12.27.11
Posted in News Roundup at 4:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds announced last night, December 23rd, that (probably) the last Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.2 is available for download and testing.
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In a Christmas-themed announcement, Evgeniy Polyakov has unveiled a brand new POHMELFS distributed file-system implementation for the Linux kernel.
POHMELFS is new in terms of being an old but completely re-designed distributed file-system. The new POHMELFS serves as a POSIX front-end to the Elliptics network, which has already been used in production cases for multiple years and handled billions of objects to one petabyte in storage.
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Graphics Stack
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Canonical is preparing to push their X.Org Server configuration they intend to use in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” into their staging area. Once again, it’s not the latest upstream code, but a convoluted solution.
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David Airlie has achieved a bit more success in his GPU “PRIME” work to provide graphics processor hot-plugging support under Linux with the X.Org Server.
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It turns out the semaphore issues for Intel Sandy Bridge Linux users continues to be present and it’s resulting in the patch from the recent Intel merge having to be changed at the last minute within the Linux 3.2 kernel.
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Applications
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TeamViewer is an application for remote control, desktop sharing and file transfer between computers, great for meetings, presentations, support and more. It runs on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux (even though it comes in a .deb or .rpm, it uses Wine which comes bundled with it) as well as Android or iPhone. The application is free for personal use only.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Kindle Fire is a pure Amazon device, where the format support and storage capacity forces user to buy content from Amazon. I in fact like that Kindle Fire supports VP8, the video format open sourced by Google. If you are running Ubuntu or any other version of Linux you can now easily encode and transfer movies to your Kindle Fire using the open source application called Miro.
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Wine
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Games
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As a recently revived Game Master/DM going back to my RPG roots in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition after about a 20 year absence, I find that computer technology has impacted Role Playing Games far beyond being able to play online.
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An update has been released to Wargus, an open-source version of the Warcraft II game that was originally released back in the 90′s.
Pali Rohár has taken over the Wargus project as the open-source version of Blizzard’s Warcraft II. It works under Linux too. However, you do need a copy of the game’s CD for Wargus to work as it relies upon the original game assets. Besides running natively on Windows and Linux, there’s been Wargus ports to the Nokia N900 (Maemo), PocketPC, GP2X, Windows Mobile Phone, and Android, among other platforms.
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Desktop Environments
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Among GNOME 3, Ubuntu Linux’s Unity, and Windows 8′s Metro, there’s no denying that desktop environments have become a hot topic in 2011. More specifically, mobile-inspired interfaces are becoming increasingly commonplace, challenging users to accept a whole new paradigm in the desktop world.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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A Nokia developer shared this week that his Qt 5.0 patch-set for Google Native Client is roughly on par with the Qt4 port, which he hopes to have integrated for upstream development in Qt5. This work allows for the Qt5 tool-kit to be used by web applications within supported web-browsers.
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If you’re like most people, getting started with an app like Krita can be intimidating. Working with a graphics tablet takes as much getting used to as learning to draw with ink and paint. How all the settings and tools work together when “used correctly” is a whole other problem. Fortunately, Krita has just released a training DVD that shows novices how it’s done, and helps fund development at the same time.
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GNOME Desktop
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The GNOME Project announced a few minutes ago, December 23rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the third development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings assorted improvements and bug fixes.
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GNOME 3.2 keeps losing fans so leading Linux desktop distribution Mint turns its attention to forking the GNOME shell into a GNOME 2.x like desktop: Cinnamon.
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Linpus Lite is a Linux distribution published by Linpus Technologies, Inc., a Linux software solutions provider based in Taiwan. Linpus Lite Desktop is, as the name suggests, the version designed for traditional desktop computing. Aside from that, the company also publishes other editions (for example, Linpus Lite Android Edition and Linpus Lite PCTV), but those are for OEMs and ODMs vendors only, and not available for download by the public. (OEM – Original Equipment Manufacturer; ODM – Original Design Manufacturer.)
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New Releases
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Stop, you could ask, why is this version 8 then? Because AgiliaLinux is not a brand-new distribution. It is based on MOPSLinux, a project which stopped development. The previous version of AgiliaLinux was more or less a remake of MOPS. The current version is a fully independent development.
This version was planned for release ages ago. A member of the development team wrote a comment on my post about AgiliaLinux 7 stating that version 8 was due in June. And finally… in October they did it!
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Robert Shingledecker proudly announced earlier today, December 27th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core Linux 4.2 and Tiny Core Plus Linux 4.2 operating systems.
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Red Hat Family
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Business software maker Red Hat Inc forecast fourth-quarter revenue largely below analysts’ expectations hurt mainly by a weaker euro, sending its shares down 7 per cent in after-market trade.
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State Representative James Arciero recently testified before the Massachusetts Economic Assistance Coordinating Council (MEACC) in support of Red Hat, Inc., a Westford high tech company, in their bid proposal for a tax credit to create new jobs at their Westford office. The MEACC subsequently awarded a state tax credit of $3.4 million.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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One of the reasons that many hated the Unity desktop in Ubuntu is because there is a lack of customization option. People switched from Windows/Mac to Linux is mainly because Linux offers them an environment where they can customize everything to their liking. When Canonical reduced your ability to do what you want with your desktop, many people start to grunt about it and some even switched to Linux Mint.
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Canonical, through Lars Anderson, announced last evening, December 21st, the immediate availability for download of the Ubuntu In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) Remix operating system.
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Over the last year quality has become a strong area of focus inside Canonical. This has included re-factoring the roles and responsibilities of QA staff (focusing them on defect analysis as opposed to just bug triage), Pete Graner has been leading an effort to get an extensive automated testing infrastructure in place, Jason Warner has led an effort to put acceptance criteria in place for Canonical upstreams (this requires that a certain level of quality is assured before Unity updates are landed in the development branch of Ubuntu), and I have hired Nicholas Skaggs who starts in January to build out our QA community, with a particular focus on manual testing and triage.
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Much awaited credit card size $25 computer Raspberry Pi is about to go in production early next year. First run beta devices are currently being tested. If all goes well, you will be able to purchase it in January.
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Boxee released version 1.5 of its free multimedia streaming software for Mac, Windows, and Linux desktops today, but simultaneously announced that it will cease offering the Boxee desktop software after January 2012. Thereafter, the company will limit its focus to devices such as the D-Link Boxee Box.
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The Boxee project has come a long way from its humble origins as a fork of the Xbox Media Center, bringing easy video playback and a couch-to-screen UI to the Mac, then later to Windows and Ubuntu, and now to the company’s own dedicated Boxee Box
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Boxee released version 1.5 of its free multimedia streaming software for Mac, Windows, and Linux desktops today, but simultaneously announced that it will cease offering the Boxee desktop software after January 2012. Thereafter, the company will limit its focus to devices such as the D-Link Boxee Box.
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Boxee rolled out version 1.5 of its Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu apps today, but the news is bittersweet: according to the company, this will be the last time it issues an upgrade for PC. The platform’s future will be on the Boxee Box and the other streaming devices that run Boxee OS, from partners like Iomega and Nuu Media. It’s not a totally surprising move — the upcoming Boxee Live TV won’t be usable with a computer, and Boxee has had some issues getting major partners on board with its PC software anyway — but we’re betting there are plenty of home theater PC fans feeling abandoned on the day after Christmas.
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Phones
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Android
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The Pentagon has approved a version of Android running on Dell hardware to be used by DoD officials, along with the BlackBerry. The approval of Android by the DoD is a major setback for Apple’s iPhone.
This doesn’t mean that DoD employees can use any Android phone. The Pentagon has approved only Dell’s hardware running Android 2.2. Interestingly Dell recently discontinued its Streak phone which runs Android 2.2. Dell is now offering Dell Venue which runs on Android 2.2. So, this is the phone which DoD employees can use.
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Tim Bird in collaboration with many Linaro and individual developers, including Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman, announced the beginning of the Android Mainlining Project, to include Android’s patches and features into the mainline Linux kernel.
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While Sharp has never had a strong foothold in Europe or the US, the Japanese manufacturer has been the leader in the mobile segment in its own country for many years. Sharp does have a few high-end Android phones like the AQUOS PHONE 102SH which features a 4.5-inch 720p display, 12 megapixel camera, a dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP4430 processor and a waterproof body, but the majority of their sales are comprised of clam-shell or slide-out feature phones.
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More than a few people got excited at the prospect of a $100 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet when a no-name manufacturer sprang out of China marketing the Novo7… and immediately became less excited at a $60 shipping fee that seemed more than a little fishy. Now the same low-powered tablet is sitting pretty with a pre-order status on import sites PandaWill and Merimobiles, both of which seem legitimate enough as far as Internet storefronts go. The latter is claiming an $80 discount off of the “retail” price of $200.
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Really wanted a tablet for Christmas but the high prices put you off? Well Dixons online in the UK could well have come to the rescue by dropping the price of the HTC Flyer to £199 for the wifi only version.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Amazon is a great company when it comes to buying physical stuff — their delivery is great. But when it comes to the digital content Amazon is as freaky as Apple. The company DRMs its books locking users into Amazon ecosystem. It also ‘endorsed’ usage of DRM for Android apps. Now, the company is playing Apple/Sony by wasting its resources in pushing patches to remove roots and ROMs from jail-broken Kindle Fire. Amazon recently pushed an update (6.2.1) for its Kindle Fire which breaks the root on jail-broken devices.
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One lesson that Amazon seems to not learn despite being a heavy Linux user is — don’t waste your time on un-rooting your devices. Let the developed do what they want to do with the devices they ‘bought’. This is a cat and mouse game where in the end the developers will win.
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Sony has finally given some indications of upgrading their Sony Tablet S to the version 4.0 of Android. Sony has not made any official statement, but a forum moderator did reply to a thread stating that the company is looking into ICS. He also said that there is no commitment at this moment. This language is vague but typical and safer for the thread moderator.
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In 1999, Linux founder Linus Torvalds joked about plans for world domination. But as the Linux kernel celebrated its 20th birthday this year, Linux, and open source in general, have achieved a limited version of world domination. As we reported in August, Linux in its many forms now powers a majority of the world’s supercomputers. Apache web servers running on Linux and other Unix operating systems serve up the majority of the web sites on the Internet, and Linux powers some of the biggest sites on Earth—including Facebook, Google and Wikipedia. And embedded versions of Linux are part of the explosion of network-connected consumer devices, most notably as the basis of Google’s Android mobile OS.
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The visual components on opensource.com are an important element to the look and feel of our content. The images help set the tone for the site. The imagery embodies qualities such as motivational, editorial, authoritative (but not authoritarian), human, and optimism.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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A day after the release of Mozilla Firefox 9.0.1 security fix, Mozilla unleashed today, December 23rd, the first Beta version of the upcoming Mozilla Firefox 10.0 web browser for Linux operating systems, and other supported platforms.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced its first bug hunting session for version 3.5 of the open source LibreOffice office suite – to be held online on 28 and 29 December. On those days, the Quality Assurance (QA) team and some experienced developers will be available on the IRC channel #libreoffice (IRC link) from 8am to 10pm UTC and will accept bug reports not only via Bugzilla, usually the only option, but also by chat and email.
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USPTO has presented Google with a last minute Christmas gift by rejecting Oracle’s U.S. Patent No. 6,192,476. According to Groklaw, on December 20 the USPTO issued a final rejection in the ex parte reexamination. All of the claims of the patent were subject to reexamination, including Claim 14. Claim 14 of the patent was the only claim being asserted by Oracle in this litigation, writes Groklaw. This rejection means Oracle has already lost 17 out of 21 patents, including all seven of the patent’s independent claims.
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Healthcare
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Let’s say you have a Ford and decide to replace everything under the hood with Hyundai parts, including the engine and transmission. Could you still honestly market your car as a Ford?
That question gets at the heart of the controversy over who is being more forthright about GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to “save” Medicare, Republicans or Democrats.
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Project Releases
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Programming
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While LLVM 3.0 has been barely out for one month and a release schedule for LLVM 3.1 hasn’t even been plotted yet, there are already some new details about what this next release of the extremely popular open-source compiler infrastructure will offer.
In particular, LLVM 3.1 is poised to offer bug-fixes and overall improved support for Advanced Vector Extensions. AVX is the x86 instruction set extension that first appeared with Intel Sandy Bridge processors in early 2011 and then made their way to the AMD side with the Bulldozer launch.
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Security
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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In 2002 Non-OPEC oil production contributed 60.75% of the world’s total oil supply. But technology, competition, and access to capital through listings on stock exchanges have not been able to overcome limits of geology. Global giants such as Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil have essentially abandoned the effort to meaningfully expand their oil reserves. Instead, they are now shifting course in favor of a strong, natural gas emphasis. The result is that Russia in the past decade has accounted for nearly all of the supply growth in crude oil, among Non-OPEC producers. Indeed, without Russia, Non-OPEC supply would be in steep decline. Instead, it’s merely flat.
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Finance
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The Private Global Power Elite embedded in major governments is dead set on imposing World Government on us sooner rather than later. Let’s look at 12 mega-processes – veritable “Triggers” – that we infer they are using to achieve their goals.
All roads lead to World Government. This should come as no surprise. London’s Financial Times openly articulated this view in an article by their chief foreign affairs commentator, Gideon Rachman, published on 8 December 2009, whose title said it all: “And Now for a World Government.” These goals are echoed by the Trilateral Commission, CFR and Bilderberg insiders – even by the Vatican.
Macro-managing planet Earth is no easy matter. It requires strategic and tactical planning by a vast think-tank network allied to major elite universities whereby armies of academics, operators, lobbyists, media players and government officers interface, all abundantly financed by the global corporate and banking superstructure.
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Exactly ten years ago Argentina suffered a full-scale financial and governmental collapse. That was the end-result of over a decade of doing exactly what the IMF, international bankers, rating agencies and global “experts” told us to do.
Then President Fernando de la Rúa kept applying all IMF recipes to the very last minute, making us swallow their poisonous “remedies”.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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We’ve talked a lot about the political process and how things work in DC to get things like SOPA pretty far along, even as the public seems to be almost universally against it. As you hopefully know by now, Larry Lessig has been focusing his attention on the issue of the deep-seeded corruption in the way our government works today, and his recent book, Republic, Lost focuses deeply on the issue. A few weeks back, Lessig did a fantastic interview on the subject with the Boston Review. In it, he describes how Congress picks up on unpopular legislation for the sake of scaring people (on all sides) into donating to their campaigns…
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Civil Rights
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As we explained in our post on Carrier IQ’s architecture, one of the main factors in determining what the Carrier IQ stack does on a particular phone is the “Profile” that is running on that device. Profiles are files that are typically written by Carrier IQ Inc. to the specifications of a phone company or other client, and pushed to the phone by Carrier IQ Inc. using its own command and control infrastructure. Profiles contain instructions about what data to collect, how to aggregate it, and where to send it.
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You will receive the same thing I received…a form letter mechanically stating the reasons to support SOPA. Jobs, yada, yada, yada. Protecting American IP, yada, yada, yada….it takes a staffer about 30 seconds to scan your email and hit send on thier boiler-plate response.
You and your “opinion” are forgotten in less than a minute.
Get that person on the phone and raise hell. Remind said staffer that the congressman from X state is going to lose his job over support of this bill. Don’t let them lapse into talking points. Sure you are going to spend some time on hold but outside of a personal appearance, your phone call is the most effective way of getting your message across.
Regardless of what happens to Lamar Smith personally or professionally, he will forever be known as The Man That Broke The Internet.
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12.26.11
Posted in News Roundup at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The vast majority of Linux users may get the operating system by downloading and installing it themselves, but there’s no denying that there are distinct advantages to buying hardware with Linux preloaded instead.
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The fight for the desktop might be entering its final phase, but not in the way any of us could have imagined 10 years ago.
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On Linux, viruses cannot do much without knowing your password.
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Server
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Since little more than half a year, I am in the process of installing a new virtualization Platform. One of the hardest decisions to make was if we should use Xen or go with KVM. We already have Xen in production and I know that it works well. From KVM we expect, that it will be growing faster then Xen and be the right thing on the long run.
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Kernel Space
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Android drivers are returning to the Linux kernel. Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has retrieved the Android drivers removed from the staging area of Linux 2.6.33 in the spring of 2010 and put them back into his development branch for version 3.3 of the Linux kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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There was a new documentation drop this week that consisted of data-sheets and other programming documentation for the 2D, 3D, and MPEG engines of a mobile GPU.
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After yesterday’s article about the Grinch that stole the Radeon Gallium3D performance, here’s three offending commits since Mesa 7.10 that are causing the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver to run slower than it should.
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Yesterday when writing about VIA Technologies preparing a new graphics open-source push, it made me curious where the S3 Graphics Linux driver is at today.
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Applications
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The Linux New Media Awards are back! Organized by the publisher of Linux Magazine and Linux Pro Magazine, these awards recognize projects, organisations, people, and companies for their outstanding contributions to the Linux/FLOSS community.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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A few months ago I was asked by Unknown Horizons (UH) upstream if I could maintain UH for Fedora, which I accepted. At a first approach I’ve decided to use OBS (Open Build Service, on openSUSE infra-structure) to provide a Fedora repository for UH, which in theory would make it easier because that’s where I maintain the openSUSE packages.
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Rotion is an addictive arcade game where the aim is to clear shapes by getting to the middle and popping them. The game features campaign , multiplayer splitscreen and survival modes.
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More than a month ago I was the first to write about the CoreBreach racing game coming to Linux. Well, there’s some more interesting news to deliver today.
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The latest Humble Indie Bundle looks to be on a course to shatter previous sales totals – and the generosity of Linux users is, like bundles previous, playing a part in that.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Today KDE released the first release candidate for its Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing. Compared to Beta2, RC1 contains hundreds of fixes. Please give this release another good round of testing to help us release a rock-solid 4.8 in January.
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I was looking back on this year and thinking about what the real successes have been. There have been many great things, new technology and work behind the scenes to make it all happen.
But perhaps the greatest thing has been the return of the Commit Digest, so I’ll name the Commit Digest team my personal heroes of KDE for 2011. Every week, they let us know what’s going on in this great community of ours. It’s a hell of a lot of work and they deserve a lot of credit.
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GNOME Desktop
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Linux Mint has not adopted the new interface instead going their own route with the MATE fork and the MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions). Apparently that’s not enough and now Mint Founder Clement Lefebvre has launched a new effort to create a new desktop called Cinnamon.
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Many Linux users who have been GNOME fans for years find themselves in a sudden quandary. GNOME 3.0 has completely abandoned the desktop experience we’ve come to love during the years. That’s not to say change is bad, it’s just that many folks (even Linus Torvalds) don’t really want to change.
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When I discovered Linux two years ago, I started looking for what I called “The Perfect Rescue Distro”, a somewhat mythical distribution that fitted into a CD, could mount Windows partitions, play all sorts of video/audio formats, include a productivity suite, decent image-manipulating tools, and burn backups…all in Live mode. Hence, over these two years, I have tested lots of distributions and some of them came really close to the ideal. I felt as if the Holy Grail was between an arm’s reach.
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Semplice Linux is a very young project that has only recently made its debut on Distrowatch with Release Candidate 1 for their upcoming 2.0 code-named ‘Emily’ getting listed. This means there must be a support structure in place, a website, bug tracker, documentation and user forum.
The distribution originates from Italy and is based on Debian unstable, using only the Openbox window manager, a handful of applications and a blank background. It will not surprise you then that semplice means simple.
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Gentoo Family
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Well it’s been a couple of months now since the start of Experiment 2.0 and I’ve had plenty of time to learn about Gentoo, see its strengths and… sit waiting through its weaknesses. I don’t think Gentoo is as bad as everyone makes it out to be, in fact, compared to some other distributions out there, Gentoo doesn’t look bad at all.
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Red Hat Family
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“What happened doesn’t necessarily give confidence in companies that are wanting to go public,” said Manoj George, CEO of outsourcing firm Nair & Co. and CFO of Red Hat (RHT) during its IPO. “I’ve talked to a couple of companies who have the fundamentals to go public, (but) they are looking at 2013 as opposed to 2012.”
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Fedora
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I used Unetbootin to install the Live/Install CD onto a USB stick. No problems booting into live mode and then installing from the live mode. The installed edition booted just fine. With the exception of some Gnome3 applications not correctly sizing to my netbook screen, the installed applications worked. Yet, I have major issues with this edition.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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When Canonical announced it was stopping its use of CouchDB, it also announced it would also be dropping DesktopCouch, the desktop API for CouchDB, and creating its own solution, U1DB, to fill the gap. The Canonical developers have now announced that a technical preview of U1DB is available and have given more details of its functionality. According to the announcement, U1DB is an API and data model designed to be backed by any database for storage. The API has been created to enable the storage of JSON documents in synchronised databases and to make that process simple.
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Just a day after questioning whether multiple monitors are really necessary, I learned the design team at Canonical had purchased not two but six monitors to attach to a single computer. Fortunately, this seeming excess should benefit Ubuntu users — if not me personally — by improving the multi-monitor experience in Ubuntu. Here’s a look at these efforts so far, and how they fit into the larger open source picture.
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The Ubuntu Tweak development team has announced the release of version 0.6.0 of its popular open source application for customising the Ubuntu Linux distribution. With Ubuntu Tweak, users can configure their installations by changing a number of desktop and system options that are not provided with the default Unity environment.
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If you are an Ubuntu fan and are wondering what is the perfect gift to suprise your friends this Christmas. Then think no more!! Gift them a CD with the latest version of Ubuntu Linux as a gift. Gifting a distro inevitably requires you to get you hands dirty and if that is what is stopping you from celebrating Christmas, then check out the rest of the post.
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We have written a number of times Linux being spotted in public. Besides powering displays in Best Buy and HMV Stores in UK, Ubuntu has just been spotted at one of the gas stations in Colorado.
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This will be the last development update of 2011, so let’s see where we stand in terms of 12.04. We are 10 weeks into the release cycle and have still 18 weeks to go. There is definitely still a lot left to be done, but the foundations for a great release have been laid already.
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Ubuntu users envious of Chinese Linux distro’s slickly-styled ‘Software Centre’ won’t nee to be green-eyed for too long: it’s coming to Ubuntu.
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Surprise! Since everything is in place there’s no point in holding back the issue until next week. You lucky devils get FCM#56 almost a week early!
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Flavours and Variants
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Jeff Hoogland has announced the release of Bodhi Linux 1.3.0. He writes that there are no earth shattering new features in this release there are many minor improvements.
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In a previous article, I talked about setting up my Asus Eee computer with eee-control on Ubuntu. Today, this is no longer valid if you’re using Ubuntu 11.10 or Linux Mint 12. Now you must run different software. Not only that, now more than ever disenchanted Ubuntu users are switching to Linux Mint due to the ongoing frustrations presented with the Unity desktop. The great news for folks wanting to switch to Linux Mint is that Ubuntu packages and PPAs work great in Mint. Even better, you have additional Gnome desktop choices made available.
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Linux Mint has been quite a revolutionary distribution, gaining plenty of popularity. In fact, DistroWatch statistics suggest the Linux Mint is now the second most popular distribution in the world, behind Ubuntu (upon which it’s based) and in front of Fedora.
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The Raspberry Pi project, which aims to sell tiny £16 Linux-based computers to help kids learn about real computing in schools, has said it is now testing beta versions of the device.
The project published photos of its first populated beta circuit boards on Thursday, having shown off the naked boards earlier in the month. If electrical and hardware and software testing goes well, Raspberry Pi devices will go on general sale in January.
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The $25 (£16) machine is being created in the hope that it will inspire a new generation of technology whizz kids.
The Pi uses an Arm chip similar to that found in mobile phones and is intended to run a version of the Linux open source operating system.
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UK-based Raspberry Pi Foundation is working on a credit card size, $25 PC which will redefine computing. The tiny computer runs on Linux. It supports Debian, Fedora and Arch Linux. Initially Ubuntu, as its based on Debian, was supported but it doesn’t at the moment.
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Magneti Marelli has demonstrated a Linux-based prototype of what it claims is the first open-source infotainment system. The platform was unveiled at the fifth Member Meeting of the GENIVI Alliance in San Jose, California. Other partners of the group, the medium-term aim of which is to connect cars to the Cloud, include BMW, PSA Peugeot Citroen and Intel.
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It’s no longer hard to find a Christmas gift that runs Linux, thanks to the popularity of Google’s Android. The Tuxy possibilities go far beyond tablets and smartphones, however, as we highlight in a list of 27 top gift picks for 2011.
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Here’s a little something to warm your festive cockles. These are populated boards from our first run of beta devices. They’re undergoing electrical testing alongside hardware and software testing at the moment, and if all goes well, the Raspberry Pi you’ll be buying in January (or by auction later this month if they all work as they should) will be exactly like one of these.
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Phones
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The lack of women involved in open source has unfortunately long been a weakness for open source software and its many, varied communities around the globe. In fact, we found out recently just how significant the problem is, with troubling figures as reported by Valerie Aurora with the Ada Initiative that indicate significantly lower representation of women in open source (2%) compared to the overall IT industry (20%).
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Rather like cloud computing and green eco-aware initiatives, open source has sometimes suffered from being added as a “label” to projects that (for the most part) remain predominantly focused on licensed sales with only an “element” of open source.
So is open source ever used a marketing badge to try and evidence some kind of community contribution effort that is actually downplayed internally?
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With the close of the old year, and the advent of the new, it’s very easy to sit back and start reflecting on where open source has been and where it’s going.
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The operating system used is becoming more irrelevant. Why? Software is slowly becoming more and more homogeneous in nature, and more cross compatible to some extent. People are also using many different devices running many different operating systems already, from phones to tablets to desktops to laptops. The age old argument that “that other operating system is too difficult” is no longer holding up as much as it used to. As we know, Microsoft still has a very high market share (anywhere from the high 80 percent to low 90 percent) in the desktop market. GNU/Linux has a high share in the server market. And on other smaller devices, it’s a large mix of Apple iOS, GNU/Linux/Android, and Windows (Windows being mainly on phones as there isn’t much of a tablet presence yet). On desktops there has been a natural shift to Wintel over the past couple of decades that has allowed Microsoft to lead the user experience with the PC as well as document formats most commonly used today, etc. But, as open source software becomes more and more prevalent, it has accustomed itself to be cross compatible with the proprietary software that already exists, and as such is a viable replacement for the proprietary software. Now that we are becoming more used to using a multitude of different devices and operating systems, moving the desktop from one operating system to another is becoming less of an issue. Users are already becoming familiar with different operating systems and are able to find their way through them easier than ever before.
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Events
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For 2012 we (Egbert Eich, Professor Hopf, and I) will be hosting the annual X conference in Nuremberg!
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You have no idea how excited I am that WordCamp is coming to Milwaukee next June 2-3, 2012. A small group of us, led by Scott Offord, have been laying the groundwork for this two-day conference on all things WordPress at Bucketworks. We’re ready to accept visitors.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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There is a report out that claims that the renewed Google Mozilla deal is worth $300 Million per year.
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Although a renewed search deal between Google and Mozilla is welcome news to millions of Firefox users, Mozilla has three big ideas for 2012 and beyond that will see it competing much more aggressively with Google, Facebook, and Apple. Here’s why you should be cheering on Mozilla.
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The Firefox development merry-go-round has moved on again, with Firefox 10 Beta and Firefox 11 Aurora builds being joined by two separate versions of Firefox 12: Firefox 12 Nightly and Firefox 12 UX, the latter build representing the efforts of a team focussed on delivering improvements to the Firefox user interface.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Apache Software Foundation has confirmed that a new build of the OpenOffice suite will be out next year, and has warned rogue developers that it – and only it – can use the trademark for the software.
According to the group, version 3.4 of the software will be out in the first quarter of next year, and will be a developer-focused release that is designed to ensure the entire code base fits with Apache’s licensing terms. There is some third-party code to remove from the OpenOffice base that is incompatible with the Apache licence, although in some cases the original coders have been happy to relicense their source under different terms in order to help the project.
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A pretrial conference was held in the Oracle v. Google case on Wednesday, December 21, during which Judge Alsup heard oral arguments on some of the motions in limine. (654 [PDF; Text]) The hearing lasted about four and a half hours, but any outcome from the hearing has yet to be reported. It is known that the court heard oral arguments on three of the four motions in limine on which the parties had agreed to have oral arguments. Judge Alsup has yet to determine how much time will be required for the trial.
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Claiming ASF is good for everyone including the end user is wrong. Clearly, the end user is a part of the ODF ecosystem, the largest and most important part. While ASF permits modifications to source code to be distributed it does not require source code to be distributed. That has serious implications for end users:
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Below you find the result of my search. Some parts are technical, some parts really talk about features for users.
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CMS
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Danish software company Composite has released version 3.0 of its .NET-based open source content management system, Composite C1. This is the first major new version since the software was released as open source just over a year ago – version 2.1 was released in March 2011. Previously only available as a commercial product, both open source and commercial products are now available. The functionality is the same, but the commercial version comes with a product warranty, automated upgrades and end-user mail/web-based support. Composite also offers a range of support, training and other commercial services.
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Business
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Commercial Open Source blog has passed its fifth year, and as every year it is time to zoom a little back once more, and maybe tell how things will work from now on.
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BSD
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If you want to try out FreeBSD 9.0 this holiday but are not turned on by the actual FreeBSD 9.0 install and setup process, nor find the KDE desktop of PC-BSD 9.0 enjoyable, you may want to try out GhostBSD 2.5.
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Project Releases
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Take a look at the campaign being run by Carl Malamud and John Podesta called “Yes We Scan”. It’s an effort to encourage the US government to make plans to digitize the contents of all national libraries including the Library of Congress. In a letter addressed to President Barack Obama, John Podesta and Carl Malamud point to the economic, scientific and social benefits that would arise from a large scale digitization of America’s cultural riches currently held in the vaults of various national institutions.
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Programming
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The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published the new specifications for the C programming language. The standard is known unofficially as C1X and was published officially as ISO/IEC 9899:2011. It provides greater compatibility with the C++ language and adds new features to C (as indicated in the draft).
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In our current higher education world, many are unable to find work after university because their degree just wasn’t applied enough.
But the Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT), at the top of New Zealand’s South Island, might be going too far by adding a VMware module to its Bachelor of IT degree.
Last week, Computerworld reported that in collaboration with VMware, IBM, NetApp and BlueBerryIT, NMIT has embedded a VMware IT Academy curriculum module in its third-year networking.
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Well, hopefully this blissful piece of article has taught you some useful tips that should bring you much rejoicing. Remember, you must exercise flexibility with your ideas and never falter, even when faced with ultimate zeal. It is important to innovate, have a backup plan ready, as well as be persistent and consistent in your trolling. Do not laugh, break down or show compassion. And you must never give up. It’s all for the greater good. With your help, one day, we might live in the world where fanboyism is restricted to Star Wars versus Star Trek. Now, there’s a tricky topic.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Oil prices emerged from their spider hole over two and half years ago. Having fallen from the towering heights of $148 a barrel in the summer of 2008, the early months of 2009 saw a return to prices in the $30s. Interestingly, during that great oil crash, the price of West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil (WTIC) spent only 20 trading sessions below $40. That is the exact price that most analysts only three years prior believed oil could never sustain as the world would pump “like crazy” should prices ever reach such “impossibly high levels.”
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The U.S. Department of Justice has rejected South Carolina’s voter ID law, which was inspired by an American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model, as discriminatory against people of color.
Fourteen states passed restrictive voting measures over the past year, many of them (including South Carolina) using the ALEC model Voter ID Act as a template. According to a report issued this month by the NAACP, 25% of African Americans (over 6.2 million African-American voters) and 16% of Latinos (over 2.96 million Latino voters) do not possess state-issued photo IDs, and as many as 5 million Americans, many of them people of color, would be ineligible to vote under the new restrictions.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Namecheap, one of the top domain registrars, has come out opposing SOPA, the dangerous bill aimed to destroy the Internet by Hollywood. Namecheap CEO, Richard Kirkendall, has released an encouraging statement “While we at Namecheap firmly believe in intellectual rights, SOPA is like detonating a nuclear bomb on the internet when only a surgical strike is necessary. This legislation has the potential to harm the way everyone uses the Internet and to undermine the system itself. At Namecheap, we believe having a free and open Internet is the only option that will continue the legacy of innovation and openess that stands for everything we all value in our modern society.”
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DRM
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But .AA is a proprietary file format, which contains Digital Rights Management, and is only supported on Mac and Windows. Googling “converting AA to MP3″ yielded a flood of Windows results; “Linux converting AA to MP3″ was more on point, but hardly more productive. It seems there are only three ways to convert AA to MP3, and all of them require Windows
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Today I needed to get a mp3 file for a certain band fast, no it wasn’t Norma Jean. The file I needed was actually released royalty free via Creative Commons license so I am allowed to download and distribute for free. I found a torrent tracker that hosted the album the mp3 was in so I downloaded the .torrent file and proceeded to open. Upon doing so, I learned that my distro of linux doesn’t have a pre-installed torrent software so I headed over to download.com. I was sad to learn they didn’t have a linux version of uTorrent, but I saw something else. It was right in front of my face. The #1 site to get the tools to download torrents, rip DVD’s, and all sorts of other illegal activities is owned by C|Net. C|Net is a large geek based media company and their parent company is none other than CBS Interactive / Viacom. Viacom, along with CBS, is the top sponsor of SOPA and has had thousands of lawsuits filed on their behalf over movies and music piracy.
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Send this to a friend
12.23.11
Posted in News Roundup at 7:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Here’s an update on NEVEX Virtual Technologies, the start-up application performance solution provider that recently launched its signature CacheWorks platform. According to NEVEX Product Manager Andrew Flint, the company is planning to support Linux and VMware ESX environments and add new dashboards for increased user interaction in 2012.
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Server
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The more things change, the more they stay the same. That is certainly true of anti-open source virtualization FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). Linux virtualization is robust and enterprise-worthy, and is evolving rapidly. It is a threat to the established giants of virtualization.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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Here’s a very unexpected but welcoming surprise for the holidays: there’s some source code that’s about to be released by VIA Technologies.
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Applications
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Red Hat Family
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Few software companies reach $1 billion in annual revenue. No company has done it with a portfolio that consists entirely of open source software. But if Red Hat delivers the expected results in early 2012, it will prove that a company can do right by the open source community and its investors. Given the 2011 third quarter results announced by Red Hat on December 19th, it’s looking very likely.
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Japan-based Daiwa Securities’ internet bank, Daiwa Next Bank has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its enterprise operating system for its core banking system in the wake of increasing scalability and performance of its mission-critical system.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s declining popularity was a hot topic on the Internet recently, with a number of sites using Distrowatch’s annual web rankings to ring alarm bells for the popular Linux distro. But there were those who looked askance at these reports — and quite rightly so, accusing them of grossly exaggerating the extent of Ubuntu’s alleged decline. Whatever be the true extent of its decline, the fact is Ubuntu is still a very popular Linux distro and Canonical will have another chance of redeeming itself with Precise Pangolin in a few months’ time.
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Open-source software engineering group Linaro has pushed out a build of Android Ice Cream Sandwich for low-cost development boards from Samsung and ST-Ericsson. The build supports hardware acceleration for Systems on a Chip utililzing ARM’s Mali-400 graphics processor.
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Has Canonical’s controversial new desktop interface improved enough to not only be an amiable desktop for Ubuntu, but to fend off the competition from Windows 8?
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Flavours and Variants
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Yesterday I installed Linux Mint 12, almost officially the world’s most popular Linux distro, made easy for simpletons such as myself. I was swayed by ZDNet contributor Jamie Watson, as he has detailed the progress of Linux Mint 12 thoroughly.
It’s kind of based on Ubuntu 11.10 ‘Oneiric Ocelot’, with the main distinction being the inclusion of GNOME 3 and the beautifully crafted bridging of old and new features using Mint GNOME Shell Extensions. As they say themselves “It’s a brand new desktop but with traditional components.”
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Phones
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HP’s decision to contribute webOS to the open source community represents, at the very least, a detour from the company’s plans to “double down” on the operating system acquired from Palm, Inc. The good news for fans of the OS is that HP will continue to invest in the software’s development, albeit probably not at the unsustainable rate at which it was going it alone.
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Android
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Ask someone to name a microprocessor back in the late 90′s and early 2000′s and you’d likely hear Intel and then maybe AMD. Jump ahead a decade and now the names that roll off of tongues are Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Texas Instruments. Why? Simply put, we’re more mobile today than ever before and Intel just hasn’t figured into the smartphone game. Until now.
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Linaro member motherboards ready for optimized Linux-based devices with latest GCC 4.6 toolchain for Android builds
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Solid engineering talent is such a prized resource nowadays that many tech firms have taken to doing acqui-hires, which is the practice of buying a company for its employees rather than for its products or technology. But it’s not just startup founders and programmers who are benefiting from this trend — the open source community has been a winner as well.
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Joining its fellow social-networking companies in the public release of internal code, LinkedIn has opened sourced software obtained in October with its acquisition of the IndexTank search-engine software provider.
“We are looking forward to seeing IndexTank thrive as an open-source project,” wrote LinkedIn director of engineering, and former CEO of IndexTank, Diego Basch, in a blog post announcing the release.
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Sankor program team will be at the British Educational Training and Technology Show (BETT) in London from January 11 to 14, 2012 to present Open-Sankor IWB Open Source software dedicated to universal interactive education and, concurrently, to open and free digital learning resource creation and sharing throughout an international ecosystem of connected teachers.
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Events
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The International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (Icfoss) will organise the Fourth International Foss Conference, Kerala (Fossk4, http://fossk.in/4) from December 27 to 29.
The event is being organised by the Icfoss and supported by the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC), Delhi; the Computer Society of India; and the Institutions of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has delivered the latest version 9.0 of its Thunderbird email and news client, a free and open source application that Windows, Mac and Linux users can take advantage of. You can get version 9.0 now, at this download site. Not everyone realizes that just as Mozilla has moved to a rapid release cycle for the Firefox browser, Thunderbird is being update much more rapidly than ever as well. Here are some of the enhancements in the latest version of Thunderbird.
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Mozilla has readied the 9.0 version of the Firefox browser for public download. In line with the product release, Mozilla confirms that an existing agreement with Google has been extended for at least three years to keep the search giant’s technology closely tied to the browser.
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SaaS
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Srivas and crew are selling a product based on Hadoop, an open source incarnation of Google’s GFS and MapReduce platforms. But unlike its competitors, MapR is offering something that’s very different from the open source Hadoop project. The company spent two years rewriting Hadoop behind closed doors, eliminating what Srivas sees as major flaws in the platform.
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If you’ve used popular cloud-based services for storing and sharing files, such as Dropbox and Box.net, you’re probably familiar with how convenient they are, and how much they provide for free. In the past few days, though, an open source competitor to them, dubbed OwnCloud, has been getting a lot of attention. It’s a Linux-based way to set up your own cloud computing instance, which means you don’t have to have your files sitting on servers that you don’t choose, governed by people you don’t know.
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LexisNexis has worked for more than a decade to develop a large scale system for Big Data manipulation, and it believes that it has produced something that’s better and more mature than the better known Hadoop technology.
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New Relic, Inc., the SaaS-based cloud application performance management provider, today announced that it has joined the OpenStack(TM) community, a global collaboration of developers and technologists producing the open standard cloud-computing platform for both public and private clouds. Organizations deploying web applications on OpenStack can use New Relic to automatically monitor web apps in production and proactively identify and eliminate potential bottlenecks.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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VirtualBox logo The VirtualBox development team has released the fourth maintenance update to the 4.1.x branch of its open source desktop virtualisation application for x86 hardware. As a maintenance update, VirtualBox 4.1.8 has no new features but does include changes that improve overall stability while also addressing several bugs found in the previous versions.
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Software developers offered new code analysis tools and extra speed via advanced compiler technology
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A few days after the Apache Software Foundation reiterated its claim on the OpenOffice.org trademark, another non-profit in Germany has decided to flaunt the ASF and the Apache OpenOffice.org incubation process by releasing a new version of the popular open source office suite: White Label Office 3.3.1.
The new office suite, now available for download, appears to be a direct slap in the face of the ASF by the German non-profit Team OpenOffice.org e.V., which has proclaimed its mission to keep OpenOffice.org development alive.
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Project Releases
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This release of Foswiki comes with quite some new features and more than 160 crunched bugs relative to the previous release. Here are some highlights:
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Public Services/Government
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And if you want any further proof that the UK Cabinet Office has given up trying to defend UK interests, and totally capitulated to the pressure of proprietary software companies
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The Australian Government’s acting CIO has stepped in to ensure open source software is considered as part of one of the largest software tenders currently on offer in Canberra.
The Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) has counselled the Parliamentary Services Department (DPS) over its compliance with the Government’s Open Source Policy after the DPS released a request for tender (DPS11097) to revamp its integrated library system (ILS).
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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The idea is to create a free and open source map of the neighbourhood that everyone can use and share. We make use of the open source OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, and the first step is to figure out how much of the neighbourhood is already mapped. After this, mapping activity (who goes to which street and what kind of data to collect) can be planned out. Then comes the fun part of exploring little alleyways, noting down details of shops, street-names, speed-breakers, trees and even trash bins. After that we discuss interesting observations and upload the collected data back to the OSM website. Once the hard work is done we celebrate the free open source map of the neighbourhood!
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Programming
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Censorship
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Apparently, Apple not only claims the right to censor what’s available for download onto your iOS devices, but they also reserve the ability to pull it totally off of your device if it slips past their reviewers in the first place. This means no more Quickpick in the Appstore, on iCloud, or on your iPhone. I’ll let that sink in for a minute…
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Civil Rights
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Chances are you’ve not heard of ‘Linux Deepin‘ – an Ubuntu-based Chinese Linux distribution.
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Since I use Linux for several years now I’ve found Linux users of all kinds, having a blog has helped me to identify many types of Linux users. But of all the guys there are some that are very annoying and I will try to classify them.
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Desktop
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Unity is more natural and user friendly to me than anything else..finally. I have not booted windows for 4 months. This is not one of those hate article or Windows vs Linux article, so if you have such intentions please feel free to escape this article presently.
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Kernel Space
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Kernel version 3.2, expected around New Year, improves support for multitouch touchpads. It also enhances support for modern NVIDIA graphics chips and offers a range of new and improved drivers for DVB hardware.
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Graphics Stack
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The plethora of Wayland news continues. Here’s a guide on how to run Qt applications within the Wayland Display Server for those not waiting until the 2012 onslaught begins.
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You’ve may have heard or seen that AMD introduced the Radeon HD 7970 graphics card this morning as their first product built in their “Southern Islands” family and is based on their new GPU architecture, but how well does it work under Linux for the open-source and closed-source AMD Catalyst Linux drivers?
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Applications
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In the process of upgrading and changing Linux distros recently, I wandered away from Screenlets and tried gDesklets. I was mildly happy with the experience. There’s a little too much runaround to get more desklets. But it is a fun way to add information to your interface, and once you have the latest supply of mini programs, you can set it and forget it.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Besides being a racing game and not yet-another-first-person-shooter for Linux, what also made the CoreBreach Linux port interesting is that it’s originally a Mac OS X title and for still using the Apple APIs on Linux they took advantage of GNUstep in porting this Objective-C 2.0 game to Linux. The game also has custom 3D rendering engine. (All of the technical details about the Linux port are talked about in this Phoronix article.)
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The popular and all time classic game Multiponk has landen on Android market. The game which is priced at $4.99 is available only for $1 as introductory price. You can invite up to four friends to play Multiponk with you. The graphics is stunning and the experience is great as the time lag, response is par excellence. The game page says that “The HD graphic designs and the ultra-realistic physical engine will make you feel like playing on an real wooden board.”
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Desktop Environments
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When I wrote about DRM and how it is a big problem, I got a comment saying that the real problem is new user interfaces. I do not agree. They are problematic for now, that much is true; but only as far as the new users are concerned and only for so long.
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A year and a half ago I did an entry entitled “Overview and Explanation of Linux Desktop Environments”. Anyone that is in the technology field (or knows even a little bit about it) knows that 18 months is a like a life time in the world of tech. Today I would like to re-cap my previous post with a few additions that have been added in recent months and mention a few desktops I missed last time.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Not in the Debian-KDE repos that had 4.7.2, but in the official Debian Experimental repositories, KDE 4.7.4 has been released! You need to be running Debian Sid to take advantage of this and be aware that these packages aren’t fully vetted and may break your world.
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The Amarok development team has released version 2.5 of its open source music player and organiser, code-named “Earth Moving”. Among the changes highlighted by the developers are re-written support for USB mass storage devices, GPodder.net podcast synchronisation and an integrated Amazon MP3 store. The GPodder.net support includes the ability to browse directly from Amarok through the list of recommended podcasts on GPodder.net.
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Just in time for Christmas, the KDE development team proudly unleashed a minutes ago, December 22nd, the first Release Candidate version of the upcoming and highly anticipated KDE Software Compilation 4.8 environment.
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The KDE team has released the first RC for its renewed Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team’s focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing new and old functionality.
Compared to Beta1, RC1 contains hundreds of fixes. Please give this release another good round of testing to help us release a rock-solid 4.8 in January.
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GNOME Desktop
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Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, has started working on a GNOME Shell fork called Cinnamon, which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2, with emphasis on “making users feel at home and providing them with an easy to use and comfortable desktop experience”:
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It has been a couple of weeks now that GNOME launched a public alpha version of their extensions site which makes adding extensions to GNOME Shell with a single click. To use the extensions through his site first of all you must have install GNOME Shell 3.2 or newer. Fedora has version 3.2 by default.
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Chakra Edn 2011.12 is the third and final edition of the Chakra Edn line of Chakra, a desktop GNU/Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. The first two editions were Chakra Edn 2011.09 and Chakra Edn 2011.11 (see Chakra Edn 2011.11 review).
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the Scribus Special Edition 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.
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There are different people. There are different Linux users. Generally, you can split all people in the world into two categories: men and women. But should we split Linux world by gender? Some people still believe we should. Many others think we shouldn’t.
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Red Hat Family
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As one of the global leading, comprehensive financial service firms, Daiwa Securities Group operates core businesses such as retail and wholesale securities, asset management, investment, as well as system support and research services. Under its unity within the group approach, the banking institution provides a broad range of services to various clients. Daiwa Next Bank was established as a new type of Internet bank that acts as an agent of Daiwa Securities Group to provide customers with one-stop services for a full range of investments services.
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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, than Red Hat should be flattered by Oracle Linux. That’s not likely case on the Linux Planet, as Red Hat pushes forward with its own agenda and revenue even as Oracle updates its own Linux.
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CentOS is a project that many people (myself included) rely on as a way to get all the goodness of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, without the cost (or support – but that’s another story). That’s probably why there was a lot of concern when it took CentOS so very long to put out the 6.0 release.
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It appears that the kernel source-code to Solaris 11 was leaked onto the Internet this past weekend.
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“With S&P’s upgrade, Red Hat is now considered Investment Grade”, said Charlie Peters, CFO of Red Hat. “This rating is indicative of the financial strength of our company, the consistency of our performance and will give the company better access to the debt capital markets, at lower cost. We are pleased with this upgrade.”
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Software developers offered new code analysis tools and extra speed via advanced compiler technology
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Fedora
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Since finding that Fedora 16 works the best of the Linux distributions I have tried on my Samsung netbooks, I have been making more and more use of it. I generally load the Gnome version of Fedora (for historical reasons), but that left me without my favorite photo management application, digiKam. The obvious solution was to switch to the Fedora 16 KDE distribution, but when I tried to load that I ran into some minor problem (I don’t remember exactly what, but whatever it was although it didn’t seem like it would be a big deal that the time, I just didn’t have time to fool with it), so I shoved that project onto the back burner. Then I saw the Kororaa 16 Release Announcement.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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The familiar login sound of Ubuntu has been disabled by default in an update to Ubuntu 12.04.
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There has been a certain amount of upset finally surfacing as a result of the decision Oracle took over the summer to discontinue packaging Java for Linux under the Distro License for Java. Quite a lot of people commenting on the article at OMGUbuntu this week, for example, see the news that the Java packages are no longer being maintained in the Ubuntu repository as a sign of the End Times for Java (ETJ). As I commented on Google+, I don’t think this is the case. To explain why, here’s a little history, necessarily abbreviated.
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It competes with Microsoft’s own offering in the car system. Linux is already quite strong in the embedded spcae, which is the same category car infotainment aka In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) falls in.
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Flavours and Variants
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Sabily 11.10, dubbed Uhud, has been officially announced earlier today, being based on Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) and featuring the Unity interface.
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Pear OS Linux Panther 3 is the latest edition of the desktop Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, but with a desktop appearance that is fashioned after the Mac OS X UI. It has already been reviewed on this website (see Pear OS Linux Panther 3 review). It is the only distribution released this year that actually makes GNOME 3 look really good. It is not perfect, but it is a lot better than other distributions that use the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
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In the past few weeks, I’ve spent some time dabbling with MATE, the new Gnome 2 fork slowly gaining momentum in the Linux world. MATE is designed to be, and let me quote the author, a non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users, using traditional computing desktop metaphor. It might be what everyone needs, a fully functional environment intended for users with opposing thumbs.
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The Linux Mint developers, led by founder Clement Lefebvre, have forked the shell of GNOME 3. The new shell fork, named Cinnamon, is being used as a platform to continue their development of a more GNOME 2-like environment for GNOME 3 users. In Linux Mint 12, the developers introduced MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions), a set of shell extensions which added in the various elements of functionality that the Mint team wanted to see in GNOME 3. This included a launcher menu at the bottom right, a task bar at the bottom and status widgets.
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If you’ve been following the world of Linux desktop environments in recent months, you may remember that the Linux Mint project has adopted a strategy of easing users gradually into the controversial GNOME 3 desktop.
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Phones
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Android
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With Android devices on the rise it’s time to consider how best to put your smartphones and tablet PCs to work. Here is a selection of ten Android productivity apps that could give your work a serious boost.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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We all have our own ideas on what looks good on a tablet display and what doesn’t. Unlike most of us though Dr, Raymond Soneira, president of DisplayMate, the world’s leading display and display tuning company, has more than just an opinion. He has a long, well-respected history of scientifically analyzing what separates great displays from good ones. When Soneira talks, I listen.
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When writing about free and open source software, sometimes I seem to spend all my time complaining. So, after last week, when I described 2011 as a whole as a disappointment, I thought I should add some balance by mentioning some of the free software-related discoveries that delighted me during the past year.
Many of these discoveries were not new in 2011, although several came into their own during the year. However, until the last twelve months, they were new to me. All are worth mentioning, just in case you’ve missed them:
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One of the greatest strengths of open source software development has been the notion that as an OSS developer, you can pretty much just pick and choose from the thousands of OSS projects out there to enrich your own project.
(There are caveats to this idea, of course, the most obvious being license incompatibility. But, the general principle still holds.)
But anecdotal evidence in the open source community seems to be demonstrating that the very opposite is occurring: new projects are often reinventing the wheel in their code, rather than partnering with someone else’s project.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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With the browser market dominated by Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer you could be forgiven for thinking that small browsers have little to offer.
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Mozilla
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Since the official release of Firefox 9 is today, it seems like an appropriate time to revisit my post from a few weeks ago complaining about Firefox’s poor performance on Linux to see if anything’s changed.
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A day after it shipped Firefox 9, Mozilla quickly released an update after backing out a bug fix that was causing some Mac, Linux and Windows browsers to crash.
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Although Mozilla has never limited its stated goals to merely building an open-source browser, there’s no doubt that Firefox has been the highest-profile project from the Mozilla Foundation.
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Mozilla faced its fair share of criticism this year when they moved to the rapid release cycle. Enterprises argued that they couldn’t update as fast as Firefox is being released, with new browsers out every six weeks.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation has announced “the first LibreOffice 3.5 bug hunting session to improve the quality and stability of the best free office suite ever.” All you need is a computer with one of the big three operating systems and LibreOffice 3.5 Beta 1. Help squash enough bugs and you could be the official LibreOffice Bug Hunting Hero.
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There’s been much uncertainty surrounding OpenOffice.org ever since Oracle decided back in June to donate the open source office productivity project to the Apache Software Foundation.
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Project Releases
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Milestone 1 of Ceylon includes a reasonably complete and stable specification and a complete command line toolset (compiler, runtime, documentation compiler). A compatible release of the team’s Eclipse-based IDE is coming soon.
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Licensing
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As announced in a previous press release, VideoLAN and VLC developers have achieved the process of changing the license of the VLC engine to LGPL. The École Centrale Paris shares its happiness about this change.
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Open Hardware
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This article is a bit different from my usual column in two ways. First, it’s starting with a hardware and software combo—something I’ve not done before. Second, the projects are linked to each other and come recommended to me by Perth LUG member, Simon Newton.
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Security
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Finance
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It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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The national hardware chain Lowe’s pulled its advertising from the TLC reality show All-American Muslim–explaining that the question of whether Muslims can be presented as regular human beings is a “hotly contested debate.”
All-American Muslim is a reality show described by TLC, the cable channel that airs it, as “a look at life in Dearborn, Michigan–home to the largest mosque in the United States–through the lens of five Muslim American families…an intimate look at the customs and celebrations, misconceptions and conflicts these families face outside and within their own community.”
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Civil Rights
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The way some congressmen are desperate to pass dangerous SOPA, ignoring all the warning being given by IT experts, shows how much money speaks when it comes to passing laws. SOPA is nothing short of a measure to break the Internet just to entertain the entertainment industry which is failing to keep up with the technological evolution.
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Copyrights
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Legal experts are warning that the proposed PROTECT IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation, currently working their way through Congress, will damage the world’s DNS system, cripple attempts to get better online security and violate free speech rights in the US constitution.
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12.22.11
Posted in News Roundup at 12:15 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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As is usually the case for X.Org Server point releases, the xorg-server 1.11.3 release just incorporates bug-fixes that have appeared in Git master and elsewhere.
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The plethora of Wayland news continues. Here’s a guide on how to run Qt applications within the Wayland Display Server for those not waiting until the 2012 onslaught begins.
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Applications
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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The Amarok development team has released version 2.5 of its open source music player and organiser, code-named “Earth Moving”. Among the changes highlighted by the developers are re-written support for USB mass storage devices, GPodder.net podcast synchronisation and an integrated Amazon MP3 store. The GPodder.net support includes the ability to browse directly from Amarok through the list of recommended podcasts on GPodder.net.
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Red Hat Family
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Linux operating system and middleware software distributor Red Hat continues to power through its fiscal quarters, even while the European economy is choppy and several key industries – government and financial services being two important ones – are under pressure.
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A state economic development board yesterday awarded $6.7 million in tax credits for a half dozen companies that promised to add jobs.
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Daiwa Next Bank, the Internet bank of Daiwa Securities Group, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as its enterprise operating system for its core banking system. The financial institution has reduced its technology costs by 50 percent by migrating from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We’ve heard the promises of bringing Ubuntu past its comfort zone and into the mobile space, but who wants to wait until 2014 when a home remedy can deliver precisely that right now. XDA-Developers AdamOutler and Loglud have been grooming a way to bring the OS to your Barnes & Noble tablet, because — you know — we’re all longing for slates with desktop-scale operating systems on them. At the moment, you can get a quick glimpse of Ubuntu running on the Nook, but porting can only be done via a VNC Server, which opens up plenty of potential avenues for lag to mar the experience. Notably, the delays should all but vanish once a ROM solution becomes available. Now, if we could only get Jane Lynch to sing her way through letting us know the Nook Tablet can also run Ubuntu, we’d be set. Have a peek at the Glee-less demo vid just after the break.
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The Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet has a locked bootloader, which has prevented hackers from figuring out how to replace the version of Android that comes on the tablet with custom software such as CyanogenMod. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to run an alternate operating system on the NOOK Tablet.
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The Ubuntu team has been working hard to improve and enhance the multi-monitor experience for users. Stewart Wilson says, “We took the opportunity at UDS in November to get some feedback on a prototype, which shows how we are planning to develop the multi-monitor experience over the next few cycles.
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Flavours and Variants
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Most of us have holiday traditions, like celebrating with family, putting up decorations, or watching A Christmas Story over and over again. One of my favorite holiday traditions? Checking out the madness of Alek Komarnitsky’s Linux-powered controllable Christmas lights.
Every year, Komarnitsky puts up his display with more than 20,000 lights and a slew of decorations. But that’s not that unusual. Komarnitsky’s not the only guy who goes gonzo with the Christmas lights, but he does give it an unusual twist. Komarnitsky puts his display online for all to see, and lets visitors to his site control the lights and inflate/deflate the giant mascots in the display.
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Phones
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Android
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Google has released version 4.0.3 of its open source mobile operating system, an incremental update to Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (ICS). According to Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK Tech Lead, Android 4.0.3 will be the “base version” of ICS and should be the version used by partners on phones and tablets as they upgrade their existing devices or launch new ones.
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At the briefing, Rubin also announced that Google’s Android platform is now seeing 700,000 activations a day, a 200,000 rise from the figure announced three months ago.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Linpus Technologies has announced the release of Linpus Lite Desktop, a Fedore-based consumer grade operating system. Linpus Lite Desktop is the notebook and desktop specific edition from their highly successful Linpus Lite product series. Linpus targets the same audience that Ubuntu targets — desktop users, so the Lite version will be a great option to see how rpm-based operating system performs against Debian based Ubuntu in the consumer market.
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Twitter has released the source code to TextSecure, the encrypted SMS messaging application created by Whisper Systems, which it acquired earlier this year, and promises more releases to come.
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With little fanfare, GitHub has released Janky under the MIT license. Janky is a continuous integration (CI) server that runs on top of Jenkins and Hubot, designed to work with projects hosted on GitHub.
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Ecobot. One way to start contributing to a more sustainable planet is to keep track of your own carbon footprint. Do you track how much fuel, power and paper you use, for example? If not, Ecobot is a free, open source Adobe AIR application that tracks your fuel consumption, paper consumption, and much more. It also directs you to green resources that you can leverage. We covered Ecobot in this post.
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In case you didn’t know yet, CocoonTech has been tracking all home automation software available to the general public, all compiles in a nice and easy to search home automation software list. This list is updated on a regular basis, and today, AZIZ has been added to the list.
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We’re big fans of open source. Libraries from Apache, Google, and various projects hosted on SourceForge.net make up a significant fraction of the third-party code we use to build our products.
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Events
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O’Reilly Media has announced that the Call for Participation deadline for next year’s OSCON open source convention will be 12 January 2012. Running from 16 to 20 July 2012, the event will, as in previous years, take place in Portland, Oregon. It is expected to attract more than 3,000 attendees including users, developers, hackers, experts and vendors.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Chrome’s a little slower, but still faster than the rest and it’s still the browser to beat.
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Mozilla
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Following a rapid release schedule that has upset several people, Firefox 9 was made available yesterday. Although it has been said that Google Chrome has taken the #2 browser market share position, I will continue using the Mozilla browser because, to be honest, none of the arguments against Firefox has been heavy enough for me to drop it. In addition, I like Mozilla’s open Web philosophy and the useful extensions that can be incorporated to “the little browser that could”.
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The pending Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) continues to inspire opponents to come up with creative solutions to circumvent it.
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As December began, it was unclear whether Mozilla would renew its long-time deal with Google, through which Mozilla gains the lion’s share of its revenues by steering users of the Firefox browser toward Google’s lucrative search/ad ecosystem. For those who favor Mozilla’s browser and other tools, the issue was an important one, because Mozilla’s deals with other search-focused companies don’t provide anywhere near the amount of money that Google kicks in. Now, in a blog post, Mozilla has announced a new, long-term deal with Google that will last for at least three years. Above all, the renewal of the deal shows that Google cares more about steering the maximum number of users toward its search engine than it does about absolute dominance for its own software tools.
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Databases
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NoSQL databases such as the graph database Neo4j don’t normally work with common database tools which are typically tailored for SQL databases. Rickard Öberg, a developer from Neo Technology, thought this wasn’t right, and now in a blog posting he has described a JDBC interface he has created which forwards database queries to Neo4j and allows common applications to access the NoSQL database without modification.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The organization behind LibreOffice is hoping community members will help it uncover problems with an upcoming release of the open-source office suite via an international “bug hunt” next week.
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The Document Foundation, the body behind LibreOffice, has announced the first LibreOffice 3.5 bug hunting session. The session will be held in a virtual environment on December 28 and 29, 2011. Volunteer bug hunters will gather on the Internet from the five continents to spot software problems of the upcoming new major release, featuring a large number of improvements and new functions, in order to make LibreOffice 3.5 the best free office suite ever.
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Apache OpenOffice.org is gradually recovering from his transfer to the Apache Foundation. Until the release of the first version, new features appear. Here’s one: the native support for graphics files of type .svg (for Scalable Vector Graphics)
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CMS
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Newscoop, the open source content management system for online news media, has a new major release out in beta. Newscoop 4.0 adds the possibility to build a community platform into a news website, allowing newspapers to grow and manage vibrant communities around their content.
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Education
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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is to extend its online educational services with a project known as MITx; this project will build on the ten-year old OpenCourseWare project, and the software developed will be made available as open source, enabling other educational institutions also to use it for their own online offerings.
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The celebrated Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is expanding its online learning resources by pushing a significant batch of online learning software to open source status.
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Business
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The Vaadin Solution Partnership helps CCC to offer architecture design, and implementation of high-quality web applications based Vaadin technology. Developer training and certification guarantees right use of tools and nicer user interfaces while keeping the development work easy and efficient.
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Funding
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The company also offers an open-source version of CouchDB in BigCouch. NoSQL is a catch-all term for developers who reject the popular open-source database software MySQL.
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Project Releases
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Red Hat has released a first milestone of Ceylon, its open source alternative to Java. The milestone allows developers to access the compiler, language module and runtime of this statically typed language. A total of five such milestones are scheduled in the development roadmap to version 1.0 – according to the developers, around 80 per cent of the planned functionality has already been made available in the now released version.
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Public Services/Government
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The government of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest state in Brazil, passed a new law which mandates public entities and companies in Rio de Janeiro to give preference to open document formats, in particular ODF. The publication of Law #5978/2011 was celebrated in an official event with representatives from the government, several state companies, and the FLOSS community.
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Licensing
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I posted a week or so ago about the latest round of discussions hosted by DCMS regarding ‘self-regulation’ and Internet policy. In addition to ongoing discussions about a new, faster scheme for website blocking, there are now plans proposed by rights holders for search engines to ‘self-regulate’ in the name of copyright enforcement too.
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Openness/Sharing
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Security
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Finance
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Ireland’s lauded rescue program is at risk of falling off track as a slowing European economy cuts into the country’s exports and sparks concern about the nation’s banking system, the International Monetary Fund reported Tuesday.
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Europe took the financial world on a stomach-churning ride in 2011.
The rising threat of default by heavily indebted European countries spread fear across financial markets and weighed on economies worldwide. As the year came to a close, banks and investors nervously watched Europe’s political and financial leaders scramble to prevent the 17-nation eurozone from breaking apart.
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On Monday, Bank of America (BofA) stocks briefly traded for under $5. Yes, you could buy a share of BofA for less than the noxious debit card fee they tried to force down your throat.
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Corporations are people too. So says our supreme Supreme Court. As such they can donate as much as they want to politicians. Does this sound right to any of you?
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Federal authorities investigating the collapse of MF Global have uncovered e-mails that detail the transfers of money in the firm’s last days, including transfers that contained customer money, according to people close to the investigation.
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In a fierce fight to keep his job in deep-blue Massachusetts, the freshman GOP senator is shunning tea party Republicans who helped send him to Washington and embracing the same populist fervor that’s made Warren, his likely Democratic rival, a hero among liberals.
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California’s attorney general filed lawsuits against mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on Tuesday, demanding that the companies that own some 60 percent of the state’s mortgages respond to questions in a state investigation.
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The housing bubble apparently still has not gotten word about the housing bubble. Of course it is easy to see how an $8 trillion bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy could escape the attention of the nation’s premier business publication.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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Late in the morning, the API Edelman team filmed three unexpectedly honest ‘citizens’ who made clear the script did not represent their real opinions on energy. Greenpeace researcher Connor Gibson of the PolluterWatch project repeated their scripted line, “I vote,” then declared, “But I am a clean energy citizen. I will not believe the lies and influence peddling of the American Petroleum Institute, which would leave you to believe that I am a citizen that is okay with giving my tax payer dollars to billionaires and millionaires that run oil companies, the most profitable industry on the planet.” Gibson stressed movement
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Privacy
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With justification, Ontario’s privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian continues to point out that Ottawa’s planned “lawful access legislation,” targeting the Internet, smartphones and other mobile devices, really amounts to a blatant infringement of our privacy rights.
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Civil Rights
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Bell advised the CRTC yesterday that it plans to drop all peer-to-peer traffic shaping (often called throttling) as of March 1, 2012. While the decision has been described as surprising or as quid pro quo for the usage based billing ruling, I think it is neither of those. The writing was on the wall in October when Bell announced that it was dropping the traffic shaping for wholesale traffic, citing reduced network congestion from P2P. At the time I wrote that the Bell move:
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Switzerland has completed a major government study on whether new measures are need to address online copyright infringement. The study concludes that no new legislative action is needed, citing the high costs and negative effects of three strikes and you’re out policies. It is noteworthy that Switzerland participated in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations and has enacted digital lock rules that link circumvention to copyright infringement.
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Intellectual property law was created to protect the rights of creators over products of the mind. Speaking loosely: Patents protect inventions. Trademark protection covers names, images, and designs used in commerce. Copyright covers literary and artistic works, including both tangible artifacts and intangibles such as performances. Trade-secret protection is for information that owners keep secret to maintain competitive advantage.
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ACTA
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With a recent decision by the Agriculture and Fishery Council of the European Union, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) seems to have made a big leap forward. And with recent breakthroughs in other countries, ACTA’s final hurdle may be in the European parliaments.
Late last week, officials who might not have previously heard a lot about the much-debated agreement authorised the European Commission to sign ACTA on behalf of the Union. With this, ACTA reaches its final phase in Europe, which consists of 28 ratification processes, including the one involving the European Parliament (EP).
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As ACTA D-day approaches the debate heats up in Brussels. Today French Sarkozyist MEP Marielle Gallo started leading the forward charge of the music and entertainment lobbyist light brigade. MEPs are already being bullied into rushing into parliamentary approval of ACTA within 3 or 4 months without even seeking the opinion of the European Court of Justice. Ms. Gallo ended the today´s presentation of her enthusiastically pro-ACTA opinion in the Judicial Affairs Committee by warning of the dire consequences of “losing 2 more years” waiting for a European Court ruling on how the implementation of ACTA could affect fundamental rights, as requested by Green and Liberal MEPs.
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So, continuing the tradition of denying European citizens any opportunity to offer their views on ACTA, the Council of national ministers employed the shabby trick of pushing the treaty through by adopting it without debate at a meeting whose main business had nothing to do with international trade.
Interestingly, this is not the first time European politicians have used this subterfuge. In 2002 the European Commission presented a proposal that would allow software patents in Europe (currently, the European Patent Convention forbids patenting programs for computers “as such”).
This saga was still going on in 2005 when the software patent proposal was added to the agenda of a fisheries meeting – just like ACTA. On that occasion, the ploy failed, but the Council Presidency went on to adopt the agreement in violation of the procedural rules. The proposal was then passed to the European Parliament, where it was definitively rejected.
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On a request from Members Lichtenberger and Engström, the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee decided to release the Legal Service’s Opinion on ACTA. You can find the documents here.
The FFII published a provisional note on the Legal Service’s Opinion on ACTA, see below or the pdf. Due to the limited time available, it is limited to border measures and damages.
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As things stand now, the European Parliament committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety will not formulate an opinion on ACTA. Despite all the analysis work done on the effects ACTA will have on access to medicine, and despite health groups informed the Parliament, no Member of Parliament has asked the committee to formulate one.
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The JURI Report, the newsletter of the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee, is a very positive about ACTA.
“Thus, it will provide benefits for EU exporting right holders operating in the global market who currently suffer systematic and widespread infringements of their copyrights, trademarks, patents, designs and geographical indications abroad.”
Not a word about all the civil society and academic criticism on ACTA. The critical European Parliament INTA study is not mentioned.
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The world faces major challenges: access to medicine, diffusion of green technology needed to fight climate change, and a balanced Internet governance. While flexibility is essential to solve these major issues, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) codifies draconian measures. ACTA’s predecessor, the 1994 WTO TRIPS agreement, still hampers fair trade, even in life saving generic medicines. The EU should have chosen to further balance, in the World Trade Organization, the TRIPS agreement.
It is not too late. ACTA goes beyond US law, the US will not ratify ACTA. The Mexican Senate urged the government not to sign ACTA. India, Brazil and China have turned against ACTA. The EU can and should reject ACTA, and seek a balanced solution in WTO and WIPO.
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12.21.11
Posted in News Roundup at 3:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The TL;DR version is that I used Ubuntu 11.04 (Naughty Nightnurse) and liked it okay, then was excited to upgrade to 11.10 (Onanistic Oedipus) only to be somewhat disappointed with many of the changes. So I tried out Kubuntu, got frustrated and ran screaming back to Apple. I upgraded to Lion, realized that Lion really, truly sucks – sucks enough to make me rethink my decision to switch back. Then I find out that Debian testing (wheezy) now supports Gnome 3, so I loaded it up.
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I needed that peace of mind that I never got with Windows, viruses always crashing my PC. I would have liked to get a Mac at some stage but the cost of it was a problem. Then I settled on Linux, and haven’t looked back since.
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The meaning is clear: the end is in sight. It has been a long haul but Munich will finally have a GNU/Linux system working for them instead of Munich working for M$. While there has been much cost and pain in the process, the future is forever and the benefits from switching to GNU/Linux, open standards and more efficient organization will continue to roll in. If there is one lesson learned from the process in Munich it is that the sooner migration is started the better. Otherwise, you’re just digging a deeper hole. While that other OS can form a basis for IT it is an unstable one designed to bring profit to M$ above all else. With GNU/Linux, FLOSS and open standards, an organization has much more control over its destiny. Almost every “feature” that M$ created served to lock-in Munich more strongly. They recognized that and took action.
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So, they’re selling desktop boxes on the small side and the other 70 items? Mostly books and courses on GNU/Linux.
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I run Arch Linux, and I love it. It’s fast, always up to date and is actually the most stable Linux distribution I’ve ever used. It takes a little while to get set up, but thanks to the amazing Beginners Guide anyone can do it and it’s well worth the investment.
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Kernel Space
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The Big 3.0 and 20th Anniversary
Granted, the jump to 3.0 wasn’t a technical achievement so much as Linus giving in to the voices in his head. Still, the 3.0 milestone is pretty nifty.
The version bump went hand in hand with the 20th anniversary of Linux, of course. As Linus wrote when the 3.0 kernel went out, “it’s simply a way to drop an inconvenient numbering system in honor of twenty years of Linux. In fact, the 3.0 merge window was calmer than most, and apart from some excitement from RCU I’d have called it really smooth.”
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X-Server 1.12 will include proper support for touch screens with multitouch capabilities. All three major manufacturers of graphics hardware for PCs have released new drivers. Linux 3.0 is still being maintained even though Linux 3.1 has already been out for a few weeks.
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What exactly is the Linux Kernel and what makes it different than, say Windows or Mac System X? I’m not going to get too deep into the weeds on this one because, quite honestly, I’m not qualified to discuss Kernels beyond the basics. I’m really going to focus on the hardware/software interface aspects of the kernel pros and cons.
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Graphics Stack
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Last week there were a number of commits to the Nouveau DRM kernel tree by Red Hat’s Ben Skeggs, several of these commits bring interesting new features and support.
With the Linux 3.2 kernel reaching the end of its development and the merge window for the Linux 3.3 kernel opening in January, it’s time for kernel developers to get ready.
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Applications
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Proprietary
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Instructionals/Technical
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The last edition of Linpus Lite that was reviewed on this website, was Linpus Lite 1.4, and that was in September 2010 (see Linpus Lite 1.4 review). That edition was good in some ways, bad in others, but in general, was usable, though it lacked basic security features that I expected to see in a modern Linux distribution.
The latest release, therefore, provides an(other) opportunity to see what, if anything, has improved in this RPM distribution. But while the review is being readied, here are a few screen shots from a test installation. If you would like to take it for a spin yourself, you may download an installation image here.
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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Only a week after releasing CentOS 6.1, the CentOS project finished up version 6.2 of its CentOS community version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), while Oracle launched Oracle Linux 6.2 — a RHEL 6.2 clone that adds the company’s Unbreakable Enterprise Linux kernel. Meanwhile, Red Hat released a beta of its long-lifecycle RHEL 5.8 platform and announced strong third quarter earnings.
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According to Red Hat, there is a misconception in the marketplace that middleware can be difficult to use for content creation. It’s a misconception the company aims to challenge with the new JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5.2 release. Red Hat is also tackling the issue of middleware server management with the new JBoss Operations Network 3.0 release.
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This example of a minimal desktop shows how to manually create partitions using ext3 and ext4 for a server that has a minimal desktop for a graphical interface. Here are the choices to complete that install.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Daniel Holbach from Canonical proudly announced a few minutes ago, December 19th, the dates for the next year’s first Ubuntu Developer Week event.
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Flavours and Variants
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Unlike Ubuntu, Linux Mint does not keep the size of their distribution’s ISO image to 700 MB. The latest release “weighs” about 1Gb. It is larger than a CD, so you need either a DVD-R(W) or a USB stick to get this operating system booted or installed.
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Phones
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Android
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Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus is now the “king fish” of Android communicators in screen size, speed, and operating system functionality, according to this eWEEK review. But, its 4.65-inch screen makes the $300 device a challenge to hold by those whose hands are average-sized or smaller, the author adds.
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Cricket Communications announced its most powerful Android smartphone, a four-inch Android 2.3 handset with a 1.4GHz processor and an eight-megapixel camera. Priced at $250 without contract and $55 per month in fees, the Huawei Mercury is the first U.S.-destined variant of the Huawei Honor, being released this month in a variety of global markets.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Android tablet computers will grow from 32 percent global market share in the third quarter to an estimated 40.3 percent through the fourth quarter, reducing Apple’s iPad share to 59 percent, projects IDC. The growth in Android tablets is due largely to the popularity of the low-cost Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, says the study.
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Archos announced a seven-inch Android 3.2 (“Honeycomb”) tablet due to ship in January for under $200. The Archos 70b is equipped with a 1.2GHz processor, and offers a 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen, 8GB of storage, HDMI output, and support for Google apps and Android Market, says the company.
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Motorola Mobility’s Droid Xyboard 10.1 tablet brings the iPad some solid competition thanks to its Android 3.2 Honeycomb operating system, thin profile, HD display, 1.2GHz dual-core processor, and compatiblity with Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Yet, Motorola should take the hardware button design and new stylus option back to the drawing board, this eWEEK review adds.
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Might Google be preparing to enter the Android tablet game with an officially-backed tablet much like the Nexus handset series? Depending on how much you read into the context and translation of the following, the answer is yes. According to Google’s own Eric Schmidt, the company plans to rally behind a top-notch tablet.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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As the world of SOPA continues to turn, the emergence of a simple Firefox browser add-on may render the potential punitive actions of these protection acts null and void; or, at least ineffective, if not outright useless.
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The update brings improvements in JavaScript, which the open-source developer says offers a 30% speed boost.
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We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.
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There’s no official announcement yet, but the binary and source archives of the final version of Mozilla Firefox 9.0 were made available for download on the official FTP site of the Mozilla company.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In its new role as steward of the OpenOffice.org open source office suite, the Apache Software Foundation expects to offer an Apache-branded version of the package for developers in 2012. Apache also is carefully guarding its trademarks.
Apache on Tuesday is releasing a statement about its OpenOffice efforts, entitled “Open Letter to the Open Document Format Ecosystem,” which notes the planned 3.4 release, tentatively slated for early 2012. Apache has just about completed with code clearance stage of the effort, said Don Harbison of the Apache OpenOffice project management committee in an interview.
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Having cranked Solaris Unix up to 11, software giant Oracle has now revved up a new companion set of compilers that work with the new operating system as well as the current Oracle Linux clone of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux.
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CMS
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Public Services/Government
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Several Brazilian government entities heavily involved with IT had already signed the “Brasilia Protocol” in 2008, a mutual commitment to Open Data Formats. Similarly, many government sectors were already implementing changes towards open source internally. This new Law formalizes this commitment and extends it to the whole of the public administration in the State of Rio de Janeiro.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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A decade after MIT began to put its teaching materials and lectures online via the OpenCourseWare platform, the university has announced that it will leverage these materials to provide an online certification program, currently termed MITx. Although these certificates won’t have the same weight as an MIT degree, they will indicate mastery of specific subject areas. The whole system will be built on top of an open-source software platform, which may enable other universities to follow in MIT’s footsteps.
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Finance
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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. spent $800,000 in the third quarter to lobby the federal government on rules for implementing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform act and on other financial services issues, according to a disclosure report.
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Civil Rights
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12.20.11
Posted in News Roundup at 5:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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It’s vacation time already and I’ve been away from the blogosphere. I remember that, before 2009 (when was still a Windows user), I longed for this free time to come. No, not because I was included in Bill Gates’ gift list, but because I really needed this free time to format my hard drive and get rid of all the malware pestering the OS…
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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One month has passed since the first X.Org Server 1.12 snapshot was released, but now a new development version has landed.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Google’s Native Client (NaCl) has already made it possible to play new console style rich 3D games in Linux. Games like Bastion and Pocket Legends now run as fast as native games making full use of 3D graphics hardware through WebGL.
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Desktop Environments
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GNOME and KDE may be the high profile Linux desktop environments, but they are not to everybody’s tastes. Richard Hillesley describes the different approaches taken by a couple of the more prominent alternatives.
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These are interesting times for the Linux desktop. The often-overlooked area of the Linux ecosystem is now the centre of attention and, while some users have welcomed the changes, others have reacted in true community style: ranting and raging, threatening to abandon ship or, when all else fails, demanding a fork.
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Razor Qt is a new lightweight desktop environment – think of it as an early LXDE, but using Qt. It doesn’t come with a display manager or window manager and its developers recommend using it with Openbox, but it should work with any WM, like Kwin, Metacity, etc.
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The guys at Razor Qt have just released version 0.4 of the advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. According to the project page, Razor Qt has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines.
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Changes to the behaviour of interfaces don’t always go down well, but are sometimes a good thing, says Richard Hillesley
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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One of the most popular music player in the GNU/Linux world, Amarok, has reached a major milestone with version 2.5. With this version Amarok is now officially supported on the ‘security-risk’ prone Windows OS as well.
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GNOME Desktop
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This past year has seen some interesting developments in the Linux desktop arena. GNOME 3, obviously, has been a big bang. But I would also mention the wide spread of Xfce 4.8, which shipped with openSUSE in March 2011. As I wrote in a review at the time, it’s a really impressive release. As usual for Xfce, there have not been any major releases since then – the project tends to take a while to push out major features. Then again, Xfce does not aim to shake up the infrastructure (like KDE did with version 4) or the user interface (à la GNOME 3). Keeping things simple and familiar has its advantages, so why do KDE and GNOME make us change our ways?
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Another milestone for the Debian ecosystem and the Gnome 3.x desktop this weekend as the Debian unstable distribution (“sid”) completed it’s transition to Gnome 3.2.1, with the migration of remaining Gnome 3.2 packages to Debian “sid” including gnome-shell 3.2.1-8.
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Anyways, the oxymoron at Wallmart made me remember that there is a nice place to get Pardus wallpapers.
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Vinux is a specialist distribution remastered from a Ubuntu base and optimized specifically with visually impaired users in mind. Some others also come with a screen reader and other accessibility options by default, for example in the login screen, but these are never turned on from the start and voice recognition software is rarely if ever present.
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Overall, Slacko is a nice continuation on the Puppy philosophy it’s designed around; It’s fast (at least on slightly newer machines than perhaps it’s intended for), reasonably simple, and most of all, very different to most current Linux distributions. Nothing else seems to combine the features it has with the footprint it takes up, and it’s incredibly flexible how it can be run as a regular, persistent OS from almost any medium. And while not suitable for a complete newbie, it’s definitely something a Windows or OSX power user could pick up and start using without too much hassle.
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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The Mageia development team has published the second alpha of version 2 of its community fork of Mandriva Linux. Aimed at developers and testers, the release is based on the 3.1 Linux kernel and includes KDE SC 4.7.4 and GNOME 3.3.3.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat reports its fiscal third quarter results on Monday and most indicators point to a solid year ahead, virtualization potential and rumblings about big data trends and Hadoop.
The company is expected to report third quarter earnings of 26 cents a share on revenue of $289.6 million.
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Cautious optimism appears to be the optimum phrase for Red Hat (RHT) as it readies to report its fiscal third-quarter results late Monday.
Revenue for the open-source Linux software services provider, which helps companies adopt cloud computing technology, will likely be 23% better than the year-ago period, at $289.6 million, according to the consensus of 24 analysts polled by Thomson Reuters. That would be the lowest percentage rise in four quarters but would mark the seventh straight quarter in which sales rose at least 20%. The company’s profit minus one-time items is expected to be up 30%, at 26 cents, which also would be the smallest percentage jump in four quarters.
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) shares are mimicking the company’s name rather well Monday heading into its third-quarter 2012 report, expected out after the market closes. The stock is down nearly 3 percent heading into the last two hours of trade.
The Street is looking for Red Hat to report revenue of $289.62 million and earnings of 26 cents per share. The company posted a gain of 20 cents per share in the same period last year.
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Total subscription, training and services revenue for the quarter rose to $290.03 million from $235.58 million in the prior year quarter. Twenty two analysts had consensus revenue estimate of $289.62 million for the quarter.
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Red Hat first launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) back in 2007. In late 2010, Red Hat released RHEL 6, providing the next generation of enterprise Linux features. RHEL 6 was recently updated to RHEL 6.2, providing new control and storage features. The upcoming RHEL 5.8 release, which is now in beta, is getting its own set of updates. However, resource control is not among them.
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For the quarter, Red Hat reported revenue of $290 million, which is a 23 percent year-over-year gain. Net income hit $38.2 million or $0.19 per share, up from $26 million or $0.13 per share last year. Moving forward, Red Hat provided fourth-quarter guidance for revenue to be in the range of approximately $289 million to $292 million.
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Ubuntu is all over it and so is HP with their Project Moonshot effort using Calxeda ARM technology. While Ubuntu and HP and optimistic, Red Hat is more…realistic.
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Shares of Red Hat Inc. (RHT) plunged after the bell, as the company posted third-quarter earnings-per-share that beat estimates but revenue was just slightly higher-than-expected.
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Debian Family
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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There are plenty of Android tablets in the market already, but none has given the iPad much of a run. “The issue with the Android tablets is they tend to be all over the map in terms of design and experience, appearing too difficult to use and too hard to learn against the simple elegance of the Apple product,” said tech analyst Rob Enderle. Can Google change that with its own model?
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Are you at a loss for what to buy the open source aficionados on your holiday shopping list? It’s actually not as difficult as you may think. Peruse this Linux fan’s personal picks to find inspiration as quick as a wink.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Ahead of an official release tomorrow, Firefox 9 has winged its way to various mirrors across the web and is now available to download from the official Firefox website — no messing around with a hammered Nightly FTP server this time, oh no!
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Databases
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After nearly a year of development, the Grails team has released Grails version 2.0, their Groovy language based open source web framework. The new version sees improvements throughout the Grails framework including an improved user and developer experience, additional cloud support via Heroku and Cloud Foundry, integration with the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) and support for a range of NoSQL databases.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In such a large ecosystem it is impossible to agree upon a single vision for all participants, Apache OpenOffice does not seek to define a single vision, nor does it seek to be the only player. Instead we seek to offer a neutral and powerful collaboration opportunity.
The permissive Apache License 2.0 reduces restrictions on the use and distribution of our code and thus facilitates a diverse contributor and user base for the benefit of the whole Open Document Format ecosystem. Within an Apache project it is possible to rise above political, social and commercial differences in the pursuit of maximally effective implementations of freely available open standards and related software tools.
Our license and open development model is widely recognised as one of the best ways to ensure open standards, such as ODF, gain traction and adoption. Apache OpenOffice offers much more potential for OpenOffice.org than “just” an end-user Microsoft Office replacement. We offer a vendor neutral space in which to collaborate whilst enabling third parties to pursue almost any for-profit or not-for-profit business model.
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Business
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Recently, I was directed toward an excellent analysis of commons-based peer production as a phenomenon which separates “entrepreneurs” (who want to get things done and create value in the world) from “capitalists” (who want to get a return on an investment of property without contributing any labor). An observer — clearly outside of the community of free software developers — expressed dismay at the example of Mozilla Foundation, which makes money from the open source Mozilla project, but does not pay for most voluntarily contributed code improvements to the Mozilla software. Is he right? Is this exploitation of those contributors?
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Project Releases
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ZFS v28 (finally, with deduplication) is available in latest D-I daily builds when selecting kernel of FreeBSD 9 as boot option.
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Public Services/Government
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The German city of Munich has been very precise at bumping off Windows PCs to give its Linux operating system Lebensraum .
Munich’s LiMux project has been going great guns and today the city announced that it had migrated 9,000 systems away from the PC and onto Linux. It only wanted to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich but it turned out a bit easier than expected.
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Programming
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PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. From top to bottom, the language has creaky joints. I’ve decided to take a look at how things got to this point, and what can be (and is being) done about it. I start out pretty gloomy, but bear with me; I promise it gets better.
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In an unexpected move, a member of the Saudi royal family has invested $300 million in social networking company Twitter. This morning, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, founder and CEO of Kingdom Holding Company and one of the wealthiest people on the planet, announced the investment, which was reported first by Bloomberg.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As winter sets in and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) encampments contract, the three-month old movement continues to have a big impact on the campaign trail. President Obama as well as some GOP candidates have adopted OWS concerns and language, while big bank lobbyists and GOP spinmeisters work hard to hold the line, defending U.S. economic institutions and the American “free market” system against what they fear could be a broad-based populist uprising.
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ACTA
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The fantastic folks from DerechoALeer.org designed this wonderful mash-up between two videos from La Quadrature: “RoboCopyright ACTA” (for the graphics) and “NO to ACTA” (for the text)! Thanks so much Juan! ♡
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12.19.11
Posted in News Roundup at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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The servers run a hardened Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.
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LinuxForce, Inc. announced today the availability of LinuxForce Cluster Services℠, a new IT (Information Technology) service offering. LinuxForce Cluster Services℠ design, provision, and maintain redundant, high availability (HA) clustered servers. HA servers are needed by organizations to assure a reliable system for delivery of critical business applications whether on-site, colocated, or “in the cloud”. LinuxForce’s advanced approach to implementing HA server clusters protect valuable data and assure continuity for virtualized systems while minimizing overall costs and maximizing performance without burdening existing staff.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds announced last evening, December 16th, that another Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux kernel 3.2 is available for download and testing.
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Applications
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The Nightingale development team has published the first release of its open source media player and re-launched the project’s web site. Nightingale was forked from the cross platform Songbird player after its developers announced that they would be dropping support for Linux, citing prioritisation issues.
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Proprietary
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DFT Digital Film Technology has announced that its Flexxity suite of software applications (Dailies, Playout and Archive) now includes native support of ProRes files on the Linux OS.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Android and Linux, despite being kernel cousins have love hate relationship. There is no client for Linux to manage your Android devices. Yes, it’s true that Android devices don’t need an iTunes like to pry on what you put on your devices, you can just drag and drop content. But what if you want to sync your contacts? Well since you are either way using a Google account so you can sync those contacts with your email client easily. In a nutshell and in a majority of cases you actually don’t need a client for Android, in Linux.
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Ever since we started this blog, we’ve talked about Linux at great length. We’ve provided tips, tutorials, hacks and even some spicy gossip from the magical Penguinland. While that may suffice your geek cravings, the information falls quite short if you’re trying to learn about Linux in greater detail. For learning Linux, you’ll need a deeper knowledge and understanding about the system and its functions. And what better way to learn Linux than by filling your shelf with some great books on the topic?
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Games
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Season 2 for fun Linux platform game No Time to Explain has just been released. The second part takes the crazy fast paced platforming action to new heights and is bigger than ever.
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Desktop Environments
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We are glad to announce the release of Razor-qt 0.4.0, after a months of development since the last release…
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The Razor-Qt desktop was just updated to version 0.4.0 after being in development for months. This release improves stability of the lightweight desktop, introduces several new components, offers new translations, a new theme, new panel plug-ins, and much more. The new Razor desktop components are azor-runner, razor-config, qtxdg, and Razor own menu.
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Most Linux distributions use one or more mainstream desktop environments. To be honest with you, I prefer KDE. My next preference is XFCE, followed by GNOME. And LXDE brings up the rear of the mainstream desktop environments for me. Every user has his own preferences, of course. That’s why arguments over Linux distributions and desktop environments will never end. People will always have differences of opinion.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)
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Plasma Active, the KDE project that aims to create an open source user environment for tablets and mobile devices has had its second release. Earlier this year, they released Plasma Active One, their first preview release of many, that showcased their new Contour UI and activities.
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Back in March 2011, LWN examined package signing (or the lack thereof) in the Arch Linux distribution. Things have advanced considerably since then. Allan McRae has now posted the fourth in a series of articles about the adoption of signed packages in Arch.
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New Releases
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The Chakra Development Team has announced the release of Chakra 2011.12. Chakra is one the most popular Arch Linux forks. This version is Linux 3.1 and KDE 4.7. With this release KDE is updated to 4.7.4, kernel to Linux 3.1.4. The sound group has been rebuild/updated, latest networkmanagement and mesa-stack are also included. Chakra is now offering a DVD and CD version.
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The SystemRescueCd and GParted Live developers have each released new versions of their Linux distributions for administering and repairing systems. Both of updated distributions include the recent 0.11.0 release of the open source GParted partition editor and new kernels, as well as other changes and package updates.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) provides open-source software and services to the enterprise computing market. It is the most recognized open-source brand in the world. Their most popular solutions are Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, JBoss Enterprise Middleware and their Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating systems. Much of the company’s revenue is generated through subscriptions and in the training of these products.
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Equities research analysts at Stifel Nicolaus raised their price target on shares of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) to $56.00 in a research issued note to investors on Thursday. They currently have a “buy” rating on the company’s shares.
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Fedora
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Dan Horák announced a last evening, December 15th, the immediate availability for download of the Fedora 16 operating system for IBM System z (s390x) 64-bit systems.
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Chris Smart announced the availability of Kororaa Linux 16 which code name is “Chum” on 16 Dec,2011. The Kororaa is originally based on Gentoo Linux but after 2010 it is based on Fedora Linux. The main aim of this Linux is to provide the easiness and user-friendly packages.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical announced a few hours ago, December 15th, that it will remove all Sun JDK (Java Development Kit) packages from the Canonical Partner repository.
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Puppy Linux is a tiny distribution that is geared towards older PCs and giving them a second life. Puppy Linux can be run from a Live CD or USB (for faster performance) or just install it onto your system.
The software programs that come part of Puppy Linux are those that are specifically picked out to ensure that resources are not wasted while providing a productive machine. The programs that are part of Puppy you will not usually find on a distribution such as Linux Mint or Ubuntu which are geared towards more modern systems but that does not mean they are any less useful.
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When I decided to start a blog and write about Linux, I never thought that I would see this. Since this surprised me somewhat, I decided to share it.
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Six months ago I wrote about a weekend project to install the SqueezeServer Squeezebox media server on an aging PC (a Hush PC based on a 1.2 GHz Via system with 40GB hard disk and 1 GB of memory) running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
This is an update. I have spent the last few months tweaking the setup and buying additional Logitech Squeezebox devices, allowing me to stream music throughout the house with the same song playing in different rooms, or each room playing different music.
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Dear People From The Future
Use gtk-theme-switch2 to change from Oxygen-Molecule to some other theme, Oxygen-Molecule caused me massive CPU usage for Thunderbird and *some* other GTK software. Oxygen-Molecule-Flat works fine.
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Ubuntu 11.10 has some jagged edges and documentation isn’t easy to locate, but Canonical is certainly dreaming big with this latest update, dubbed Oneiric (dreamy) Ocelot.
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Canonical is showcasing a new effort to reach out and touch hardware manufacturers… an effort that coincides well not only with its ongoing desktop PC push, but perhaps also Canonical’s latest drive to target the mobile device market.
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Flavours and Variants
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Pear OS is a new Linux desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop with the graphical installer. Its development started in early August 2011 by David Tavares (from France), and on August 15 2011, Pear OS 1.0, the first version marked “stable,” was released. The latest edition, release on December 14 2011, is Pear OS Linux Panther 3.
Though a Linux distribution running the GNOME 3 desktop, Pear OS’s desktop is fashioned after Apple’s Mac OS X, and each major version’s code name is taken from the Mac OS release with a corresponding version number. So, “Panther,” the code name of Pear OS Linux 3, is taken from the code name of Mac OS 10.3. If you have not been following Apple’s flagship operating system, each Mac OS edition is named after a big cat. Like all reviews published on this website, this one is based on test installations of the 32-bit edition of Pear OS Linux Panther 3 (a 64-bit edition is available too) in virtual environments and on real hardware.
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Linaro, the open organization focused on improving Linux on ARM, has formed the Linaro Community Contributor Process and Team. Linaro Technical Leads now have the opportunity to nominate any individual who has made sustained contributions over a significant period of time as a Community Contributor of Linaro.
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Phones
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Android
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Yesterday Google made available Galaxy Nexus in the US and today the company started rolling out Android 4.0 to its Nexus S phones.
The Google + page of Android posted that “We’re rolling out Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, to GSM/UMTS Nexus S devices over the coming month, starting today.”
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File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a popular and time-honored method of transferring files to and from remote network sites and devices. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. The FTP client connects to the FTP server, and enables the user to send and retrieve files from that server.
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Released with a GNU GPL license (see notice below), this is the application only. The distribution package contains the version 1.0 application .apk, source code, and all resources in an eclipse IDE workspace. There is a user’s guide.
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Last week, IBM announced that it was taking Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) into the open-source realm with the debut of Eclipse EGL Web Developer Tools version 0.7, which is built on an open, extensible compiler and generator framework. ( You can download it and get more information here.)
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Chromium OS Lime logo Following nearly a one year delay, web developer and hacker Liam “Hexxeh” McLoughlin has released new builds of Lime, a customised Chromium OS-based operating system. Chromium OS is the open source branch of Google’s Chrome OS, the company’s minimalist Linux-based operating system that is built around the Chrome web browser.
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SaaS
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The file sharing, synchronization market led by Dropbox is a popular target these days. For many companies, it’s a chance to horn in on a growing market and carve out a piece of the pie for themselves. For open source projects, it’s a chance to return control of personal data to the user. For the folks behind ownCloud, it’s both.
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Business
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Career so far I founded LinuxIT 12 years ago with the aim of it becoming the UK’s leading authority in the application of Linux and open source by offering the complete, integrated technology and service solution.
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Funding
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There are still a few days left for funding deals to be announced in 2011 but it is already clear that 2011 will be a record year. $672.8m has been invested in open source-related vendors in 2011, according to our preliminary figures, an increase of over 48% on 2010, and the highest total amount invested in any year, beating the previous best of $623.6m, raised in 2006.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hello, it’s Andrew the FSF campaigns intern. My internship is coming to a close, so I’d like to share with you what I’ve done this fall.
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Today is a good day. I just distributed ucommon 5.1.0, and a second api and utilities snapshot for what will eventually become GNU Bayonne 3.0. I think GNU Bayonne will become strategic to our goals in 2012, along with GNU SIP Witch and the GFC client. We have already discussed internally an outline and possible goals for 2012 development in GNU Telephony, and I have made preliminary plans to attend LibrePlanet2012 in March.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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The localized Linux distro of the German city Munich LiMux has reached another milestone.
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The Australian Government Information Office (AGIMO) has reported a healthy level of open source software (OSS) use within government agencies during the past year.
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The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is to pilot a new computing scheme over the next 12 months.
As part of the government’s plans to adopt open source technology, 1,000 desktops are to be installed in the department to replace the current set-up. The DWP currently uses computers running Windows XP, Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer 6.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg announced Tuesday that he will push for legislation to create an online, open-source library to reduce the cost of course materials for college students across the state.
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Open Hardware
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Programming
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One of the most striking findings was how often API programs were started in secret, nurtured by the true believers in a clandestine way, slipped into production, and then brought to the awareness of senior management after the API was shown to be a success.
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Security
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A hacker has published code for potent cross-site scripting attacks that he claims go beyond the usual cookie stealing and phishing for users’ private details.
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Linux security boffin Andrew Griffiths has launched series of educational hacking challenges that hone skills in privilege escalation, vulnerability analysis, exploit development, debugging and reverse engineering.
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Finance
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But what singles Goldman Sachs out for special opprobrium isn’t the culpability it shares with other investment banks for helping to create the financial crisis and then get bailed out with taxpayer dollars. It’s the fact that Goldman Sachs figured out, before any of its Wall Street colleagues, that the housing boom was a house of cards and the entire mortgage-backed security market was headed for a crash. Goldman wasn’t caught by surprise by the revelation that the mortgage securities it was creating were toxic junk. Quite the opposite. But instead of sending up an alarm bell and using its political influence and lobbying muscle to try to fend off the coming disaster, Goldman Sachs simply liquidated the positions in which it would be vulnerable to a downturn and started betting, instead, on the likelihood of disaster. As the Senate report acidly notes, in December 2006, “when it saw evidence that the high risk mortgages underlying many RMBS and CDO securities were incurring accelerated rates of delinquency and default, Goldman quietly and abruptly reversed course.”
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Obama did not explain what Wall Street behavior he found least ethical or what unethical Wall Street actions he believed was not illegal. It would have done the world (and Obama) a great service had he been asked these questions. He would not have given a coherent answer because his thinking on these issues has never been coherent. If he had to explain his position he, and the public, would recognize it was indefensible.
[...]
I have explained at length in my blogs and articles why:
• Only fraudulent home lenders made liar’s loans
• Liar’s loans were endemically fraudulent
• Lenders and their agents put the lies in liar’s loans
• Appraisal fraud was endemic and led by lenders and their agents
• Liar’s loans could only be sold through fraudulent reps and warranties
• CDOs “backed” by liar’s loans were inherently fraudulent
• CDOs backed by liar’s loans could only be sold through fraudulent reps and warranties
• Liar’s loans hyper-inflated the bubble
• Liar’s loans became roughly one-third of mortgage originations by 2006
[...]
As a criminologist, I do not favor sentencing criminals to the fates they richly deserve.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s new policies restricting protest in the Wisconsin capitol take effect in advance of the anniversary of 2011′s historic labor uprisings, the controversial governor has enlisted a new spokesperson to sell the rules, a 28-year old protégé of Karl Rove and new political appointee of the governor.
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