LinkedIn page. Lovely idea to get the feel of how a person is socially but for the most part is a failure when you’re in search of a specialist for your network. The same is true for an Audio Technician, or any other “geek” type job.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • ACTA

    • India will not accept any intellectual property talks outside WTO: Anand Sharma

      India will not accept any attempt made by groups of countries to discuss intellectual property rights outside the multilateral forum of the world trade organisation, commerce and industry minister Anand Sharma has said.

      Responding to questions on India’s position on the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a new intellectual property treaty being framed by a group of developed nations, the minister said a few countries cannot get together and try to change what is and will always be a multilateral regime called the TRIPS agreement.

• Distributions
• Devices/Embedded

Using GNU/Linux is cooler than using Windows: Laura Lucas Alday

This is the last interview of the trinity series and in this interview we spoke with Laura Lucas Alday the woman power behind the latest release of Cheese. She was responsible for enhancing cheese to support svg overlays. Laura finds GNU/Linux better than Windows.

Where’s the Parallel Beef?

Years ago there was this ad campaign by the Wendy’s hamburger chain that asked the question Where’s the Beef?. The commercials were rather funny and “Where’s the beef?” has become a way to ask “where is the substance?” or to call attention to the lack thereof. Before GP-GPU, multi-core, and clusters, I have been asking a similar question about HPC development tools. In particular, “Where are the parallel programming tools?” This question has become fundamentally important to the future of computing and the answer is not quite clear.

Top five new things in Linux

This past week, the cognoscenti of the Linux community gathered in San Francisco to discuss the state of the platform as a whole. During the week, a number of projects also managed to release new versions. Here are five you should know about.

Cloud Appliance Solutions for the Enterprises (CAFÉ) Taiwan

The Institute for Information Industry (III) Taiwan and Ulteo announces a joint agreement to develop Cloud Appliance solutions for the Enterprises (CAFÉ).

Kernel Space

• The Linux Kernel Trojan Horse Gift

Applications

• Quick And Dirty Scanning On The Linux Desktop

  Even though we’re supposed to be in the digital age, it’s amazing how much paper and printed matter we still have to deal with. Contracts, receipts, photos, forms. It’s hard to count how many trees have been sacrificed to print those kinds of things.

  If you want to try to go paperless, one way to do it is by scanning all of your important documents and archiving them. That can be easier said than done sometimes, though.

• Best Screen Capture Software for Windows, Linux and Mac OS

• A Better Way to Find & Install Windows & Linux Apps

  This post is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark as a new part of the Spark of Genius series that focuses on a new and innovative startup each day. Every Thursday, the program focuses on startups within the BizSpark program and what they’re doing to grow.

• Proprietary/Opera

  • A second Barracuda Release Candidate

    Here is a second release candidate for Opera 11.10 (“Barracuda”). Since we are so close to release the change log is a little smaller than normal, with a focus on critical fixes.

  • Barracuda Release Candidate 3

  • GIMP webpage plug-in

    GIMP now has a webpage plug-in in the development tree. Using this plug-in, you can capture a render of any webpage. This is useful for pixel-perfect designers, and others who want to publish images of webpages.

  • Barracuda Release Candidate 3.1

• Instructionals/Technical

  • Easy way to create a Debian package and local package repository

  • How to read the content from the RAM (Random Access Memory)

  • How to Display Different Content to Visitors from Different Sites

  • IPv6 and thttpd

  • 9 Best practices to secure your Linux

  • Pimp My Bash Prompt

  • Bash shell-scripting libraries

  • Iptables – Providing More Access Without Compromise!

  • How To Switch Firefox Update Channels

  • Let your Ubuntu read documents aloud with Gespeaker

  • Attempt to manage Fedora 15 KVM Server via Gnome 3 shell

  • Printing to AirPort shared printers from Linux

  • Creating Bootloader For Dual Boot

  • How to customize your VLC hot keys!

• Games

  • icculus’ “Gaming on Linux” (adjusted for open source context )

    A 1-hour talk. By a pretty cool guy called @icculus called Ryan C. Gordon. About games and open source.

  • Quick look: Spiral Knights (A Java RPG)

    Zelda and Final Fantasy are two names which most owners of consoles will be familiar with and whilst you either loved or hated them (in my case the later) don’t think as a Linux user (or any other user) you will be left out with this interesting Java title – Spiral Knights.

  • Tux Games Sale!

  • Moar games sales!

    Wupra has reduced all LGP games.

Desktop Environments

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

  • Plasma Active – A Desirable User Experience Encompassing the Device Spectrum

    Today, I’d like to announce to a wider audience a project we have been working on in and beyond the Plasma team. Its goal is to “Create a desirable user experience encompassing a spectrum of devices“, and it is called Plasma Active. A couple of things make Plasma Active special. First, the driver is the desirable user experience. That means that we want to create something, people want, and people want to use. It means we are less technology-focused, but are taken a user-centered approach. Second, we are not targeting a single device, or a narrowly-defined class of devices. Plasma Active is made to run on a spectrum of devices that make up the user experience together. Devices change, and so does the way the user interacts with them. By strongly separating data and visualisation / interaction, we do not re-invent the wheel but adapt to the requirements and expectations of a device, and about how devices work together for the user.

  • Plasma/Active/Installation

• GNOME Desktop

  • How To Create A Screencast In GNOME 3

    GNOME 3 has an inbuilt software that allows you to record your desktop. This makes it very easy to create a screencast in GNOME 3. Here is how you do it …

    You can start/stop recording your GNOME 3 Desktop by pressing the Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R key combination.

  • Welcome GNOME 3! We have a present for you…

    So, you’re born, and we here at openSUSE Project are very excited to welcome you into the world. We’ve been watching with anticipation and excitement as the many thousands of developers and contributors mobilized around the world to make your first steps into this world a reality. The videos and plethora of information shown on gnome3.org make clear that you’re very welcome!

  • Sam and me

    It’s not a particularly ringing endorsement. But neither is it particularly precise in its criticisms. It seems Sam has two or three gripes about the beta, and lumped them all together in one muddy package.

  • Making awesome even better; gnome back to work with gnome 3.2

    Just in case you didn’t notice, the much delayed, much awaited, much criticized and, why of course, much enhanced gnome desktop version 3.0 with its brand new shell released last week. (If you not yet tried it yourself, head on to the gnome3 page and grab a copy of the live cd .iso of the next generation desktop.)

  • Drag Me to Shell, p2.

    I said last time I would go into the file maangement side of GNOME 3 a bit more, and I think I would be right in saying that there are a number of people who think this is probably one of the weakest aspects of the release.

    The first thing to say is, I vaguely surprised myself by the lack of problem in this area. If you read various reviews, the changes in accessibility to file management and the lack of desktop icons are quite often brought up as serious issues, and as a relatively heavy user of the desktop file space I imagined that this would be the thing which would hurt the most.

  • Great one, Gnome! Would you like to reload and try for your other foot?

    I was rather appalled to see the direction Gnome is going. Even though I’ve complained about Gnome before, I’ve still been using it thus far since going Ubuntu. But this is really going to sever my relationship with Gnome for good.

    This review shows Gnome 3 completely botching up the whole multi-virtual-desktop metaphor. Once again, we see something that Linux got right, which is being bludgeoned out of it.

  • GNOME 3: configuration wish granted

    Almost two and a half year ago GNOME 3 was in a very early state and most plans still had to be drawn up. At that time there was an interesting meme going on at Planet GNOME in which people blogged about their wishes for the large changes that would come to GNOME.

  • Wishlist for gnome (and shell) 3.2

    I know gnome 3.0 is just released and people are more or less still getting used to it. As such this may not be a right time to discuss what should be in gnome 3.2.

  • GNOME 3 and Its Fallback Desktop

    I like the GNOME 3 fallback desktop better than GNOME 3 itself.

Distributions

• Slackware 13.37 RC 4.6692

  Another call for Slackware 13.37 Release Candidate. This time, Pat took the suggestion from Nicola to take Feigenbaum constant of 4.6692 to be the codename for (hopefully) the last RC before Slackware 13.37.

• 3-in-1: How 3 Old Friends Can Be Found In Same Place

  Can you ever expect that three of your oldest friends which belong to different companies can be found in the same place? Difficult to imagine, isn’t is? It’s like accidentally finding your best school friend and your best colleague in your favorite pub just across the road from your home. Dream!

• Reviews

  • Distro Hoppin`: Saline OS 1.3

    Iiiii’ve been working at the saaaline aaaall the live looong daaaay. Actually, that’s a lie, as this Debian-based operating system is quite easy to install, setup and, once that is done, it lets you run about your daily computing routine.

    [...]

    Yep, yep, I really loved spending some time with Saline OS and I think this could be a keeper.

  • Salix Xfce 13.37-beta2 – first impressions and screenshots

    Salix 13.37-beta2 was installed into a virtual machine with 512 MB RAM and it’s faaast.

• PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

  • Mandriva 2010.2 KDE Review

    Way back in ancient times when Mandriva was still Mandrake this was actually the first distribution of Linux I recall ever using. Things have come a long way since then but unfortunately I have neglected using Mandriva in recent years. So I decided it was time for some nostalgia. These days Mandriva is an excellent distribution, definitely up to par with all of the rest. Mandriva offers extensive consumer services and business solutions, but for the everyday Linux user there is also the Mandriva free download DVD ISO. This DVD comes with optional KDE or Gnome desktops, and wide selection of popular free software.

  • PCLinuxOS 2010 Gnome Zen Mini Review

    Another similarity to KDE is the single panel on the bottom of the desktop, in your panel you can store launchers, see open windows, or store useful applets to display information. The panel also holds a workspace switcher to switch between virtual desktops. You can customize the look and feel of your panels simply by right clicking on the main panel. In the right click menu you can add new panels, view panel properties, or add applets to your panel. You can try many of the usual Gnome applets like a system monitor, note pad, or local weather monitor. For even more style try floating, or transparent panels.

• Red Hat Family

  • Moving on from Red Hat to Google

    Last month, I moved from Red Hat to Google. After spending six-and-half years at Red Hat, it was a tough decision to make because I got to work on issues like open standards and open source that have such long-term implications for India. To tell the truth, I had also gotten into a warm comfort zone in my previous job and was wondering what to do next, after we won the open standards fight in India.

• Debian Family

  • DebConf11 call for contributions

    We invite submissions of proposals for papers, presentations, discussion sessions and tutorials for Debconf11. Submissions don’t have to be limited to traditional talks, you could propose a performance, art installation, debate, or anything else. Official submissions will be accepted until May 8th 2011, 23.59 UTC.

  • Canonical/Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Gets Much Needed Launcher Customization

      One of the major criticisms of Natty’s Unity launcher was a user’s inability to control or customize it. The good news is Ubuntu team is working at war-footing to iron out the wrinkles pointed out in the Beta 1. John Lea reported a bug to offer increased customization of the launcher.

    • New hardware, Sandybridge, and Ubuntu.

      My fiancée and I have decided that we should invest in a new tower computer for various reasons. One primary reason is to use it for multimedia (music streaming to the stereo/home theater, movies, videos, etc), as well as a data server around the house.

    • Unity and Me

      I’ll admit when Mark announced that Unity would be the new desktop for Ubuntu, I was skeptical. I always liked the indicators work, but had used an otherwise pretty standard Gnome desktop for years, and liked it. I upgraded to Natty very early in the cycle and have been using Unity for months. Things were quite rocky at first, with instability issues and features either gone or partially implemented. Of course that is to be expected since massive amounts of development work was being done on it. Today, the features are there and Unity is quite stable for me. It is getting very close to release, but AIUI the Unity developers are working very hard to squish the remaining stability bugs. You can read more about the decision to stick with Unity, but that is not what I am writing about today. I’m writing about why as an Ubuntu user I like Unity. Keep in mind, I am not a Unity developer and have just picked things up along the way and this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of features or bugs. Just what I like and and dislike.

    • Ubuntu Natty release countdown banners chosen

    • Ubuntu, Unity, Linux Mint and other stuff

      The truth must be said, I’ve not tested Linux Mint yet, I’m somehow too comfortable with my two main OSs Slackware Linux and Arch Linux, using Debian from time to time.

      But I’m reading good reviews about it all time, just like this one, what caught my attention on that reading was not only how good the author consider Linux Mint, but also how bad he consider Ubuntu.

      It is also a long time since I do not try Ubuntu, but I’m looking forward to test ‘11.04’ with unity, I’ve run it in a Netbook some time ago, and I must said I liked it.

    • How I multitask in Unity

    • Fast Two Way Sync in Ubuntu!

      I love the portability of a laptop. I have a 45 min train ride twice a day and I fly a little too, so having my work with me on my laptop is very important. But I hate doing long running analytics on my laptop when I’m in the office because it bogs down my laptop and all those videos on The Superficial get all jerky and stuff.

      I get around this conundrum by running much of my analytics on either my work server or on an EC2 machine (I’m going to call these collectively “my servers” for the rest of this post). The nagging problem with this has been keeping files in sync. RStudio Server has been a great help to my workflow because it lets me edit files in my browser and they run on my servers. But when a long running R job blows out files I want those IMMEDIATELY synced with my laptop. That way I know when I undock my laptop to run to the train station that all my files will be there for me to spill Old Style beer on as I ride the Metra

    • Clementine Steadily Improving – PPA for Ubuntu Maverick, Natty Updated

      Clementine Music Player version 0.7.1 was released few days back and the venerable Amarok 1.4 fork continues its steady improvement it received during the last year. Clementine 0.7.1 is largely a bug fix release for Clementine 0.7 which came out with a number of major new features. Clementine PPA for Ubuntu Natty and Maverick is updated as well.

    • Falling In Love With ‘Sexy’ Ubuntu 11.04 aka Natty Narwhal

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Gets Much Needed Launcher Customization

      After long discussion and weighing the pros and cons the bug has got a fix. Once the patch is in the repositories, user will see an applet in the Gnome Control Center called ‘Unity Launcher’. It doesn’t have any super cow powers at the moment other than offering users the option to control the visibility of the launcher — users will be able to select whether they want to trigger the launcher when they take the mouse to the left of the screen or to the top left corner. At the moment the launcher pops out only when you take the mouse to the top left corner.

    • Flavours and Variants

      • Review: Linux Mint Xfce 201104

        Just over 2 weeks ago, I wrote about how Linux Mint is moving the Xfce edition to a Debian base. Well, a few days ago, they released the official Linux Mint Xfce 201104.
        For those of you who didn’t read that post, in short, Linux Mint Xfce is now Debian-based instead of Ubuntu-based. The developers had a few things to say about this: (1) the desktop will be faster and lighter on resources (114 MB of RAM at idle, 177 MB of RAM with Mozilla Firefox, LibreOffice Writer, and LibreOffice Calc open all at the same time), (2) the Xfce edition will now include more mainstream applications like Rhythmbox instead of Exaile, and (3) the Xfce edition, being based on Debian Testing, will be a rolling-release branch. All these things sounded very excitin

      • Spotlight On Linux: wattOS

Devices/Embedded

• Care robot runs on Windows and Ubuntu, uses Kinect for vision

  GeckoSystems will show off its fourth-generation “CareBot” service robot at its “Mobile Robots in Motion” conference on April 13-14. Based on two dual-core Intel Atom-based Mini-ITX boards, with one running Ubuntu Linux and the other Windows XP, the latest CareBot features an updated GeckoMotorController 7.0 and a new GeckoImager 3.1 vision system based on Microsoft Kinect technology.

• In praise of the D-Link Boxee Box

  Following several months of use, and one major firmware update, DeviceGuru is now ready to relate our experience with using the D-Link Boxee Box. Despite seeming a bit more like a late-stage beta than a fully-released product, the device has gradually taken over command and control of our non-DVD TV watching experience.

• linux: pwning computers and devices after 20 years

  2011 is the 20th anniversary of the first release of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. Since that time, the linux kernel, together with the GNU tools and a whole host of software has been developed by enthusiasts and professional programmers into an operating system that runs on tiny embedded systems right up to the world’s fastest supercomputers.

• Phones

  • Nokia/MeeGo/Maemo

    • Why I root for MeeGo instead of Android

      I root for MeeGo because it has a lot of advantages over Android and iOS…

  • Android

    • Putting Text to Speech to Work

      In a prior article we explored using the Text To Speech (TTS) capabilities native to Android.

      In this article we begin to apply the TTS capabilities into an application that has (slightly) more utility.

      The reasons for using Text To Speech range from the practical, safety-minded applications to the “just for fun”. The application we build in this article is arguably a little bit of both.

      While our prior look at Text To Speech was geared around the mechanics of using the TTS features, this application spends a bit more time with the context of the application and leverages what we have previously learned.

    • Android Honeycomb Code Will Be Released Soon: Google

      I never doubted that Google will close Android. But, then it took Andy Rubin to come forth and further clarify. In a nutshell, we all agree that Android has been fragmented. Whose fault is it? Google’s? No. Its the fault of those hardware vendors who picked up wrong OS to run tablets or are now planning to use a wrong OS to run smartphones. Using 2.x series on tablets was a big a mistake as is using 3x on phones.

Understanding Project Harmony

I’ve been highly critical1 of corporate copyright assignment policies, especially those that effect me personally. Canonical, one of those I’ve complained about, has been working to try and standardise the wording and formation of the contracts that you have to sign in order to assign copyright over.

Events

• FLISOL: A Continent (and more) of Free and Open Source Software Celebration: April 9th

  FLISOL, the Latin American Festival of (Free and) Open Source Software Installation will be celebrated throughout Latin America and the Caribbean this Saturday, April 9th, 2011, typically between 0900 and 1800 hours (9 A.M. and 6 P.M. for Microsoft users), but you should check your local dates and times on the FLISOL website.

Web Browsers

• Why is Microsoft pushing IE 9 out now? Firefox.

• Internet Explorer 6 is Holding Back the Linux Desktop

  There is no reason, other than fear of change, to be using a browser or operating system in 2011 that was created over a decade ago (unless of course it is on a server that has over a decade’s worth of uptime). It amazes me how many times I’ve setup Firefox or Google Chrome on a friend’s computer only to return later to find out they have foobared something because they fell back into using Internet Explorer after I left (most often times simply because they liked the blue E). Once most people are set in their ways it is hard to get them to change – no matter how subtle that change may be.

• Chrome

  • Chrome to block downloads of hazardous .exe files

    As well as sounding the alarm when navigating to a nefarious web site, in the future the Windows version of Google’s Chrome browser will block downloads of infected .exe files. Users will, however, still be able to override this feature and download them anyway.

• Mozilla

  • Firefox 4 Is Faster, Cleaner, More Secure

    With all other major browsers having recently released new versions, this also means that the current generation of browsers all represent the latest in cutting edge Web technologies, including support for the emerging HTML 5 standard.

Databases

• Planning for MariaDB 5.6 at the MySQL Conference 2011

  MariaDB 5.3 / 5.5 are now almost in beta (the last features will be pushed directly after the MySQL conference) and it was time to start considering what features should be in the next MariaDB release.

Project Releases

• Gnubik version 2.4 released

  Gnubik is a 3D single player game which displays an interactive cube
  similar to the well known Rubik Cube.

• GNU Typist 2.8.5 released

Openness/Sharing

• Open Data

  • Announcing the Open Data Challenge – a pan-European open data competition

    For a long while our Working Group on EU Open Data has been very keen to run a pan-European open data competition. Hence we’re very pleased to announced the opening of the Open Data Challenge, which is precisely such a competition.

    The competition is open for the next 60 days and there are €20,000 in prizes up for grabs! As seems fitting for a pan-European initiative, the winners will be announced by EC Vice President Neelie Kroes in Brussels this coming June.

Programming

• Practice with while Loops

Cablegate

• Bradley Manning: top US legal scholars voice outrage at ‘torture’

  More than 250 of America’s most eminent legal scholars have signed a letter protesting against the treatment in military prison of the alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning, contesting that his “degrading and inhumane conditions” are illegal, unconstitutional and could even amount to torture.

  The list of signatories includes Laurence Tribe, a Harvard professor who is considered to be America’s foremost liberal authority on constitutional law. He taught constitutional law to Barack Obama and was a key backer of his 2008 presidential campaign.

Finance

• What We’ve Learned About Wall Street From Watching the Raj Rajaratnam Trial

  Depending on whom you talk to, the allegations of $63.8 million in securities fraud against the Galleon hedge-fund owner Raj Rajaratnam amount to either the biggest insider-trading case since Michael Milken or the largest insider-trading case, ever, period, the end. Twenty-seven people were charged, and nineteen have pleaded guilty. Authorities investigated Rajaratnam’s alleged network of co-conspirators like they were the Sopranos, with 2,400 wiretaps producing 90 hours of tape. Thanks to those recordings and testimony from power brokers at Goldman Sachs, Intel, and McKinsey, the first few weeks of the trial have offered a rare glimpse into the Brioni-collared, Ferragamo-slippered tribe normally hidden behind closed doors. The defense has yet to present its arguments. But as the prosecution prepares to rest its case today, here’s what we learned so far.

• Now Facebook Might Not IPO Until 2013 Or Later

  The SEC has said it is considering raising the shareholder limit for private companies in a letter to Rep. Darrell Issa obtained by the WSJ.

  The SEC has a rule that says that once a private company reaches 500 individual shareholders, it has to report publicly the way a public company does, so this rule is an incentive for companies to go public: if they’re going to have the drawbacks of being public (disclosure) they might as well have the advantages (access to public markets).

Privacy

• CPS Rule on Phorm intrusion – A two tier charging threshold?

  There are very few tech cases that hit the news in the UK, so its always interesting to look at decisions made by the CPS when the digital world is thrust into the British legal system. The Phorm case is facinating for a number of reasons, but before we look at those, lets remind ourselves of the BBC Click and its Botnet incident.

  Apparently if you are the BBC and run a botnet, then there is no crime since no charges were ever placed.

  That decision disappointed me since it seemed you can get away with “research” and “public interest” defences if you happen to be a larger entity than the average Joe and that, has not gone unnoticed, with comments in tech forums remarking on a disproportionate balance between size of entity and chance of prosecution.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

• How to cut off the Internet the easy way? A Shovel

  According to the Guardian, one little old lady in Georgia managed to cut off an entire country, Armenia, from the Internet for five hours Her weapon? A shovel.

  No, I’m not kidding.

  The story goes that the woman was hunting for copper, which is worth real money these days everywhere, when in mid-dig, her shovel cut the fibre-logic cable which carried 90% of Armenia’s Internet.

• What to do About Retail Usage Based Billing: A Modest Proposal

  OpenMedia.ca, which spearheaded the public uproar over usage based billing earlier this year, launched a Vote Internet campaign that quickly attracted political support. The campaign asks candidates to be pro-Internet, which includes standing up for an open and accessible Internet and stopping the “pay meter on the Internet.” While this predictably raises claims of retail price regulation, addressing concerns about retail UBB need not involve a return to regulatory approvals over retail pricing of Internet services.

• Canadians encouraged to ‘vote for the Internet’

  Trust and economic recovery might be topping the polls as the issues most important to voters in Canada’s 41st general election, but some Canadians might believe keeping the Internet open and affordable trumps all others.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Copyrights

  • RIAA Lobbyist Turned Judge Backpedals On BitTorrent Cases

    In the ongoing mass-BitTorrent lawsuits, last month U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell laid down a landmark verdict in favor of copyright holders. The verdict was widely publicized, but put in doubt after it was uncovered that the Judge was a former RIAA lobbyist. This critique appears to have had an effect. In two new orders in the same cases, Howell has now backpedaled on her earlier stance.

  • Statutory Damages In Copyright Law Make It More Appealing To Sue Than To Innovate

    There are all sorts of problems with copyright law today, but one of the biggest is the farce that is statutory damages. This is what allows everyone who sues someone for a single instance of copyright infringement to threaten them with the possibility of a $150,000 fine. Of course, even in situations where the $150,000 isn’t available, we still end up with rulings that seem totally disconnected from any actual “harm.” Defenders of the statutory damages provisions in copyright law come up with all sorts of twisted rationalizations for why ridiculously high statutory damages rates make sense, usually along the lines of saying that there’s simply no reasonable way to calculate actual damages. This is, of course, silly. Even if you can’t calculate exact damages, you can come up with something that at least approaches a reasonable level.