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09.25.12

Links 25/9/2012: Linux Used at Airbus, Linux 3.6 RC7 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 5:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • A Dying Tux in an Airbus

    When I was on an airplane several days ago, an entertainment screen broke. As it rebooted and printed the console debug information, I found out that these computers actually ran Linux. But the reboot didn’t finish properly…

    There was nothing I could do about it, so I just watched it struggle. In this story I pour upon life and death in digital era, and how computers demonstrate human-like feelngs.

    A couple of days ago I took a transatlantic flight on an Airbus A330. It is a large plane where each seat is accompanied by a computer named “Entertaintment System”. It contained games, movies, and stuff like inflight information (plane location mapped onto the world map, and flight progress details, which is kimda reassuring given that the flight lasts for 10+ hours.) A killer feature of such system is its USB port useful when you want to read/watch something on your mobile phone (or type this story, for instance.)

  • Automotive manufacturers gear up for open source push

    Both the Linux Foundation and the Genivi Alliance have announced new open source initiatives at the Automotive Linux Summit, which is currently under way in Warwickshire, England. The Linux Foundation has founded the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup with the goal of streamlining the development of software for automobiles, while the Genivi Alliance has said that it will concentrate all of its development on open source projects going forward.

  • Desktop

    • Why Are We Still Buying Desktop OSes, Anyway?

      That’s essentially what the return on investment will be when hundreds of thousands–perhaps millions–of enterprise desktops get upgraded to Windows 8. Surely we can figure out something better to do with all that money, even if we have to move some cheese in the process.

      And that’s where my inner finance child starts struggling with my tech self who’s committed to keeping things rolling along. I see my staff and users happily and productively ensconced in the Windows world. I want them to be happy and productive, but I want to get rid of unnecessary ongoing expenses, too, even if it causes temporary pain.

  • Kernel Space

    • Twists and Turns for Linux on Intel’s Slippery Clover Trail

      “I just can’t buy Intel’s explanation for this, since it would be easy for Intel’s own Linux kernel developers to add the needed support to Linux,” said consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack. “There must be some other reason, and I bet that reason is that Intel is desperately hoping that Windows 8 will extend the Intel/Microsoft juggernaut from the PC market into the tablet market.”

    • On to better booting

      More than a few Linux distributions have pulled up their stakes in the decades old System V method of booting and quietly moved to a better way of booting. Better, faster, easier to maintain, and less prone to problems. I say “quietly” not to imply that there haven’t been announcements, banners waving, and proper cheers from some segments of the Linux user community, but to emphasize how little disruption has occurred and how little those of us who have been living in the slower-to-change Linux environments have had to pay attention. But the changes are nothing short of huge.

    • Linux 3.6-rc7
    • 30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Jiri Slaby
    • LPC videos on Linux & UEFI, ARM and ACPI 5.0

      The organisers of the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) 2012, which was held at the end of August in San Diego, have released videos, notes and presentation slides from the conference presentations. The talks are primarily concerned with Linux software that deals with the interaction between hardware and the user interface.

    • Ask a kernel developer: maintainer workflow

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Interview with XFCE’s Nick Schermer

      After the release of Unity and Gnome Shell, XFCE gained more popularity, fans and support for being the reliable “traditional” desktop environment. Fast, modern, mature, light and beautiful, XFCE is naturally becoming the default DE on big distributions like Debian.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • DigiKam Software Collection 2.9.0 Out

        “After one month since 2.8.0 release, digiKam team is proud to announce the digiKam Software Collection 2.9.0, as bug-fixes release. This will be the last 2.x release. Next one will be 3.0.0, currently under development, following GoSC 2012 projects, listed here.”

    • GNOME Desktop

      • First Look Of Gnome OS Boot Screen

        The Gnome Foundation had earlier announced an operating system mainly focused for Gnome development, known as Gnome OS. The OS is still in early development stages and developers are currently busy in designing and planning phase. William Jon Mc Cann posted some insights as hoe the boot screen will look like in Gnome OS and its features in Gnome Live! Here is a screenshot below:

      • Making GTK3 themes – Part 4: Porting GTK2 themes

        This is the 4th post from the “Making GTK3 themes” series. The older posts can be found here, here and here.

        Gnome 2 had some really great themes. And now we miss them with GTK3. Porting is not that much hard, but still, not that easy. But with some little tricks, you can ease porting GTK2 themes to GTK3.

      • Gnome 3 vs. Gnome 2 vs. change
      • Desktop Linux: The GNOME 3 Release Series Extensions

        Extensions — plugins that add specialized bits of functionality to a Linux desktop — have helped many free software projects succeed, including Vim, LibreOffice, Firefox, and Amarok. Could they do the same for the often-beleaguered GNOME 3 release series?

        The GNOME Shell Extensions site has been running for a little less than a year now. Technically, it’s in beta, but, if my experience is any indication, the problems are few.

      • What’s going on with GNOME?

        GNOME release manager Frederic Peters shares insight into the excitement surrounding the GNOME project…

  • Distributions

    • Vector Linux review

      After a very busy month, I finally had some free time to try Vector Linux, a distro that a facebook friend told me to take a look at. For those of you that dont know, Vector Linux is a distro that has been around for quite a long time. It is based on Slackware, with Xcfe, KDE and LXDE as the available desktop environments. According to the official website, the aim of Vector is to keep the distro simple and small and let the end user decide what their operating system is going to be.

    • New Releases

      • Tiny Core 4.6.2
      • Updated Waldorf testing images: 20120924

        The previous CrunchBang 11 “Waldorf” development images have now been replaced by some updated builds. The updated images include the Debian Installer 7.0 Beta2 release. Other changes have been kept to an absolute minimum. For more information and to leave any feedback, please see the forum announcement.

      • Slackware 14.0 RC5 Is Now Ready for Testing

        Patrick Volkerding has announced last evening, September 19th, the immediate availability for download and testing of fifth Release Candidate of the upcoming Slackware 14.0 Linux operating system.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • First look at PCLinuxOS 2012.08

        The PCLinuxOS distribution is an interesting creation. The project, originally based on the Mandriva distribution, is now an independent project with its own base, its own packages and its own vision. The project provides a rolling release distro which tries to balance being modern with being stable. It also attempts to balance modern software with a familiar look & feel. Finally, and perhaps most unusually, PCLinuxOS uses RPM software packages, but manages them with the APT package management utilities. It is a unique creation and all the more welcome in a world full of simple re-spins.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Sabayon Linux 10 Has MATE and Linux Kernel 3.5

        Fabio Erculiani proudly announced on September 13th, the immediate availability for download of the Sabayon Linux 10 operating system.

        Sabayon Linux 10 is powered by Linux kernel 3.5.4 (with BFQ iosched), and it features the GNOME 3.4.2, KDE 4.9, Xfce 4.10, and the new MATE 1.4.1 desktop environments.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat narrows full-year revenue forecast

        Red Hat Inc (RHT.N), the world’s largest distributor of Linux operating software, reported a lower-than-expected adjusted profit as costs rose, and lowered the top end of its full-year revenue outlook on slow growth in its services business.

      • Is Red Hat looking to a model of the past?

        A recent blog post from Red Hat raises some interesting questions about the paradox that exists between what large enterprises want in terms of their IT future requirements, and what the cloud is now able to offer. And perhaps the first question is whether one of the key drivers now in play is not the issue of what large enterprises want but the perception of established IT vendors as to what the large enterprises ought to want.

      • FactSet Net Soars, Red Hat Net Declines

        Carnival Corp. third quarter net nearly flat to $1.33 billion. FactSet fourth quarter net jumped 19% to $48.5 million. Neogen first quarter net climbed 12%. Paychex first quarter net grew 3% to $153.1 million. Red Hat second quarter net declined 13% to $35 million. Vail Resorts loss narrowed.

      • Red Hat Delivers New Beta Version 5.9 of RHEL

        On Monday, Red Hat reported that while its revenues were up, its quarterly profit was short of analyst estimates as its cost of doing business rose. Buried within the report were several nuggets of promise for the first-ever billion dollar a year open source company, though. The company’s subscription support business rose 17 percent, and Red Hat has a beta version of an updated 5.9 release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The new release will greatly expand RHEL’s support for newer hardware, among other enhancements.

      • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 Nears Release

        Not every enterprise updates to the latest version of new software from Linux vendor Red Hat, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be updated.

      • Red Hat: Linux on ARM Is No Joke

        There was a time when x86 was the only major chip architecture Linux vendor Red Hat cared about. That time has now come to an end as the Linux giant is now taking a serious look at ARM.

      • Red Hat’s Latest Legal Battle? Storage.

        Red Hat is the most successful pure play open source company on the planet, generating over $1 billion in revenue a year. Its success is rooted in a strong legal basis and understanding of how open source software works.

        Red Hat is using its open source expertise to its advantage in a new legal battle over alleged storage patent infringement with the Gluster filesystem. Red Hat acquired Gluster in 2011 for $136 million. The Gluster technology is now the cornerstone of Red Hat’s Storage technology, which recently hit its 2.0 release.

        Backup storage vendor Twin Peaks Software filed a complaint in July with United States District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division, alleging patent infringement. The alleged infringement deals with United States Patent Number 7,418,439, (the ’439 patent), titled “Mirror File System,” which Twin Peaks owns.

      • Red Hat CEO: ‘This Is a Good Market For Us’

        Shares of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company are up 35% year-to-date, and Whitehurst said that the stock’s performance is based on strong growth and solid guidance provided in March. Wall Street analysts have been predicting that Red Hat’s organic growth would eventually slow to that of GDP growth, currently at 1.7%. Red Hat, however, has been able to continually deliver growth of 20% or more on a constant currency basis. “Our job is to beat the fade,” Whitehurst noted. “If we can continue to grow 20% every year, that will drive the stock.”

    • Debian Family

      • Linux Mint Debian update pack 5 shows maturity

        With relatively little fanfare, Linux Mint Debian Edition Update Pack 5 was released on Monday last week. It is a sign of the improving stability and maturity of this distribution that unlike previous Update Packs, this one brings only incremental updates — albeit lots of them — rather than the eagerly awaited and badly needed bug fixes and distribution changes that have come before it.

        On the four systems I have updated so far, the download was between 900MB and 1GB, and it took quite a while to install — 30 to 60 minutes after the download completed. If you prefer to wait for updated ISO images incorporating this Update Pack, the Linux Mint teams said in their release announcement that those should become available over the next “weeks or months”.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Opening Ubuntu Up To the World

            Recently I have been working with David Planella and Michael Hall on my team around a new specification for empowering app developers to deliver their content in Ubuntu. This post provides some background information around this work and the problem it seeks to solve.

            Like many of you, I am hugely proud of the progress we have made with Ubuntu over the years. We have worked together to create a simple, powerful experience underlined with the foundation of our core Ubuntu values of creating a free platform, available to all, in your language, irrespective of (dis)ability.

          • The Ubuntu 12.10 Desktop Includes Amazon Search Results–Users Revolt

            While some are calling it a tempest in a teapot, Ubuntu loyalists are expressing fury that the next version of Ubuntu includes shopping suggestions from Amazon directly in desktop search results. Version 12.10 is imminent, and many Ubuntu users feel like the Amazon inclusions are nothing more than adware. What does Canonical get out of this arrangement, and will the company reverse its decision? Mark Shuttleworth has weighed in.

            Version 12.10 of Ubuntu has a lot to like, and it has an updated version of the Unity desktop environment, Unity 3D, which includes a range of desktop effects achieved through hardware acceleration. However, Ubuntu fans of up in arms over the inclusion of Amazon results in the desktop search function, and many are concerned that their personal data will be picked up by Amazon.

          • Ubuntu on Air!: Beta
          • All your base are belong to Canonical
          • On The Recent Dash Improvements
          • Ubuntu: Re-Doing the Possible

            There’s some sort of push back going on regarding the Ubuntu shopping lens. It’s a neat little feature that I wouldn’t want to be in the home screen, but would like to have in it’s own category.

          • Ubuntu 12.10: What to Expect

            According to my sources, it’s almost October, and that can mean but one thing: The debut of Ubuntu 12.10 is almost upon us. To prepare, here’s a look at some of the biggest changes to expect in the forthcoming release of one of the world’s most popular open source operating systems.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Will Have an Improved Unity Interface

            With last night’s update, Canonical published a major update to the Unity interface of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system, due for release next month.

            The improved Unity interface brings new lenses, such as a Shopping Lens for your online shopping needs and a Google Docs Scope for searching through your online stored documents. Also, price and user ratings ribbons were added on suggested apps – information taken from Ubuntu Software Center.

          • Desktop Linux: Has Ubuntu’s Unity Surpassed the Mac?

            At OSCON in 2008, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, challenged the crowd, “The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop. Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”

            The challenge was a defining moment for desktop Linux, coming near the start of an era in which KDE, GNOME, and Ubuntu would all attempt to rethink the desktop.

            Four years later, speaking again at OSCON, Shuttleworth implied victory. “We’ve leapt ahead of some of the competition,” he said, claiming that Ubuntu’s Unity desktop was now the second easiest to use after Windows, and showing specific elements in which he felt Unity surpassed Mac OS X.

          • New Update of Landscape Is Part of Ubuntu’s Enterprise Push
          • Canonical Updates Ubuntu Linux Landscape

          • Flavours and Variants

            • ArtistX 1.3 Is Based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

              Marco Ghirlanda has announced a couple of days ago, on September 23rd, that the ArtistX 1.3 Linux distribution is available for download.

              ArtistX 1.3 is based on the popular Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system and is powered by Linux kernel 3.0.0.

              With over 2,500 open source multimedia applications on-board, this release of ArtistX features the GNOME 3.4 and KDE Software Compilation 4.8 desktop environments.

            • Peppermint OS Three: between the cloud and the desktop

              The cloud era is coming. Some people can argue whether this is good or bad. Maybe that’s only the fashion. Maybe not. Although more and more people think of the cloud as if it were the inevitable future.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Using Raspberry Pi as a Photo Station

      Although Raspberry Pi (RPi) is not powerful enough for heavy-duty image processing, you can still put it to some photography-related uses. For example, as an amateur photographer, I take a lot of photos when I travel, and I upload the photos to my Raspberry Pi at home which neatly organizes and keeps them safe till I get back home.

      To turn RPi into a photo station, I opted for the Debian Wheezy minimal image. The only thing I needed to install was the usbmount tool which automatically mounts and unmounts external USB storage devices. Although it’s possible to save photos on the SD card, I decided to keep them on a dedicated 16GB USB stick which usbmount tool mounts at /media/usb0. Since the minimal image comes with an SSH server enabled by default, I only had to configure my router to make RPi accessible from the Internet.

    • Raspberry Pi: Turbo – Warranty safe overclocking

      Raspberry Pi’s can now shift into turbo by changing some configuration settings and getting a 50% power boost, all without voiding the warranty

    • Phones

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Vivaldi KDE tablet delayed following major setback

        KDE developer Aaron Seigo has announced that the release of the Vivaldi KDE tablet has been postponed for now. The 7-inch tablet will use the Mer Project’s Linux distribution as its operating system, and KDE Plasma Active as its default desktop user interface. However, the manufacturer of the originally chosen Zenithink C71 tablet has modified the system board of the device at short notice. Having made numerous adjustments to the Linux kernel to support the previous system board, the developers must therefore restart their development work almost from scratch.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Study urges CIOs to choose open source first

    CIOs looking to replace legacy systems should consider open source options over proprietary software or public cloud services, according to a study by prominent British IT academic, Professor Jim Norton.

    Norton’s study, released today and commissioned by travel industry processing giant Amadeus, assessed the role of open source software in critical transaction systems.

  • Google’s Code-in Contest Is Ideal for Teens Interested In Open Source

    Google has announced its third annual Code-in contest for high school students, an international contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source software development. According to the announcement: “The goal of the contest is to give students the opportunity to explore the many types of projects and tasks involved in open source software development. Globally, open source software development is becoming a major factor in all industries from governments, healthcare, and relief efforts to gaming and large tech companies.” This looks like one of the better opportunities for young people picking up technical skills to differentiate themselves from the pack.

  • The Open Source Column – It pays to help

    The vast majority among the Linux community? Incredibly helpful. The minute minority? Less so, suspects Simon…

  • How to pay for open source

    We often think of open source as “free software.” That’s a good association. Many people follow the tradition, dating from the ’80s, of referring to software that offers users the liberty to deploy, study, modify, and distribute its source code as “free software.”

    But that’s “free” as in liberty, not “free” as in beer. Like it or not, the idea of getting something for nothing still drives many customers to open source solutions — and can deceive them into into thinking it’s wrong to pay people for open source software.

  • Open NASA – An Interview with Nick Skytland from NASA

    An interview with one of the talented people behind NASAs Open Government initiative.

  • Pentaho, Cisco Partner on Open Source Big Data Solution

    Big Data often requires “Big Hardware.” In other words, to process and analyze large stores of information, organizations usually need a lot of computing power, which brings with it its own set of demands and maintenance costs. Eying opportunity in this challenge, open source Big Data analytics company Pentaho has partnered with Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) to deliver a complete hardware and software solution for business analytics. Here’s the scoop.

  • Rackspace Hands Over Keys to Open Source Cloud

    When Rackspace and NASA started OpenStack — a collection of open source tools for building Amazon-style clouds in any data center — Rackspace shouldered the responsibility for organizing the community.

    But as that community grew, it became clear that the project needed a more neutral steward, and the company started taking steps to hand the project over to the non-profit OpenStack Foundation.

    On Wednesday, that transition was completed, as Rackspace handed over the OpenStack trademark, and the foundation officially took over governance of the project. From here on out, the OpenStack Foundation is responsible for all legal, financial, marketing and operational management issues.

  • 80 Open Source Replacements for Audio-Video Tools

    Multimedia creation and consumption continue to be among the most common uses for PCs and mobile devices. Consider: According to recent research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 46 percent of U.S. Internet users have posted original videos or photos online. Seventy-one percent of online Americans have used a video sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo.

    Recording industry trade association IFPI reports that more than half of record company revenues from the U.S. come from digital music, and those digital music revenues continue to grow every year. Global Industry Analysts forecasts that mobile entertainment, including video and music, will be a $67.6 billion industry by 2018.

  • British Academic Advises CIOs to Choose Open Source
  • Open source in 2012: Bigger and better than ever

    This year’s Best of Open Source Software awards includes a whopping 125 products in 7 categories. The real story is the technology leadership so many of these products display

  • 5 Free Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Office

    While Microsoft Office is the industry standard in terms of , integrated applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database management, email and desktop publishing. However, it’s important for small business owners to know that these types of office applications are also available in free and open source office productivity applications.

    Open source office software has come a long way in recent years, so choosing free software over expensive proprietary software doesn’t mean you’ll lose features and support. Today’s open source office productivity software is feature-rich and provides ample access to online documentation and large communities of users and developers.

  • 5 Best Open Source Tools to Create Scalable Online Social Networking Platforms

    While Facebook and Twitter is the core of the Internet’s social networking world, some companies and organizations may have reasons to set up their own social networking applications. For some companies, setting up their own social network is a good option because the public Internet may not be secure enough for certain conversations concerning sensitive proprietary information or customer contact information.

  • How Successful CEOs Leverage Open Source Software
  • Open source education software unveiled by Google

    Online education startups such as the Khan Academy, along with new efforts by MIT, Stanford, and Harvard have helped spur interest in and add legitimacy to the notion of remote learning. Now Google is lending its brainpower to the rapidly growing area by releasing a tool called Course Builder, open source software designed to let anyone create online education courses.

    The Course Builder project came by way of another program Google ran earlier this year called Power Searching With Google. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which attracted approximately 155,000 students from 196 countries, allowed Google to marry some of the practices now common to online instruction with the company’s robust array of collaboration and communication tools. A new Power Searching session begins in two weeks.

  • Open Source Ceph Storage Filesystem Advances with Inktank

    Sage Weil started the Ceph filesystem as a research project. Today that research project is a bona fide enterprise option for Big Data and cloud storage purposes.

    Ceph is now in the Linux kernel and Weil is the CEO of startup Inktank, which provides commercial support for Ceph.

  • Events

    • Linux Event TV: One-on-One with Open Source Visionaries

      Linux Foundation events are studded with Linux and open source community leaders, as well as some eccentric personalities. What better place than one of these events to sit down and talk to the people who are making innovation happen in software development and cloud computing?

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • ZTE Will Be Mozilla’s Smartphone Partner in China

        As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Chinese telecom company ZTE will be launching smartphones based on Mozilla’s new “Firefox OS” mobile operating system. Based on open standards, the mobile OS is being aimed at primarily emerging markets around the world. With Qualcomm and Telefonica in place as existing Mozilla partners, the ZTE hookup implies that Mozilla’s play in the smartphone arena may have some real legs.

      • Mozilla Firefox Completes 10 Successful Years

        Firefox is the third most popular browser in the world

      • Meet the Mozilla OS Developer Phone

        It’s no secret that Mozilla has been working on a mobile OS. Previously codenamed Boot2Gecko, the project focused on a purely HTML5 based system that worked in many ways like current mobile devices. As the project grew into Mozilla OS, the company has laid out a partnership with ZTE that will have real world devices in certain markets early next year. Testing for this OS had previously consisted of a compiled ROM that would be flashed over a handful of Android devices. Now, Mozilla has moved into full fledged product evaluation mode with their own custom developer phone.

      • Why is Open Source WebKit the Weak Link in Apple Security?

        bout a month before the recent HP mobile pwn2own event, I told the event organizers that is extremely likely that the mobile vulns they find will be WebKit related.

        As it turns it out I was right and I’m not surprised.

        The iPHone 4S was hacked by way of a WebKit vuln and I strongly suspect the NFC attack on the Samsung Galaxy had a WebKit component too. WebKit vulnerability fixes also rank highly (by my count over 50 percent) for all security fixes made in the recent Apple iOS 6 update.

        WebKit vulnerabilities also accounted for over 100 flaws fixed in Apple’s latest iTunes update.

      • Next Firefox ESR release planned

        Enterprise users of Firefox should get ready for the next cycle of Firefox ESR, which will begin on 20 November 2012. The Mozilla developers have clarified their plans for the next release of Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release), the version designed for enterprises and other organisations that require a stable qualified version of the browser for inhouse deployment.

        The process, as designed, sees a Firefox ESR release being cloned from the mainstream version of Firefox at a particular point in time, in this case the release of Firefox 17 at the end of November, to create Firefox ESR 17. Then, over the next two cycles of mainstream Firefox development, Firefox ESR is tested and bugs fixed in it creating versions 17.0.1 (alongside Firefox 18 on 8 January 2013) and 17.0.2 (alongside Firefox 19 on 19 February 2013).

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle broadens support for open-source R analytics
    • Exclusive Interview | Alasdair Lumsden

      At Unixmen, we were lucky enough to score an exclusive interview with former Project Leader of the OpenIndiana, Alasdair Lumsden.

      Since Alasdair’s resignation, it has not only sparked discussion on the reasons of Alasdair’s resignation from OpenIndiana, but also generated a lot of interesting discussion on development and the future of OpenIndiana.

      I want to really thank Alasdair for taking the time to chat with Unixmen and reveal all in this very intimate and honest view of OpenIndiana from the very inside of the project.

  • CMS

  • Semi-Open Source

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Spotlight on … “free France!”

      It is certain that with just some little errors that contains the form 35837 like the article 3.2.2 about the free software license are not another form of law, but international law for computers an industries and another error in the 3.2.6 which seems to misunderstood Free Software and Open Source.

  • Project Releases

    • Joomla 2.5.7 Released
    • Version 2.6.0 of Avidemux video editor released

      With the recent release of version 2.6.0, the cross-platform Avidemux video editor has had all of its internals rewritten and now supports more scripting languages. Avidemux is a basic, open source video editing tool designed for simple tasks such as cutting, filtering and encoding; these tasks can be automated using project and job queues, or with Avidemux’s built-in scripting capabilities. Supported formats include AVI, DVD-compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, as well as a variety of codecs.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Licensing

    • Open-Source Software Licenses

      To some people’s surprise, even open-source software has a license attached to it. And with that license comes a description and agreement for what can and can’t be done with the source code of any particular product or service. What exact license the specific open-source software lies under is generally up to the developer(s) and/or current maintainers of the original code.

      Open-source software licensing is not something that I have really taken particular notice of in previous and recent times. In fact, all code I have ever created or modified has been done so with no regard to what the license is. I am guilty, yes, as are probably a lot of open-source developers and programmers.

    • Open sourcing legal docs for small business

      Open source is one of the concepts that has taken off in a variety of implementations: hardware, cars, and… legal documents?

      Sure, why not? Docracy, is a start-up that provides free, open-source legal documents to individuals and companies that need them, as well as a framework on which legal agreements can be negotiated and signed electronically.

      As a freelance writer, I have used e-signing services myself to get contracts signed so I can get paid. So far, everything has all worked well, in the sense that I am getting paid. But I also wonder how well such electronic signatures would actually stand up in court should I or one of my vendors decide to get squirrelly?

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Hardware

      • Baccus open-source robotic arm hits Kickstarter

        Baccus is an open-source robotic arm project aimed primarily at educators and researchers, but because it is seeking funding on Kickstarter, it also poses value to robotics enthusiasts or people who just want to see the latest and most unique crowdfunded scientific advancements.

  • Programming

    • 9 key career issues software developers face

      The path from birth to death is filled with choices about where to work and what kind of work to do. Sometimes the world is nice enough to allow us some input. These days, developers have a lot more say in their employment, thanks to rising demand for their services.

      Whether you’re an independent contractor or a cubicle loyalist with a wandering eye, programming want ads abound, each stirring its own set of questions about how best to steer your career. For some, this is entirely new territory, having fallen into employment with computers simply as a means to scratch an itch.

Leftovers

  • Finance

    • The Omerta Surrounding Goldman Sachs: A Documentary

      On September 4th, the French-German Television channel, Arte, will show a documentary based on the book The Bank: How Goldman Sachs Rules the World by London-based correspondent for Le Monde, Marc Roche. Last week I spoke with Mr. Roche and co-director of the film Jerome Fritel in London and Paris, respectively, about the new documentary. Every time I think I have heard enough of how bad the banks are and what new thing has been discovered on or off their books, and proven to be legal, if immoral, I am always surprised by how far certain players go to make a profit.

    • Who Will Bear the Brunt of “Deficit Reduction”?

      A sort of joke making the rounds a few years back had (billionaire) Bill Gates walking into a working class bar. The joke was that the moment he did everyone in the bar on average became a billionaire. Understand—he didn’t give away any money or, other than possibly ordering a beer and paying for it, did any money change hands. But through the miracle of statistics the gargantuan difference in wealth between Mr. Gates and the other bar patrons was converted to faux equitable distribution under the measure of ‘average’ wealth.

    • Citigroup, Goldman, UBS Sued Over Mortgage-Backed Bonds
    • Goldman Sachs Sued Over Mortgage Bonds
    • Better investment = better innovation: a radical shift for EU research in ICT

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Romney and “Investments” by the 1%?

      “People can invest what they want,” billionaire industrialist David Koch recently told Politico.

      Koch wasn’t discussing the stock market or oil futures. He was talking money in politics: wealthy donors “investing” in elected officials, apparently with the expectation of getting a return. In total, donors like the Kochs, along with Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, and “outside” groups have pledged to raise a total of $1 billion this election to elect Republicans, particularly President Barack Obama’s opponent Mitt Romney.

    • Response to DfE consultation on parental controls

      The consultation followed a code of conduct signed by the main UK ISPs in October 2011, in which they promised to give new customers a choice about whether they wanted parental controls set up on their account. Shortly afterwards, Claire Perry MP launched a campaign for more internet filtering, and ran an inquiry into the issue. The report, which was sponsored by Premier Christian Media, recommended that ISP level filtering be switched on by default.

  • Censorship

    • CleanIT: bad policy making

      Thanks to an EDRi leak, European proposals for widespread action against “terrorism” were revealed last week, with press coverage in the Telegraph and elsewhere.

      The project – Clean IT – moved swiftly to deny that they had been a closed project, which is partly true. They also tried to reduce the significance of the document they had produced, saying it was “for discussion” (even though page one of the leaked document suggests the contents are ‘detailed recommendations’).

      The plans include measures for upload filtering, corporate censorship, plus procedures for flagging dubious content.

  • Copyrights

    • Another Judge Blasts Copyright Trolls

      We’ve been seeing more and more judges reacting negatively to copyright trolls. What’s interesting is that they seem to be getting more aggressive in their statements against the trolls, and it seems clear that fewer judges are falling for their antics. The latest is from Judge Harold Baer in the Southern District of New York, who you could say is not impressed by some copyright trolling cases that have ended up in his court, coming from Media Products and Patrick Collins. He had allowed for expedited discovery, which is what copyright trolls want, but it seems quite clear that Baer regrets that decision and now seeks to reverse it. Expedited discovery basically gives the trolls what they want: it lets them subpoena ISPs to find out contact info of users based on the IP addresses they’ve collected. From that point on, they have no intention of ever proceeding with the actual lawsuit. They just want to start pressuring people into “settling.”

09.24.12

Links 24/9/2012: New Distros, GNOME 3.7 is Coming

Posted in News Roundup at 11:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • New Workgroup Will Deliver a Standard Linux Platform for Cars

    Vehicles have been an emerging platform for Linux for some time now, with much of the momentum driven by auto makers and a few technology standards bodies, plus steadfast support for the trend from The Linux Foundation. Now, The Linux Foundation has announced the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL). It will “facilitate widespread industry collaboration that advances automotive device development,providing a community reference platform that companies can use forcreating products,” according to the Workgroup announcement. News of it arrives amidst other news related to Linux in vehicles.

  • The Linux Foundation Announces Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup

    The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the Automotive Grade Linux Workgroup (AGL). The Workgroup will facilitate widespread industry collaboration that advances automotive device development, providing a community reference platform that companies can use for creating products.

  • The State of Linux in 2012

    Every year for the past four years, Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation gets in front of thousands of Linux developers and users at the LinuxCon conference to detail the success and the State of Linux.

  • This Week in Linux: Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, and More
  • Becoming a completely Linux household Clip to Evernote

    That’s something I’ve been wanting to happen for a while. Until recently, we were 2/3 the way there – with the laptops and mobile devices that my daughter and I use all running Linux or Android. But I finally got my wish of living in a completely Linux household a few weeks ago, all thanks to my wife’s laptop.

    It all started one Saturday morning when my wife wanted to scan some documents. Her laptop went into rather scary boot-shutdown loop, and the hard drive started clicking. This had happened a few months ago, and as it turned out the particular model of hard drive used in her laptop (which the manufacturer replaced) is one that’s prone to failure.

  • From My Linux Soapbox!

    One of the strong points about Linux is its hardware detection at boot time.

  • Desktop

    • Google Drive File Management Is a Big Deal for Chrome OS

      It’s the end of August, and in case you missed it, Google closed out the month by delivering a new stable release of Chrome OS that does a few things that many users have been clamoring for. As noted on VentureBeat, the update “…finally gives the browser-based operating system file management to match the original product vision: a thin layer on hardware that puts intelligence and storage in the cloud. Now, users will have the option to save a file directly to Google Drive, instead of being forced to save it locally and then upload it.” Indeed, the update solves long-standing file management problems that Chrome OS has had.

    • Why It Makes Sense for Google to Rent Chromebooks

      This is a wise strategy from Google as it seeks to turn the enterprise into its next large market to conquer. Putting Chrome OS-based hardware in enterprises could be the final step in validating the operating system.

    • How would you fix the Linux desktop?

      I was reading the back-and-forth between Miguel de Icaza and Linus Torvalds (with special guest star Alan Cox) over the holiday weekend, and I was hardly surprised by the amount of finger-pointing going on.

      In case you missed it, de Icaza got the ball rolling with a blog entry a week ago opining on What Killed the Linux Desktop. The fault, de Icaza stated, lay in the way that Linux developers would consistently deprecate APIs just to improve them, coupled with the myriad of configurations between each separate distro.

    • The System76 Gazelle Professional: Just How Good Is It? [Review]

      The Gazelle Professional is the flagship laptop from Ubuntu computer maker’s System76.

    • The History of Linux

      Linux history teaserLinux has been around for more than 20 years and serves happily in both desktop and server roles. But it didn’t show up overnight. Linux is the result of the collaboration of lots of people over the years.

    • History of Early Linux Distros

      If you haven’t noticed, if you’re looking for a Linux distribution, you’re spoiled for choice. Sites like DistroWatch list hundreds of different Linux distros on the site. But where did they all come from?

      Since Linux is just a kernel, as Richard Stallman is fond of pointing out, it’s not really that useful by itself, and regardless of how you feel about the GNU/Linux naming controversy, it really is a misnomer to call Linux an operating system. As a kernel, it just does basic things like storing files on a hard drive or accessing a network. It requires utilities to make it useful.

  • Server

    • Software Defined Datacenter – All You Really Need is Linux

      vmwareMaybe I’m getting old. Perhaps that’s why I just don’t get it anymore when I see the direction of the virtualization industry, and specifically, VMware. The virtualization giant has been swinging around the buzzword, and of course, accompanying acronym, “Software Defined Datacenter”, SDDC for short, to explain their take on how VMware can be the center of the IT world. However, when I look at their latest offering, I see layers upon layers of complexity, hiding beneath the veneer of their slick GUI. I have a simpler solution, a programmable datacenter.

    • Supercomputer Built From Lego Blocks And Raspberry Pi ARM Boxes

      How cheaply can you build a supercomputer? A group from the University of Southampton just made one using 64 Raspberry Pi ARM GNU/Linux boxes ($25 each) and Lego blocks. The machine, named “Iridis-Pi” after the University’s Iridis supercomputer, runs off a single 13 Amp mains socket and uses MPI (Message Passing Interface) to communicate between nodes using Ethernet.

    • Cambridge Uni publishes free Pi-OS baking course

      Cambridge University has joined the ranks of terribly prestigious universities giving computer science classes away online, releasing a 12-step course teaching how to create what it calls a “basic terminal Operating System” for the Raspberry Pi.

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Skateboarding with Greg Kroah-Hartman

      After the Linux Kernel Summit was done, the Linux kernel panel had wrapped and the LinuxCon and CloudOpen keynotes were finished, there was only one thing left to do at last week’s event: Skate. You might have heard rumblings and seen pictures of the skateboards that were given away as speaker and VIP gifts at this year’s event (you might have even scored one). Well, on Friday we took them out to the curb and put them to work – - with a little help from Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman.

    • 10 Insights from Linux Leaders in the Open Cloud

      How do the Linux and open source communities define the open cloud? Our Leaders of the Open Cloud series posed this key question, along with many others, to industry heavyweights in the 10 weeks leading up to the CloudOpen conference in San Diego last month. Here, we’ve distilled their answers into a slideshow to illustrate the range of participants and viewpoints as well as some areas of contention.

    • Linux 4.0 Coming in 2015?

      Linus Torvalds took stage tonight at the LinuxCon conference in a panel discussion about the state of Linux. Lucky for me they took questions from the audience via Twitter – though apparently i was the only one that asked questions over Twitter…

      I asked about the naming issue – many of us were almost caught of guard by how the whole Linux 3.0 name came about, with Linus pretty much saying at the time that the numbers in the 2.6.x series had simply just gotten too large. The last 2.6 kernel was the 2.6.39 kernel.

    • If Linus Torvalds Got Hit By a Bus Would Linux Die?

      As was the case in the beginning, Torvalds remains the leader of Linux and is responsible for maintaining the mainline kernel and pushing out its new leading-edge releases. One of the questions that has long been asked, and was asked again at the LinuxCon conference on Wednesday night, is the question of succession known as, “What if Linus gets hit by a bus?”

    • Kernel Log – Coming in 3.6 (Part 5): Infrastructure

      Similarly to current versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Linux is now capable of a hybrid sleep state. The 3.6 kernel also provides improved randomisation and reduces the work load of EFI bootloaders.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Linux Multi-Monitor Support Could Be Improved

        While some want Linux multi-monitor support removed, others are looking for it to be improved. Multiple display support for Linux has improved over the years with X.Org and desktop environment advancements, it’s still generally less than ideal, especially for Linux gamers.

        With the liaising earlier this week between a long-time Linux desktop developer (circa 1996) and a game company, besides talking about the AMD Catalyst driver being on his blacklist of junk, he had many thoughts to share on the state of Linux multi-monitor support.

      • Wayland 1.0 Stable Release Is Imminent

        Kristian Høgsberg spoke this week at XDC2012 about Wayland and Weston. Here’s a short recap plus some videos that include new demos of this promising project.

        Kristian began with a Wayland/Weston status and overview where he reiterated information about the desktop technology that has advanced in recent months — pretty much what’s already been covered by past Phoronix Wayland articles.

      • The Future Of OpenGL On Linux Looks Better

        The discussion was around providing a new Linux OpenGL ABI to better focus around today’s needs and technologies rather than sticking to a decade old ABI. Backwards compatibility, however, will be maintained. That article has more information on the background of the original proposal by NVIDIA for coming up with a new Linux OpenGL ABI.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • A real update on the progress of Wayland in KWin and KDE

        Of course I was asked quite often about the current state of Wayland in KDE and I honestly replied which resulted in rather incorrect “news” postings about Wayland in KDE not happening “any time soon” (whatever that is supposed to mean) to “Wayland for KDE will be delayed” (given that we never had a schedule in the first place, it cannot be delayed).

      • An Improved Apper For KDE Users Is Coming

        KDE, while extremely customizable, always lacked a tool which resembles the eye candy Ubuntu Software Center. One may argue that USC is not as powerful as plain Synaptic Package manager, yet it is polished enough to attract average user. KDE’s own Apper comes close but there are some missing features which keep it below the USC.

      • Randa Fundraising Success!
      • New KDE Telepathy 0.5 Adds Improved Images And Video Support In Chat
      • Qt 5 Beta Released, Promises Improved Graphics

        Qt, a C++ GUI and application framework is up for a new major release. Lars Knoll announced the release of Qt 5 beta in the Qt Labs developer blog and this release has got some exciting features.

        Among the major changes, developer will enjoy improved graphics and advanced UIs for apps written in QML and JavaScript. For those who wish to make their Qt apps more connected with the web, Qt 5 will be a blessing. High performance and better tools are also some major milestones achieved in this release.

      • Randa begins and Lernstick

        The sun has risen this morning to reveal the beautiful valley which a some 20 or so KDE community members have gathered to work on 3 main topics (multimedia, accessibility and Plasma). People were awake and hacking here in Randa until the early hours of the morning of our first day here. In the Plasma room we spent the day catching up with each other and what we’re working on as well as starting in on libplasma2, the next version of the underlying Plasma library, with the goal of having it in top shape for inclusion in the first release of Frameworks 5.

      • KDE Commit-Digest for 22nd July 2012

      • GNOME Desktop

        • Choose your Gnome distribution!
        • Gnome Shell 3.6 Preview

          Gnome 3.5.92 has been released few days ago and nothing more than translations and bug fixes will arrive till the stable release at September 26.

          Gnome Shell and Nautilus were the two modules that received huge development from 3.5.91 to .92 and more development is expected in 3.6.1 version in October 17. Gnome Shell 3.6 brings major changes in optics and huge improvements underneath.

        • A place for GNOME?
        • Input Sources in GNOME

          Today I want to take a look at one of the bigger new features in the upcoming GNOME release, Input Sources. I have written some early code for this, but the credit for getting it all working and completed really goes to Rui Matos and Takao Fujiwara.

      • Gnome 3.7 May Release On October 24, Gnome 3.8 On March 27th

        A release candidate of Gnome 3.9 is already out and Gnome 3.6 stable release is scheduled on September 26. However, development never stops in Linux world, and the developers are already making plans for the next releases. Currently, you can suggest some features for future Gnome releases as we announced earlier, and Gnome 3.8 feature freeze is on October 22nd this year.

      • Gnome 3.8 Accessibility improvements!

        Accessibility is an always important factor for Gnome designers/developers. All the people of the world should be able to use and contribute to our favorite desktop environment no matter their physical disabilities.

        Two new accessibility oriented/related features are now discussed and initiating with the purpose of being ready for the 3.8 release. These are the color tinting in Gnome Shell and the focus-caret tracking.

      • Gnome Sudoku: Final Look

        In Google Summer of Code this summer, Gnome apps and games got major enhancements and bug removals. One of the games that specially was given importance was Gnome Sudoku. Chris Baines has posted a screenshot on his blog about the final look of this game.

      • Preview of GNOME 3.6

        The Activities Overview has seen some improvements too that Clasen says will make a big difference in one’s overall GNOME experience. He explains, “Applications can now be accessed using the grid button in the dash, rather than by clicking on the applications tab. This improves the layout of the overview, and enables us to highlight the all-important search bar. It also addresses an issue that we saw when observing people use GNOME 3, where the applications button sometimes went unnoticed.”

      • Cinnamon 1.6 To Support Keyboard Navigation, Configurable Panel Heights And Notifications Applet
      • Gnome Shell 3.5.91 Released

        A new version of Gnome shell is out. This version is mostly a bug fix release and will be merged with the 3.6 release cycle. As its quite unstable, its not recommended to be installed as default work environment. You can, however, install it to get a taste of Gnome 3.6 and report bugs to the Gnome team.

      • Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer’s Redefined Looks

        With Gnome 3.6 release coming closer, a lot of visible improvements are arriving in the desktop front. Some applications have got some renovated looks, namely Nautilus, Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer, Empathy and the Gnome Message Tray. Gnome Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab) has got some visual improvements and looks cleaner now. Some screenshots below…

      • GNOME Answers Criticisms

        Since GNOME 3 was released in April 2011, the criticism has often been harsh (and, yes, I contributed to it myself). Seventeen months later, it shows few signs of ending, and Linux Mint has released Cinnamon and Mate, two popular re-creations of GNOME 2, as an alternative. Yet aside from the occasional comment from individuals, the GNOME Project itself has refrained from answering.

      • GNOME is simply losing its grasp

        The GNOME development team shot another bullet in their foot when they removed some beloved features from the Nautilus file manager. Read Jack Wallen’s take on how this serves as the final blow to GNOME’s relevancy.

      • 13 years old hacker Esteban is announced developer of the month! ..and the Cinnamon 1.5.8!

        Some great news come from Mint camp this month. First, Mint has been ranked “Best Distro 2012″ by Linux Format! Then, Mint is proud to have in his side one of the most talented hackers, the just 13 years old Esteban -esteban1uy- who was announced as the developer of the month (in Mint).

      • Senior GNOME dev says users not being ignored

        Despite public perception to the contrary, GNOME developers pay a great deal of attention to the opinions of users, senior GNOME developer Vincent Untz told iTWire today.

        Untz is in Orlando, Florida, to attend the first SUSECON, the first annual conference of the Linux company; the quiet-spoken Frenchman, who was on the GNOME Foundation board from 2006 till 2010, has been working for SUSE since 2008.

  • Distributions

    • New Distro Manjaro Linux Based on Arch

      There’s a new distro in town and it is not based on Ubuntu. In fact, almost the opposite – it’s based on and completely compatible with Arch Linux. Well, maybe not opposite because they aim to make Arch easy to install and use. The main version features Xfce 4.10, but they also offer GNOME and KDE DVDs. Best of all, it’s an install live CD/DVD.

    • Secure Your Network With pfSense

      One of my first experiences with network security was building firewalls for small offices and Internet cafés. Our boss at the time was adamant that we use open source, and directed us to OpenBSD and “pf”, their packet filtering firewall. It was a good call. OpenBSD proved to be rock solid, and pf was easy to configure and easy to maintain. Fast-forward a little over a decade and I’ve just finished installing a new pf-based firewall, this time as an entire FreeBSD distribution called pfSense.

    • Too Many Geeks, Too Much Choice

      One of my favorites is a quote from King Linus himself. “Everything would be easier if there was no choice.” That’s his way of saying freedom is messy. Many think freedom always results in more choice and that’s always a good thing.

      The problem with Open Source Software and freedom is that sometimes no one chooses the difficult or seemingly boring and unappreciated aspects. However, many times someone comes along and improves the product, Magiea and LibreOffice are two prime examples. But sometimes they don’t, like Symphony OS. Ultimately, consensus seems to be that the benefits of Open Source minus the problems associated with it are still preferable to the disadvantages even with the advantages of popular but proprietary software.

    • Warren Woodford and the Linux distro market | Interview

      Warren Woodford is the man behind MEPIS, one of the first ever GNU/Linux distributions that tried to be more friendly to the user. In this quick interview he talks about the distribution market, the different strategies that are followed and his opinion on what all distributions should do in order for the Linux desktop to grow and prosper.

    • SolusOS 1.2 Eveline Review

      SolusOS is a lightweight distribution which uses Gnome 2 as its desktop interface and it is geared towards novice Linux users or those who do not need a heavy distribution.

      Coming off the heels of an impressive first release earlier this year, we are back with an updated version of this distribution. The main focus is still the same but it now has some updated offerings.SolusOS 1.2 now comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors which for those who have more than 4GB of memory can now access all of it making a huge improvement in performance and multitasking. This distribution still comes as a Live media so you can try it before installing it.

    • SolusOS Eveline 1.2 Review

      After recently installing the Debian based edition of Linux Mint operating system on my home office desktop, I decided to take a look at another Debian based Linux distribution, SolusOS.

      This is my first time trying SolusOS, so I dived in with an innocent fresh mind. Upon booting the LiveCD, I couldn’t help but notice how fast the SolusOS boot process is. Whether it has been tweaked by the developers or whether it is due the lightweight nature of the distribution, I’m not too sure.

    • Snowlinux 3 E17 Crystal Review: Fast, very fast!

      The world of preferred Linux window manager is dominated by Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE primarily. About 90% of the new releases I see are based on either of the four desktops because of the extremely elegant graphical interfaces they offer. However, with changing priorities and a need to provide aesthetically pleasing visual effects, Linux world is also undergoing tremendous transformation, specially Gnome 3. Most of the today’s highly sophisticated Linux distros no longer run well on low resource environment or support desktops less than 512 MB RAM.

    • New Releases

      • Parted Magic Team Releases 2012_09_12
      • ArtistX 1.3
      • Mandriva and Fedora Release Alphas

        The Linux world received two exciting announcements recently. Two popular distributions have released alphas of their next versions. Fedora 18 Alpha “offers a preview of some of the best free and open-source technology currently under development” and Mandriva 2012 Alpha sports “quality closer to what one would expect from a RC.”

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • PCLinuxOS KDE 2012.08 Review: Better than ever!

        To start with, I became a big fan of PCLinuxOS since February this year. First time, I used PCLinux (I am still a Linux n00b) when I downloaded the Feb’12 release and installed it in one of the systems I have. I am not a KDE fan but PCLinuxOS is different! I have used Ubuntu mostly in last 2 year or so and I could never successfully update Ubuntu – I had to do fresh install every time! PCLinuxOS is actually the first Linux OS which I could upgrade without breaking anything. Also, there’s a knowledgeable and helpful forum in place to help you out of issues like screen not displaying proper resolution and stuff like that!

      • September 2012 issue of The PCLinuxOS Magazine Released!

        The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the September 2012 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is a product of the PCLinuxOS community, published by volunteers from the community. The magazine is lead by Paul Arnote, Chief Editor, and Assistant Editor Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo Picks Screenshot Contest Winners

        I used Gentoo for several years a while back, but I still remember the monthly screenshot threads. Gentoo users posted their screenshots to show off their customizing prowess or how minimal they could get. So, it always catches my eye when the Gentoo Website announces their official yearly winners. Today we found out the winners for 2012.

      • Sabayon 10 Released with Four Desktop Choices

        Sabayon 10 was released recently bringing lots of updates and your choice of four different desktop editions. Fabio Erculiani said, “If you really enjoyed Sabayon 9, this is just another step towards World domination (yay!).”

      • Sabayon X Gnome Screenshots
      • Sabayon 10 Review: Gentoo on steroids!

        Gentoo Linux is one Linux OS I haven’t tried yet. But, surely this week I am going to try their 2009 Special DVD edition. The best feature of Gentoo is, it is version-less and once you make an emerge update, it has the most up-to-date packages. There are step-by-step guides available to install Gentoo and once I try it, I’ll know how complicated or easy it is!

    • Red Hat Family

    • Debian Family

      • Debian Project News – September 17th, 2012

        Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10 will have a shopping lens
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Wallpapers Chosen
          • New Look Default Wallpaper Lands in Ubuntu 12.10
          • First Images Of Ubuntu Gnome Remix 12.10 Arrive For Testing

            It’s here. We have been writing about the ‘official’ edition of Ubuntu Gnome for almost a year now and it’s finally here. The first ISO (alpha) images of Gnome Shell edition of Ubuntu is now available for download and testing, Jeremy Bicha just told me on Google+.

          • GNOMEbuntu Will Be Available This October

            As a long time Ubuntu user I was essentially a Gnome user but Unity changed everything. Unity did bring a new UI but it also enabled Canonical to drive the development of Ubuntu in the direction they wanted to increase the market share of Ubuntu. We are noticing the results in the market as Ubuntu’s adoption is increasing.

            Unity is extremely rich when it comes to new features and services. You can keep an eye on OMG! Ubuntu or our Ubuntu section to see how Unity is shaping up. However, there are Gnome users who are still looking for the pure GNOME experience on top of the stability and app ecosystem of Ubuntu.

          • The New ‘Pure GNOME’ Ubuntu Linux Is Coming This Fall

            Earlier this month fans of the good old GNOME 2 desktop environment got some exciting news when it became clear that a version of Ubuntu Linux featuring the classic desktop was in the works.

          • Encrypted Installation Arrives In Ubuntu 12.10

            As days advance towards the Ubuntu Quantal release, new and exciting features are being added to Ubuntu; the old features and bugs are being squashed and Canonical is making sure that Ubuntu 12.10 will be the best Ubuntu release ever.

          • Canonical To Drop Ubuntu Alternate Installation CDs

            Canonical has decided to drop alternate Ubuntu installation CDs from the next Ubuntu release. This CDs were previously used to install Ubuntu with encryption and also configure RAID arrays for data storage. As per Ubuntu developer Steve Langasek, Ubuntu 12.10 default installation CD will support encrypted installations. Also RAID can be configured easily after installation.

          • Touring the Ubuntu Unity Desktop

            Ubuntu 12.04 is an alternative to the Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X operating systems. It features a functional and intuitive desktop environment.

            Ubuntu’s Unity desktop has similarities to both Windows and OS X, meaning that users considering the switch to Ubuntu should not have much difficultly becoming familiar with this alternative operating system (OS), which is based on Linux, a popular open-source OS.

          • Ubuntu provides magic that Windows 8 doesn’t

            Linux is the supreme software conquest for me, and one particular distribution has tormented my early adopter “lifestyle” — Red Hat Linux. It’s now long gone, abandoned by parent company Red Hat, though it was given a new lease on life through Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

            Ten years ago, I stumbled upon a magazine that came with a copy of Red Hat Linux 7, and I was so tempted to try it and see how it felt to run something other than the Windows editions of the day. My experience was less than ideal back then, but I’ve re-encountered Ubuntu and the spark has reignited…

          • Buying A Printer For Ubuntu
          • 5 golden rules

            Any company that wants to save a bundle in software licensing fees and build a productive, stable and secure computing environment for its users should download a free workbook entitled “Five Golden Rules for a Successful Ubuntu Desktop Migration.”

            Produced by Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, the book offers some pragmatic advice to companies that want to migrate from a proprietary system like Microsoft Windows to a free and open source platform.

          • Ubuntu Software Center Not Working

            Now go ahead and try to install something via apt-get. Chances are, it’s working now! And that is awesome. Sadly though, Synaptic and the software center still aren’t working quite right. So let’s fix that issue next.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Beta1 Screenshots

            The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 Release of Ubuntu 12.10 give you a preview of the next version of Ubuntu.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1: Preview

            The first beta build of Ubuntu 12.10 drops Unity 2D, retains Nautilus 3.4 and adds a new Dash preview, a Photo lens and new centralised Online Accounts management.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) Beta 1 Released.
          • Five Must Have Ubuntu Apps for Music

            For me one of my favorite things is listening to music and I use music as an aid to help make me more productive when working on projects. Luckily there are a variety of applications that “just work” on Ubuntu to help me get my music fix.

          • Five new features in Ubuntu 12.10 ‘Quantal Quetzal’ Beta 1
          • My impressions of Ubuntu/Unity – Ubuntu 12.04

            I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 on my MSI netbook for about a week now. The netbook is a 10″ model with a 1.66 Gig dual core Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 Gig of RAM and Intel Mobile 945GSE Integrated Graphics, 3 USB ports, VGA out, and Microphone and Headphone sockets, and an SD card slot.

            I’ve been using Ubuntu 12.04 on my MSI netbook for about a week now. The netbook is a 10″ model with a 1.66 Gig dual core Intel Atom N280 CPU, 1 Gig of RAM and Intel Mobile 945GSE Integrated Graphics, 3 USB ports, VGA out, and Microphone and Headphone sockets, and an SD card slot.

            I’ve been using it with Ubuntu Studio, with XFCE desktop and Audio applications, but became quite annoyed with it because it kept losing the network applet, and it never seemed to connect with the wireless network unless I was within a meter of the transmitter.

            So as I had a copy of Ubuntu on hand, I decided to give that a go.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1 (Report #3)

            Just a quick update on my experience running the pre-release version of Ubuntu (this time upgraded to Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 1!). Not a whole lot new to report – Beta 1 is basically the same as Alpha 3 but with the addition of an option to connect to a Remote Server directly from the login screen. Unfortunately the bugs that I have filed so far have yet to be resolved, but I’m still hopeful someone has a chance to correct them prior to release.

          • Online Shopping Feature Arrives in Ubuntu 12.10
          • Should Ubuntu’s Minimize Button Be Vertical?

            When was the last time you paid any attention to the icons used inside Ubuntu’s window controls?

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal Beta 1 Review

            The beta version of the next Ubuntu release – 12.10 Quantal Quetzal – is now available for testing. There are several new and interesting features added and whether you like it or not, the Unity desktop is here to stay and it is getting better with each release.

          • Ubuntu Unity: A beginner’s walk-through

            You may have noticed that over the last year, I’ve spoken quite a lot about Ubuntu Unity. More specifically, I’ve become quite the champion for Unity being one of the most efficient desktops on the market. I thought it might be helpful to take you on a walk through of the default Ubuntu desktop to help you see just how it could be that a completely different desktop could possibly be so user-friendly and efficient.

          • Shuttleworth defends Ubuntu Linux integrating Amazon

            You’d think someone had just kicked some Ubuntu Linux fans’ puppy. Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has added Amazon search results to the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Dash search function. Some users hate this and have declared Ubuntu to be adware. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, has replied that this response is FUD. Here’s what’s really happening.

            First, yes, when you do a search from Unity Dash in Ubuntu 12.10, besides the usual search results you’ll also see a More Suggestions results box. This will contain, not ads, but search results from Amazon. This is part of the integration of Web apps into the Ubuntu desktop. In addition to the Amazon integration into Ubuntu search, there’s also a separate Amazon search app. More than 40 other “Web site apps” such as BBC News, Facebook, and Reddit also will be available.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • First look at Linux Mint 13 “KDE” edition

              Before I get into my review this week I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge a good suggestion I received earlier this year. One of our readers pointed out that burning distribution images to CDs and DVDs was wasteful as, eventually, the discs typically end up in the trash. The reader suggested switching to a USB thumb drive in order to be more environmentally friendly. At the time I had been testing most distributions on two machines, one of which was old enough that it did not support booting from a USB device. This situation limited my options and was the main reason behind using optical media. Still, after some consideration I decided that reducing my environmental footprint is more important to me than testing distributions on hardware which I rarely use any more.

              With that in mind, I have switched to using a (second hand) USB drive in place of optical media. It is rare these days that I encounter Linux distributions which do not run smoothly on both of my test computers and I feel that the additional testing and use of resources does not provide significant benefit to justify the time and media expended. Going forward I intend to limit hardware testing to one machine and load distributions onto the hardware using a USB drive. Should you have any thoughts on this change one way or the other, please feel free to comment below or e-mail me.

            • Ubuntu vs Linux Mint

              Ubuntu or Linux Mint. This is the question most people ask me when they set mind to install first Linux distribution in their machine. When you plan to use Linux, you are surrounded by the choice. There are 100′s of Linux distribution available, each having their own specialty. People pick their favourite distros because they find it convenient and easy to use. The same distro can be disgusting and ridiculous to other people. So, its the choice that matter. however this articles will helps you to visualize the differences between Ubuntu and Linux Mint and helps you to find the appropriate choice for you.

            • Bodhi Linux 2.0.1 – performance with pizzazz

              The path to Enlightenment is long. In fact, Enlightenment 17 has been in the works for 12 years now. The first version of this unique desktop environment was released by Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) in 1997. Version 0.17 (E17) was born in December 2000, and is a complete rewrite of E16. A number of distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, to name a few) have long included an E17 package. However, these versions have so far failed to exploit the amazing eye-candy potential of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL).

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wind River Introduces Yocto Project–Based Embedded Linux Platform

      Wind River has introduced the latest version of Wind River Linux, which was developed from the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure and has achieved Yocto Project Compatible registration. Wind River Linux supports an array of hardware including ARM, Intel, MIPS and Power architectures.

    • Breaking out the Raspberry Pi

      With flexible I/O options and Linux capability, the Raspberry Pi offers enormous potential for hardware development. Andrew Back takes us through the possibilities with his hardware-hacking getting-started guide for the credit-card-sized Linux computer.

    • Phones

      • The World’s First Firefox Phone Will Launch In A Few Months

        Mozilla, the company that makes the popular Firefox browser, is working on a mobile operating system that will launch on a smartphone built by ZTE, Reuters reports.

      • Android

        • BlueStacks App Player Now Runs Android Apps on the Mac

          Android continues to win market share despite being a very young mobile operating system, and as that happens, the number of impressive applications for it is rising too. Many of us have favorite Android apps, but we use them almost exclusively on smartphones or tablets. As we’ve covered before, you can also run Android apps on your desktop computer or laptop. BlueStacks App Player has been available for some time for Windows users who want to run Android apps on PCs. Now, BlueStacks App Player is out in an alpha version for Mac users.

        • Android Turns Four: What a Wild Ride

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

Free Software/Open Source

  • Announcement: Diaspora* Will Now Be A Community Project

    We have been overwhelmed with your support the past week after our announcement of Makr.io and the opening up of signups on joindiaspora.com. This week, we are excited to share with you some important Diaspora announcements.

    When we started Diaspora two years ago, the project kicked off with amazing reception and support from people that believed in our ultimate goal: giving users ownership over their data. It’s a powerful idea, one that captured the imaginations of millions of people across the world. This vision has expanded and evolved over the past two years that we have been working on it as the project has grown.

  • Diaspora, the Open Social Network, Gets Handed Over to the Community
  • How Twitter tweets your tweets with open source

    Some people may have been surprised when Twitter recently joined The Linux Foundation. You couldn’t tweet about your dinner, your latest game, or the newest political rumor without open-source software.

    Chris Aniszczyk, open-source manager at Twitter, explained just how much Twitter relied on open source and Linux at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technology conference. “Twitter’s philosophy is to open-source almost all things. We take our software inspiration from Red Hat’s development philosophy: ‘default to open.””

  • Bossies 2012: The Best of Open Source Software Awards

    It’s back — and bigger and badder than ever! Our sixth annual Bossie Awards call out more than 100 open source products in seven categories

  • How To Evaluate Open Source Software

    One of the best benefits to open source software is how it can fill in the gaps when developing applications. At times it makes sense to look around and see if anyone else has already solved the problem you are looking at, especially if it is a common feature. Unfortunately, not all open source projects are built the same, and deciding to adopt someone else’s code into your project must be carefully considered. Here are seven steps to starting a successful long-term relationship with an open source project.

  • Rethink Robotics’ Baxter Robot Leverages Open Source

    For more than a decade, some of the more interesting work in the field of robotics has been driven by open source efforts. As we’ve noted, there is now even an Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). While companies such as Willow Garage have grabbed most of the headlines on the open source robotics front, a new one is generating buzz: Rethink Robotics. It’s the brainchild of noted roboticist Rodney Brooks.

  • Woman Force In Open Source: Eilidh McAdam Interview

    I’m a graduate student at Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland. I got my BSc in Computing then was accepted for a PhD studentship in 2008 – I’m currently writing my thesis on biological metaphors for critical infrastructure networks. I also work remotely part-time for the open source consulting company Lanedo. I believe that open data and communication can have a massively positive impact on how the world connects, so a job programming open source software is a dream come true. I’m fascinated by coding (C, C++, Python, Ruby, Java), music (composition and consumption), physics, mathematics and more generally, learning how things work. FLOSS is a fantastic bridge for all of these things and has the additional benefit of bringing people the world over together. I also like functional programming languages, reading (particularly but not exclusively sci-fi and fantasy), gaming (Valve’s recent porting efforts are very hopeful), electronics, writing and drawing.

  • Rating Open Source Desktop Notification Systems

    It’s a problem as old as the microprocessor: How do you provide important information to users without getting in the way of their workflow? On most open source platforms, the answer to this conundrum currently lies in passive notification popups or bubbles. And while some interfaces get it right, others — especially GNOME Shell — could do a lot better. Here’s how.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

    • Mozilla

      • New Firefox Health Report to Aid Performance

        Users have complained about the performance of Firefox for years and although each release promises better resource management, the complaints keep coming. Now a new feature will help users and developers pinpoint the reasons Firefox may not be as peppy as it should be.

      • Faster Firefox 15 Released, Install From PPA

        The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of the popular and free browser, Firefox. Firefox 15 comes with major changes that will make the browser more lightweight and prevent memory leaks.

      • Thunderbird 15 Comes With Instant Messaging Support

        Following the release of Firefox, the Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of their email client: Thunderbird. Now along with E-mails, you will be able to chat with your online buddies right from the application. For the time being, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, IRC, Twitter and XMPP/Jabber are supported. You can read about the configuration instructions from here.

      • Mozilla’s Firefox OS: Take It Seriously

        Back in February, we reported on how Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm to become a serious player in the smartphone arena with its own open mobiile operating system. And, just recently, we reported on Techweek Europe’s posts of a series of screenshots, seen here, showing Mozilla’s mobile operating system with a look and feel that Mozilla claimed was non-representative of the final OS. What’s being called “Firefox OS” looks very compelling, and is even showing up for the Raspberry Pi.

      • Mozilla’s Firefox OS Is Headed for Developing Mobile Markets

        The Mozilla Foundation has been moving ahead quickly with its plans to become a big player in the smartphone business, and is retaining its focus on emerging markets, according to several recent update posts. And, photos of its “Firefox OS” have been appearing everywhere, including collected updates found here. Many people don’t have a firm grasp on Mozilla’s strategy, though, and recent comments from Mozilla’s CTO can clear any confusion up. Here are details.

        As Mozilla jumps into the smartphone and mobile operating system arenas, its big partners are Qualcomm and Telefonica. As we’ve reported, these big telecom players can help Mozilla compete in emerging markets. Telefonica, for example, has a huge presence in Latin America.

      • Mozilla Festival 2012
      • Firefox 15 launches tomorrow, downloads already available

        If everything goes as planned, Mozilla will release an update for Firefox 14.0.1 that will bring the version of the Internet browser to 15.0. The stable version of the browser won’t be the only version that will receive an update in the coming days. Firefox’s extended released support version will be updated tomorrow as well, followed by updates for Firefox Beta on August 30, and Firefox Aurora on August 31 (you can check out the regularly updated Mozilla Firefox Release Schedule to find out about future Firefox releases).

      • Firefox 16 Goes Back To The Command Line

        Even before the bits have dried on Firefox 15, Mozilla want to talk about Firefox 16. One of its big “innovations” is a command line for debugging but this isn’t your father’s command line – it’s all new and reinvented.

        Firefox 16 is still in the beta channel, but you might want to check out its new developer feature – a command line. It doesn’t add much that is completely new, just a keyboard-oriented way of getting at the existing developer tools.

  • SaaS

    • IBM’s Angel Diaz: 3 Projects Creating User-Driven Standards for the Open Cloud

      To seasoned software standards expert Angel Diaz, today’s effort to create interoperability in the cloud is reminiscent of the mid-90s when HTTP emerged as a state-of-the-art technology. Every application server had to do that same function but there was no standard, he said. And so IBM helped create Apache web server software and the standard code for building web pages.

    • The OpenStack Foundation Launches, Wields Lots of Cloud Might
    • Defining the Open Cloud
    • Quotes from the Kernel Panel at LinuxCon in San Diego
    • Slideshow: LinuxCon and CloudOpen Highlights
    • OpenStack Foundation Moves Forward, Taking VMware With It

      In the past two weeks, many momentous announcements have arrived surrounding OpenStack, the open source cloud computing framework. As we reported, Rackspace, which has begun calling itself “the open cloud company,” announced the release of Rackspace Private Cloud software, built on OpenStack and designed for companies that want to install, test and run a multi-node OpenStack-based private cloud environment. That news, of course, immediately followed Red Hat’s announcement of its upcoming OpenStack-based cloud platform, already available in a preview edition. And now, as it releases a significant update to Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is also doubling down on its OpenStack focus.

    • OpenStack Foundation Launches to Promote Open Cloud

      It’s official: OpenStack, the open source cloud platform, has formed an independent entity, the OpenStack Foundation, to promote the project and open source cloud computing more generally. Here’s the scoop, and what it means for the open source channel.

      Founded in 2010, the OpenStack project has enjoyed broad support from a host of big names for some time. In addition to Rackspace Cloud and NASA, which launched the project, several major companies in the open source channel and beyond have worked closely with it for a while. The platform provides the main cloud computing solutions for the Ubuntu and Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) Linux distributions, and is endorsed by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD), among other organizations.

    • ownCloud Offers Three-Hours Test Drive To Business Customers
    • Red Hat Opens Its OpenStack Kimono

      Upon the occasion of the launch of the OpenStack Foundation, which will put an enormous amount of backing behind the open source cloud computing platform, the OpenStack team at Red Hat is out with a post that discusses how the team will transform OpenStack into a meaningful product. As we’ve noted before, and as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports, Red Hat intends to do for OpenStack what it did for Linux. There are several reasons to believe that Red Hat can do just that, not the least of which is that Red Hat knows exactly how to provide world-class support for open source software.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • LibreOffice 3.6.1 Released

      The Document Foundation has announced a new bug-fix release of the open-source office suite, LibreOffice. LibreOffice 3.6.1 is fixes some of the bugs and enhances stability of the application. LibreOffice 3.6 was released last month and this version includes some enhancements over that release.

    • Oracle: Leading with Linux, Then and Now

      Adopting Linux as a platform has helped change Oracle over the past 15 years from a fragmented, decentralized behemoth to a sleek, consolidated service provider, said Senior VP and CIO Mark Sunday in Oracle’s LinuxCon keynote presentation Friday morning.

    • LibreOffice 3.6.1 Available for Download
    • The Other Oracle

      I’m starting to realize it’s like pulling teeth to get Wall Street analysts to say something indiscriminately positive when discussing the prospects of database giant Oracle (ORCL).

    • Be wary of LibreOffice 3.6!

      f you’re considering upgrading to LibreOffice 3.6, my advice — at least for the present — is DON’T. Or if you do, proceed with caution. (Instructions below.)

      In the past, upgrades have been flawless, but I do still regularly backup my Profile folder. The wisdom of doing so was proved at the weekend when I upgraded from LO version 3.5 to 3.6. It all went swimmingly as usual, but when I can to use the new version I discovered some anomalies. Gone: 40+ macros I’ve built up over years of using OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Gone: some basic settings such as Page Format (A4 went back to Letter) and Measurement Units (Millimetres went back to Inches).

  • CMS

  • Funding

    • Open source champ Mark Shuttleworth invests $1M in Ceph storage startup

      Ceph is an open-source storage subsystem that proponents say is more adaptable and less expensive than proprietary storage systems. Probably more to the point, it is also a competitor or alternative to the Swift storage system that is part of the OpenStack cloud platform. Ceph claims API compatibility with both Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • An Improved Apper For KDE Users Is Coming

      The first ever professional grade GIMP Magazine will launch on September 5th this year.

      Steve Czajka of GIMP Magazine tells Muktware, “GIMP Magazine features the amazing works created from this world wide community. Photography, digital arts, graphic arts, web design, tips & tricks, step by step tutorials, master classes, help desk questions, product reviews and so much more are showcased and explored in this quarterly publication. This publication is available for free and is licensed Creative Commons CC-AT-SA 2.5.”

    • First Issue of New GIMP Magazine Released

      GIMP is one of the most important applications for Linux users. It gives them some of the capabilities found in other popular image manipulation programs without the expense. Well, a group of enthusiasts have banded together to produce a new magazine just for GIMP users. GIMP Magazine “features the amazing works created from an enormous community from all over the world estimated at around 8-10 million people.”

    • A platform for everyone

      Software freedom activist Richard Stallman, speaking at IIT-M, argued that non-free software created a system of “digital colonisation” and applauded the states that have introduced GNU/Linux operating systems in their schools. He declared, “More Indian states should open their windows to free software. It is safer and cheaper than available alternatives.”

      I was impressed. When a Linux-lover offered to change the OS on my desktop to Ubuntu (Linux), I nodded. I was thrilled this would let me modify and personalise programmes on my PC. It was a 160-GB version of 12.04 LTS (long-term-support for five years) and free, free!

    • Join the FSF and friends in updating the Free Software Directory

      Join the FSF and friends on Friday September 21st, from 2pm to 5pm EDT (18:00 to 21:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory by adding new entries and updating existing ones. We will be on IRC in the #fsf channel on freenode.

    • GCC 4.7.2 Compiler Released

      GCC 4.7.2 has been released with fixes for regressions and serious bugs on GCC 4.7.

  • Public Services/Government

    • Belgium Government Open Sources Code Of Voting Machines

      A day after the Federal elections were over, Belgium government has open-sourced the code used for voting machines. The move is, however not for sharing and reuse, but for showing that the machines were not fraudulent.

  • Licensing

    • Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0

      Over the past several years, Creative Commons has increasingly recommended free culture licenses over non-free ones. Now that the drafting process for version 4.0 of their license set is in full gear, this is a “a once-in-a-decade-or-more opportunity” to deprecate the proprietary NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses. This is the best chance we have to dramatically shift the direction of Creative Commons to be fully aligned with the definition of free cultural works by preventing the inheritance of these proprietary clauses in CC 4.0′s final release.

    • Stop the inclusion of proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0
    • GPL Violations Are Still Pretty Common, You Know?

      As I’ve written about before, I am always amazed when suddenly there is widespread interest in, excitement over, and focus on some particular GPL violation. I’ve spent most of my adult life working on copyleft compliance issues, so perhaps I’ve got an overly unique perspective. It’s just that I’ve seen lots of GPL violations every single day since the late 1990s. Even now, copyleft compliance remains a regular part of my monthly work. Even though it’s now only one task among many that I work on every day, I’m still never surprised nor shocked by some violation.

      When some GPL violation suddenly becomes a “big story”, it reminds me of celebrity divorces. There are, of course, every single day, hundreds (maybe even thousands) of couples facing the conclusion that their marriage has ended. It’s a tragedy for their families, and they’ll spend years recovering. The divorce impacts everyone they know: both their families, and all their friends, too. Everyone’s life who touches the couple is impacted in some way or other.

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Open Source Will Power The Solar Steam Engine

      Open Source is everywhere. When fossils fuels are depleting fast and humanity is worrying about how to supply power to the next generations, Zenman Energy is building a solar steam engine that will be affordable to the masses and also cost fraction of current photovoltaic solutions. On the top of it, it will be open-source.

    • ENCODE DNA Data Project, Inspired and Built By Linux

      Scientists celebrated a breakthrough in their understanding of the human genome this month – the results of a large collaborative project driven by big data and built with Linux.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Stanford’s Class2Go to Offer Free Courses This Fall

        Many universities, including U.C Berkeley and M.IT. have been involved in e-learning for a long time, and, not long ago, M.I.T. and Harvard teamed up to deliver online learning to millions of people around the world, through their new edX initiative. Not to be outdone, Stanford University is going to offer 16 courses and two new, interactive e-learning platforms this fall. Here are details.

  • Programming

    • I will teach you C
    • Thank You!

      The abundance of you that have contacted me regarding my offer to teach you C is heart warming and clear evidence of GNOMEs future potential.

    • Get your Bachelor’s degree from Gnome University!

      Gnome University Project (GU) is an effort by Christian Hergert to push people in Gnome developing. GU is all about C and Gnome technologies, but it also a nice way to start learning C programming within a big scale project.

      GU is still on early stages and it is a work in progress but there is already a repository with some beginner chapters.

Leftovers

  • Health/Nutrition

    • How to fight a food crisis

      The drought that descended on the United States this summer will translate into higher prices for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The inevitability of this scenario introduces an old question that has become new: When weather strikes, what can curb food inflation?

      Recent suggestions cover a wide range of complicated approaches, from GPS-guided drip irrigation techniques to genetically engineered crops and from new federal biofuel standards to new farm insurance programs to new commodity-markets regulations. How ironic that the oldest agricultural technology of them all may provide the simplest and most timely solution.

  • Finance

    • Shareholders sue insurer Amerigroup

      A group of shareholders has filed a lawsuit against health insurer Amerigroup Corp. and its adviser, Goldman Sachs & Co., alleging that the company eschewed more lucrative offers from other companies before agreeing to be acquired by WellPoint Inc. for $4.5 billion.

    • Payoff in the Pit of the Plutocracy

      This book is about corporate crime – although that phrase doesn’t appear anywhere in its 288 pages.

    • 11 Reasons Why America Would Be A Better Place Without Goldman Sachs

      Unfortunately, corruption is so endemic on Wall Street that Goldman Sachs really does not seem out of place. The truth is that a lot of the things that are said about Goldman could also be said about JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley.

    • Wall Street And Washington Share Millions Of Dollars, Lot Of People

      The close relationship between Wall Street and Washington belies their 200 mile separation and theoretically differing goals.

      By spending money on campaigns and lobbyists, The financial industry has managed to give itself something of a voice in the halls of Congress, regulators’ offices and even the White House. Of the top ten firms with employees donating to Romney’s campaign, eight are big banks, according to Federal Election data cited by Bloomberg. In addition, Wall Street spent more than $100 million last year on lobbying while the provisions for the Dodd-Frank financial reform law were being finalized, according to The New York Times.

    • The Quiet Coup

      One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

    • More Details on the Goldman Sachs Sukuk Debacle

      Back in the first quarter of this year, SFW covered Goldman Sachs’ ill-fated sojourn into the world of Islamic bonds (sukuk). Goldman had planned on floating a $2 billion sukuk but the entire project was shot down by Shariah scholars.

    • Barclays bank made nearly $800 million speculating on food

      When central bankers talk about more quantitative easing to help spur markets, remember this. While millions around the world go hungry or pay more for food, the bankers are cashing on enormously on the crisis. Barclays is being named here but don’t forget that both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley also operate in this space.

  • Copyrights

09.22.12

Links 22/9/2012: September Catchup

Posted in News Roundup at 3:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Is Aliyun OS really Linux? Android? A rip-off of both?

    When Acer was ready to announce a new smartphone running Alibaba’s Aliyun operating system, Google responded with force. If it were to be released, Google would end its partnership with Acer, which uses Android for 90 percent of its smartphones.

  • The Linux Setup – Jayson Rowe, Server Administrator
  • The Linux Setup – NuxRo, Stella GNU/Linux
  • Linux nonsense
  • Video Art: Experimental Animation and Video Techniques in Linux

    Animation and video editing in Linux can be treacherous territory. Anyone who has tried working in these media probably has experienced the frustration of rendering a huge file for an hour only to see the program crash before the export is finished. A bevy of tools and applications for manipulating video exist for Linux, and some are more mature than others.

  • Desktop

    • A Call for Common Sense

      For years now, there has been a lot of talk about the “fractured” Linux Desktop environment. It’s an easy argument to make, given the number of distros, desktop choices the user has and the number of apps that may perform the same function.

      [...]

      Previously I preferred a “clean” install of Gnome, uncluttered with KDE dependencies and apps but recently, I’ve had a change of heart

    • Five things Desktop Linux has to do to beat Windows 8

      In 2007, thanks to netbooks and Vista, Linux briefly exploded onto the desktop. Microsoft soon realized they were losing the low-end laptop market and they brought XP back from the dead and practically gave it away to original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s. It worked. Linux’s popularity receded. In 2012, Microsoft is once more bringing out a dog of a desktop operating system, Windows 8, so desktop Linux will once more get a chance to shine… if it can.

    • Linus Torvalds on the Linux desktop’s popularity problems

      And here is where Torvalds disagrees. Torvalds wrote, “One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any external interfaces. That rule has been there since day one, although it’s gotten much more explicit only in the last few years. The fact that we break internal interfaces that are not visible to userland is totally irrelevant, and a total red herring.”

    • Preview of ROSA Desktop 2012

      The alpha version of what will become ROSA Desktop 2012 has been made available for download. It comes about a week later than planned, but that is no big deal. The most important thing is that it is here. Let the bug hunting begin!

      For those reading about ROSA Desktop for the first time, it is a desktop Linux distribution published by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia. ROSA Desktop is actually the end-user version of ROSA Marathon Enterprise, the desktop edition for businesses.

    • Torvalds pours scorn on De Icaza’s desktop claims

      Linux creator Linus Torvalds has poured scorn on claims made by the co-founder of the GNOME Desktop project, Miguel de Icaza, that he (Torvalds) was in any way to blame for the lack of development in Linux desktop initiatives.

      De Icaza made the claim in his personal blog on August 29 when he wrote: “Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.”

    • Handbags drawn in dawn war in the Linux world

      Torvalds said that Gnomes were in total denial about what their problem really is and were blaming everybody except themselves.

      De Icaza puffed that his involvement with Gnome stopped about five years ago, so it is unfair to the Gnome guys to attach my position to their project.

      But he claimed that the fact that kernel guys ruled Linux did stuff up everything for the rest.

      He said that Torvalds had a strong personality, and so do a lot of the people that surround him and like it or not, that influenced the attitudes of people.

      “My take is that you are brilliant, clever and funny, and you can also be mean and harsh. Many people tried to imitate you, but they were neither brilliant, clever or funny. They just turn out to be mean and harsh and this attitude spread on the mailing lists,” he wrote.

      He agreed that when it came to CORBA, both the KDE guys and GNOME had it wrong and the same applied to .NET.

  • Server

    • Apple, Microsoft, VMware: Everyone’s building open-source software

      At LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, Jim Zemlin’s, the Foundation’s executive director said, “If you are going to master software development, you must master open source.”

      Why is it important for businesses to master open source? Zemlin said it’s because “Software is the future of IT. Hardware is important to enable software, but what I mean that the value that end-users sees from technology increasingly comes from the software.”

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Intel’s new Clover Trail chip will support Android & Linux

      When the “news” came out that Intel wouldn’t be supporting Linux on its new Atom CPU, Clover Trail, I didn’t buy it. This next-generation Intel Atom processor was always meant primarily for Windows 8; but with Intel’s x86 instruction set, it would also always support Android and Linux.

    • Torvalds touts Linux’s advances in power, ARM and cell phones

      Linus Torvalds rarely appears in public these days, and has little to say when he does.

      “There’s nothing interesting about me,” Torvalds asked, when asked along with his fellow panelists to name something interesting about himself that no one knows. “I’m in a bathrobe reading email. I read email and answers and merge code written by others.”

      His appearance at LinuxCon 2012 in San Diego yesterday was no different, but he did reveal a few interesting factoids after being questioned by the audience.

    • How To Get Your Ph.D. Project Included In The Linux Kernel

      The Linux kernel is the world’s largest collaborative development project. Almost 3,000 individual contributors work together to create and maintain an operating system kernel that works on everything from wristwatches and mobile phones to mainframes, along with all the peripherals imaginable for each platform. Linux creator Linus Torvalds sits at the top of a loose hierarchy of kernel maintainers and acts as final arbiter for what does or does not get included.

    • The Future is Forever

      It’s been a year since Kernel.org was hacked by intruders. Still no report publicly explaining what happened.

    • Wait and watch on systemd

      I have been pondering the systemd situation for a while. My biggest concern has been that Debian and Ubuntu have not made decisions to adopt it as default, especially when Fedora, OpenSUSE, Mageia, and others have. Maybe Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 will include it as well. So it seems like on the init system level, two fragmented groups are emerging: those who use systemd and those who don’t. My second concern is the ability for a casual/intermediate user to transition from a systemd-using system to one that doesn’t use it.

    • Why the Linux Foundation Works (and Why the OSDL Failed) [VIDEO]

      Not all Open Source foundations are created equal. Over the last 15 years that I’ve been actively engaged in open source activities I’ve seen more than my fair share of open source foundations go bust. I’ve also seen a few do really well.

      Remember the OSDL?

      The OSDL was the pre-cursor to the Linux Foundation. It was an organization that I personally never really liked and neither did Oracle. Back in 2006, Wim Coekaerts (then the Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle) told methat OSDL was all about business and Oracle knew how to deal with the Linux community on its own.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • Why I don’t like game rendering performance benchmarks

      It’s benchmark season again and as I have raised some concerns about the results of the published benchmark, I was asked to properly explain my concerns without making it look like a rant. So this is what I try with this blog post.

      Given the results of the published benchmark, I could go “Wooohooo, KWin’s the fastest!”, but instead I raise concerns. I don’t see that in the data and I hope nobody else sees that in the published data.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • 5th release of KDE Telepathy Instant Messaging suite

        The KDE Telepathy team is pleased to announce the fifth major release of the new KDE Instant Messaging suite. The immediately available 0.5 version brings polish in many places, better stability, 58 reported bugs fixed and some nice new features too, making the instant messaging experience in KDE Workspaces more pleasant and enjoyable. Special attention was given to the log viewer, which received improvements galore.

      • nobody will do it for you (and therefore they will)

        Indeed, in spite of the disbelief, people do realize that it is up to them to make things happen, that it is unrealistic to wait for it to magically occur at the hands of others and so they dig in and get it done, thankfully often with great joy. (Most of us working on Free software love what we do.)

      • supporting Randa 2012

        The Randa meetings have hosted discussions on KDE’s libraries, Plasma, multimedia, messaging and more.
        These discussions resulted in significant decisions being made that were unlikely to be achieved with the quality and quickness experienced at such a meeting. Those decisions translated into improvements in our software … a lot of improvements. This time around the topics in focus are education, accessibility, multimedia and the Plasma Workspaces. Each of these four topics has a group of committed developers and contributors coming to Randa to work on them. Yes, it’s four developer sprints in one!

      • Who is Randa for?
      • Randa Makes a Difference

        21 year old twins from Greece are two of the dedicated people headed for Randa, Switzerland to work on KDE software. Giorgos and Antonis Tsiapaliokas are working on Plasmate, the KDE Software Development Kit for Plasma Workspaces. Giorgos wrote about his KDE background and what is motivating him to be part of the intensive coding in Randa.

      • Call for Host for Akademy 2013 Still Open

        The hosting proposal needs a strong team of local volunteers who have an eye for detail that is able to organize and host our annual community summit.

      • KDE Ships September Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform

        Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform.

        These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.9 series. 4.9.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the latest edition in the 4.9 series and are recommended for everyone running 4.9.0 or earlier versions. The release only contains bugfixes and translation updates so it is a safe and pleasant update for everyone. KDE’s software is already translated into more than 55 languages, with more to come.

      • Kubuntu 12.04 – Two months later

        Truth to be told, I’m writing this article something like three, three and a half months after my original Kubuntu Pangolin rather lukewarm review, but to be in line with the same take on SUSE, which took place 60 days after the initial piece, the title here was chosen as it is, just slightly misleading. Anyhow, it’s been a while since I first installed the latest Long Term Release version of Ubuntu, the one adorned with the KDE desktop. Overall, I was somewhat disappointed by the spring edition, as it showed a definite neglect when compared to its sweet big brother. In a way, it got the attention you reserve for bastard children, in a medieval setting, of course. Today, everyone loves their children equally, right.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Gnome 3.8: Fallback Mode – The first feature under discussion

        With Gnome 3.6 still being on beta (3.5.90), the discussions about the features of the upcoming 3.8 have already begun. It is not surprising that the first feature that is under examination is Fallback Mode.

      • Trisquel GNU Linux, the “most Free” Gnome Distro :)

        Yeap it is official by FSF Free Software Definition. Fedora isn’t free software. Linux (kernel) isn’t free software. Firefox isn’t Free Software. Pretty much there isn’t Free Software (FS), but we can baptize things by occasion as FS.

        Trisquel according to FSF is one of the nine distributions that they meet the FSF’s strict guidelines by completely eschewing proprietary components.

      • Gnome Shell 3.6 beta on Ubuntu – first impressions

        Few days ago I installed Gnome Shell 3.5.91 in my Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal beta setup. and I’ve a mixed feeling about the new version of Gnome Shell, which is going to be called as Gnome Shell 3.6.

        This new version introduces many changes and improvements and is definitely worth an upgrade. So I’m sharing my feelings about this version of Gnome Shell on Ubuntu. Note that Ubuntu 12.10 is still in beta and so is Gnome Shell. Though there shouldn’t be any visible changes since feature freeze and UI freeze is already over.

      • We are almost there: Web in 3.6.0
      • A look at Gnome 3.6 beta

        Gnome 3.6 beta has been out for a while, but not available for testing without compiling the software, so I was pleased to see that a live image is available- basically running on an alpha release of Fedora 18.

        I was familiar with what was coming from a post at As far as I know. There are descriptions of changes with screenshots there, so I’ll just add a few personal comments.

      • Upcoming Features of GNOME 3.8

        Even if GNOME 3.6 has not yet been released, the GNOME developers published some of the features that will be implemented in the next major release of the desktop environment, GNOME 3.8.

        According to the GNOME developers, it looks like GNOME 3.8 will fix or even drop the Fallback Mode, because it has become less and less useful and because it does not work as it should. More details can be found here.

  • Distributions

    • Building a Linux distribution from scratch | Interview

      Here’s a quick interview with Constantine Apostolou who is the creator and maintainer of the Cinux Linux distribution. Creating an operating system from scratch has its difficulties, but also its good parts. Constantine explains this process and gives us more details about his own baby – Cinux!

    • Linux From Scratch 7.2 relies on latest GCC

      The start of the month has seen the latest release, 7.2, of Linux From Scratch (LFS). The new edition of the guide that shows users how to create their own Linux system from the source code is now based on a toolchain that uses glibc (GNU C Library) 2.16.0 and GCC (GNU compiler collection) 4.7.1. There are, in all, 26 other components that have had their instructions in the DIY Linux guide updated, including Linux 3.5.2, Kmod 9, Perl 5.16.1 and, Udev 188 (extracted from systemd).

    • Zorin OS 6 Educational: the operating system for students’ and pupils’ home computers

      Just a few days ago I wrote about Edubuntu, the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution targeted to the “market” of teachers, students, pupils and everyone in the industry of education.

      You can install this operating system on a Linux Desktop or Laptop, which you bought for your child or yourself.

    • SolusOS Has Something Cool for Veterans, Novices Alike

      A huge factor in this project’s early success is its ability to maintain state-of-the-art Linux components without compromising on the Gnome 2 user experience. SolusOS’s development team has molded a classic Gnome 2 menu using Gnome version 3.4.2 with no new user interface.

    • Big distributions, little RAM 5

      Once again I’ve compiled some charts to show what the major, full desktop distributions look like while running on limited hardware.

    • blackPanther OS – A nice-looking distribution

    • New Releases

      • Manjaro 0.8.1 XFCE edition released
      • Manjaro Linux 0.8.0
      • Baltix 12.04.1
      • Tails 0.13 is out
      • SMS version 2.0.0 Released!
      • Parted Magic Team Releases 2012_09_12
      • Slackware 14.0 RC4 Announced

        Pat called another round of testing due to changes and more bug fixes towards a stable Slackware 14.0 release by announcing RC4. While some may be disappointed due to delay to the release, but they must understand that Patrick has it’s own standard when talking about stability and security in Slackware. He never prefer to have early release when he thinks it’s not ready yet. So, please test this release and make sure all the major bugs has been resolved.

      • Slackware 14 Almost Ready To Go

        Slackware is bound to be about ready, Patrick’s on his fifth release candidate for Pete’s sake. Fortunately, his steganographical message in the latest changelog said, “Really, this time it is not a drill! Everything is in place and ready to release at this point.”

      • GeeXboX 3.0

        A shiny new GeeXboX release has arrived! GeeXboX 3.0 is a major upgrade that integrates XBMC 11 “Eden” and adds the long-requested PVR functionality. This means you can finally use GeeXboX to watch and record live TV too! In addition to our usual x86 ISOs, this release is also available for several embedded platforms, with working full HD video and graphics acceleration for most of them.

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • On the PCLOS 2012.08 KDE release

        Katherine Noyes wrote her opinion about the new release of PCLinuxOS here. When I read it, I did not pay a lot of attention mainly because of one reason: I had installed PCLinuxOS 2011.6 in both my desktop and experimental laptop and I was very satisfied with its performance. Therefore, I thought, is it really necessary to bother downloading the PCLOS 2012.08 .iso, burning it to a DVD, and installing it if my computers are doing OK? After all, as a PCLOS newbie, I did not want to break a system that was working as expected.

      • Playing with Gnome Boxes Beta in Mageia Alpha!

        Mageia Foundation released the first Alpha version towards to Mageia 3 (March 2013) three days ago, with UsrMove! If I am not wrong Mageia is just the second popular distro (after Fedora) that migrates to UsrMove, and that shows that the people there, chancing the optimal solutions.

        Speaking of popularity, Mageia’s market trend grows rapidly and by taking into consideration that Mageia 3 is a huge improvement from version 2, it won’t be long till Mageia will look Ubuntu in the eyes.

      • Mageia 3 Alpha 1 brings /usr/ merge
      • Mageia 3 alpha 1 is now available
      • What money can buy…

        It’s no mystery that Mageia depends on the conjunction of many contributors and many donors. Totally. Some provide the financial and technical means for the project – some provide their skills and time to make it go ahead.

        So here’s a quick, mid-year, report of how we have used the money we received. Mostly – for building our technical infrastructure.

        For 2012 alone, to this date with a budget of about 10k€:

        *

        about 80% has been invested in our infrastructure; this means: domain names, certificates, hosting and most importantly, server hardware: in July and August, we purchased and installed 2 new, rather expensive servers in Marseille Lost-Oasis datacenter, to improve the distribution’s building and packaging;
        *

        about 10% has been used for transportation, people to events or to go to the datacenter for maintenance operations;
        *

        about 7% percent has been used for marketing materials.

      • Mandriva specialist ROSA releases enterprise distribution

        ROSA, previously known for ROSA Marathon 2012, a Mandriva fork with five-year support, has now released a test version of an enterprise Linux server distribution. According to the release announcement, the beta version of ROSA Enterprise Linux Server (RELS) “Helium” is based on Red Hat and Mandriva server solutions.

      • Enough with the command line. Say hello to MSS 2.

        Since its inception, Mandriva has been known for delivering solutions that are easy to use.
        Since the beginning of 2012, many things have happened ; and very soon you will see the release of new products that help businesses with the tools they need for their infrastructure and their IT.

      • Mandriva releases Mandriva Class, the real-time Education Solution
      • The underdog is on the loose! A glimpse of Mandriva 2012 Alpha1

        Breaking news! Mandriva is not dead. Or maybe it was and came back to life, not as a zombie (Bernie Lomax) this time, but as a modest, yet persistent dog that simply refuses to give up the race.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat plans to do for OpenStack what it did for Linux

        In 2002, Linux was on its way to becoming a major business operating system, but it wasn’t there yet. Then, Red Hat dedicated itself to make Linux an enterprise operating system. Ten years later Red Hat was the first billion dollar pure play open-source company. Today, Red Hat announced a similar plan for the OpenStack cloud.

        Just as with Linux, Red Hat knows there’s no way it can make OpenStack the de facto cloud software of choice for the enterprise by itself. In a blog posting, Red Hat’s OpenStack team wrote, “A huge community is contributing to OpenStack. More than 180 participating companies and 400 contributing developers have produced six software releases in just a little over two years. Some organizations will choose to leverage all that innovation directly by implementing, testing, patching and supporting community releases on their own.”

      • What’s happening at Red Hat?

        Red Hat, Inc. is expanding its engineering headquarters at 413 Littleton Road from 75,000 square-feet to 175,000-square feet. The shell of the addition is expected to be completed by the end of December, according to project manager David Ferreira of the Gutierrez Company of Burlington. Gutierrez is overseeing the ongoing project.

      • ‘IT procurement practice hinders growth of open source industry’

        The current practice of public procurement of IT solutions is a barrier to the development of a healthy industry of open source service providers, says Jim Whitehurst, the Chief Executive Officer at Red Hat. He also says that public administrations and open source software are a natural fit, since this type of software allows them to share and reuse software solutions.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora + Cinnamon – Second attempt, great success!

          The last time I tried to install and run the Cinnamon desktop on top of Fedora, I hit a snag and the review ended with a rather uninspiring screenshot of a failed loading of the desktop. This happened after using an external repository source for the Cinnamon installation.

          Since, I’ve been mailed by lots of people, including the Fedora Community Chief Simian, as his very signature proclaims, and they all told me that Cinnamon is now available in the official repositories and that I should retest with this new source. Which is exactly what I did. I will not keep you in eternal suspense, so I’m going to tell you upfront. It worked this time. But what about my overall satisfaction? Ah, well, you will have to scroll down a bit for that. Fedora + Cinnamon, take two. Action.

        • Kororaa Linux 17 – now with bubbles

          The Konqueror web browser has been replaced by Firefox, for example, and VLC has replaced other video players. This reduces the amount of time a new user needs to spend hunting down software packages and makes the environment feel more friendly. In addition, Kororaa comes with several third-party repositories enabled, allowing users to simply open their package manager and find the software they need, rather than manually searching the web for repositories, enabling them and then searching for the package. Kororaa’s approach takes the headache out of finding software, or at least most of it. The graphical front-ends for YUM are still quite slow, but at least having YumEx available in the default installation makes up for the waiting by having an attractive and flexible interface.

          Packages and management of the same aside, Kororaa does a nice job of being a friendly desktop-oriented operating system. It’s cutting-edge, it is responsive and it comes with some great administrative utilities. The KDE edition provides a powerful, flexible desktop with a traditional layout and the distribution is easy to install. Despite some early problems I faced with updates and the boot loader, things got straightened out and Kororaa was, after that first day, a pleasant distribution to run. It’s modern, it comes with good software, a manual with a few helpful tips and the interface generally stays out of the way. If you’re a fan of Fedora and want to stay on the cutting edge without the hassles that upgrades and fresh installs bring, then Kororaa is a nice, friendly way to achieve that. It is essentially a ready-out-of-the-box desktop edition of Fedora and a welcome member of the Fedora/Red Hat ecosystem.

        • Fedora 18 Alpha Wallpaper

          It’s rather old news, but today it has been finally set as default—yes the wallpaper for Fedora 18 Spherical Cow release. It took so much time because I didn’t manage to update the package that sets the defaults in time before Alpha freeze.

        • Fedora 18 postponed a third time

          The Fedora project has postponed the release of the Fedora 18 alpha by a further week. The delay was caused by various problems with the Anaconda installer, which is being given a face lift that required major restructuring work in this version of the Linux distribution. A proposal to continue using the version of Anaconda that was used in version 17 of Fedora was recently dismissed by the Engineering Steering Committee.

        • A great service for Fedora and Humble Bundle

          I think most people are aware of the Humble Bundle which have been releasing a range of cool and great games on Linux since they started up. The games though has usually tended to be distributed as a tarball and doesn’t automatically integrate itself into your Fedora system like you would like. Well thanks to the cool effort called Mumble RPMS you can now turn all those tarballs from the Humble Bundle into nice RPMS for Fedora. So a big thanks to the author of Muble RPMS for doing this work!

        • Fedora 18 and Firewalld

          When Sperical Cow hits the digital shelves sometime in late October or early November, users will have to get used to a new firewall management application. Sperical Cow is, of course the code-name for Fedora 18, the next stable release of Fedora.

          On current versions of Fedora, the firewall management application is system-config-firewall, a static firewall application that requires a refresh of the firewall with any rule change. The new application will provide a dynamic system that will not require a refresh or reload of the firewall, even after a rule change.

    • Debian Family

      • The newsletter for the Debian community

        Joerg Jaspert sent some bits from the FTP Team, announcing the ongoing sprint during which the team is working on optimising the current code behind the main archive, finalising a proposal for Debian Personal Package Archives (PPAs), and merging backports.debian.org into the main archive host. This year, participation in the Google Summer of Code initiative helped the team in implementing a true multi-archive capability, making it possible to merge separated parts of the Debian archive (like security and backports) into the main archive. Joerg also added a call for volunteers: if you are a Debian Developer and want to help one of the key teams of the Debian infrastructure, please consider joining them.

      • Things to do after installing Debian Wheezy
      • Debian Project News – September 3rd, 2012

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #1)
          • Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 3 (Report #2)

            Running an alpha version of an operating system, Linux or otherwise, is quite a different experience. It means, for instance, that you are not allowed to complain when minor things have bugs or simply don’t work – it is all par for the course, after all this is alpha software. That doesn’t mean however that when you do run into problems that it doesn’t still suck.

          • Ubuntu vs Windows 8

            Ubuntu and Canonical have come a long way since their 7.04 Feisty Fawn release, which followed Microsoft’s Windows Vista. Back then, Canonical failed to capitalise on Vista’s universal rejection by its users. But it’s now 2012, and things are different. Does Ubuntu 12.04 have what it takes to position itself as a more usable alternative to Windows 8? We put both operating systems in front of 18 testers to find out…

          • The truth about Goobuntu: Google’s in-house desktop Ubuntu Linux

            Most Linux people know that Google uses Linux on its desktops as well as its servers. Some know that Ubuntu Linux is Google’s desktop of choice and that it’s called Goobuntu. But almost no one outside of Google knew exactly what was in it or what roles Ubuntu Linux plays on Google’s campus, until now.

            Today, August 29th , Thomas Bushnell, the tech lead of the group that manages and distributes Linux to Google’s corporate desktops unveiled Goobuntu from behind Google’s curtain at LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual North American technical conference, First things first, can you download Goobuntu to run it yourself? Well yes and no.

          • The five best things coming in Ubuntu 12.10 Linux

            Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions around. The next version, 12.10 aka Quantal Quetzal, has just reached beta phase. Here’s what looking to to be the new Ubuntu’s best features so far.

          • Canonical updates Ubuntu Landscape management platform

            The Ubuntu sponsor last week released an upgrade of its Landscape systems management platform that offers a bevy of new features including enhanced reporting capabilities for compliance management, roles-based access control, a robust API, bare metal provisioning capabilties and better integration with the Ubuntu 12.04 platform.

          • Ubuntu 12.10, due in October, said to be ‘Cloud for Human Beings’

            At LinuxCon 2012, and CloudOpen, Canonical touted its pioneering work with OpenStack and said it intends to position its next platform – Ubuntu 12.10 in October — with Juju and Charm technologies as the Cloud for human beings, much the way it positions its current OS as Linux for human beings. Its five-month-old Ubuntu 12.04 was the first commercial distribution to incorporate OpenStack.

          • Stephen Fry: “I Use Ubuntu”

            Stephen Fry is more than just a a revered actor, writer and comedian: he’s also an Ubuntu user.

          • Ubuntu to drop alternate installer

            The alternate installer, required when users want to configure cryptsetup, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) or software-based RAID arrays during installation, may disappear from Ubuntu as early as version 12.10. The idea is mooted in a proposal put forward by Steve Langasek, Engineering Manager at Canonical’s Ubuntu Foundation.

          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 280
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 281
          • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 282
          • Kiwi Linux 12.08 Review: Ubuntu Precise with Gnome classic

            Amazingly while Ubuntu is moving more and more towards Unity and Gnome 3, there are quite a few distro hugging the limelight with their remixed Gnome 2 offerings. Kiwi Linux is one such distro – it takes you back to the classic Gnome 2 days. I guess users of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will love Kiwi, 12.04 has changed a lot for many of them!

          • Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain
          • Edgy penguins test-fly Ubuntu’s Quantal Quetzal

            Forget colourful foliage and dropping temperatures, nothing says autumn for Linux nerds like the arrival of an Ubuntu beta. This season includes twice the fun, with Canonical plotting not one, but two betas for the coming Quantal Quetzal, or Ubuntu 12.10. The first arrived on Thursday.

            Quantal Quetzal comes hot on the heels of the 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) release earlier this year and – at least for more conservative users – is unlikely to be a high priority upgrade. LTS editions of Ubuntu are delivered every two years and have extended support from Canonical.

          • Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) reaches end-of-life on October 28, 2012
          • New Unity Features will Generate Affiliate Revenue for Ubuntu

            Olli Ries, Director of Technology at Canonical shared information about some new features in Ubuntu 12.10 that will help in generating affiliate revenue for Ubuntu project.

            Music and Video Lenses, will have a “more suggestions” category that is added to search results obtained from the home dash. This will help users to find content available online in addition to what already resides on their device. All these results can be previewed from dash itself through new ‘Unity Previews’ feature available in Ubuntu 12.10.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Edubuntu 12.04: Let’s Learn It!

              Where do you live? I don’t know the rules of your residence country, but Russia, where I was born and spent most of my life, has a rule: the 1st of September is the start of the school year. Even if this day falls on a weekend, like we have it in 2012, schoolchildren must have their great event, especially those who go to school for the first time in their lives.

            • Emmabuntus 2.1.01 Review

              Today we review a fresh Linux distribution from France called Emmabuntüs. Their first major release of Emmabuntüs 2 1.01 is based on Xubuntu12.04. This distro was designed to facilitate the refurbishing of computers given to human help associations, especially Emmaüs communities (where the name comes from) and promote the discovering of Linux and GNU by beginners. The goal of this thousandth Linux distro is intended to be sleek, accessible, equitable.

            • Build Your Own Personal Linux Distro using Lubuntu

              If your like me, no Linux distribution or desktop environment suites you just right. I always seem to have to work around something or with something that just doesn’t suit me.

            • Cinnamon 1.6 in Romeo

              Cinnamon 1.6 (along with Muffin 1.1.0 and Nemo 1.0.1) was released yesterday. You can read the release announcement and an overview of the new features at: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=207

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Raspberry Pi manufacturing comes home as production shifts to UK

      A major deal will see a Sony factory in Wales crank out thousands of the Linux mini-computers, proving that not all low-cost electronics need be made in China.

    • Raspberry Pi revision 2.0 board announced

      The Raspberry Pi finally saw a release on February 29 this year and is thought to have sold 200,000 units, with a million expected to ship before the year is over. That’s a lot of tiny PCs, but it’s also been an opportunity for owners to feedback any problems or tweaks they’d like made to the board.

      The Raspberry Pi Foundation has taken the feedback on board and today announced a revised design is being put into production. The new Raspberry Pi, known as revision 2.0 PCB, is expected to start shipping in the next few weeks. The only way you’ll be able to tell which version you have is when you receive it, hook it up, and type “cat/proc/cpuino” in a terminal. if the code that appears is 4, 5, or 6 then you have the new board, otherwise a 2 or 3 signifies the original board.

    • Phones

      • Open webOS August Edition
      • Why yes, thank you, I too would like a command line on my phone

      • Android

        • Android PC vs Hackberry A10

          After the Raspberry Pi, the APC and Hackberry A10 are the latest entrants in the hugely popular line of ultra small motherboards designed to run any thing from the Android OS to trimmed down Linux distributions. But keep in mind that these are development boards, not mobos that you can buy and build a standard desktop computer from.

          No wonder they are popular with tinkerers, developers and wannabe DIYers. No doubt that they will eventually go mainstream, but for now, these boards are a hacker’s delight. This article presents a casual comparison of the Android Personal Computer (APC) and the Hackberry A10.

        • New NASA Satellites Have Android Smartphones for Brains

          NASA is aiming to launch a line of small satellites called “PhoneSats” that are cheaper to make and easier to build than those it has produced in the past. To achieve this, engineers are using unmodified Android smartphones — in one prototype, HTC’s Nexus One, and in another, Samsung’s Nexus S — to perform many of a satellite’s key functions.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • An in-depth Nexus 7 review

        This highly detailed review introduces Google’s first Android tablet: the Nexus 7, made by Asus. After briefly comparing the device’s features and specs to those of several other leading 7-inch tablets, we’ll examine the Nexus 7′s Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) user interface, and then demonstrate a selection of useful Android tools and apps for system management, communications, social networking, media streaming, entertainment, and productivity.

      • a small update on Vivaldi
      • Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD will give Apple’s iPad fits

        I love my Nexus 7. It’s replaced my Apple iPad for daily use. But, at 7-inch display, people who want a full-sized tablet don’t like it as much as I do. For them, the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD with its 8.9-inch display, 16GBs of storage, and a price of only $299 may just hit their sweet spot

        Don’t think for a minute that the Kindle Fire HD is just for home-users. True, it’s got lots of consumerish features such as FreeTime, so your kids won’t spend all day on the tablet; Dolby audio for music and movies; X-Ray for Movies, which will let you get film info from IMDB while you’re watching a film; and so on. That’s all nice, but it was the business features that caught my eye.

      • Sony Takes Another Swing at Android Tablets With Xperia S

        The 9.4-inch Xperia Tablet S is Sony’s latest shot at an Android slate. “Every Android tablet has to be compared against the Nexus 7,” said ABI’s Jeff Orr. Like the Nexus 7, the Xperia Tablet S is based on the Nvidia Tegra 3 processor. However, the Google tablet is priced at $200, while the Xperia Tablet S will be offered in three models starting at $400.

Free Software/Open Source

  • OSI Welcomes Five More Affiliates
  • Open source the vote

    The Democratic party has released a Ruby on Rails open-source program, Voter Registration that enables you to deploy a Web application that enables U.S. citizens to register to vote. There is also a version that you can simply embed on your site, which is branded for the Obama/Biden campaign. The open-source version is unbranded so there’s nothing on it that even a Tea Party member could object to.

  • Taking a peek at some Open Source software for writers

    Over the years, I’ve heard (and I keep hearing) that you can’t do this or you can’t do that or you can’t do the other thing using Linux or using Open Source software. And guess what? Most of those things I’ll never do or rarely, if ever, need to do. As I’ve written in this space and elsewhere, I really don’t care what other people think or what they use their computers and devices for. None of that has any bearing on what I need and what to do.

  • Vector graphics shoot-out: Illustrator v open-source

    We wrap up our investigation of vector graphics editors with a look at Adobe’s Illustrator, along with a selection of more specialist applications, including Microsoft’s Visio and the free, open-source LibreOffice Draw.

  • Lots of LUV on Software Freedom Day

    Melbourne is one of many cities around the globe that will mark Software Freedom Day next Sunday, September 15.

  • The Limits of Open Source

    Technology history is one of software platforms and control over those platforms. Generally, the more companies allowed to participate in a platform the more growth that platform can generate, because no one company can possess all the good ideas.

  • LinuxCon

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

    • Concerns linger about corporate involvement in OpenStack Foundation

      The official debut of the independent OpenStack Foundation was welcomed by most as a big step forward to establishing an open cloud but the inclusion of two big league proprietary vendors, namely VMware and Cisco, has raised a few eyebrows.

      As the OpenStack Foundation prepares to launch its most advanced open source cloud platform code-named “Folsom” within weeks, the organization held a coming-out day to celebrate its official independence, its ability to attract more than 180 companies and an excess of $10 million in funding and the acceptance of last-minute bigwig members Intel, NEC and VMware.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Seven Reasons for Choosing LibreOffice over Microsoft Office
    • Libre Office in GTK3 and Wayland!

      The first quarter/half of 2013 will be the most exciting period for Linux Desktop – ever(!?) so far. This has to do mostly because many major distros are going to drop XServer for the shake of Wayland.

      While GTK3 port in Wayland is expected to be complete and stable by 3.8 around in March, some popular applications like Gimp, Libre Office, Firefox, VLC isn’t sure if they make it.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Health 1.6.3 released

      We are proud to announce the release of GNU Health 1.6.3, the Free Health and Hospital Information System. This version brings major improvements in the hospital information system, both from the administrative and patient management. Here is a quick summary of the main changes…

    • GNU Health workshop at the United Nations for African and Asian countries

      The United Nations International Institute for Global Health UNU-IIGH – have sucessfully delivered another GNU Health training, in their “Free Software Hospital Information System Development Workshop” .

      The workshop was held during September 10-14th, at the the United Nations University facilities in Malaysia. There were delegates from Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Philippines, Cambodia, Tajikistan, Sudan, Kenya and Morrocco.

    • OpenEMR 4.1.1 is released

  • Project Releases

  • Licensing

    • The AGPL: Solution in Search of a Problem

      In the early days of commercial open source, misinformation was a major impediment to adoption. Many enterprises, for example, explicitly forbade usage of code released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). When asked about the justification for this prohibition, the most common response centered around difficult-to-articulate concerns about being compelled to open source code they did not wish to. The fear that this “viral” license would infect their private repositories was rampant.

      The truth, as became obvious following the mainstream adoption of GPL-licensed projects like Linux and MySQL, is that this was never the risk it was perceived to be. Simple usage of these technologies does not trigger the reciprocal provisions of the license, those that require modifications to be distributed under the same terms as the original source code, i.e. the GPL. More to the point, even if it was the case that applications built on top of Linux or MySQL were regarded as modifications, enterprises would not be subject to the terms of the license because of the so-called ASP loophole.

  • Programming

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Leading Standards Organizations Assert Principles of a “New Global Standards Paradigm”

      The big news in the standards arena yesterday was a joint announcement by five of the standards setting organizations (SSOs) that have been most essential to the creation of the Internet and the Web: IEEE, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and Internet Society (the last three being closely affiliated entities).

      Joint announcements by SSOs are rare, and the subject matter of this announcement was more so: each organization was joining in the endorsement of a set of five principles that they assert support a “new paradigm for standards” development.

Leftovers

  • Windows – Now with added malware!

    The BBC have recently written about a sample of PC’s in a study being pre-loaded with malware intentionally prior to buying them , so with the best will in the world on behalf of the consumer, you’ve lost before you have begun.

  • Health/Nutrition

    • Approval of New Chemical-Resistant GMOs Likely to Prompt Pesticide Escalation

      A decade and a half after farmers began planting the first genetically engineered (GE) crops, the future is clear. The scientists who pioneered genetic engineering thought of themselves as environmentalists, creating products that could reduce pesticide use. Instead, they have simply perpetuated the same “pesticide treadmill” as their pesticide-peddling counterparts resulting in the application of a greater volume of ever more toxic pesticides.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • The Repricing of Oil

      Now that oil’s price revolution – a process that took ten years to complete – is self-evident, it is possible once again to start anew and ask: When will the next re-pricing phase begin?

      Most of the structural changes that carried oil from the old equilibrium price of $25 to the new equilibrium price of $100 (average of Brent and WTIC) unfolded in the 2002-2008 period. During that time, both the difficult realities of geology and a paradigm shift in awareness worked their way into the market, as a new tranche of oil resources, entirely different in cost and structure than the old oil resources, came online. The mismatch between the old price and the emergent price was resolved incrementally at first, and finally by a super-spike in 2008.

    • New Yorkers Rally to Urge Gov. Cuomo to Reject Fracking

      The future of New York’s water supplies and the health of its millions of citizens hang in the balance as Governor Andrew Cuomo decides whether to end the state’s moratorium on new wells to drill for “natural” gas through the controversial industrial process of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” Activists estimated that over two thousand concerned citizens joined the march in Albany Monday to try to persuade Cuomo not to lift the moratorium — statewide or in some counties — a decision expected to be announced some time after Labor Day.

    • Coordinated Actions Worldwide Call for Banning Fracking

      Concerned people from the U.S. and numerous other countries will join in a global campaign event Saturday to call for a ban of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking.” More than 150 events, on five continents, are planned for this weekend’s “Global Frackdown” — a day of action against fracking — coupled with the promotion of the expansion of clean, sustainable energy options.

  • Finance

    • Business making an anti-regulation pitch to voters

      The National Association of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business are working to make the anti-regulatory fervor their members share an issue in the last weeks of the campaign.

      The chamber and the manufacturers group have taken out issue ads saying the expense to business in complying with federal regulations is killing job creation. NFIB local affiliates are conducting tours and news conferences to let small business owners present their personal stories.

    • What Really Happened with Occupy?

      Despite the divide-and-conquer tricks of both the mainstream Left and the mainstream Right, Occupy and the Tea Party were originally protesting the exact same thing: the malignant, symbiotic relationship between big government and big corporations. Conservative and liberal protesters both railed against the unchecked power of the Federal Reserve.

    • Some Big Corporations Don’t Pay Taxes, Either

      On Sept. 13, Harold Hamm, chairman and chief executive of Continental Resources, testified before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce about achieving energy independence. He said his company, an oil producer, could produce much more if federal policies didn’t hold it back. Among them is the tax system. Mr. Hamm said his company paid an effective tax rate of 38 percent.

    • Since Romney Raised the Issue of Freeloaders, What Is Erskine Bowles?

      Since we seem destined to have a national debate on the topic of government freeloaders in the wake of the Romney fundraising video, it might be worth asking how we think about someone getting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for sitting on a corporate board for which they did little obvious work. Erskine Bowles, a possible future Treasury Secretary, is of course the poster child for such people.

      Mr. Bowles has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards over the last decade. The stock prices of the companies on whose boards he sat have mostly plummeted. Since 2003 the Erskine Bowles stock index has lost more than one third of its value. By comparison, the S&P 500 has risen by more than 50 percent. If Mr. Bowles was trying to serve shareholders, he has not done a very good job.

    • GSEs Remain Backdoor Bailouts for Banks

      The entire backdrop to this transaction is problematic. An FHFA official “wondered whether Fannie Mae squeezed Bank of America hard enough on price considering the bank was benefiting by “getting this stuff off their books.”

    • Asian stocks rebound despite global uncertainty

      Asian stock markets rebounded Friday, led by gains in technology and oil companies, despite uncertainty about the fragile global economy.

      Crude rose above $93, clawing back some of its recent large fall and helping to boost energy stocks.

      Strong orders for Apple’s iPhone 5, which went on sale Friday starting in Asia, gave a general boost to sentiment in the technology sector.

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Chicago Teachers “On Strike for Better Schools”

      Negotiations between the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) failed to result in a contract before Sunday, September 9, 2012 at midnight, sparking the first teacher’s strike in Chicago in 25 years. The strike is now in its second day.

      The last teacher walk-out in 1987 lasted 19 days. Many hope and expect that this strike will be short-lived, both sides of the negotiations say they are close to a compromise, but have yet to settle important issues such as how much teachers will pay for their health benefits and how teachers will be evaluated.

      This final set of issues comes on top of a long series of demands made by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration which included longer work days, a longer school year, new ways of evaluating and rewarding teachers, and an expansion of non-union charter schools in the city. CTU leaders also cited concerns such as a lack of professional development opportunities, and the lack of air-conditioning in many sweltering classrooms. The union was pleased however to restore through negotiations some of the art, music, world language, technology, and physical education classes cut by the administration earlier.

    • “Citizens for Fire Safety” Smoked Out: Front Group Folds After Exposé

      Manufacturers of flame retardant chemicals, an industry that got a boost from Big Tobacco’s shadow money decades ago, are being exposed to increased public scrutiny. In the fallout, a front group formed by the three biggest manufacturers, calling itself “Citizens for Fire Safety,” has been shuttered.

      The Chicago Tribune published its “Playing with Fire” series in May 2012, catapulting highly toxic flame retardants — present in many household consumer products — into the national spotlight. In the process, it not only highlighted the work of a handful of chemists who’ve been fighting to ban the most toxic of these chemicals, but it also exposed the “deceptive tactics” of the industry’s main front group.

  • Censorship

    • Government of India: Quiet all the way!

      An analysis of the orders issued by the Ministry of Communication & IT makes it difficult to discern the intentions of the authorities. The specific URLs sought to be blocked included the domains of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, BlogSpot, WordPress, Google Plus, Wikipedia, Times of India, Al Jazeera, FirstPost and other websites.

      Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provides the Central Government, the power to block access by the public of any information, to maintain public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offense amongst other things.

    • Open Letter to the Prime Minister regarding parental internet controls

      We write to you as the consultation on parental controls closes. In recent years there have been two comprehensive reviews into the issue of child safety online, the Byron Review and the Bailey Review. They considered a wealth of academic expertise, parental concerns and technical input and both arrived at the same conclusion – parents are the best people to decide what their children can see.

    • When content is noticed and taken down – have your say

      Due to some problems with their website, the European Commission have extended the deadline for submissions to the ‘notice and takedown’ consultation. This is actually pretty good news for anyone who has yet to submit a response – you still have until Tuesday 11th September to have your say. The Commission are asking for responses to a questionnaire.

    • Porn filtering: stop the Daily Mail Nanny State
    • Make Your Voice Heard Against a “Clean Internet”

      The European Commission is holding a consultation -ending on the 5th 11th of September- about “A clean and open Internet”. Citizen input is critically needed to ensure that freedom of expression is protected, against the attempts of many lobbies to impose draconian repressive procedures to censor online content.

    • The Royals, the Web and a look at freedom of speech.

      It’s been a while since I wrote an article for OpenBytes. So I’m to look at a subject which is all over the news at the moment, but in this case take a look at it from a slightly different perspective.

  • Civil Rights

    • Cofounder of La Quadrature du Net Jérémie Zimmermann rewarded with an EFF Pioneer Award

      Tonight at 7:45pm PST (4:45am CET), Jérémie Zimmermann, co-founder and spokesperson of La Quadrature du Net will receive his 2012 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) at a ceremony in the Project One Gallery in San Francisco. The whole team of La Quadrature du Net thanks EFF and congratulates Jérémie.

    • Photo May Prove Assange Innocent

      A photo published by the Mail Online, shows one of the two women who accused besieged Wikileaks spokesman Julian Assange of “rape”, happily smiling with him at a party … two days after he allegedly “raped” her. This casts even further doubt on what is already a highly dubious story, as it seems very unlikely that a rape victim would voluntarily attend a party with her would-be “rapist” at all, much less be smiling about it for the camera.

      Although the woman, known only as “Woman A”, has had her face obscured in the photo “for legal reasons”, The Mail reveals she’s 33 years old, which by a process of simple elimination means she must be Anna Ardin (who also goes by the pseudonym “Bernardin”), the 33 year-old militant feminist currently in hiding in the American-Israeli occupied West Bank, not her co-accuser, 28 year-old Sofia Wilén.

      The basis for both women’s accusations is also highly dubious. In Ardin’s case her sole claim to “rape” is that Assange’s condom broke during sex, and Wilén’s complaint (which she only made under coercion from Ardin) is that he didn’t wear one at all, but she “couldn’t be bothered” telling him to put one on. Suffice it to say Sweden’s “rape” laws are quite bizarre, if they seriously want to extradite Assange on the basis of something as trivial as “condom incompetence”. And that’s assuming any of their claims are true at all, given that Wilén’s testimony was apparently “embellished” by the police, and Ardin found it necessary to subsequently delete SMS and Twitter messages to cover up her distinct lack of emotional trauma after supposedly being “raped”. In fact, quite why Sweden felt it necessary to issue a European Arrest Warrant to extradite Assange in the first place is a bit of a mystery, given that they had more than adequate opportunity to question him while he was in Sweden, but chose to let him go, then bluntly refused to question him in the UK later. This is by far the most suspicious “rape” case I’ve ever heard of.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Dominant Telcos Try to End Net Neutrality Through ITU

      For some months now, there have been intense discussions on the threats raised by the upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). In December, the 193 Member States of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an agency of the United Nations, will gather in Dubaï for this important conference aimed at amending the ITU’s founding treaty, the “International Telecommunication Regulations” (ITRs).

  • Copyrights

    • Has Canada Effectively Shifted from Fair Dealing to Fair Use?

      The reverberations from yesterday’s Supreme Court of Canada copyright decisions will be felt for years (good coverage of the decisions include posts from Mark Hayes, IP Osgoode, Barry Sookman, Howard Knopf, the Toronto Star, and the CBC). While much of the coverage has focused on the music downloading issue, the continued expansion of fair dealing is perhaps the most significant development.

      I focused on the court’s expansive view of fair dealing in an earlier post, but I think it is worth digging a bit deeper to ask whether Canada has now effectively shifted from fair dealing to fair use. The Copyright Act obviously still speaks of fair dealing, but the expansion by the courts and the legislature may have effectively rendered it very close to fair use.

      Under a fair use system (such as that found in the U.S. or Israel), the list of qualifying categories or purposes is illustrative rather than exhaustive. In other words, the statute identifies purposes that may qualify as fair use, but acknowledges that the courts may add new purposes as they see fit. The key to fair use therefore lies not in the purposes – virtually any copying can qualify – but rather in the analysis that follows over whether the particular use is fair. The flexibility of fair use has been lauded as one of its great benefits, opening the door to new innovation that politicians might not envision when drafting the law.

    • Internet Archive Starts Seeding 1,398,875 Torrents

      The Internet Archive has just enriched the BitTorrent ecosystem with well over a million torrent files, and that’s just the start of “universal access to all knowledge.” The torrents link to almost a petabyte of data and all files are being seeded by the Archive’s servers. Founder Brewster Kahle told TorrentFreak that turning BitTorrent into a distributed preservation system for the Internet is the next step.

08.27.12

Links 27/8/2012: Twitter Joins Linux Foundation, *ubuntu 12.04.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Genode OS 12.08 Gains ARM Support, NOVA Work

    The interesting Genode OS framework project has released their 12.08 operating system with several new features.

  • Forging a new Linux path

    There are a lot of debates going on about the pros and cons of the systemd service management system versus the legacy System V init system. Many of these debates center around the technical efficacy of systemd, but perhaps the most powerful question to be asked is: is Linux finally ready to walk away from its Unix legacy once and for all?

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 214

  • Kernel Space

    • Download Linux Kernel 3.6 Release Candidate 3

      Linus Torvalds announced last evening, August 22nd, that the third Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.6 kernel is now available for download and testing.

    • PowerTOP Can Still Extend Battery Life On Linux

      Following the recent release of PowerTOP 2.1 I did some testing from a modern Intel notebook to see what kind of power-savings one can expect from running the open-source PowerTOP software on a modern notebook running Ubuntu.

    • Linux Kernel: “Drop Support For x86-32″

      An alleged Linux user-space developer has called for dropping x86 32-bit support from the Linux kernel.

      If you need a good laugh to start or end the day, there’s the Drop support for x86-32 thread on the Linux kernel mailing list. Microsoft is planning to drop their 32-bit flavor of Windows beginning with the next release, Windows 9. Microsoft has already shared that Windows 8 will be their last 32-bit release and then Windows 9 will only support “x64″ when it comes to the x86 architecture. The user initiating this thread is proposing that Linux drops support for 32-bit support too at the same time as the release of Windows 9 x64.

    • A New Collaboration Aimed at Automatically Backporting the Linux Kernel

      The Linux Foundation’s Driver Backport Workgroup is working on automatically backporting the Linux kernel, which was discussed in some detail at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in April. As a result, a new collaboration is forming between this Workgroup and the compat-drivers project.

    • Twitter Joins Linux Foundation
    • Twitter Joins Linux Foundation, Says Linux is Fundamental to Twitter
    • Twitter Is Set To Join The Linux Foundation

      The Linux Foundation tips us off this Friday afternoon of the pending announcement. “Not only is Twitter built on Linux but open source software is core to its technology strategy. It’s investing even more in the platform now as the company evolves and positions itself for the future. Linux has become even more dominant among web-based companies as the ‘hacker way’ has become pervasive among the newest generation of startups. Twitter’s Open Source Manager will be speaking next week at LinuxCon in San Diego Thursday morning.”

    • Linux Foundation Ranks Grow as Twitter Joins the Community

      The Linux Foundation is growing, again. The Foundation is set to announced that Twitter, Inktank and Servergy willl be joining the Linux organization. The formal announcement is set for next Tuesday, at the LinuxCon event.

    • Twitter joins Linux Foundation’s fight for open source software
    • Twitter To Join The Linux Foundation
    • Happy 21st Birthday, Linux
    • Happy 21st Birthday, Linux

      So what Linus assumed to be a ‘won’t be big and professional’ has grown with leaps and bounds and now used almost everywhere you can imagine — from mobile phones to super-computers, from home equipments to space, from small desktop computers to those massive servers serving millions of pageviews a day. Linux has almost dominated all large technological fields known to mankind.

    • Raise a glass to Linux

      Tomorrow, August 25, is the day traditionally used as the anniversary date for the Linux operating system.

      Much pomp and circumstance surrounded last year’s observance of Linux’s 20th birthday, so this year there won’t be a lot of big parties planned. But for those of us here in the U.S., the 21st birthday is a significant milestone.

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa Set To Lose OpenVMS Support

        Support for OpenVMS is set to be removed from Mesa due to lack of maintainership in four years and trimming out the OpenVMS can shave just over two thousand lines of code.

      • Radeon Gallium3D Gains Greater MSAA Support

        As expected, with Marek Olšák requesting a delay in branching Mesa 9.0 so that he can land more features, support for multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) for more ATI/AMD Radeon hardware has landed plus there’s improved anti-aliasing support for currently-supported GPUs.

      • Shader Optimizations Greatly Speed-Up Wayland

        Rob Clark, the Texas Instruments developer known for his work on the OMAP DRM driver, DMA-BUF, and hacking a Qualcomm open-source driver in his spare time, has been dabbling with Wayland. Rob’s done some optimizations and simplifications to shaders used by Wayland’s Weston reference compositor that greatly improve the performance.

      • MPlayer2′s Latest Development Activities
      • MPlayer2 Patches To Support Wayland

        MPlayer2, the fork of MPlayer, now has patches to support this video player while running on Wayland.

        Alexander Preisinger presented the set of patches to Wayland and MPlayer2 patches that allow for the open-source video player to work over Wayland via EGL, with input and output working correctly but the only reported shortcoming right now is no window decoration support. The patches can be found here.

      • XDC: Hardware-Independent Graphics Driver & More

        With less than one month to go until the XDC2012 summit and the X.Org Franconian Beer Hike, the schedule for this annual development event is beginning to come together.

        In the past day there’s been two new sessions started by Lucas Stach, one of the Nouveau developers:

      • Mesa’s DRM Library Finally Builds VMWGFX By Default

        In a commit made on Friday to mesa/drm, VMWGFX is now built by default with a commit message of “vmwgfx: No longer experimental…And hasn’t been in a long while..” If someone is against the support, at configure-time for building libdrm they can pass the –disable-vmwgfx switch.

      • Compiz now supports OpenGL ES 2.0
      • Yet Another Intel 2.20.x Graphics Driver Release

        Chris Wilson has released yet another driver update in the xf86-video-intel 2.20 series.

        This latest update though isn’t just centered around Chris pushing out more SNA acceleration architecture updates, but it just has a couple of fixes.

      • Intel Makes More Driver Improvements For Valve’s L4D2

        Developers at Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center have made more improvements to their open-source Linux graphics driver to benefit Valve’s upcoming release of their Left 4 Dead 2 game that’s powered by the Source Engine natively on Linux.

      • Comparing Intel HD 2000/3000/4000 Linux Graphics

        Following the recent Intel HD 2500 Ivy Bridge Linux graphics benchmarks, here’s some more numbers that were recently collected when benchmarking the latest Linux graphics code with the Intel HD 2000/3000/4000 graphics cores when clocking the rest of the CPU to a common speed.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Nautilus 3.6 Beta Brings New Features and Improvements

        The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project (now known as Files) announced earlier today, August 21st, that the Beta release of the upcoming Nautilus 3.6 is now available for download and testing.

      • Division Within GNOME

        When I was first asked to write this article, I immediately thought back to the many articles I’ve seen surrounding this now famous blog post. The blog post highlights one GNOME developer’s view about how GNOME has lost its way and needs a clear direction for the future.

        Others see it differently, of course. A counterpoint to this view was written by Bryan Lunduke, who explains that trying to measure the success of a project such as GMOME using standard metrics is pointless.

        He opines that if users are able to use GNOME to customize their desktops to meet their needs, then the project is in fact a success.

        In this article, I will bypass that minefield entirely. Instead, I’ll focus on the desktop experience of GNOME 3 vs alternatives, while putting emphasis on the user experience – not how the underpinnings of the GNOME desktop work under the hood.

  • Distributions

    • Instant WebKiosk: A Live Distro For Secure Browsing

      We often need to access web services from public computers, most that run Windows. There is always a possibilities, especially on public PCs, that they are infected with viruses and Trojans. It can compromise the accounts of the online services that I use from such terminals.

    • The 5 most popular Linux distributions

      These conclusions are not from a formal survey. Why?

      IDG and Gartner figures only look at pre-installed server operating systems, and Web browser surveys — such as StatCounter and NetMarketShare — don’t drill down far enough to say which Linux desktop distributions are the most popular.

      With that, I have to turn to DistroWatch, the master Linux desktop tracking site for useful desktop Linux use data.

      Before launching into this though, I should point out that the most popular end-user Linux of all is probably in your pocket and not on your desktop: Android, of course. With just over half of the U.S. smartphone market, and hundreds of millions of smartphones around the world, Android is the most popular Linux distribution ever; despite 99 percent of its users not realizing that they’re Linux users.

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Five Reasons to Try the New PCLinuxOS

        Hard on the heels of the 19 new distros I wrote about the other day resulting from this month’s “31 Flavors of Fun” project–not to mention major updates to Bodhi Linux and Damn Small Linux, among others–this week has seen the debut of another significant new entry as well.

    • Red Hat Family

      • CloudLinux Reaches Milestone with 1,000 Paying Customers and 9,000 Servers
      • Red Hat CEO: We’re the cloud leader — with Linux

        When you think about the leading cloud computing companies, does the name Red Hat spring to mind? Jim Whitehurst hopes it does. In fact, the CEO of the rapidly growing, Raleigh, NC-based, open source company, is doing everything in his power to ensure that Red Hat has the widest possible portfolio of tools for your private and hybrid cloud — a collection of technologies that Whitehurst says is only rivaled by Microsoft (without the “walled garden” strategy, of course). In addition to Enterprise Linux — the flagship product — Red Hat’s growing cloud stack includes tools for server and storage virtualization, management, security, and an “enterprise-ready” version of OpenStack.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora 18 schedule slips by a week

          At the latest count, there are still 18 open bugs currently classed as blocking the release; these bugs have been deemed important enough that they must be fixed before the alpha can be released. The developers also called attention to the incomplete test matrices for the alpha, which suggest that not enough testing has been done on the code base.

        • Fedora 17 Doesn’t Change The Apple MacBook Pro

          Following yesterday’s OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion vs. Ubuntu Linux benchmarks and the OS X vs. Linux power consumption results after that, some wondered whether Ubuntu was to blame for the poor Linux showing on the Apple hardware. Unfortunately, Ubuntu isn’t alone and here’s some fresh data from Fedora 17 on the MacBook Pro.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.04.1 Released; Brings Calxeda SOCs Support

            Canonical has announced the availability of a sub release of Ubuntu 12.04. The 12.04.1 release brings support for Calxeda SOCs, so businesses can prepare for a datacentre dominated by low-energy, hyperscale servers by testing their workloads on the new hardware now.

          • OS X 10.8 vs. Ubuntu Linux: A Battle With No Clear Winner

            Since Apple released OX X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” last month, there have been tests going on at Phoronix of this latest Apple operating system not only on the Retina MacBook Pro, but other Mac hardware as well. In this article is a comparison of OS X 10.8 versus Ubuntu Linux — when trying out both Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and the latest Ubuntu 12.10 development version.

          • Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS “Precise Pangolin” Released

            The first point release for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” was released on Thursday evening.

            Canonical’s Kate Stewart announced the release of Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, which incorporates about four months of stable package updates for the Ubuntu Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core products.

          • MacBook Pro – Ubuntu Linux: 21 Watts, OS X: 9 Watts

            Earlier today I published the long-awaited benchmarks of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion vs. Ubuntu 12.04/12.10. The benchmarks showed strengths and weaknesses of both operating systems, resulting in the the usual spectrum of comments from Phoronix readers. Here now are the power consumption results when comparing OS X and Ubuntu Linux on Apple hardware.

          • Wayland/Weston 0.95 Land In Ubuntu 12.10

            Wayland and the reference Weston compositor have been updated against the upstream version 0.95 release for the packages to be found in the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.10 release.

            Wayland isn’t playing any useful/official role in Ubuntu 12.10 with Canonical’s plans for a Wayland-based system compositor having been delayed to a future release, but Wayland/Weston packages continue to be available from the Ubuntu universe archive — they just aren’t too useful at this point. There are the Wayland/Weston packages and some simple demos that can be run from the Ubuntu packages, but the tool-kits packaged for Ubuntu along with other components aren’t yet being shipped by Ubuntu with the Wayland support enabled.

          • Ubuntu 12.04.1 out now, 10.04 users prompted to update

            Ubuntu 12.04’s LTS updates have started, with its first point update being released, with updates to cloud support and Calxeda ARM chips

          • Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS Officially Released

            Dear Ubuntu 12.04 LTS users, Canonical proudly announced a few hours ago, August 23rd, the first maintenance release for the long term supported Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

            The Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS release brings to its dedicated users a lot of security updates and corrections, all with a single goal: to keep Ubuntu 12.04 LTS a stable and reliable Linux distribution.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 14 Nadia To Drop Gnome 3 Shell

              The Linux Mint team has revealed the code name of the next edition of this popular Linux-based distribution. Linux Mint 14 will be called Nadia.

              Linux Mint 14 aka Nadia is scheduled to be released at the end November this year. The name is inspired from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, where Nadezhda ‘Nadia’ Chernyshevski is Maya’s best friend.

            • Linux Mint 14 Will Be Named Nadia

              Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, proudly announced a few minutes ago, August 24th, that the codename for the upcoming Linux Mint 14 operating system will be Nadia.

              Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) will be available for download at the end of November 2012, and it will be shipped with separate MATE, Cinnamon, KDE and Xfce editions. However, it has not yet been decided which desktop environment will be the default for Linux Mint 14.

            • Fuduntu Reorganization

              With the Fuduntu project growing, a reorganization in the team was deemed as a necessary step. The reorganization will include more defined primary roles for the Fuduntu team members as well as setup team leaders for the major areas of Fuduntu.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • BeagleBone gets I/O ‘capes’

      Fans of the BeagleBone single board computer, little brother to BeagleBoard, now have access to 20 plug-in boards to add a camera, LCDs, weather sensors, and other I/O, writes Steve Bush.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Quad-Core ODROID-X Tested Against PlayStation 3

          Here are some more benchmarks of the ODROID-X, a $129 ARMv7 development board that packs four Cortex-A9 cores along with Mali-400 graphics to provide a fairly impressive punch. There’s even some comparative numbers to a Sony PlayStation 3 running Linux.

        • Review: Motorola Atrix HD
        • Is 7-inch E FUN Nextbook worth $130 of your money?

          Hardware details include a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, 4GB internal storage, microSD expansion, and 3200mAH battery. No, it’s not half the stuff you get for the $199 Nexus 7 but it be just enough for most users to get started. Would you consider something like this for yourself or someone you know?

        • Can Android Revolutionize Spacecraft Design?

          NASA’s Ames Research Center is working on a new project designed to drastically cut the cost of launching and operating small satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The project, known as PhoneSat, will see the Android powered Nexus One and Nexus S phones command their very own small scale spacecraft this year in a first of its kind research mission.

        • Humble Bundle For Android 3

          I will readily admit that I am an iPhone user. It sits happily beside me at all times, and I’m constantly reading about all sorts of new gizmos and games that are iOS-specific. However, I suppose it’s alright that Android users get some neat games every now and then.

        • OsciPrime: Open Source Oscilloscope for Android

          Since 2010, the OsciPrime project has aimed to turn your Android smartphone or tablet into a fully functional oscilloscope. From its simple beginnings as a school project to the current run of dedicated hardware, OsciPrime is an excellent example of a open source product’s creation from start to finish.

      • Ballnux

        • LG posts teaser site and video for upcoming quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro smartphone

          Ready to start your Friday morning off with a mystery? LG has put up a new teaser site for an upcoming smartphone, and while details about it are still light, there are a few tidbits that ought to pique the interest of anyone that loves high-end specs. The site touts that the device features a Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, which it describes is a “second generation quad-core processor,” paired with an Adreno 320 GPU. There’s also a mention of LTE on the site. A brief teaser video has been posted to the site, but unfortunately both it and the site itself it all in Korean, so those of us that don’t speak the language can’t discern much else from the clip or the page.

Free Software/Open Source

  • Baruwa 2.0 Source code released

    I have just open sourced the source code to Baruwa 2.0 on Github. Baruwa 2.0 is a ground up rewrite of Baruwa which adds lots of new features.

  • Is Disney’s Anti Open Source Kid Inspired By Bill Gates?

    The timing of the show is bad for Disney who recently announced the release of Pixar’s Open SubDiv under the Open Source Microsoft Public License and this episode implies that open source is dangerous. Given the size of company Disney is, I won’t believe that it was an organized propaganda, but it does show the writer or R&D team of the show is living on some remote island without any connection to the real words.

  • Rike project management tool open sourced

    Japanese for “signboard” or “billboard”, Kanban is a scheduling system designed to better prioritise the individual activities of team members; it was first devised by Toyota and used for its Toyota Production System (TPS). Unlike other scheduling systems that are based on the classic “push” principle, Kanban uses the “pull” principle. Work that needs to be done on a project is shown on the Kanban board, which shows the status of the project and tasks available to be worked on. Developers can pull tasks from the board to work on and the system ensures no developer takes on too many tasks.

  • 3D Deformable Object Library Released as Open Source
  • Cloud, mobility, open source driving app development market growth
  • 5 OSS up-and-comers to watch

    Red Hat has blazed a path for all open source software (OSS) companies to follow after it raked in US$1.13 billion in the fiscal year of 2012–making it the first pure-play open source company to hit the billion dollar revenue milestone.

    Jeffrey Hammond, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said the company has proven it can go toe-to-toe with the enterprise market’s big boys by signing customers up to use its OSS products for mission-critical processes.

  • What Every Organization Needs to Know About the Changing Face of Software Development
  • Open Source Cameras : A new digital innovation

  • Events

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Oracle and Google meet again to discuss rangeCheck code

      Attorneys for Oracle and Google met for a brief hearing on Thursday morning at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, once again to discuss the copyrightability and potential damages related to the rangeCheck code.

    • Oracle VirtualBox 4.2 Virtualization Benchmarks

      For those curious whether the forthcoming Oracle VirtualBox 4.2 virtualization platform delivers on any performance enhancements, at least as it pertains to Linux virtualization, here are some quick benchmarks.

      Many Phoronix readers have written in asking about new VirtualBox benchmarks for the forthcoming VirtualBox 4.2 release, especially following the recent Phoronix articles showing how VMware’s graphics stack for OpenGL on virtualized guests beats VirtualBox and also how VMware Fusion generally has an advantage over VirtualBox in other workloads too. I will have more benchmarks once VirtualBox 4.2 is officially released, while for this weekend are just 4.1 vs. 4.2 benchmark results for a lone Intel Linux system.

  • Funding

  • BSD

    • FreeBSD 9.1 RC1 Finally Surfaced This Week

      For those that didn’t see yet, FreeBSD 9.1 Release Candidate 1 was introduced into the world on Thursday.

      The first release candidate for FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE was put out for i386, amd64, and PowerPC64 with the ISOs being available from the usual FreeBSD FTP mirrors. The FreeBSD.org release announcement has more details on updating to this release for those interested.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GIMP 2.8.2 Released

      GIMP went through a major makeover with release 2.8, most notably the single window interface which has enhanced the user experience manifold. The team has announced the release of version 2.8.2 which is mostly focused on bug fixes so no new features have been added.

    • Unified Parallel C (UPC) Proposed For GCC 4.8

      A proposal has went out to merge support for GUPC, the GNU Unified Parallel C branch, into the forthcoming GCC 4.8 compiler code-base.

      Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an extension to C that’s intended for high-performance computing across large-scale parallel machines. Unified Parallel C can handle both SMP/NUMA systems with a global address space along with distributed clusters. UPC extends ISO C99 with a parallel execution model, a shared address space, synchronization primities and a memory consistency model, explicit communication primitives, and memory management primitives.

    • Guest Post: Why schools should refuse iPads

      My name is David and I’m 24 years old, and I was born and educated in Minnesota. My high school exclusively used Apple computers.

    • More Of What’s Landing For The GCC 4.8 Compiler

      GCC 4.8 likely won’t be released until H1’2013, but there’s a number of changes building up for this next release of this leading open-source multi-language compiler.

      Recently some of the GCC 4.8 work has been talked about like the Unified Parallel C proposal, the compiler’s code-base being converted to C++, improved diagnostics/error reporting, and newer hardware support, but that isn’t it.

  • Project Releases

    • PixelLight Open-Source 3D Framework Hits v1.0

      After being in development for one decade, the PixelLight cross-platform open-source 3D application framework for use by games, simulators, and other visualization environments has reached version 1.0.

    • Zarafa Collaboration Platform 7.1 released

      Expanded cluster and backup abilities will improve availability for Zarafa Collaboration Platform (ZCP) 7.1, which was recently released by Zarafa. The new version of the groupware solution does not include Zarafa Indexer, which was only introduced in version 7.0, as the feature’s regular text analysis of mailboxes led to performance problems; instead, the new Zarafa Search now takes care of analysis.

  • Public Services/Government

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Pop culture references for open source principles

      From Nine Inch Nails to Star Trek, open source principles are represented in much of pop culture. Ruth Suehle, community marketing leader for the Fedora Project and moderator of the Life channel at opensource.com, found this to be a great approach to explaining the open source way to people who don’t know much (or don’t want to know much) about its humble beginnings in software.

Leftovers

  • Empowering education: the path to Europe’s brighter future in innovation

  • Finance

    • Sad But True: Corporate Crime Does Pay

      Almost daily we read about another apparently stiff financial penalty meted out for corporate malfeasance. This year corporations are on track to pay as much as $8 billion to resolve charges of defrauding the government, a record sum, according to the Department of Justice. Last year big business paid the SEC $2.8 billion to settle disputes.

    • One last prop trade for Goldman?

      As US regulators put together the final touches to the controversial Volcker Rule, Goldman Sachs’ third-quarter results are likely to reflect the benefits of one last proprietary trading hurrah from the purchase – and subsequent sale – of Knight Capital’s accidental stock portfolio.

    • The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class

      This study asks Who are the the world’s 1 percent power elite? And to what extent do they operate in unison for their own private gains over benefits for the 99 percent? We examine a sample of the 1 percent: the extractor sector, whose companies are on the ground extracting material from the global commons, and using low-cost labor to amass wealth. These companies include oil, gas, and various mineral extraction organizations, whereby the value of the material removed far exceeds the actual cost of removal.We also examine the investment sector of the global 1 percent: companies whose primary activity is the amassing and reinvesting of capital. This sector includes global central banks, major investment money management firms, and other companies whose primary efforts are the concentration and expansion of money, such as insurance companies. Finally, we analyze how global networks of centralized power—the elite 1 percent, their companies, and various governments in their service—plan, manipulate, and enforce policies that benefit their continued concentration of wealth and power. We demonstrate how the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital in the world.

  • Civil Rights

    • Would you give the government remote control over your router?

      Well-meaning proposals sometimes have a way of raising troubling questions. Case in point: A team of wireless researchers in Germany proposed a way to improve the communications abilities of first responders, the brave people who rush into disastrous situations to help save the victims.

    • NSA mathematicians

      When I was a promising young mathematician in college, I met someone from the NSA who tried to recruit me to work for the spooks in the summer. Actually, “met someone” is misleading- he located me after I had won a prize.

      I didn’t know what to think, so I accepted his invitation to visit the institute, which was in La Jolla, in Southern California (I went to UC Berkeley so it wasn’t a big trip).

      When I got to the building, since I didn’t have clearance, everybody had to stop working the whole time I was there. It wasn’t enough to clean their whiteboards, one of them explained, they had to wash them down with that whiteboard spray stuff, because if you look at a just-erased whiteboard in a certain way you can decipher what had been written on it.

      I met a bunch of people, maybe 6 or 7. They all told me how nice it was to work there, how the weather was beautiful, how the math problems were interesting. It was strangely consistent, but who knows, perhaps also true.

      One thing I’d already learned before coming is that there are many layers of work that happen before the math people in La Jolla are given problems to do. First, the actual problem is chosen, then the “math” of the problem is extracted from the problem, and third it’s cleansed so that nobody can tell what the original application is.

      Knowing this (and I was never contradicted when I explained that process), I asked each of them the same question: how do you feel about the fact that you don’t know what problem you’re actually solving?

      Out of the 6 or 7 people I met, everyone but one person responded along the lines, “I believe everything the United States Government does is good.” The last guy said, “yeah, that bothers me. I am honestly seriously considering leaving.”

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • AT&T, have you no shame?

      Bob Quinn, one of the top AT&T lobbyists (“Senior Vice President-Federal Regulatory”) in a company famous for lobbyists, must have drawn the short straw at the office staff meeting this week, because he got a truly unenviable job. Quinn’s task was to explain to the world how AT&T’s plan to keep blocking FaceTime video chats on some data plans but to unblock it on others was a good thing for customers, how AT&T was in “a learning mode,” and—most importantly—why the decision was absolutely, completely legal despite what the unwashed peasants in “public advocacy” work would have you believe.

    • With SOPA gone, setting Internet advocacy’s next stop

      In January, several tech companies aided by a groundswell of support from communities across the Web fought to derail a pair of online piracy bills — and won.

      Since the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP (Intellectual Property) Act ended, there’s been a lot of discussion about where, exactly to direct all that energy.

08.24.12

Links 24/8/2012: Linux 3.6 RC3, Gnome Shell 3.6 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Linux Forums Etiquette
  • Linux and Apple: Which Is the Lemon, Which Is the Lemonade?

    Think you’re going to run Linux as a second operating system on that new Retina MacBook of yours? Think again. Phoronix’s Michael Larabel has described it as a “less than ideal experience,” even after jumping through the various technological hoops necessary to make it work at all. But who’s at fault for this — Apple or Linux?

  • Desktop

    • Time to Shine: Why Desktop Linux is Taking Over

      Microsoft Windows has long been the operating system of choice for corporate level desktop PCs, but times change. There are a number of drivers that are pushing Linux into the domain of the end user device from the enterprise server space; such as tablets, smartphones and the 20 million desktop PCs and countless server installations using the free Ubuntu Linux operating system.

    • The Stark Unreality of Retail GNU/Linux in USA

      Check out Walmart.com. Look for

      * “linux” in Books – 104 results (YAY!)
      * “ubuntu” in Books – 25 results (YAY!)
      * “linux” in Computers – 2 results , online only pickup in stores a few days after ordering (BOOO!)
      * “ubuntu” in Computers – 0 results (BOOO!)

      What’s wrong with this picture? There’s obviously a great interest in GNU/Linux in Walmart’s customers. Several books about GNU/Linux are on the first page of the “best-sellers” list under Books/Computers/Operating Systems. Why don’t they sell more than a couple of models of GNU/Linux PCs (ones with a popular distro at least)?

    • 6th Grade Teacher Builds Students a Free Linux-Based Computer Lab From Scratch

      Robert Litt teaches sixth grade in Alameda County, California. Until recently, he taught at a school that lacked a functioning computer lab. For reasons that are probably clear to anyone who reads technology and nerd culture blogs, a school in 2012 not having a computer lab is a totally unacceptable thing. It occurred to Litt that if students aren’t coming out of primary education with some basic computer literacy, they’re being drastically underserved by their school system, and he wasn’t ready to let that fly. So, with no budget to speak of and in dire need of a computer lab, Litt turned to the warm embrace of free software and put together 70 computers running Ubuntu, meaning that ASCEND, the school where he teaches, now has not only a computer lab, but computers in classrooms as well.

  • Kernel Space

    • A New Collaboration Aimed at Automatically Backporting the Linux Kernel

      The Linux Foundation’s Driver Backport Workgroup is working on automatically backporting the Linux kernel, which was discussed in some detail at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in April. As a result, a new collaboration is forming between this Workgroup and the compat-drivers project.

      Ann Davis of SUSE and the Driver Backport Workgroup guest blogs today about these developments:

    • Kernel Log – Coming in 3.6 (Part 1): Filesystems and storage

      Linux 3.6 introduces quota and backup functions for Btrfs as well as security enhancements for temp directories. New interfaces enable the kernel to be made aware of changes to the sizes of used partitions.

    • Systemd To Secure Logs With “Forward Secure Sealing”

      Systemd has picked up a new feature — Forward Secure Sealing (FSS) — in an attempt to better secure system logs on the local file-system in the event a hacker penetrates the system the logs cannot be modified.

    • Linux 3.6-rc3

    • Graphics Stack

      • Mesa 9.0 Branching Delayed So More Features Can Land

        The code branching of the next Mesa release — what was going to be known as Mesa 8.1 but is now being called Mesa 9.0 — is being delayed by a few days to allow time for some last-minute features to land.

      • New X.Org Server 1.13 RC Bumps The ABI
      • OpenGL ES 2.0 Support Merged Into Compiz

        The OpenGL ES 2.0 support branch has been merged into mainline Compiz. This allows the once-thriving compositing window manager to run on the PandaBoard ES and various other mobile/embedded devices that only support GLES for rendering.

        Sam Spilsbury has announced via his blog that the OpenGL ES support was merged into mainline Compiz. “That means as of now, you can build lp:compiz on a platform like the pandaboard below and expect it to run as it does on the desktop…It also means that we’ll be able to deploy compiz on any other platform that implements OpenGL|ES 2.0.” This comes after KWin and GNOME Shell / Mutter have already supported OpenGL ES as a subset of OpenGL.

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • Gaurav Joined the Game

        There are many reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution. It is important to KDE e.V. by helping to create a predictable income. This money is used to support events that accelerate development of KDE software, enhance promotion efforts and help grow the Community. KDE contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds, so their reasons for contributing are diverse. Claudia Rauch and Jayson Rowe from the Join the Game Team asked supporting member Gaurav Chaturvedi why he joined the game.

      • Merging LightDM Log-In Manager For KDE Workspaces

        The developer behind LightDM-KDE has called for merging the log-in manager into KDE Workspaces. KDM, however, will remain the default but it will become optional with LightDM-KDE being a build-time alternative.

        David Edmundson has long been working on LightDM-KDE: a version of the LightDM catered towards KDE. With Kubuntu 12.10 planning to use LightDM-KDE (the Unity/GNOME version of Ubuntu already uses LightDM), Edmundson is looking to make LightDM-KDE more official. Currently LightDM-KDE is living within KDE’s Playground.

      • openmamba Milestone2 KDE: are you ready to use it?

        Some of my reviews are inspired by new arrivals in the families of popular Linux distributions. Others – because I am interested in one or another aspect of the distribution. There are also cases, when authors of the distribution ask me to review it.

    • GNOME Desktop

      • Is GNOME Still Needed?

        When GNOME began in 1997, the project had a clear purpose. At the time, there was no other free desktop, since KDE relied on the then-proprietary Qt toolkit. But today, looking at the mounting evidence of problems within the project and the denial of many project members, I have to ask: Does free software still need GNOME? Or has it outlived its usefulness?

        The fact that such questions seem reasonable today is a bizarre reversal. Years ago, KDE became unquestionably free software. Yet the rivalry between GNOME and KDE, sometimes friendly, sometimes fiery, has long driven the development of the desktop to the benefit of all. The need for cross-compatibility, to say nothing of the hopes of equaling or surpassing each other, improved both desktop environments.

      • Gnome Shell 3.6 Beta Released

        The Gnome team has announced a beta release of Gnome Shell 3.6, the next major release of Gnome Desktop Environment Shell. Version 3.5.90 is a beta release, which means it contains all the features of the upcoming Gnome Shell Release but may contain some bugs which may effect stability of the desktop and applications.

      • GNOME Shell 3.6 Beta Has Been Released

        The GNOME Project announced earlier today, August 22nd, the immediate availability for download and testing of GNOME Shell 3.6 Beta.

      • 5 Top Features Of Gnome 3.6

        HarfBuzz is a text shaping engine that is use for implementing OpenType fonts. This has been finally merged with pango and will be avialable in Gnome 3.6.

      • A ton of Updates for Gnome components!

        It is one of those “new versions” days again were new bug fixing versions for applications, libraries and components for the Gnome desktop environment are released.

        This time it is about the stable or unstable branches of Vala, Empathy, Epiphany, gThumb, WebkitGTK+, Nautilus, Seahorse, Gdm, Eye of Gnome, File Roller, Evince, GTK3, Clutter and Mutter that will be analysed on another article and GLib.

      • Gnome 3.6 first impressions | Simply Beautiful!

        Johansson or Gnome, Gnome or Johansson? I am very sorry but I have to say it. Both are ***** beautiful! I tried Gnome 3.5.90 for about 7 hours, and I don’t really know what to write about it.

        Gnome 3.6 it’s impressive better than its predecessor. Fast, clean, simple, pretty ..slick.

        This time Gnome isn’t about the Shell. While Shell received significant changes, the rest modules of Gnome pull the attraction. Amazing things from the Gnome Team in this release. Congratulations boys ‘n’ girls of Gnome Team!

  • Distributions

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Red Hat Family

      • Fedora

        • Why Fedora 18 Will Be The Practical Choice For Vanilla Enthusiasts

          We all know about the rocky road that Gnome 3 has been travelling on since March of last year. Not since KDE 4.0 has a desktop environment been met with such community backlash and perceived exodus. I say “perceived” because that’s what it is. In the world of Linux, these things are almost impossible to measure and are almost always gauged by media reaction. These powerful media reactions almost always build the bandwagon that everyone hops onto.

        • Fedora 18 Delayed, Blame It On Bugs

          A number of outstanding bugs still present in Fedora 18 apps have delayed the release by a week. This was decided in a go/no go meeting organized by Fedora QA team this week.

          Currently numerous bugs are still unresolved in Fedora 18. These bugs have been marked as important and their resolution is necessary before Fedora 18 is released. The developers also need to solve the problem of incomplete test matrices, which are still not ready.

        • Fedora 18 “Spherical Cow” Has Been Delayed

    • Debian Family

      • File under ‘disturbing’: Debian Wheezy doesn’t ship with the Synaptic Package Manager

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu 12.10: New features, new levels of user-friendliness

            Ubuntu 12.04 brought to the table one of the most user-friendly desktop operating systems to date. With the improvements to Unity, Ubuntu took leaps forward in usability and did so in an incredibly unique way — making something radically different work more efficiently than the standard metaphor. Well, release 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) will arrive October 18, 2012 and it promises to improve upon what 12.10 had to offer. Seeing as how that is now less than two months away, I thought it time to discuss some of the feature additions that will appear in the upcoming release.

          • Ubuntu – All other versions of LINUX aspire to be this successful

            Ubuntu is innovative, forward thinking and the most likely LINUX distribution to have any hope of taking on Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS on the desktop. Ubuntu also has aspirations of taking on the mobile and tablet market dominated by Apple and Google.

            So many other distributions are derived from UBUNTU including the distribution that is competing for the honour of top dog in the LINUX world, MINT.

            Ask most people in the LINUX world which distribution they would recommend to people who are thinking of trying LINUX and UBUNTU would be the first word out of their mouths.

          • Ubuntu 12.10 Pushes Sandy Bridge Further

            Recently I have shown that Intel graphics hit a high point with the Linux 3.6 kernel and that Ubuntu 12.10 is faster with Intel hardware compared to the current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release. In this article are more Ubuntu 12.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 12.10 benchmarks to highlight the performance improvements for Intel Sandy Bridge graphics that will be found in Ubuntu 12.10.

          • Ubuntu Developer Week 2012: 28th – 30th August

            Daniel Holbach from Canonical proudly announced a few minutes ago, August 22nd, the schedule of this year’s second Ubuntu Developer Week event.

            The second Ubuntu Developer Week event for 2012 will take place between August 28th and 30th, and will cover several aspects of Ubuntu development, from crash-courses in getting started with working on Ubuntu to more advanced topics.

          • Unity 4.0 Public Beta to Launch Today, Canonical Presenting at Unite 2012

            Game engine maker Unity Technologies announced at the Unite 2012 conference in Amsterdam that Unity 4.0 public beta will be available today.

          • Minor improvements coming in Ubuntu Linux update release

            Ubuntu 12.04 Linux isn’t just a very popular end-user Linux, it’s also Canonical’s Long Term Support (LTS) version. That means, besides Linux distributions’ usual constant stream of improvements, it gets updates for business users and the first one is just about here.

            Officially, August 23rd will see the first update, Ubuntu 12.04.1, to the operating system. Actually, the Ubuntu update is running a bit late. In any case, here’s what you can expect from it.

          • Gnome Online Accounts To Ship By Default In Ubuntu 12.10

            Ubuntu 12.10 is going through a massive development phase with new and exciting features being added to it everyday.

            Ubuntu developers are working hard to integrate onlines services within Unity. Webapps are great example of what kind of integration Canonical is planning for Ubuntu. Gnome Online Accounts is one such powerful and useful tool which needs a better integration within Unity. Although Ubuntu teams are doing just that. Ubuntu 12.10 will ship Gnome Online accounts by default.

          • Canonical Promoting Ubuntu Software Center To Game Devs

            With the Unity 4.0 game engine gaining native Linux support, Canonical is sponsoring a session at this week’s Unite game development conference to promote their Ubuntu Software Center to game developers of this Mono-powered proprietary game engine.

            “This week Canonical is sponsoring a developer session at Unite 2012 to share how easy hundreds of thousands of Unity developers can now bring their games to the Ubuntu Software Center. Unite is the yearly conference for the Unity community with hands-on demonstrations, educational seminars and keynotes about developing games with Unity and we are happy to be a part of it,” was said by Canonical’s David Pitkin on the Ubuntu developer blog.

          • Ubuntu Server Plans to Move Away From 32-Bit Computing

            It took a while, but the era of 32-bit computing may finally be coming to a close. At least, that’s what the Ubuntu Server Team’s decision has implied with its decision to cease providing 32-bit installation CD images for the upcoming 12.10 release of the operating system. Here’s a look at this plan, and what it reveals about hardware trends more generally.

            Like most major operating systems, Ubuntu is currently available in both 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (x86_64) versions. Unless you’re a geek, you probably don’t have much reason to care about the differences between these two builds, but there are certain technical advantages to installing the 64-bit variant of Ubuntu. The catch, however, is that not all computers support 64-bit operating systems — although virtually all machines manufactured in the last few years should.

          • Canonical to release Ubuntu 12.04.1 with Calxeda ARM support

            LINUX VENDOR Canonical will release Ubuntu 12.04.1, introducing support for Calxeda’s ARM based system-on-chip (SoC).

            Canonical’s release of Ubuntu 12.04 Long Term Support (LTS) earlier this year marked the Linux outfit’s latest push into the enterprise with an increased emphasis on servers. Now the firm has released a rare point release dubbed 12.04.1 LTS that brings support for Calxeda’s ARM SoC and the upcoming Folsom release of Openstack software.

          • Great Wall U310 packs an Ubuntu desktop PC into a keyboard

            Ever wonder why you need a keyboard, mouse, monitor, and a PC case for a desktop computer? It turns out if the brains of the PC fit into a small enough space, you don’t.

            All-in-one PCs generally combine most of the components into the display case. If you want to bring your own monitor, you can always try a PC that fits inside a keyboard case, like the Great Wall U310.

          • Turn a Keyboard Into a Computer with Raspberry Pi

            Turn a Keyboard Into a Computer with Raspberry PiThe Raspberry Pi is still picking up momentum with different types of DIY projects. If you’re looking for a means to build an old-school computer-in-a-keyboard with a Raspberry Pi, the German blog Preamp shows you exactly how to do it.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon Review

              Regrettably, this is the first time I have reviewed the Cinnamon desktop which is the new shining star of the Linux Mint Project. This release is one that should not be missed for Linux Mint lovers.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • Google’s Mind-Blowing Big-Data Tool Grows Open Source Twin

    Mike Olson and John Schroeder shared a stage at a recent meeting of Silicon Valley’s celebrated Churchill Club, and they didn’t exactly see eye to eye.

    Olson is the CEO of a Valley startup called Cloudera, and Schroeder is the boss at MapR, a conspicuous Cloudera rival. Both outfits deal in Hadoop — a sweeping open source software platform based on data center technologies that underpinned the rise of Google’s web-dominating search engine — but in building their particular businesses, the two startups approached Hadoop from two very different directions.

  • Google Delivers Octane, An Update to Its V8 JavaScript Benchmark Suite
  • Open Source Router Platforms – Part 1: The Hardware

    A few months ago we asked a simple question – what do you use for your router, and what would you look for in a router review. Unless you’re entirely mobile, getting online these days pretty much requires the use of some kind of NAT router. Picking that hardware is often a function of what software can be tossed on top, and having a consistent and familiar set of configuration pages makes setup and maintenance much less of a nightmare than dealing with the third party alternatives. There are so many arguments for using some open source package instead of the first party software which is usually derived from the board software package the SoC vendor hands out.

  • Twisted pleasures of open source ‘sprint’ worth my weekend

    I walked into the business heart of San Francisco, tapped on the closed offices of a profitable IT business, scooted into what looked like their main conference room, sat down, and started fixing bugs. I felt a little like an accountant breaking into someone’s ledgers at night, and double-checking their book-keeping.

    I was there for the “Twisted Sprint”, which is perhaps both slightly less fun and/or painful than it sounds.

  • The Greatest Contribution To Technology In 2012: Open Source Technologies

    Open-source technology has become a common phenomenon nowadays. Despite the big number of open source technologies sprouting up around the world, there are those which are superior to the rest. Below is a list of 5 such technologies and how they have changed the world.

  • Open-Source virtualization management coming for KVM, Xen and VMware
  • ColdFusion’s open source-fueled renaissance

    Earlier mou this year, over 100 of the ColdFusion community’s most passionate and innovative members met in Dallas, to convene the second year of OpenCF Summit, a conference focused exclusively on advancing free and open source software in the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) community.

    Energized by a special video greeting from the father of ColdFusion, Jeremy Allaire, attendees spent the next 72 hours learning about the enterprise-class open source CFML engines Railo and Open BlueDragon, powerful development frameworks like ColdSpring and Mach-II, and the sophisticated Mura Content Management System. All culminating in a better understanding of how to promote this elegant and powerful language as an accessible and uniquely well-suited platform for open government and civic hacktivism.

  • Twisted pleasures of open source ‘sprint’ worth my weekend

    I walked into the business heart of San Francisco, tapped on the closed offices of a profitable IT business, scooted into what looked like their main conference room, sat down, and started fixing bugs. I felt a little like an accountant breaking into someone’s ledgers at night, and double-checking their book-keeping.

    I was there for the “Twisted Sprint”, which is perhaps both slightly less fun and/or painful than it sounds.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • VirtualBox 4.1 update improves stability

      While users are awaiting the imminent publication of version 4.2 of the desktop virtualisation system, the VirtualBox developers have released version 4.1.20 with fixes that improve its overall stability and rectify various regressions. In total, the tenth update to the 4.1.x branch of Oracle’s desktop virtualisation application addresses more than twenty bugs; some of these could cause it to crash when, for example, running virtual machines (VMs) without hardware virtualisation or restoring an old snapshot.

    • New Program to Squash Key Bugs in LibreOffice
    • VirtualBox 4.1.20 Has Support for Linux Kernel 3.6

      Oracle announced a few minutes ago, August 21st, the immediate availability for download of the VirtualBox 4.1.20 virtualization software for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows platforms.

      VirtualBox 4.1.20 comes with compile fixes for the Linux kernel 3.5 RC1 and Linux kernel 3.6 RC1, as well as for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS 6.3 distributions.

    • The Future of LibreOffice – Android, iOS, fixes, and more
    • OpenOffice 3.4.1 released, includes more languages

      OpenOffice has got a point update to the now Apache managed office suite, including bug fixes, performance enhancements, and extra language support

  • CMS

    • Basic Web Design with Drupal 7

      Drupal is one of the most popular and versatile platforms for Web design. It’s free, open source and will run on Linux. Early last year, a new version was released (Drupal 7), making it even better with improvements in usability, performance and security. If you’ve looked at Drupal before, but didn’t end up using it, you may want to take another look.

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • GNU Alive 2.0.0 available

      GNU Alive 2.0.0 is available. GNU Alive is a keep-alive program for internet connections. It repeatedly pings a series of user-specified hosts, thereby encouraging (one hopes) the involved networks to not disappear.

  • Project Releases

  • Openness/Sharing

    • QR Code Open Source Beer
    • Version 1.0 of openHAB home automation bus arrives

      The openHAB (open Home Automation Bus) has now reached version 1.0 after two and a half years in development. The 1.0 release takes a very different approach to the commercial home automation offerings, and not just by being GPLv3 licensed open source. Being open source though does allow it to be easily extended beyond the mainstream automation tasks of switching lights, activating plug sockets or moving blinds. Of course users will need to purchase and install the light switches, smart sockets and automated blinds themselves.

    • Crowdfunding open source 3D printing of plastic guns
    • The code for open source milk is cracked

      My son was recently put on a temporary alternative milk diet, no cow, rice, or soy milk. I panicked. My entire life my family has been a cow’s milk household—I don’t know a life without dairy products. We had been making our own yogurt, so I hoped that would help. Thank goodness, my son and my family don’t have a nut allergy. Otherwise I would panic more.

      First, I shop. Then, panic, again. Finally, I do the math. And, yes, panic. Cow’s milk is usually $2.99 (USD) or more for a gallon where I live, and almond or coconut milk is around $2.99 (US) for half that amount.

  • Programming

    • Top 5 open-source IDEs for developers

      Ever wanted to hack out some code on a IDE (Integrated development environment) without having to splash the cash? Fortunately, there are some great IDEs out there that are completely free. We look into 5 open-source IDEs and look at what they can offer to developers.

    • NAG Fortran Compiler Can Now Do OpenMP 3.0

      The Numerical Algorithms Group has released a major update to their multi-platform Fortran compiler. Beyond improving support for new versions of the Fortran language, NAG Fortran can now do OpenMP 3.0.

    • Node.js set to land on Engine Yard’s PaaS

      The addition of Node.js to Engine Yard lets customers host highly scalable web services on the platform, and helps it close its language gap with rival platform

Leftovers

  • CowboyNeal Looks Back at the SCO-Linux

    This past week, SCO filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which finally begins the end of a long saga that started over nine years ago. While their anti-IBM litigation has risen from the grave and still shambles onward, the company itself is nearly put to rest after nine years of choosing the wrong legal battle to get into. Even if it may be too early to dance on SCO’s grave, join me as I look back over the long and bumpy road to nowhere of The SCO Group.

  • Everything You’ve Heard About Failing Schools Is Wrong

    “SPEEK EENGLISH, TACO,” THE GIRL with the giant backpack yelled when Maria asked where to find a bathroom. The backpack giggled as it bounced down the hall. It had been hours since Maria began looking for a bathroom. Anger boiled inside her, but she didn’t know any English words to yell back. That was the hardest part. Back in El Salvador she’d always had something to say.

    The bell rang. A flood of shoulders and sneakers swirled around Maria, and she couldn’t see much until the sea of strangers streamed back into classrooms. Then she stood alone in the hallway.

  • Security

  • Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Finance

  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Dems Decide Kochs Are an Election Issue: “Patriot Majority” Launches $500K Ad Buy

      A left-leaning group, Patriot Majority, has launched a $500,000 ad campaign trying to make an election issue out of conservative mega-donors David and Charles Koch, suggesting the brothers are spending big “to buy this year’s elections and advance their agenda,” with the goal of electing “politicians who will pass laws that benefit special interests but hurt the middle class.”

  • Censorship

  • Privacy

    • The Program

      It took me a few days to work up the nerve to phone William Binney. As someone already a “target” of the United States government, I found it difficult not to worry about the chain of unintended consequences I might unleash by calling Mr. Binney, a 32-year veteran of the National Security Agency turned whistle-blower. He picked up. I nervously explained I was a documentary filmmaker and wanted to speak to him. To my surprise he replied: “I’m tired of my government harassing me and violating the Constitution. Yes, I’ll talk to you.”

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Looking for Kids’ Books? Avoid This Propaganda

      Did you know that genetic engineering (GE) “is helping to improve the health of the Earth and the people who call it home”? A trade group funded by Monsanto wants your kids to believe it.

      The Council for Biotechnology Information (CBI) has published a kids’ book on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that purports to give kids “a closer look at biotechnology. You will see that biotechnology is being used to figure out how to: 1) grow more food; 2) help the environment; and 3) grow more nutritious food that improves our health.”

    • Copyrights

      • US Government Seizes Android Piracy Websites

        The Department of Justice (DOJ) has issued orderes to seize websites that host pirated Android apps.

        In a press statement DoJ said, “The seizures are the result of a comprehensive enforcement action taken to prevent the infringement of copyrighted mobile device apps. The operation was coordinated with international law enforcement, including Dutch and French law enforcement officials.”

08.22.12

Links 22/8/2012: Linux 3.4 Longterm, PowerTOP 2.1 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 8:44 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • Walt Disney’s Real Commitment To Open Source
  • Pixar software goes open source

    The mighty animation studio has decided to share its Subd evaluation code as used on its latest feature Brave. Download the software yourself for free!

  • The 2012 Google Summer of Code fruits!

    More than two months ago, we took a look on the 29 new things that this Google summer of code would bring to the Gnome desktop environment and its various components.

    Today it is the “pencils down” for everyone as we finally reached the end of this magnificent program. Interns and mentors have done a great job providing new exciting things to the Gnome users benefit.

  • Events

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Mozilla: IonMonkey Firefox Faster Than Chrome

        More than two years ago, Mozilla promised that it would catch up with Google’s Chrome performance in JavaScript. Today, JavaScript is not as much as a problem anymore as it was in 2010, but Mozilla has not forgotten its promise. IonMonkey is breathing down Chrome’s neck.

  • SaaS

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • New Program to Squash Key Bugs in LibreOffice

      If you’re like many of us here at OStatic, you’ve probably been using the LibreOffice suite of applications for some time now. And, without a doubt, this suite has become very impressive both in terms of its overall capabilities and in terms of the speed with which problems are addressed. New releases of the suite clean up lots of bugs, with community support behind the effort. But there is a new and aggressive program that has just been introduced to crack down further on bugs in LibreOffice. Dubbed HardHacks, it should make the suite much better–and do so quickly.

    • Oracle Closing MySQL?

      Seems Oracle is on its way to close sourcing the widely used relational database management system – MySQL. It was acquired by Oracle from Sun Microsystems in 2010 and is used in millions of websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and even Google.

    • Vagrant distances itself from Virtualbox

      Vagrant, the open source developer environment generation tool, is being re-engineered to no longer be dependent on VirtualBox, Oracle’s open source desktop virtualisation platform. Vagrant allows the creation of “boxes” which contain all the assets needed to provision a fresh virtual machine. With a single command, Vagrant can create a machine from a box and bring it up. Vagrant was designed for developers who need to bring up multiple virtual machines, repeatably and easily in a testing environment. Vagrant 1.0 appeared in March this year.

    • Oracle secrecy threatens open MySQL development

      Oracle has been accused of hiding MySQL test cases and obfuscating revision history by MariaDB VP Sergei Golubchik. In a blog post entitled “Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL become closed source”, Golubchik says they noticed that, according to the release notes, a number of bugs had been fixed in the most recent MySQL 5.5.27 release, but there were no test cases associated with any of the bug fixes – indeed, there are no tests associated with bug 61579 or 60926. When he asked on the MySQL internals mailing list, he was unable to get a response from Oracle as to whether this was new policy or an oversight.

    • LibreOffice team to focus on hard bugs

      In a new initiative, “LibreOffice HardHacks”, the LibreOffice developers are being called on to take on the harder bugs in the LibreOffice code. Bjoern Michaelsen announced the programme, which is complementary to an earlier successful project “LibreOffice Easy Hacks”, which set out to get the “low hanging fruit” bugs, the ones that would be easy to resolve and would bring new developers on board.

  • Funding

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • Yet Another Government Adopting Free Software

      Google’s translation:

      “The municipality of Vieira do Minho definitively adopted productivity software LibreOffice”.

    • Swiss open source awards for canton of Waadt and Supreme Court

      The Swiss canton of Waadt(Vaud) and the country’s Supreme Court are among this year’s winners of the CH Open Source Awards. The Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open announced the awards last week Tuesday.

      The advocacy organisation writes in a statement that the ‘Portail eGov du canton de Vaud’ was awarded for its involvement in the open source community and its vision on using open source. “The price is to support the Canton of Vaud”, ch/open says, hoping it will serve as an incentive for other cantons.

      A special award was given to the Swiss Supreme Court. Ch/open chairman Matthias Günter says the court earned the award for its “pioneering of the use of open source, even as many other public administrations are increasing their use of open source, consciously or not.”

    • Government petitioned to “free the code”

  • Openness/Sharing

    • Four insights to selling and marketing open source software

      Without genuinely valuable services for your customer, you have no revenue. I am aware that “value” is an overused word. Having spent many years of my career in marketing, I have been guilty of saying “what’s the value proposition?” more than a few times. But now, having been in the driver’s seat selling services for open source software applications, I can provide a more specific definition of value, particularly as it applies to application software (in contrast with infrastructure software).

    • Yeastie Boys win gold for open source beer

      New Zealand brewing company Yeastie Boys added a gold medal for design to the growing swag of international gongs they have recently won for their leftfield ales, when they were awarded gold for their open source Digital IPA in the Packaging Class at the Sutton Group Brewers Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards last week.

    • Timberlake: Iceland open-sources its constitution for modern adaptation

    • Open Data

      • Open data done well is a catalyst for change

        In March 2012 I reported in a post entitled “Open by design” a paper by Harlan Yu and David Robinson entitled “The New Ambiguity of Open Government“. A discussion of the paper has now appeared on the World Bank blog by Anupama Dokeniya entitled “Opening Government Data. But Why?” [A thank you to Jacques Raybaut at en.europa-eu-audience for the heads-up]. This is also even more relevant given the UK Public Accounts Committee report back so recently which was linked to and commented upon in Transparent e-gov.

    • Open Hardware

      • MakerPlane open source hardware airplanes

        John sez, “MakerPlane is an open source aviation organization which will enable people to build and fly their own safe, high quality, reasonable cost plane using advanced personal manufacturing equipment such as CNC mills and 3D printers. The project will also include open source avionics software to enable state-of-the-art digital flight instruments and display capabilities. Basically we are designing an aircraft that can be built on a CNC mill at home, or at a makerspace which is easy to assemble and quick to build. The plans and instructions will be available for free to anyone that wants them!”

  • Programming

Leftovers

  • Wilt Chamberlain’s Family Tries To Block Film About His College Years, Claiming ‘Publicity Rights’

    A filmmaker is trying to make a film about basketball great Wilt Chamberlain’s college years at Kansas. However, his estate appears to be threatening the filmmaker if he goes ahead, claiming such things as publicity rights over Chamberlain’s image…

  • Security

    • Systemd to secure system log information against attacks

      Systemd can now secure log information on system processes stored in its journal, using a procedure known as Forward Secure Sealing (FSS). This prevents attackers who have obtained administrator privileges from clearing traces of their activity from the journal without deleting it in its entirety. A verification key is used to secure the data and, to prevent modification, it has to be stored externally. Instead of writing the key down, users can optionally save it to a smartphone via a QR code.

  • Finance

  • Privacy

    • Deep Web, Deep Privacy

      Tell someone that you know how to go off-radar on the Internet and, as a rule, they won’t believe you. They imagine shadowy intelligence agencies have state-of-the-art technology and can see everything you do. Bkut they would be wrong.

      No doubt they do have amazing technology, but it is perfectly possible to hide yourself on the Internet, to send and receive emails that nobody can intercept or read, to upload and download securely, to visit banned websites, blog anonymously, and do anything you want without being followed, profiled or analysed. Those that know how use the Deep Web.

08.20.12

Links 20/8/2012: Wine 1.5.11, Frugalware 1.7

Posted in News Roundup at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • OS4 1.0 “OpenDesktop” has been released

    oberto Dohnert has announced the release of OS4 1.0 “OpenDesktop” edition, a Xubuntu-based distribution targeting legacy 32-bit hardware, ultrabooks and netbooks: “Today we are proud to announce the general availability of OS4 OpenDesktop 1.0. OS4 OpenDesktop is a 32-bit offering that runs on all legacy 32-bit hardware as well as the newer ultrabooks and netbooks.

  • Softpedia Linux Weekly, Issue 213

    · Announced Distro: AV Linux 6.0

    · Announced Distro: SolusOS 1.2

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • LanyardFS: A New Linux File-System

      A new Linux kernel file-system has been presented, LanyFS, a.k.a. the Lanyard File-System.

      From the patch announcement by Dan Luedtke, “This patch introduces the Lanyard Filesystem (LanyFS), a filesystem for highly mobile and removable storage devices.” The kernel patch then goes on to describe Lanyard FS as “The lanyard file system (LanyFS) is designed for removable storage devices, particularly those small gadgets one would carry around using a lanyard.”

    • KMSCON Is Getting Ready To Kick The Kernel Console

      KMSCON is turning out to be a successful and interesting project with high ambitions of being the leading terminal emulator for Linux while running from user-space.

      Back in March was when I first talked about KMSCON as a DRM-based terminal emulator when the developer, David Herrmann, was inspired by Jesse Barnes’ guide to hacking with EGL and KMS.

      KMSCON is built upon the Linux kernel APIs for kernel mode-setting provided by the Direct Rendering Manager drivers for frame-buffer access to all displays as well as hot-plugging support with the DRM drivers through udev.

    • Adaptive Tickless Kernel Still Being Adapted

      While in development for nearly two years without merging, the adaptive tickless Linux kernel support is still being developed.

      The adaptive tickless kernel support ended up being a big endeavour as well as getting other kernel developers to review the patches.

    • Link-Time Optimization To Speed Up The Linux Kernel

      An extensive set of patches have been published that allow the Linux kernel to be built with GCC’s LTO (Link-Time Optimization) support for generating a faster Linux kernel binary but at the cost of much greater compile times.

    • Retina display MacBook Pro does not play nicely with Linux

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

    • Play the Guitar with Rhythmbox!

      Are you sick of wasting too much time on trying to find the “correct” tablature for your favorite song? Do you want to learn how to play your favorite songs on the guitar but you have no idea of what notes stand for? Rhythmbox is the answer for you!

      Recently I discovered a fantastic 3rd party plugin for Rhythmbox that will search, download and display under a second the guitar, bass and drums tablature of the song you are listening to right now! How cool is that?

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Wine

    • Games

      • Humble Bundle 3 Now Available For Ubuntu Precise

        Humble Bundle is a donation based game project where users set their own price for a series of games and can decide the proportion of money to be given to charity and developers. The project is quite successful and the third series of games are now available in Ubuntu.

      • Evilot, New Puzzle/Defense Game for Linux

        Evilot is a new Puzzle/Defense game for Linux, where you play as Count Dolfus, a retired evil overlord, that just wants to spend his last days in peace.

        The problem is that the small retirement fund you’ve managed to amass, over decades of evildoing, is too tempting a prize for the heroes and adventurers running through the Kingdom of Evilot, so you’ll have prepare your defenses to withstand their fierce attack.

      • Steam to debut Big Picture beta soon, make couch potatoes of PC gamers

        Early last year, Valve mentioned it was working on something called Big Picture mode for Steam, an alternative user interface with controller support designed specifically for use on televisions. According to Gabe Newell, the distribution services’ couch-ready UI is almost upon us. “We should have both Linux and 10-foot betas out there fairly quickly,” he told Geoff Keighley in the latest episode of GTTV, noting that the interface would be available on both the current iteration of Steam and the upcoming Linux version. Newell said that Valve has been showing the interface to hardware manufacturers, but ultimately feels that the community will decide its fate. “I think customers will say ‘this is really great,’ or they’ll say it’s another interesting but not a valuable contribution, fairly quickly.” Check out the interview for yourself (and the full episode) after the break.

      • Let’s Play: Darwinia
      • Steam for Linux Beta is imminent
      • Planetary Annihilation To Have Linux Support

        Uber Entertainment have added the promise of Linux support to their Kickstarter for Planetary Annihilation, and not as a stretch goal. The funding is now at $453,000 of their $900,000 goal with 26 days to go. Platforms now confirmed are Windows, OSX and Linux. The rate of funding seems to have flattened out a bit over the past few days, so it will be interesting to see if this announcement affects it in the coming days.

      • Valve Releases New CS: Global Offensive Trailer

        The official release of Valve’s much-anticipated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive title is set to happen on the 21st of August. In anticipation of the launch, Valve has released a new CS:GO trailer.

        Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is the latest game in Valve’s wildly-successful Counter-Strike franchise built atop their impressive Source Engine. CS:GO has been in beta for a number of months already while next week will mark its official release. This first person shooter is initially being released for Windows, OS X, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, but a native Linux version will very likely come once Valve begins shipping their Steam client and Source-based games for Linux.

  • Desktop Environments

    • Some Enlightenment EFL Components Hit v1.7 Beta

      Last week there was the release of some 1.7 alpha packages for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), but today there’s some beta packages.

      Eina, Eet, Evas, Ecore, Embryo, Edje, Efreet, E_dbus, Eeze, Expedite, Evas Generic Loaders, Eio, Emotion, Ethumb, and Elementary experienced the new release cycle beta releases of 1.7.0 on Friday. The announcement was made at Enlightenment.org.

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • KDE News (dot.kde.org) undergoes major upgrade

        Today, we finished upgrading one of the most visited KDE websites: KDE.News. The Dot now not only runs on drupal’s latest release (7.15), but also has a fresh new look featuring the Neverland theme.

    • GNOME Desktop

  • Distributions

    • BlankOn 8 preview

      BlankOn is a desktop distribution based on Debian, and comes to use courtesy of some enterprising folks from Indonesia. It uses a highly-modified GNOME 3 desktop environment built with an HTML 5 and CSS 3 custom desktop shell called Manokwari.

      Because I am not particularly fond of the GNOME 3 desktop in its default state, I am always on the lookout for a distribution that takes it and makes it a lot more user-friendly. Linux Deepin is one that I like very much, but choice is good, and so I decided to download BlankOn 8, the latest edition of BlankOn, to see what it has to offer.

    • Endangered Banyumas Dialect Gets Its Own Linux OS

      The @blankonbanyumas project in Indonesia has launched its open source, Linux-based OS that’s fully localized in the Banyumas local language. It launched on Friday, aptly arriving on Indonesia’s 67th Independence Day. Wikipedia describes the tongue as “considered to be a dialect of Javanese.”

    • New Releases

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Get to know Mageia better!

        Hmm, it is hard to address the target group of Mageia. A quick answer would be that targets to a lot of people. Yes, Mageia is one of the most popular distros around and is relatively a new one.

        Mageia isn’t for enthusiasts, isn’t about the latest packages, isn’t a LTS and it doesn’t ship any commercial support, but is user friendly. The best words I can find to describe it, would be a Community Edition of Canonical’s Ubuntu.

    • Debian Family

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Applications Are Always Crashing, Biggest Problem Right Now According To Ubuntu QA
            Survey

            The Ubuntu Quality Assurance team had earlier created a survey to gather feedback from users regarding differen issues in Ubuntu operating system. The results are out, published in Ubuntu Orange Notebook blog and here are some interesting findings.

          • Here Comes The Amazing Wikipedia Lens With Previews

            Canonical has recently announced a new feature called Unity Previews and this program has got tremendous potential as shown below.

            Unity has already got tight integration with different online services, such as Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, Ask Ubuntu etc. What users do is to type in their queries in the dash and the lenses display the results from which users have to click on an item and open it on their web browser. With Previews, one can get more information of an item such as description, ratings, or maybe, even a full web page.

          • Flavours and Variants

            • Peppermint LINUX 3 – The mint with no holes

              There have been a number of reviews of Peppermint 3 already so I am somewhat behind the pace with this review.

              I wrote a review about Peppermint 2 back in February but it didn’t really contain all that much information except to say that Peppermint utilises the idea of cloud computing and wraps it up to make it look like you are running a local application.

              As we have moved on a version I thought I’d have another look especially as the reviews have been mainly positive.

            • Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 (PHP-FPM) And MySQL Support On CentOS 6.3

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • GGA Software launches new version 1.1 open-source chemistry toolkit, Indigo

    GGA Software Services LLC, a leading provider of outsourced scientific informatics services to the life sciences industry, has released new version 1.1 of its popular open-source organic chemistry toolkit known as Indigo. Scientists at companies and institutions around the world have used this Indigo toolkit widely to secure broad capabilities in cheminformatics.

  • Google’s Real Time Big Data Tool Cloned By Apache Drill

    Google, as you might expect, has massive amounts of data and it’s built many tools to handle it. Stuff like MapReduce and GoogleFS, which spawned the open source Apache Hadoop, and BigTable, which spawned Apache HBase.

  • SaaS

    • Cloud Computing: Moving To Open Source

      With more and more organizations moving towards the clouds for its customization, flexibility, and agility, sad to say, large cloud computing providers are not that keen to tap the open environment because doing so will be have negative effects to their financial interests. Since Linux started some 20 years ago, there is a growing demand for openness in the IT arena. Today, there is a growing demand for cloud computing to deliver open source cloud computing applications. OpenStack, a community for the development of open-sourced public and private clouds, is on the forefront with more than 180 organizations around the world as supporters.

  • Databases

    • PostgreSQL patches XML flaws

      A flaw in the built-in XML functionality of PostgreSQL (CVE-2012-3488) and another in its optional XSLT handling (CVE-2012-3489) have been patched, and the developers have released updated versions of the open source database with relevant fixes. The holes being patched are related to insecure use of the widely used libxml2 and libxslt open source libraries and the PostgreSQL developers advise anyone using those libraries to check their systems for similar problems.

    • Oracle Makes More Moves To Kill Open Source MySQL

      Oracle is holding back test cases in the latest release of MySQL. It’s a move that has all the markings of the company’s continued efforts to further close up the open source software and alienate the MySQL developer community.

      The issue stems back to a recent discovery that the latest MySQL release has bug fixes but without a single one having any test cases associated with it. That creates all sorts of problems for developers who have no assurance that the problem is actually fixed.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • SolusOS 1.2 Features LibreOffice 3.6.0

      Ikey Doherty proudly announced yesterday, August 17th, the immediate availability for download of the SolusOS 1.2 Linux distribution.

      SolusOS 1.2 is the second maintenance release of the 1.x branch of the SolusOS distribution, bringing better GPU, bluetooth and printer support, as well as many system-wide optimisations and fixes.

  • Healthcare

    • The Eclipse Way vs. The Android Way

      The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA), an independent, nonprofit, open source organization formed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), has taken an active role in upgrading and standardizing the agency’s VistA electronic health record (EHR). Meanwhile, the role of open source developers in building the joint Department of Defense/VA EHR system is still in flux.

      Up to now, it has been difficult for the VA to introduce enterprise-wide changes in its VistA software, said Seong K. Mun, president and CEO of OSEHRA, in an interview with InformationWeek Healthcare. The main problem is that many of the 152 VA medical centers have tweaked VistA to meet their own needs over the years.

  • Project Releases

  • Public Services/Government

    • The UK Public Sector Finally Gets Open Source

      The use of open source technology in the UK’s public sector has historically lagged behind other European countries, most notably France and Germany, both of which have successfully embraced open source to deliver enhanced value to the taxpayer through efficiency and collaboration.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • Dart: Build HTML5 Apps Fast

      Dart is a language, library, toolset, and virtual machine from Google that greatly facilitates writing fast, interactive HTML5 apps without requiring you to be a JavaScript expert.

      Dart helps developers build fast HTML5 apps for the Web. Currently in Technology Preview (with a Beta release planned for this year), this open source project is building a “batteries included” developer platform that integrates a new language, libraries, an editor, a virtual machine, and a compiler (with JavaScript output).

    • How Microsoft was forced to open Office

      In Office 2013, Microsoft was compelled to support the true ODF format as well as the PDF format. Here’s how open source won

Leftovers

  • Patton Boggs to Lobby for Facebook

    Facebook Inc. has signed on with a former U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman and other Patton Boggs lobbyists.

    Patton Boggs disclosed to Congress on Tuesday that firm partner Kevin Martin, the FCC chairman from 2005 to 2009, as well as partner Jeffrey Turner and senior public policy adviser Emanuel Rossman, are lobbying for the social network. They are focusing on matters concerning “technology and internet policy, including personal privacy, protecting children, advancing online security, and tax policy issues,” according to a lobbying registration report the law firm filed with the U.S. House of Representatives.

  • Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA

    I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It’s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don’t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has created 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf’s and pixels, he’s used DNA.

  • Why the Man Who Invented the Web Isn’t Rich

    I hadn’t realized that the World Wide Web turned 21 this week until I saw the nice birthday card that Megan Garber sent it yesterday. And it’s a good thing I did–because otherwise I would have missed a fabulous recycling opportunity!

  • Finance

    • Attorney For Goldman Sachs CEO Is Eric Holder’s ‘Best Friend’

      Last week, the Justice Department announced that it will not prosecute Goldman Sachs or any of its employees in a financial probe.

      Could that be because the attorney for Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was none other than Attorney General Eric Holder’s “best friend” and former personal attorney, Reid Weingarten?

      Or because in 2008, Goldman Sachs employees donated $1,013,091 to Barack Obama?

    • Goldman, Still Playing in Bayou’s Mud

      Goldman had executed and cleared trades for Bayou, and there were questions about how well Goldman supervised the account. On July 30, Goldman paid $20.7 million to roughly 200 Bayou investors in the United States. Those investors, unsecured creditors in a separate Bayou bankruptcy case, were awarded that amount by a securities arbitration panel in June 2010.

      It was one of the few bright spots of the Bayou story, but it didn’t last. The same day Goldman paid the investors, the firm filed its own creditor’s claim for the same amount — $20.7 million — in the Bayou bankruptcy. Goldman contended that paying the award had made it, too, a Bayou creditor. If the court agrees, the investors who won their arbitration case — also unsecured creditors of Bayou — will be out of luck.

      Ross B. Intelisano, a partner at Rich, Intelisano & Katz in New York who represented the Bayou investors, said they would fight Goldman’s latest filing.

      I asked Goldman last week about the bankruptcy court filing. Michael DuVally, a spokesman, said Goldman never controlled the money at issue in the arbitration.

      “Our claim is consistent with bankruptcy law,” he said in a statement. “The arbitration panel, which was not ruling on wrongdoing, determined that money the Bayou funds deposited with us while insolvent needed to be returned to the estate to distribute to creditors. With the ruling, we became a creditor entitled to compensation along with the other victims of the fraud.”

    • Oracle settles SEC charges over secret India payments

      Oracle Corp agreed to pay a $2 million fine to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges that an India subsidiary secretly set aside money used to make unauthorized payments to phony vendors in that country.

  • Privacy

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • UN body opens debate on Internet future to public after critics slam secrecy of talks

      The U.N. telecoms agency has invited the world’s more than 2 billion Internet users to join a debate about the future of the Internet.

      The Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union’s announcement Wednesday follows criticism from civil society groups who say preparations for an upcoming global conference have been shrouded in secrecy.

08.19.12

Links 19/8/2012: SolusOS Eveline 1.2 Released, Unity Favours 3-D

Posted in News Roundup at 11:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

  • Pandora: The Handheld Console for Linux Tweakers

    We here at S|A recently got a chance to interview Micheal Mrozek, one of the core members of a small company named OpenPandora, which produces the Pandora handheld gaming console. Long before Kickstarter and crowd sourced development funding became the flavor of the week, the OpenPandora team was designing and producing their own handheld gaming console based off of what their fellow forum members wanted. The idea behind the Pandora was to produce a handheld gaming console that met the needs of their highly active, but small, forum. It had to be a fully functional Linux PC, have an awesome D-pad, and be powerful enough to emulate the mass market console gaming systems that had proceeded it. It took a long time to get all of the pieces into place (read: four years of hardship and delays), but the Pandora has finally matured into the handheld console that its steadfast supporters have always hoped it would.

  • Advocating for a Linux advocate

    Ken Starks can drive me crazy sometimes.

    It’s been a while since I have spoken with him. After leaving Linux Today and working for the Linux Foundation, I found myself falling out of touch with various members of the Linux community, and unfortunately Ken was one of them.

  • Migrating to GNU/Linux

    While a perfectly planned set-piece migration appears to work for large organizations, smaller organizations may simply experience delay and greater costs doing the detailed work. The GNU/Linux desktop has evolved to the point where for a large proportion of users it can do the job with little fuss. Just backup data, install the OS and restore the data. If any problems arise they are likely to be small and manageable. With a good backup, one can always revert particular machines if a show-stopper arises. In ten years of migrating small organizations I never encountered a show-stopper that could not be simply worked around. Migrations of simple computer labs may take only an hour or two. A whole school may be about as complicated as that. Where I last worked, I walked around replacing PCs with GNU/Linux PCs. I could have installed over the network to avoid the walking but there was a matter of locked doors after hours… That’s not a show-stopper associated with the OS, just constraints on the institution.

  • MacPup LINUX – How do you like this Apple?

    During previous reviews of Puppy LINUX distributions such as Wary, Slacko and Lucid I have received comments asking “Have you tried MacPup?”. Well up until now no I haven’t.

    I downloaded the ISO for MacPup a few weeks ago but I’ve only just reached the point where I have had time to have an in depth look.

  • The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computers

    Last month, I gave a talk called “The Coming Civil War Over General Purpose Computing” at DEFCON, the Long Now, and Google. We’re going to have a transcript with the slides on Monday, but in the meantime, here’s a video of the Long Now version of the talk.

  • Server

  • Audiocasts/Shows

  • Kernel Space

    • Download Linux Kernel 3.6 Release Candidate 2

      Linus Torvalds announced last evening, August 16th, that the second Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.6 kernel is now available for download and testing.

      Linux kernel 3.6 Release Candidate 2 brings the usual bug fixes, updated drivers, and general improvements.

    • A Power Saving Schema For The Linux Kernel Scheduler

      An Intel engineer has proposed introducing a power saving schema for CFS, the Linux kernel’s default scheduler. Code hasn’t been presented yet, but there’s lots of discussion about this topic to improve the power efficiency of the Linux kernel scheduler.

    • Graphics Stack

  • Applications

  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

      • After 4.9 there will be 4.10

        After the release of the KDE Plasma Workspaces 4.9 I have read quite often in the Internet that users and also Media assume that the next release will be 5.0. This is not the case, the next release of the KDE Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Plattform will be 4.10 to be expected at the beginning of 2013 (release schedule has not yet been finalized by the release team).

        I do not know why people assume that there would be a 5.0 release but I guess it is related to the work on Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5. Also some people seem to assume that after 4.9 the 5.0 has to follow due to second number being single digit, but a simple look at e.g. GNOME would show that numbers can increase as long as one likes.

      • An alternate history of KDE

        In reality, the deal makes perfect sense, and Qt is now clear of its tenure with Nokia. So how did Qt and KDE do under Nokia’s influence?

        If Digia sounds familiar, it’s because the company was already heavily involved in the Qt community. In 2011, not long after Nokia announced its intention to place its fate in the hands of Windows-based smartphones, Nokia sold the commercial Qt support business to Digia. Selling over the trademarks, copyrights, and other assets to Digia just completes a transition that started back in March of 2011.

        At the time, Nokia’s Sebastian Nyström laid out the reason for that sale, indicating that the commercial licenses sales of Qt “are not core business activities for Nokia, so since the introduction of the LGPL license for Qt in 2009 we have been actively working to grow the number of companies providing Qt services.”

      • Muon Suite 1.4.0 Released

        This is a KDE application for simple and easy package management in Debian-KDE based distros, similar to Software Center available in Ubuntu.

      • Qt 5.0 Beta Not Here Due To Difficulties

        While the Qt 5.0 Beta was supposed to be out in July, it was changed to release the Qt 5 beta in early August. We’re now half-way through August and there’s no signs of an imminent beta. It’s now been said that “some things have been a bit more difficult lately” leading to a delay in Qt5.

      • Motomic enables Qt applications on Freescale Kinetis “K” Series MCUs

    • GNOME Desktop

      • GNOME: Seven Possible Recovery Strategies

        The conventional wisdom these days is that GNOME is faltering. GNOME 3 is unpopular, and users and distributions are abandoning it for alternatives such as Xfce or Mate.

        The project itself suffers from a lack of developers and a loss of morale, and faces new challenges as mobile devices become more common than traditional desktop environments.

        So what strategies are available for GNOME in the next few years?

        This ugly assessment of GNOME’s current condition is not just being made by outsiders. Recently, GNOME developer Benjamin Otte made the same critique in a widely discussed blog post entitled “Staring into the Abyss.”

        Many of the same subjects were even raised at GUADEC, GNOME’s annual conference. In particular, Xan Lopez and Juan Jose Sanchez gave a presentation called “A Bright Future for GNOME” that outlined the project’s challenges. Lopez and Sanchez’s presentation was supposed to be a call to arms, but, in the weeks since it was delivered, it has been used mainly as proof of just how the once mighty GNOME has fallen.

      • Jovovich reveals the new Gnome in its 15th birthday!

        It is true that Gnome scientists work secretly many meters under the ground in mysterious projects under the protection of evil and powerful Red Umbrella Corporation. They share no information about their future plans and communication is closed.

      • Gnome3 porting to FreeBSD

  • Distributions

    • ROSA Marathon Release Pack 1 brings tooltips to SimpleWelcome

      The first Release Pack of ROSA Marathon 2012 has been made available for public download. ROSA Marathon is the enterprise desktop edition of ROSA Linux, a Linux distribution derived from Mandriva Linux and developed by ROSA Laboratory, a Linux solutions provider based in Moscow, Russia.

      Desktop environments supported by ROSA Linux are the K Desktop Environment (KDE), GNOME 2, and LXDE. The main edition, which received this release pack, uses KDE. Aside from an updated Kernel (from kernel 3.0.28 to 3.0.38) the main highlight of this release pack is the addition of tooltips to SimpleWelcome, the distribution’s menu application.

    • Two Rolling Release Distributions

      I am using Arch Linux and PCLinuxOS for past many years with PCLinuxOS dating back to V.92 and Arch Linux since early 2010 . I also used Sabayon Linux , ALT Linux , Chakra , Fuduntu and Unity Linux for different periods of times in past but never settled down with any of these for a daily usage due to many different reasons ranging from instability to facing many problems at different levels.

    • Crunchbang 11 20120806 Review: Minimalistic but highly functional

      If you need a cutting edge Linux OS but you have a very very low resource computer, what would you do? You download Crunchbang and your computer will start performing blazing fast and amazingly stable. Now Crunchbang 11 Waldorf is in the testing stage, based on Debian Wheezy (it’s also testing till date). I guess once Wheezy is released as a stable distribution, we will have the Crunchbang stable as well.

    • BackTrack 5 R3 review

      BackTrack is a security-focused Linux distribution that is loaded with all the best Free Software penetration testing applications available. It is based on Ubuntu Desktop. The latest edition is code-named Revolution, and the newest update-release – BackTrack 5 R3, was released just a few days ago.

      It is distribution designed for penetration testers and other security professionals, or those who want to mess with all the best security and penetration testing applications the free software community has to offer.

    • Pardus ANKA?

      Apparently, the community of Pardus is working on Pardus ANKA, the fork of Pardus. They have a logo, too!

    • Macpup 529

      Macpup is a small,light OS. It runs in ram and is very fast. It is not a striped down,bare bones,basic core OS. Macpup is a full featured systemright out of the box with apps for office,graphics,multimedia,internetand much more.And it looks really cool.

    • New Releases

      • SolusOS Eveline 1.2 Released
      • SolusOS 1.2 Arrives, Updates Eveline

        SolusOS is a newish distribution that has been getting some real good reviews since its inception. A new update was released today to update the current 1.x “Eveline” stable release. I thought it was about time to take this

      • AV Linux 6.0 Has Been Officially Released
      • 6.0: The beginning of the end for AV Linux

        Following what he calls “a very turbulent development period”, AV Linux Project Leader Glen MacArthur has released version 6.0 of his custom Linux distribution geared towards audio and video production. AV Linux is a Debian-based distribution that uses the lightweight LXDE desktop environment and includes various multimedia creation programs out of the box. While the OS is specifically aimed at multimedia content creators, MacArthur says that the “state-of-the-art release” is still well-suited for most common daily computer tasks.

      • Calculate Linux 12.0.2 released

    • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Get to know Mageia better!

        Hmm, it is hard to address the target group of Mageia. A quick answer would be that targets to a lot of people. Yes, Mageia is one of the most popular distros around and is relatively a new one.

    • Gentoo Family

      • Gentoo-Fu: Building KDE branches

        5

        Being a happy Gentoo user myself for about half a year, I thought I would share some tips from my personal experiences on this great distro. It’s nothing you cannot already google for; these are just some ideas/motives to further dig into for yourselves. Mayhaps I will write another post or two about Gentoo. If I ever decide to overcome my laziness :) Take it easy with this post, it’s a bit lengthy, but to quote Blaise Pascal: “I haven’t had time to make it shorter yet“.

        Gentoo being a source-based distribution allows for some very cool stuff like building from an upstream git branch. You can find ebuilds for KDE branches 4.9 and master (as of 17.08.2012), which can vastly help you with bug triaging/fixing. Bug triaging is as easy as updating your system from this branch and trying to reproduce bugs (the procedure is fully automated thanks to Portage’s Moo Powers – “emerge –moo” – and the Gentoo Developers). Bug fixing is as easy as writing a patch and applying it using Portage’s excellent patching abilities. I actually *fixed* a bug like this recently (Bug #297209), being too lazy to manually pull and compile the source code. Sure, a manual setup is way more flexible, but doesn’t come without quite some hassles.

    • Red Hat Family

      • Open Source Is Becoming a Military Necessity

        In letting just anyone use your code, that has to include the bad guys. They’re bound to find a way to compromise it, the thinking goes.

      • Becoming Red Hat: Cloudera and Hortonworks’ Big-Data death match

        In the Big Data market, Hadoop is clearly the team to beat. What is less clear is which of the Hadoop vendors will claim the spoils of that victory.

        Because open source tends to be winner-take-all, we are almost certainly going to see a “Red Hat” of Hadoop, with the second place vendor left to clean up the crumbs.

        As ever with open source, this means the Hadoop market ultimately comes down to a race for community support because, as Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady argues, the biggest community wins.

      • Red Hat unveils new cloud framework

        Open-source platform developer Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced on Monday that its new OpenStack cloud framework is ready for enterprises looking to build private, public and hybrid Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds.

        Red Hat is a major supporter and supplier of solutions based on OpenStack, the open-source framework for enterprise cloud platforms. This most recent distribution is designed to complement Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Storage and Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), according to the company.

      • Fedora

        • Fedora + Cinnamon – What gives?

          Not that long ago, I gave Fedora Beefy Miracle another spin, this time, the KDE version, and it was a decent experience overall. Not as bland as the Xfce test, not as good as the last autumn KDE edition, somewhere in between. Decent, but still very much Fedora, blood and sweat and hi-tech all combined.

          Then, a reader pinged me and suggested a marvelous idea – what about testing Cinnamon? It’s a most beautiful product. And more importantly, it worked great on Linux Mint, where it’s the default desktop. It even worked splendidly in Ubuntu Pangolin. So why not see what happens when you mate Cinnamon to Fedora? Can this lovely desktop environment turn the tide against all the geekiness and boredom that happen to infuse Fedora?

    • Debian Family

      • Debian and I

        Debian is the most influential Linux distribution ever. Of the 305 active distributions listed on Distrowatch, 147 are derived from Debian, and 87 from Ubuntu, Debian’s most famous off-shoot. In other words, 77% of the distributions being used today wouldn’t exist without Debian. That makes Debian’s nineteenth anniversary on August 16 worth a moment’s reflection, not just technologically, but socially as well.

      • Happy Birthday Debian! And memories of an old-timer…

        For Debian’s birthday, Francesca Ciceri of the Debian Publicity team suggested that developers “blog about their first experiences with Debian”. I found this a good idea so I’m going to share my own early experience. It’s quite different from what happens nowadays…

      • Month of birthdays
      • Happy Birthday, Debian!
      • Happy Birthday Debian And Gnome

        Its birthday time for some of the major players in Linux world, Gnome and Debian. While Gnome was founded on 15th August 1997, and is fifteen years old, Debian has an older history, dating back to 16th August 1993. One of the oldest surviving distro, Debian turns 19 this year.

        Debian shares its history with some of the older distros like Slackware and Mandriva. One of the major changes Debian bought in the Linux world is binary .deb packages. Previously, Linux users had to compile each of the program they wished to install, but with Debian, it was gone. This gave rise to number of package repositories and number of user friendly derivatives, like Ubuntu which show how significant Debian’s development was.

      • Derivatives

        • Canonical/Ubuntu

          • Ubuntu One offers 500 mb free storage for users
          • Unity 2D dropped from Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal”

            The 2D variant of Canonical’s Unity desktop user interface – introduced in Ubuntu 11.10 for systems without 3D/OpenGL hardware acceleration – will not be included in future versions of Ubuntu. The change was first discussed at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), but has only just been confirmed in a bug report that sees the removal of Unity 2D.

          • Say Hello To Unity’s Newest Feature: Previews
          • Previews, The Latest Awesome Feature Of Ubuntu 12.10
          • Unity: Dash Gets A Cool New Previews Feature [Video] – Ubuntu 12.10 Development

            A cool new feature has landed in the Unity Staging PPA, for Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal: previews in Dash.

            With the new “previews” feature, you’ll be able to right click applications or files in Dash to get a preview, along with some extra information which depends on the item you’ve right clicked.

          • Ubuntu’s Unity Has Room To Improve Performance

            Following yesterday’s news that Ubuntu 12.10 will drop the Unity 2D desktop, I carried out some quick tests comparing the latest state of the Unity desktop with Compiz against the lightweight Unity 2D desktop that’s now being removed. To not much surprise, the composited Unity desktop still has some performance shortcomings for OpenGL workloads compared to Unity 2D.

          • Canonical Comments On The Unity 2D Defenestration

            Jason Warner, the Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, acknowledges that dropping Unity 2D and going with Unity-Over-LLVMpipe may lead to some regressions and that some users will want to stick to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or switch to another desktop environment.

            Warner wrote a message on the Ubuntu development list on Friday entitled “Unity Going Forward” where he confirms yesterday’s information that Ubuntu 12.10 is dropping the Unity 2D desktop and focusing upon using Unity with LLVMpipe in cases where there is no sufficient GPU/driver for handling the composited desktop. “Unity 2D has been removed as a default option in favor of Unity 3D across the board. This is a work in progress, so bear with us as we sort out the details in the transition.”

          • After a while of using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS…

            You don’t often see post reviews / analysis of Linux distributions so I thought I would break the trend and share some of my thoughts after using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for quite some time.

            So, the great thing which I have observed with all Ubuntu LTS releases starting with 8.04 LTS is how well they work (eg lack of bugs and good support). 12.04 LTS in no exception. It is what I expect from LTS releases and what Canonical Ltd aims to deliver, a stable and working product which you can rely on.

          • New Ubuntu One Incentive Gives Twice!

            Ubuntu one, Canonical’s long running cloud storage program just got a little better today. Users are now able to invite friends and family to the program and be rewarded. Unlike most referral based rewards, this one gives twice! It works quite simply.

  • Devices/Embedded

Free Software/Open Source

  • New Apache project will Drill big data in near real time

    Working with big data is a lot like dealing with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: either you’re going to have a massive amount of data on hand or you’re going to be able to query that data in real time–never both.

    But now a new open source project has just been accepted as an Apache Software Foundation Incubation project that will let you do both: have your data and search it fast, too.

    Apache Drill is an ad-hoc query system based on Dremel, another big data system that, like Hadoop, was invented by Google engineers to not only manage large datasets but also perform interactive analysis in near real-time.

  • Cloud PBXes: Can Digium Asterisk Answer the Call?

  • Web Browsers

    • Chrome

      • Google Ups Ante for Chrome Bug Hunters

        Google isn’t stopping with Chrome. The Chromium Vulnerability Rewards Program continues to cover vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash as well as other well-known software such as the Linux kernel, various open-source libraries and daemons, X windows, and so on.

    • Mozilla

      • Raspberry Pi now comes in Firefox OS flavour

        The little computer that can, the Raspberry Pi, has successfully run the imminent Firefox OS, thanks to the efforts of a Nokia employee named Oleg Romashin.

        Firefox OS, also and/or formerly known as Boot to Gecko (B2G), is the Mozilla foundation’s attempt at providing an HTML-5 powered OS that will free punters from the tyranny of apps tied to mobile operating systems. The foundation sees the project as not entirely dissimilar to Google’s Chrome OS efforts, but doesn’t feel it is in competition with the text ad giant as it intends Firefox OS as a phone-only play rather than a Microsoft-on-the-lap irritant.

      • Firefox Competitive Strategy Must Focus On Privacy

        We have previously spent some time here discussing Mozilla and what the problems that are plaguing Firefox today. For a long time during the past decade, Firefox was able to successfully challenge Internet Explorer by offering a much more nimble browsing experience that was more responsive to developing user needs such as a protection against security threats. That competitive advantage slowly unraveled once Google introduced Chrome and began to spend marketing dollars promoting it, something Mozilla has done very little of.

      • Mozilla Firefox Release Schedule

        With four different versions of the Firefox web browser available at any time, plus special builds that pop up every now and then and ESR versions, it is quite difficulty to keep up with the browser’s rapid release schedule. To make matters even more complicated, some versions like the aurora or nightly versions get updated fairly often. To bring order into chaos, release schedules usually only concentrate on version increases and not all the updates that get released.

  • SaaS

    • The Battle to Become “The Linux of the Cloud”

      In the business world, money has long been the dominant success benchmark. A hundred years ago being a millionaire was enough, today it’s about being a billionaire. In open source software however, things are a bit different. Success is often defined not only by how much money is made, but instead by a company or project’s level of community contribution, involvement and participation. The gold standard for this type of success has long been the Linux Operating system.

    • Openstack Matters To Almost Everyone

      Openstack, as the name suggests, is a stack of open application for building public and private cloud. The project started with joint effort of NASA and Rackspace in July 2010. The project gained support of 3386 people/developer/contributor and 186 enterprises within 2 years of its launch. Some of its corporate supporters include Canonical, RedHat, Intel, HP, Piston Cloud and Nebula. The project code is available under Apache Licence and is hosted on Github.

  • Databases

    • Fixing things the proper way

      Looking at the bug report (opened in 2010) one can see that the bug was marked in March 2012 as ‘solved’. What was not made clear was that the solution was to disable the query cache for all partitioned tables.

      Reading the bug report comments, I get the impression that the main reason for removing the feature was that the developers looking at the issue didn’t really understand how the query cache works in detail and it was just easier to remove the feature than fixing it. (The problem was well understood but not how to fix it).

    • Disappearing test cases or did another part of MySQL just become closed source?
    • PostgreSQL patches XML flaws

      A flaw in the built-in XML functionality of PostgreSQL (CVE-2012-3488) and another in its optional XSLT handling (CVE-2012-3489) have been patched, and the developers have released updated versions of the open source database with relevant fixes. The holes being patched are related to insecure use of the widely used libxml2 and libxslt open source libraries and the PostgreSQL developers advise anyone using those libraries to check their systems for similar problems.

    • Time to rely less on MySQL?

      KDE software tends to require mysql as the database engine (either a hard requirement like Amarok, or recommended backend like in Akonadi) so things like these genuinely worry me:

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Celebrating ODF… and a lot of other good things.

      Simon’s point is that because of ODF, Microsoft was forced to open up its MS Office platform to open standards. And he’s right, but as I’m reading his lines I again realize that, as an old Chinese wise man once wrote, “Do turn back from time to time while on your way, and contemplate the road you’ve already travelled”. I’ve given an interview recently where I was expressing my frustration at the limits in our work towards ODF’s massive adoption. Well, that’s the other way of looking at the glass, it seems, and it has been made possible by all the ODF ecosystem and their relentless efforts to encourage and advocate ODF and open standards. Because of them, because of us, Microsoft had to actually open up, and not in a trivial way. It takes an enormous effort to achieve just that, and I’m proud to have been part of this team all along.

  • CMS

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Lisping Spleen & Evil in Smalltalk, GNU Know?

      Formal computer languages are lots of fun conceptually, and often provide mind-bending visions of the various shapes, curves and dimensions of textual thought. But there aren’t many interesting words, sounds, colors. I don’t really have the discipline to study linguistics (ho, ho) formally, but I get off on etymology on one hand, and the Gertrude Steinian approach to words as both colors and sounds, and “objects,” sometimes willful and mindful, with texture, temperature and taste. Creatures. But also abstractions: object-oriented programming concepts devised when Turing was in baby booties; however, with the depth and variety of real words forged from real life.

    • FSF introduce “DRM Free” logo

      The Free Software Foundation’s “Defective By Design” campaign has introduced a new “DRM Free” label. The idea behind the label is to identify products that do not have DRM protection so that they are easier for consumers to find in stores, and give those products a competitive advantage.

    • New DRM-Free Label

  • Public Services/Government

  • Open Hardware

  • Programming

    • Dojo 1.8′s highlight – updated documentation
    • Intel Ivy Bridge: GCC 4.8 vs. LLVM/Clang 3.2 SVN

      Kicking off the Linux benchmarks this weekend are some early numbers from the GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 development compilers when running on Intel’s latest-generation Core i7 “Ivy Bridge” processor. GCC 4.8 and LLVM/Clang 3.2 are still months away from being formally released, but this article provides a glimpse at how the open-source compiler battle is panning out.

    • Forget LinkedIn: Companies turn to GitHub to find tech talent
    • Ever Higher Levels of Abstraction – Building the Future With Chef

      If you have been in the industry for a decade or more, you probably have a pretty good idea of what being a Unix sysadmin is all about. Load the OS? Check. Configure local user accounts? Check. Install packages, compile some from scratch? Double check. Unix has not changed all that much, so it would be easy to assume that the job you were doing ten years ago would be the same job that you can do for the foreseeable future. But, that is the trap of dinosaurs my friend, the weather has already changed, and the days of dealing with bare metal are already moving fast behind us.

  • Standards/Consortia

Leftovers

  • Security

  • Finance

    • The Port of Goldman Sachs

      Goldman Sachs has multiple longstanding interests in the Port of Oakland’s finances and business operations. Goldman Sachs is a party to at least three major areas of Port business.

      First and foremost is Goldman’s role as an underwriter or dealer for the Port’s various debt offerings. No other financial company is as important as Goldman Sachs for the Port’s numerous and complex bond and commercial paper deals

    • Did the Bounds of Cyber War Just Expand to Banks and Neutral States?

      Last week the Russian security research group Kaspersky Labs announced they had found a new computer virus infecting thousands of computers in the Middle East. Called “Gauss,” after a filename found in its codebase, the malware can capture information about the infected computer, including Internet browsing histories, user login details, and system configuration details. The existence of Gauss suggests that countries may be using cyber warfare for more than just countering imminent threats, and that, with the rules of digital engagement so ambiguous, there’s little to restrain or guide cyberwar’s development.

      Kaspersky Labs was blunt: Gauss, it says, is likely a “nation-state sponsored banking Trojan” built by the same programmers behind Stuxnet and Flame, the recent, sophisticated digital pathogens often speculated as designed by the United States and Israel. However, unlike these viruses, which both targeted Iran, Gauss appears to have a very different target: the banking system of Lebanon.

      Gauss is the latest in a line of massive malware attacks, and much like its predecessors, it appears to be so complex and sophisticated that it’s assumed to have been built by a sovereign state. Gauss uses the same platform as Flame, a “cyber espionage” program that was found in a number of locations in Iran in early 2012 and was capable of comprehensive surveillance of infected computers. Flame itself bore a strong family resemblance to Stuxnet, a 2010 virus that targeted the Iranian nuclear research program.

      Like Flame, Gauss transmits detailed records of user activity back to its central command. Like Stuxnet, it carries a special encrypted “payload” that targets machines that carry specific system configurations. Stuxnet’s payload would identify and disable nuclear research systems, but the encryption for the Gauss payload has not yet been broken, and its purpose remains unknown.

      However, unlike Flame and Stuxnet, which targeted a rogue state’s government networks, Gauss goes after the commercial sector in a country that has normalized relations with the United States. Out of more than 2,500 identified instances of Gauss, nearly two-thirds of have been found in Lebanon. And, unlike the broad spying capacity of Flame, Gauss seems designed for the narrow purpose of capturing transaction data from financial institutions and digital payment providers; specifically, Lebanese banks Fransabank, Bank of Beirut, BLOM, Credit Libanais, Byblos Bank, and EBLF, as well as siphoning data from PayPal and Citibank.

      Why Lebanon? Why banks? Stealing financial transaction data is traditionally the province of, say, shadowy underground criminal gangs. Lebanon is a small country better known for its vibrant nightlife and perpetual domestic volatility. Neither its banking sector nor the state itself are obvious targets for the U.S. or Israeli ntelligence services, which, though they haven’t been connected to Gauss, are the only groups with both the know-how and, if they truly were behind Stuxnet and Flame, the track record.

    • Why Wall Street unfriended Facebook

      When General Motors Co. said three months ago that it was pulling its paid ads from Facebook because it didn’t believe advertising on the site was effective, the move cast a sharp shadow over the company’s initial public offering. Two days later, Facebook‘s stock began trading – and then it began sinking.

  • Civil Rights

  • Copyrights

    • Private justice: How Hollywood money put a Brit behind bars

      Anton Vickerman, 38-year old owner of the once popular link site surfthechannel.com (STC), was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday by a British judge. But the prosecutors sitting across the courtroom from him didn’t work for the Crown—they were lawyers for the movie studio trade group Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT).

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