Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Fear Haunts Users of That Other OS

  It won’t go away. That other OS fools its users about the identification of files causing what looks like text or other innocent files to be executable… If ever there was a flaw in the design of an OS this is it. Use Debian GNU/Linux, which actually examines the file to determine its type. The latest malware exploiting this “feature” of that other OS romps through Vista and “7″. Use Debian GNU/Linux, a real OS, working for the end-user and not criminals.

• Chromebook: the good and the bad

  Chromebook is a brand name for range of hardware from the likes of Acer and Samsung that will run Chrome OS. Both the Samsung and the Acer machines sport a 12-inch screen, a 1.6GHz dual core processor and either 3G or combination 3G-WiFi connections. The selling point for many is that the Chromebooks will be available on a subscription basis at US$28 a month over three years. However, there are pros and cons to the Chromebooks.

• Is Lack of Marketing Still Linux’s Achilles Heel?

  …Linux and open source purists who cringe at the sheer mention of terms like “marketing” or “public relations”…

• Desktop

  • Top 20 Countries for Use of Desktop GNU/Linux

    Compare these numbers showing global acceptance at around 1% with Wikipedia Stats that show 2.53%, and that’s only in the English-speaking world.

    Really, StatCounter does not cover the globe in a neutral way. Give us the list of sites covered, please. We know Wikipedia is a neutral site because anyone can post articles and anyone can read them but it is biased towards English, so it will be undercounting most countries of the world. It shows MacOS at 7.73% but we know from Apple’s own numbers that it is less than 4%.

  • A Windows Guy Goes Linux

    In case you are a new TNW reader, I am a card-carrying Windows fanboy.

    [...]

    I accepted shipment of the laptop, a fine, if slightly low-end ThinkPad, and opened to the gate to the land of Linux bristling with uncertainty as to what I was about to experience.

• Kernel Space

  • Fedora and Ubuntu are getting the Butter on our File systems…

    Phoronix.com, a great site with an even better preformance test suite, has a nice write up about the often talked about BRTFS(commonly pronounced Butter FS). They mention that Fedora seems to be releasing it with GRUB extenstions to allow for file system snapshot roll-backs by the end of the year and Ubuntu by the 12.04 release next April.

• Applications

  • Need A Password Manager? Install KeePass2 In Ubuntu Natty

  • Your Vote Counts…

    Recently we talked about some of the problems encountered by The HeliOS Project concerning the name GIMP within our custom respin. This is the distro we put on our computers going to disadvantaged kids.

  • Proprietary

    • Practical Alternatives to Skype (For Me)

      (Before I start, I’d like to apologize for the lack of a “Featured Comments” post this week. I saw that there were comments on my article about Mozilla and the DHS, but I didn’t have time to thoroughly read and respond to them immediately; by the time I did have time again, Blogger had temporarily shut down, and all the comments got erased. Once again, I apologize to all those who commented on that article and to those who wanted to read it but couldn’t because of Blogger issues.)
      Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Microsoft has just bought Skype for $8.5 billion. That’s a lot of money! But the bigger issue is that it’s Microsoft, and we know how Microsoft and interoperability go together (hint: they don’t).

    • 9 Great Alternatives to Skype for VoIP and Video Chat

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Nethogs, Iptraf – for network statistics

    • Get the Best of Both Worlds,Your Own Alternative to the Default Unity Main Menu

    • Graphing Power Management Statistics

    • Getting the Right Kernel Configuration for Your System the Easy Way

    • Using a Linux Driver for a Device that is not yet supported without recompiling

    • synchronize time with NTP server on Ubuntu 10.04

    • Linux command History file united

    • 7 ways to switch activities

    • Testing in Python using doctest

    • How to choose the best mirror in Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu

    • how a linux refugee can wrangle text on OSX like a boss

    • Howto: Linux on your wireless router

    • 12 handy OpenOffice Writer tips

    • Migrating Multiple MediaWikis with Practically Perfect People Policies

    • Thoughts on Learning Emacs

      Emacs, a supremely powerful command line tool, is one of those programs that takes “ten minutes to learn, a lifetime to master.” For my own part, I greatly enjoy messing around with it and finding out more about how it works. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a big fan of desktop programs like TextWrangler and Fetch, but I love that such an unadorned piece of software running from the command line can be made to do nearly everything you’d expect of a desktop environment, from checking email to word processing to browsing the Web, and in many cases far more. I think it’s beautiful, not to mention insanely useful. It’s available for, if not pre-installed on, pretty much every computer since the late 1980s, and as far as I can tell, will continue to be until the end of time. That means that once you know it, you can sit down to nearly any machine and be ready to work. I think this is why people joke that Emacs is not just software, but a lifestyle or a religion—”In the beginning, and in the end there was Emacs. Amen.”

  • Games

    • Caveman Is Coming For GNU/Linux

      If you loved the legendary game Lemmings (or the FOSS version Pingus), then you would be happy to learn that a new game named Caveman is being ported to GNU/Linux.

    • 18 of the Best Free Up-and-Coming Linux Games (Part 2 of 3)

      The plethora of free games available for Linux makes it time-consuming for gamers to randomly try even more than a small fraction of them. A good proportion of these titles are entertaining, highly addictive, offer captivating gameplay, and are challenging. Whilst there are a variety of both printed publications and online resources which point gamers to the hottest Linux gaming titles, there are still many free games that receive little or no promotion but which exhibit real promise and merit publicity.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE PIM 4.6 RC1

      This version will have regressions compared to KDE PIM 4.4. There was never a goal to create a Kontact2 with zero regressions. The only goal was to create a working release. After that the work on making it perfect can begin. Division of resources between maintaining the 4.4 series and attempts to perfect the Kontact2 release was causing demotivation in the community. Making the release is the act that allows us to cross the starting line towards fixing the smaller issues.

    • JuK facelift

      So, somewhat miraculously, I’ve been doing a little KDE hacking again this week for the first time since, oh, 2006 or so (aside from TagLib, which recently moved to GitHub).

      Being as I’m all a startupy web weenie these days, some of the design sins of my youth have been haunting me. I wanted to give JuK a little bit of a fixer-upper. Almost all of the 20 commits that cia.vc says that I’ve done this week stem from either polishing the interface some or improving the initial experience on startup.

      [...]

      I’d love to someday have time to go all OCD and just spend like a couple weeks fixing things like text alignment and margins all over KDE.

    • Kubuntu Council? What is this?

      Every year the Kubuntu community gets to elect 3 new members for the Kubuntu council.

    • digiKam Tricks 3.5 Released

      Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.

    • Nokia Update On Qt 5 Provides Open Assurances

      Now, it’s clear that Qt is moving toward an open governance model, and Lars Knoll reports that it will be relatively easy for developers to move applications from Qt 4 to Qt 5…

  • GNOME Desktop

    • ISO image for GNOME3 promo DVD available for download

      a quick post for people who want the GNOME 3 promo DVD iso image (it is based on 1.1.0 image, combining both x86 and x86-64 images and some demo video and music).

    • Gnome Outreach Program for a clueless head

      It could happen to anyone to have being using Gnome many years on Ubuntu or SuSE without knowing they are gnome users, and it did to me. I somehow get to know gnome by working on Beijing Gnome User Group community events, because many my other friends joined and asked me to. When I got a dim picture of what gnome is, I had been using it for years. Until now I still not so clear which application belongs to Gnome. I know Inkscape is of gnome, but a few month ago I thought (wrongly) SmartSVN in my toolbox is also of Gnome. I guess with this level of background knowledge I am the most clueless of all. I knows something about web building, graphical works and so like,Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Andreas Nilsson (my mentor) somehow thought I might be of use. “Get on-board”, they say, so here I am. I’ll try to be useful:)

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • SalineOS 1.0 (Personal Server)

    • Zentyal 2.1-1

    • BackTrack 5 – Are you Infected yet?

    • Clonezilla 1.2.8-41

    • Berry 1.09

    • Kanotix Hellfire 2011-05

    • Salix Xfce 13.37

      Salix Xfce 13.37 is finally here, shortly after Slackware 13.37 was released, on which Salix 13.37 is based. Salix Xfce 13.37 includes numerous changes and improvements, both Salix specific and also inherited from Slackware. With Salix being fully backwards compatible with Slackware, the Salix repositories for 13.37, for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, are already the largest 3rd party binary package repositories available for Slackware users.

      This release comes with linux kernel 2.6.37.6, the Xfce 4.6.2 desktop environment, Firefox 4.0.1 and Claws-mail 3.7.8. Libreoffice 3.3.2 is included by default in full mode installations, replacing OpenOffice.org and localization packages for it for more than a hundred languages are available through the package management tools.

      [...]

      There is also a full source tree in the Salix 13.37 repositories, for all software packaged by Salix.

    • 2011-05-09: version 0.9.7 of live.linux-gamers.net released!

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Enlightenment Special Edition of The PCLinuxOS Magazine released

      The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the Enlightenment Special Edition 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 Editors Andrew Strick and Meemaw. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share-Alike 3.0 Unported license, and some rights are reserved.

    • The mystery of the missing wi-fi in Mageia/Mandriva

      I’ve been avoiding kernel 2-6.38.4 and 2-6.38.6-1 in Mandriva because last time I found them in an update and installed them, my netbook lost its wi-fi capabilities. Yes, it would not pick any signal or start wireless connections at all. It would tell me that I needed some b43 files from a web site and the installation was beyond my understanding.

      Well, I decided that I wanted to install Mageia 1 in my netbook. I will spare you the story of my mistake of installing beta1 and my consequential sadness because iBus would not work. However, when I corrected my mistake and installed beta2, my happiness upon seeing iBus working flawessly quickly faded away because I discovered that the dreadful kernel 2-6.38.4 was what Mageia uses and, therefore, my wi-fi was gone!

      [...]

      It worked. Now, I’m posting this entry using the wi-fi in Mageia beta2.

    • Considerations on Mondorescue packaging for Mageia

      There has been a recent discussion on the Mageia mailing list on the mondo package which is one of the last having a non-coherent version schema with the one in Mandriva, thus blocking the update.

      [...]

      Note that it just affect the mondo package. All the others are already sane.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Gentoo Public Service Announcement: crossdev, glib and binary compatibility

      Quick summary, please read as it is important! If you’re running a 64-bit arch such as amd64, then you’re safe and you can read this simply as future reference. The same goes if you have never used sys-devel/crossdev (even better if you have no idea what that is. But if you’re cross-compiling to a 32-bit architecture such as ARM, you probably want to read this as you might have to restart from scratch or you’re using a 32-bit architecture and have sys-devel/crossdev installed you really want to read this post.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Who maintains RPM? (2011 edition)

      Back in 2006, LWN looked at the rather complicated story around the maintainership of the RPM package manager. Given the importance of this tool for any RPM-based distribution, the lack of a clear story on how it was being maintained was somewhat discouraging. Later that year, the Fedora project announced the creation of a new, community-oriented project around RPM. Since then, things have been on the quiet side, but recent events show that the RPM story has not yet run its course.

      The above-mentioned RPM project lives on at rpm.org; the 4.9.0 release was announced at the beginning of March. The code is actively maintained and sees the addition of some small features, but the project does not show any real signs of having big plans for the future. Only a handful of committers show up in the repository; almost all of them work for Red Hat. By all appearances, RPM is at least halfway into maintenance mode.

      [...]

      That has changed, though, in recent months; the Mandriva 2011 plans include a switch to rpm5.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian 6.0: KDE 4

      Having got Debian 6 “Squeeze” running, the next project was to reconfigure my desktop environment, KDE, the way I like it. I’ve used KDE for years, and really liked KDE 3.5 on Debian 5 “Lenny.” Alas, Debian 6 has moved on to KDE 4, and the developers couldn’t leave well enough alone.

      [...]

      I must say, even before adding Xinerama, the desktop display seemed slower to me. And I see that Xorg is consuming 18% of my available RAM. Oink!

    • DebConf “Newbies”/Non-Regulars Funding Initiative

      This year the Debian Project again invites “newbies” and non-regular attendees to join the annual Debian Conference (DebConf). As a special incentive an extra travel fund has been set up, which is only available to new or non-regular DebConf attendees. Every Debian Developer or Maintainer who has never been to a Debian Conference or who last attended in 2007 (Scotland) or before is invited to participate.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu, Linux, and Eucalyptus

          Last week Eucalyptus participated in the Red Hat Summit in Boston. This week we are at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest. At UDS Canonical formalized the decision to make OpenStack what they call foundation technology in Ubuntu Cloud. What are the likely impacts of this decision?

        • I will not use Unity because…

          Ubuntu 11.04 has been released, and I’m very happy about it. I gave the news to many (Italian) media, I wrote the (Italian) press releases, I did several talks (Ubuntu parties, Universities, simple events) about the Unity allure. I said it’s new and fantastic. What else should a good promoter do?

          Probably use it. But I’m sorry i will not use Unity. For many reason.

        • Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.13: bugs, bugs and bugs

          The door to Ubuntu Tweak 0.6 is never closed, but there’re still a lot of bugs have to fixed. Here’s Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.13.

          After the release of Natty, the desktop environment of Ubuntu has never been so complex before: Unity, GNOME classical, GNOME 3(Through PPA), LXDE, KDE…

        • Ubuntu gnome remix shaping up; now install with a script

          Ubuntu gnome remix or UGR got serious attention partially because of the disappointment on the latest iteration of the Ubuntu desktop and its Unity shell. The Unity although a good idea, falls short of meeting the expectations of many users. Since Ubuntu uses the gnome 2.32 desktop the gnome 3.0 ppa had real issues working well in Natty (11.04). There came UGR with lot of promises to provide a stable ubuntu remix with a vanilla gnome 3.0 and its shell. So, where do they stand now?

        • Canonical switches to OpenStack for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud

          Canonical has announced that Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud will adopt the OpenStack cloud platform over Eucalyptus. In other Ubuntu-related news, an Ubuntu 11.04-based Linux Mint 11 release candidate (RC) was announced that opts for the GNOME 2.32.1 desktop environment over both Canonical’s Unity and GNOME 3.0.

        • Some changes to contacts

          Last month was a big one for Ubuntu and Ubuntu One. For Ubuntu One, in addition to all the improvements we made in Ubuntu 11.04, we also released substantial improvements to contacts on the web, including Facebook import. Our attention now turns to contacts sync for mobile devices.

          We’re working on completely revamping contacts sync for mobile to give you an overall better experience. The new service will work with mobile devices running iOS or Android operating systems. We decided to focus on these two operating systems so we can deliver the best user experience without having to limit functionality to the lowest common denominator. The new service will be free and available later this year. If you are interested in testing the new service, please add your email address to this form and we will provide you with more info once the service is ready for testing.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Pinguy OS 11.04 Released With Classic GNOME 2.32.1 Desktop

            Pinguy OS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that comes with a lot of applications installed by default, trying to cover everyones needs. But it’s not the default application selection what makes Pinguy OS so interesting and easy to use (though it’s a plus if you use most of the default applications in Pinguy OS) but Pinguy’s attention to detail: every single aspect of the desktop is carefully customized to provide a great out of the box experience. From drivers (and Compiz enabled by default) to pre-installed Firefox addons, themes and so much more from both the Ubuntu and Linux Mint worlds.

          • Ubuntu Studio says no to Unity, adopts Xfce

            In another sign Canonical’s Unity desktop environment is not resonating well with the wider Ubuntu community, multimedia-centric Ubuntu derivative, Ubuntu Studio, will move from the GNOME to the Xfce desktop for its next release.

          • Find your favorite apps installed by default in PinguyOS 11.04

            PinguyOS 11.04 is released, Based on ubuntu 11.04 natty Narwhal, this new release is an optimise build of Ubuntu 11.04 Minimal CD with added repositories, tweaks and enhancements that can run as a Live DVD or be installed. It has all the added packages needed for video, music and web content e.g. flash and java, plus a few fixes as well. Like fixing the wireless problems, gwibber’s Facebook problem and flash videos in full-screen.

          • Enlightening Your Linux Desktop With Bodhi: Jeff Hoogland

• Devices/Embedded

  • Linux-based IP and VoIP routers gain embedded database

    McObject announced a design win for its in-memory ExtremeDB database management system, which will be integrated across dozens of Linux-based IPLink IP routers and SmartNode voice-over-IP (VoIP) routers from Patton Electronics. Patton is adopting ExtremeDB as a component of its Linux-based Trinity AE distribution to manage configuration data on the routers, says the company.

  • Linux/Android mini-PC debuts HD-ready Marvell PXA510 SoC

    Globalscale Technologies announced a $249, mini-PC hardware/software development kit based on the Marvell PXA510 — a new ARMv7, 1GHz processor capable of 1080p video. The D2Plug clocks the PXA510 at 800MHz, and offers 1GB DDR3 RAM, 8GB flash, a full set of peripherals including 802.11n and Bluetooth 3.0, plus Ubuntu Linux and Android 2.2 support, says the company.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Android gets a Netflix app!

        Roma De, from Netflix’s product team, has announced that the company has released an Android Netflix app, which he says eventually will support a “large majority” of Android phones. Five devices, four from HTC and one from Samsung, are initially supported.

      • Finally, Netflix Comes To Android

Free Software/Open Source

• Another High Priority Project done: The Unarchiver provides free RARv3 extraction tools

  This collection of software fills an important gap in free software support for different archives.

  Free software to support the RARv3 archive format has been listed on our High Priority Projects list for some time now. We’ve always had ways to create and extract free archive formats, using tools like GNU tar and Info-ZIP. The RARv3 format is proprietary, so we don’t want it to replace these tools, but it’s not uncommon to see it used for distributing multimedia files over the Internet. That means the lack of free software to extract RARv3 files has been sorely felt.

• Why free should not always mean cost-free

  More and more I realize that there is a misconception about free software. Many people tend to believe that free software actually means software that should not cost any money. They somehow find natural and fair the fact that some people may work voluntarily in order to produce software, which the rest can use to make money without having any legal obligation to contribute either money or effort back upstream.

• Events

  • Notes from : Nagios World Conference Europe – 2011

    Yesterday I’ve attended the Nagios World Conference Europe hosted in Bozen (Italy) by Wurth-Phoenix, so as first thing thanks to Wurst-Phoenix for the organization this meeting, for the free access provided to the event , and for the good meal that we have enjoyed.

  • Presenting NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond at OSBC

    Next Monday, May 16, I will be hosting session at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco focused on NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox 4 Pulls Farther Ahead of IE9

      Since activating the Firefox Update system and alerting Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 users to the availability of Firefox 4, the line has really picked up some speed.

• SaaS

  • EMC Unveils Hadoop Appliance for Big Data Analytics

    EMC (NYSE: EMC) says the company has a new strategy for distributing, integrating and supporting the Apache Hadoop open-source software that is emerging as the preferred solution for Big Data analytics across unstructured data in enterprises.

    Announced at EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas, the EMC Greenplum HD Data Computing Appliance is a purpose-built data co-processing Hadoop appliance that integrates Hadoop with the EMC Greenplum Database.

  • Oracle: Quit messin’ and marry Hadoop!

    Oracle isn’t the biggest enterprise software vendor, but in 2010 it grew faster than its big-enterprise peers, including Microsoft and IBM, to claim third place. Being ever so ambitious, it’s unlikely that Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison will be content to take the bronze. But it’s equally unlikely that relational databases will be enough to power Oracle to the top of the enterprise heap.

• CMS

  • WordPress 3.2 Drops IE 6 Support

    Word Press team has announced the release of version 3.2 Beta 1 or the popular blogging platform. The team expects that Word Press 3.2 will be released by the end of June, 2011.

• Education

  • Aristotle University of Thessaloniki joins the FTA

    The Free Technology Academy is pleased to announce the inclusion of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) in the FTA Partner network.

    The Aristotle University will participate through its Programming Language and Software Engineering Lab and will contribute to the FTA curriculum by co-developing new courses in the fields of Mobile Development, Data Analysis, Intelligent Systems, Reuse Methods and others.

• Business

  • UK OpenERP Partner Community

  • Openbravo ERP Software Downloads Surpass Two Million

    Openbravo, the Agile ERP company, today announced its flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been downloaded over two million times – making it the most popular open source ERP software in the world. Openbravo’s agile ERP solution is modular and extensible so can be ‘right-sized’ for any organization, in any industry, in any country with over 325 modules from which to choose. The download milestone underscores the growing momentum of open source adoption in the ERP software category.

• Funding

  • Talend Becomes a Sponsor of The Apache Software Foundation

  • WSO2 Closes $6.5 Million in Funding to Accelerate Global Market Expansion

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU GRUB 1.99 Released; So Close To Version 2.0

    While a number of Linux distributions are already shipping “GRUB2″, version 2.0 of the GRUB boot-loader has in fact not been officially released. The proper GNU GRUB 2.0 release though is slowly nearing and yesterday marked the release of GRUB 1.99.

  • GNU Fdisk 1.2.5 released

  • GNU SIP Witch 1.0 released for peer-to-peer next gen VoIP

    May 14, 2011 (Bayonne, NJ). We are distributing today a 1.0 release of the GNU SIP protocol provisioning and peer-to-peer call server, GNU SIP Witch. GNU SIP Witch is developed within GNU Telephony and has been selected for use in the GNU Free Call project. This will provide a stable release that we will support for existing applications while we actively develop GNU Free Call services.

  • GNU Scientific Library 1.15 released

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Data

    • New Ways to Exploit Raw Data May Bring Surge of Innovation, a Study Says

      Math majors, rejoice. Businesses are going to need tens of thousands of you in the coming years as companies grapple with a growing mountain of data.

      Data is a vital raw material of the information economy, much as coal and iron ore were in the Industrial Revolution. But the business world is just beginning to learn how to process it all.

      The current data surge is coming from sophisticated computer tracking of shipments, sales, suppliers and customers, as well as e-mail, Web traffic and social network comments. The quantity of business data doubles every 1.2 years, by one estimate.

    • Getting out the Data

      Today I want to to draw your attention to the Open Data Challenge that has started a while ago. I am grateful to the Share PSI initiative and its partners for organising such a competition at the European level. The jury features the World Wide Web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, no less. Here you can really show how creative, innovative and successful you are with getting data out into the open, visualising it in new ways and building apps on top.

  • Open Access/Content

    • How the Internet is Revolutionizing Education

      10 years ago in April 2001, Charles M. Vest, the MIT President at the time, announced that the university would make its materials for all its courses freely available on the Internet. This initiative, found at OpenCourseWare, has enabled other teachers and lifelong learners around the world to listen and read what is being taught at MIT. 5 years later, in April 2006, UC Berkeley announced its plan to put complete academic courses on Apple’s iTunes U, beginning what is now one of the biggest collections of recorded classroom lectures in the world. One year later, in October 2007, the school launched UC Berkeley on YouTube. According to Benjamin Hubbard the Manager of Webcast at UC Berkeley, the school has had well over 120 million downloads since first sharing videos online, which they began doing in 2001.

  • Open Hardware

    • Aldebaran Robotics To Open Source Code of Nao Robot

      Aldebaran Robotics has just announced that it’s going to open the source code of its popular humanoid robot Nao.

      The French firm has been developing Nao over the past five years, turning an initially obscure robot with a quirky name into a widely adopted research and education platform used to study human-robot communication, help treat hospitalized children, and play soccer.

• Standards/Consortia

  • BT Beats: User freedom and artistic freedom go hand in hand

    Today, the Free Software Foundation Europe’s UK team calls on BT to not forget free software users when launching its upcoming service, and to build the system using web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, rather than proprietary and invasive software such as Flash.

Leftovers

• How Do We Get To IPv6?

• Science

  • Chernobyl’s 20,000-30,000 Fatalities

    Since at least the mid-1990s, the standard estimate of the long-term human impact of the Chernobyl catastrophe is that there would be between 20,000 and 30,000 premature deaths from leukemia and other cancers, almost entirely in the greater European region. So how have the New York Times’s editorial writers got the idea that Chernobyl’s impact was minimal?

• Health/Nutrition

  • The inadequacy of US labeling laws and how people are trying to fix them.

    You will be shocked at all the loop-holes given by the government to industrial chemicals to avoid safety regulation and accurate labeling.

  • Twitter ‘vital’ link to patients, say doctors in Japan

    In the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan, Twitter is proving “an excellent system” for communicating with chronically-ill patients, say doctors.

    In letters written to The Lancet, Japanese doctors say social networking sites have been vital in notifying patients where to get medication.

• Security

  • After Sony Data Breach, Lawsuits Flood The Courts

    In the wake of Sony’s admission that information for millions of accounts was stolen, Reuters has tallied no less than 25 federal lawsuits. That number shows a very active bar of plaintiffs’ lawyers who believe that they’ll be able to turn companies’ privacy snafus and data breaches into serious cash payouts.

  • Is Sony getting a bad rap on its data breach?

    It discovered that a second network, Sony Online Entertainment, had also been hacked, and then had to admit that bank card numbers had indeed been stolen, contrary to its earlier assessment.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Eye for an Eye in Iran.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • 1936 response to floods and depression compared to now.

  • Record Tornado Storm is the Result of Global Warming

    Dr. Kevin Trenberth, a leading climate scientist, said he believes it’s “irresponsible not to mention climate change” when talking about the recent extreme tornadoes

  • Worcester Polytechnic Institute, unable to undo administrative invite of Exxon CEO, invite Richard Heinberg, senior fellow of Post Carbon Institute, to give an alternative commencement speech.

    the Class of 2011, will not give [the Exxon CEO] the honor of imparting … his well-wishes … for our futures … when he is largely responsible for undermining them.

  • Gulf of Mexico Seafood at risk: Dispersed oil poses a long-term threat

• Finance

  • The People vs. Goldman Sachs

    They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

  • Here’s How Eliot Spitzer Would Handle The Goldman Sachs Perjury Claims

    What would Eliot Spitzer do if he were handed the Senate Subcomittee’s report on what caused the financial crisis?

    “Once the steam stopped coming out of my ears, I’d be dropping so many subpoenas,” Spitzer told Taibbi in this month’s Rolling Stone.

    “And I would parse every potential inconsistency between the testimony they gave to Congress and the facts as we now understand them.”

  • Simon Johnson: U.S. Banks Need More Capital

    The Vickers report came out in Britain identifying areas where Britain’s banking system needed to alter its regulatory structure. Simon Johnson talked to Bloomberg about this report and banking regulation in general. His view is that first and foremost large globe-spanning banks are too large. Using Goldman Sachs as an example, he notes that Goldman had a $1 trillion balance sheet when the panic hit in 2008, 4 times as many assets as it did just a decade earlier. Meanwhile most studies show no significant economies of scale or scope above the $300 billion range.

  • An Updated List of Goldman Sachs Ties to the Obama Government Including Elena Kagan

    This essay shows the pervasive influence of Goldman Sachs and its units (like the Goldman-Robert Rubin-funded Hamilton Project embedded in the Brookings Institution) in the Obama government. These names are in addition to those compiled on an older such list and published here at FDL. In the future, I will combine the names here and those on the earlier article but I urge readers to look at the earlier list too (links below). Combined, this is the largest and most comprehensive list of such ties yet published.

    For readability and clarity, I have NOT included many of the details and links that are found in the earlier article so as to make this one less repetitive and easier to read. So, if you want more documentation, please look at my earlier diary here at Firedoglake called “A List of Goldman Sachs People in the Obama Government: Names Attached To The Giant Squid’s Tentacles” published on April 27, 2010.

  • U.S. Attorney Sends a Message to Wall Street

    Every few days during the trial of Raj Rajaratnam, the Galleon Group’s co-founder, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, would quietly enter the courtroom and take a seat in the last row of the gallery.

    From that unassuming vantage point, Mr. Bharara watched his colleagues try to persuade a jury to convict the former hedge fund titan of securities fraud and conspiracy.

  • Reflections of the Evolution of Capitalism

    Then came the 2008 financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression. Many believe that the crisis was the direct result of the prevailing anti-regulation ideology of the past few decades, which once more led to a reckless, largely unregulated behavior by financial institutions.

    Our system of checks and balances has started to react to the crisis. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction, with the Financial Reform law signed by President Obama in July of 2010. It is too early to tell whether this law will make the US financial system transparent and accountable enough to avoid another major economic crisis, as well as ensure that individuals are protected against the excesses of large financial institutions. There continues to be strong opposition to the bill, by many who are still holding on to their anti-government ideological position despite our recent experiences. These include not only politicians but also academics and economists who by now should know better.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Close the Revolving Door.

    US citizens: call on Congress to investigate the conflict of interest of the FCC commissioner who voted to approve the Comcast-NBC merger, then quit to become a lobbyist for the merged company.

• Censorship

  • Americans face piracy website blocking

    The Protect IP bill gives government and copyright holders tools to stop Americans reaching illegal material.

  • Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales criticises injunctions

    Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has waded into the debate over super-injunctions, saying current privacy laws are a “human rights violation”.

    The online encyclopaedia has fallen foul of UK privacy law in recent weeks, with details about those using super-injunctions appearing on the site.

    Mr Wales told the BBC that such information would be removed because it did not come from a reliable source.

• Privacy

  • New FBI Documents Provide Details on Government Surveillance Spyware. Looks mostly like Windows trash, but the intent and disregard of basic principles of law is alarming.

  • Facebook profile access ‘leaked’ claims Symantec

  • Facebook Faces Lawsuit Over Unauthorized Sharing Of User Data With Advertisers

    A judge yesterday threw out most of the claims made in a lawsuit against Facebook, in which two California individuals, David Gould and Mike Robertson, accused the social networking giant of sharing their names and other private information with some advertisers in direct violation of its own privacy policy.

    That said, the judge also ruled the lawsuit will not be dismissed in its entirety either, as Facebook had pleaded.

  • TalkTalk or StalkStalk plans should be opt-in

    TalkTalk today announced their plans for their website malware software, which has been criticised for opening up potential interception issues under RIPA.

    We met with TalkTalk and Richard Clayton has produced a technical note on the software. Nick Bohm, below, outlines the potential legal issues. Linked is Talktalk’s legal analysis.

    ORG believes an opt-in system should avoid both technical problems and legal breaches.

  • Canadian company develop new flying CCTV camera

    The company are attempting to acquire permits to fly the Scout in America, and have already spoken to a variety of law enforcement and security agencies who are interested in it’s versatility and ease of use. Due to the fact it can be fitted into a small, covert suitcase, it can be deployed almost anywhere instantaneously without attracting attention. Pictures from the attached gyroscopic camera can be beamed to any sort of electronic device, from a central computer to something as small as an iPhone.

• Civil Rights

  • Israeli extremists abuse their neighbors

  • Denounce Ugandan abuse of homosexuals

  • Denounce US laws against women.

  • Peaceful Activists Treated worse than those who Aim to Kill

    Will Potter explores how environmental and animal rights activists concerned with civil disobedience and property destruction are labeled domestic terrorists.

  • Bureau Of Prisons Should Shutter Secretive And Isolated Communications Management Units

    the ACLU called for the immediate closure of all Communications Management Units (CMUs), which were ostensibly created to house and control the communications activities of prisoners with suspected terrorist ties. But because the criteria for placement in a CMU are so vague and overbroad, and because those criteria are applied by prison officials with no outside review or accountability, CMUs in fact house prisoners who have never been convicted or even accused of any terrorism-related crime.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • The Economist supports more money for patent review to support more innovation.

    In response, David and I submitted the following letter to the editor:

    “The assumption of your editorial (Patently Absurd, May 5) that patents foster innovation is wrong. All the constantly growing evidence shows that patents hurt rather than help innovation. To be sure, in the US patents are required by law to be original, useful, and not obvious. When hundreds of thousands are being issued each year, that beggars credibility. Instead, the patent system fosters endless efforts to hijack the profits of successful innovators, generates endless time consuming costly litigation and worse, leads to monopolization with the concomitant expensive products – and indeed discourages real innovators.

    “This isn’t merely a matter of theory, nor yet one of empirical studies – although both are in plentiful supply: you might take a look at the many references in Against Intellectual Monopoly by Boldrin and Levine. But more to the point: why don’t you talk to engineers and venture capitalists – or even patent examiners? Or at least read the comments they left on your website? You will find that they too view patents as time-wasting defensive operations that provide little protection to real innovators and instead serve merely to protect entrenched monopolists and encourage patent trolls. You are right that the present patent system is broken, but your proposed cures will only make matters worse.”

  • Trademarks

    • Using (and Abusing) Trademarks In An Attempt To Monopolize The English Language

      “By definition, intellectual property includes the words, images, and sounds that we use to communicate, and the courts are strongly admonished not to ‘indulge in the facile assumption that one can forbid particular words without also running a substantial risk of suppressing ideas in the process’.”

    • US cleaning company claims UK NGO cannot call themselves “eco labs”

      A small UK based NGO, EcoLabs, using the domain eco-labs.org, is being taken to the .org arbitration process by the US cleaning company Ecolab. The corporation claims that the NGO EcoLabs is infringing their trademark by using the name “Eco labs” and the domain should therefore be withdrawn from the NGO.

  • Copyrights

    • Forget the iPod Tax, Canadian Copyright Collective Demanding Memory Card Tax

      During the most recent election campaign, there was no shortage of debate over the so-called iPod Tax, a proposed levy on iPods and similar devices to compensate for copies of sound recordings. While the prospect of an iPod tax in Canada died with the Conservative majority, the existing private copying system remains unchanged. Canadians currently pay levies on blank CDs (and cassettes) and now the Canadian Private Copying Collective, which collects the private copying revenues, would like to establish a new levy on blank memory cards used in a wide range of devices such as smartphones and digital cameras.

      [...]

      There are many problems with the current private copying system, but this latest attempt to extend the levy should serve as a wake-up call to the government. While there may have been a sense that the private copying levy would gradually diminish in importance, the CPCC (which has been sharply critical of the Conservatives in the past) has made it clear that it will work to extend the levy within the full extent of the current law. Even without iPod levies, there is still room for the collective to expand the levy system, despite the weak linkages to actual copying of music. If the government is broadly against iPod taxes, it may be forced to take legislative action to stop extensions that can still occur within the current legal framework.

    • Limewire pays $105m settlement to music firms

    • Twitpic angers users over copyright grab

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Munich/Limux at the Halfway Point

  Actually Limux is further along than halfway since all of the applications in use are now FLOSS but the operating system on 6000 PCs is now GNU/Linux. At the rate they are going sometime in 2012 12000 PCs will be running GNU/Linux. Apparently they will have 3000 still running that other OS when the migration is complete. That’s a bit puzzling since everyone is using FLOSS applications for everything. There should be no reason to leave that other OS on anything. Perhaps something is lost in the translation:
  LiMux project celebrates mountain festival

• More Free/Non-Free Angst in Germany

  Sigh. Apt-get update;apt-get upgrade is too much for them? They could not use a local repository, check things out and do the updates from time to time when convenient? That’s an awful lot less work than keeping one machine running that other OS and can be extended to hundreds/thousands with no extra effort.

• Desktop

  • Desktop Linux Success

    I came across an article with a simple thesis: Desktop Linux needs a controller who looks out for the needs of the end-user; there isn’t one; Linux fails…

    [...]

    The authour claims the success of Android/Linux is due to the magical control of Google but that is only part of the story. Google’s Android is just another distro (He derides distros…). The success of Google is not because of the central control but the energy of the hundreds of thousands of developers who tweak the systems and write applications for it and the hardware manufacturers, outside M$’s and Apple’s control, who invest in Android/Linux.

  • Computer Centers in West Virginia’s Volunteer Fire Stations

    The refurbishing program buys large batches of used computers, usually about 5 years old, from various government agencies through its partner organization, MissionWV. Our refurbishers test, and in some cases upgrade, the hardware, and then install Ubuntu on them. We sell them to our partner fire departments at cost, who then sell them to the public as a fundraiser. The end-user price is between $125 and $175 for a laptop. We are also have 200 refurbished desktop computers ready for the new computer centers we’re adding this year.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • CAOS Theory Podcast 2011.05.13

  • Linux Outlaws 207 – SambaXP

    Fab returns from the SambaXP conference in Göttingen and brings you interviews with Kai Blin, Andrew Tridgell and Chris Hertel.

• Kernel Space

  • Linux needs rebranding

    I’ve never truly lost that sense of wonder from computers, and it was this wonder that eventually led me to Linux. It’s the modularity of the computer that gets the imagination running, and I think many software developers from the ’80s and ’90s, many of whom have contributed to the free software projects that got us to this point, feel the same way.

  • What’s up with ARM

    Over the course of the last month or so, numerous people have asked me for my opinion on what’s going on with the ARM architecture in Linux. It seems time to broadcast those thoughts more widely. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, the short version is this: Linux on ARM is a victim of its own success and, as a result, is going through some growing pains. That has created a lot of noise, but all that’s really needed is a bit of house cleaning.

    ARM processors are generally found in embedded applications; your phone, network router, video camera, and more are quite likely to be running Linux on ARM. Supporting ARM on Linux brings some challenges which are much less of a problem on desktop and server-oriented systems. ARM is not so much an architecture as a family of architectures with lots of little quirks; the size of the kernel’s ARM-specific code – nearly three times the size of the x86-specific code – reflects that. ARM also has traditionally suffered from the “embedded problem”: every vendor does its own work and, likely as not, never gets around to contributing its code upstream. That has resulted in a lot of fragmented and duplicated code.

    [...]

    The ARM mess is not small, but it’s really just another cleanup job of the time that we have done many times in the past.

  • Ideas for a cgroups UI

    On and off over the past year I’ve been working with Jason Baron on a design for a UI for system administrators to control processes’ and users’ usage of system resources on their systems via the relatively recently-developed (~2007) cgroups feature of the Linux kernel.

    After the excitement and the fun that is the Red Hat Summit, I had some time this week to work with Jason on updating the design. Before I dive into the design process and the mockups, I think it’d be best to do a review of how cgroups work (or at least how I understand them to) so that the rest makes more sense. (And maybe I’ve got some totally incorrect assumptions about cgroups that have resulted in a flawed design, so hopefully my calling out the current understanding might make it easier for you to correct me ).

  • Graphics Stack

    • AMD Already Adds On Two Open-Source Developers

      AMD’s John Bridgman has now confirmed that they have hired two open-source developers. These two new development hires was done previous to the announcement a few days ago that they are still looking for another open-source developer to work on their open-source Linux (kernel DRM, Mesa / Gallium3D, DDX) stack for Radeon graphics hardware.

    • Kicking Around The Wayland Display Server

      The “still very experimental for the foreseeable future but promising” Wayland has been discussed more at UDS Budapest, on the mailing lists, and now this weekend in Berlin at LinuxTag.

      Wayland was already discussed earlier in the week during the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest, Hungary. While I had left early on Friday to make it back to Deutschland for LinuxTag, Wayland was discussed some more.

    • OpenGL ES 2.0 Support For Compiz, KWin, Cairo

      There’s been a lot of references this week at UDS Budapest to OpenGL ES support since this version of OpenGL is what’s predominantly supported on ARM/embedded devices. There’s already been talk of OpenGL ES support in QEMU, among other projects. OpenGL ES 2.0 support is also coming to the Compiz and KWin compositing window managers. An OpenGL ES 2.0 back-end for Cairo was also brought up separately.

      There’s already initial OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Compiz, but it’s not yet been merged upstream. OpenGL ES 2.0 support for KDE’s KWin is also being worked on.

      The Compiz GLES 2.0 push upstream is expected to take place after the new Compiz shader API is integrated. Support for missing plug-ins also needs to be added along with per-plugin shader support. Clean-ups are also needed and potentially better consolidation between vanilla GL and GL ES code. Build-time support for OpenGL vs. OpenGL ES suppoort was also discussed as well as testing.

• Applications

  • Citadel Groupware Suite

    Citadel is a suite of packages in Debian GNU/Linux which you can install in a minute or two. You can install it on a PC or a server to provide web services, LAN service or just to serve your local PC.

  • a miraculous walkthrough: let’s do it with relish

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Add applications to autostart on login, in GNOME 3

    • HowTo: RadeonHD 4550, Gallium3D, UT2004

    • Installing Gnome Tweak Tool on Natty

    • Custom Unity Launcher To Reboot In A Different OS

    • Remove and add www from url using apache .htaccess file

    • How to choose the best mirror in Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu

    • How to enable exFAT in Ubuntu

    • HOWTO : SopCast and PPStream on Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop Made Easy

    • What’s an orig-addon ?

    • Playing with Gnome shell themes

    • How to Create a LiveCD for your local Fedora installation

    • Ubuntu 11.04 Unity Keyboard Shortcuts and Tricks

    • Beautiful Icon Set ‘Awoken 2.0′ Released, Now with a PPA for Natty

    • Basic Linux Security for Beginners – Suitable For External and Internal Security Purpose!

    • How to Install / Update Linux Driver for HP Printers / Scanners

    • Fosswar 2011 – How we did it

    • Endless recursion

  • Games

    • New Game ‘Family Farm’ is Now Available in Ubuntu Software Center

      Farming and Simulation game, Family Farm is now available in Ubuntu Software Center under applications available for purchase section. Few days back, we reported that soon Family Farm will be released in Ubuntu Software Center. Well, it is here now and the game is priced at $14.99.

    • Heroes of Newerth free to play week

      Starting today (Thursday, May 12) at 9 p.m. EST new players will be able to sign up and play at no cost.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • KDE at LinuxTag

      Sharing a nice, big booth at LinuxTag, the KDE, Kubuntu and Calligra teams are pulling together to promo all things KDE. As you can tell from the picture below, the booth is very well visited, with lots of people interested all ’round – showing off Plasma on the desktop in the middle there, and the brand, spanking new Plasma Active running on an openSuse powered tablet nearest the camera – already a real crowd puller, even in its experimental stage! Kudos to the Active team there, great stuff, very demoable

    • KDE Commit-Digest for 8th May 2011

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME Outreach Program for Women Reincarnates

      “It’s not rocket science,” says Marina Zhurakhinskaya, the organizer of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women,talking about efforts to get more women involved in free software. “You just need to say that women are welcome in your project, because that in itself sends a signal. Also, you want specific people they can get in touch with to do their first patch and to ask questions.” It’s a simple formula, but the first indications are that it is a reliable enough foundation to make the recently revived Program a success.

• Distributions

  • Zenwalk 7, it didn’t go well…

    I cannot blame Zenwalk 7 at all for this mishap. I understand that it was entirely my fault because I was not prepared to carry out this kind of installation. Zenwalk is a well-built, functional Linux system. That its installation is presently beyond my limited knowledge should not be taken as a negative point at all.

  • Robby Workman Answers a Few Questions on the Occasion of Slackware-13.37 Release

    Dear fellow Slackers! We are happy to publish another interview with Robby Workman, a Slackware developer and one of the leading mainainers of the SlackBuilds.org project, he has kindly given us on the occasion of the Slackware-13.37 release. Enjoy!

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Squeeze + btrfs = FAIL

      Executive summary: Don’t use btrfs on Debian Squeeze.

      Longer summary: Don’t use btrfs RAID with the kernel Debian Squeeze comes with.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu 11.04 – Adding my electrons to the deluge

          If I were installing an OS on a tablet, I’d be all over this interface. But I’m not. And a desktop is not a tablet. Keep repeating that to yourself, Canonical. I hope it gets better.

        • Y PPA Manager: One Stop Shop For All Your PPA Related Needs in Ubuntu Natty

          Y PPA Manager lets you search, add, remove or even purge PPA’s in Ubuntu the easiest way. This is not a command line tool and is very easy for even a newbie Ubuntu user to understand and use. Below, you will see a brief review of Y PPA Manager and instructions for installing it in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Ubuntu Studio 11.10 Will Get Xfce Desktop

            Ubuntu Studio 11.04 comes with Gnome 2.xx not Unity or Gnome-Shell cause it don’t target audience or intended workflow. Now Ubuntu Studio developer mentioned on the mailing list they will re-base the project on Xfce lightweight desktop environment with custom user interface UI instead of Gnome 2 desktop.

• Devices/Embedded

  • The Plex “Penguin-Friendly” Media Server

    With 227 replies, and almost 400 votes in this thread, it’s obvious that there is a sizable bunch of you who would really like to run the Plex Media Server on Linux. And who can blame you, with sexy Linux-based storage devices on the market like the ReadyNAS pictured below? A device like this (or an unRAID for the DIY-ers, and damn it, why did I have to go read about unRAID and end up falling in love with this case?) running the Plex Media Server, combined with a rich assortment of clients (a Mac Mini, an iPad, an iPhone, an Android tablet, an LG Smart TV for the guest room, and a Roku Streaming Player for the kids’ room?), makes for an amazingly flexible, unified, and powerful media solution. Not to mention, the NAS is the only device that has to be left on, so Al Gore would yet again be proud.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Global Android phone sales to top 180 million units in 2011, says Sony Ericsson CTO

        Global sales of Android-based smartphones are expected to grow from 60 million units in 2010 to 180 million units in 2011 and over 400 million units in 2014, according to Sony Ericsson vice president and CTO Jan Uddenfeldt.

      • Others

        The world designs and makes better software more efficiently than any single corporation. The Linux organization makes the hardware-abstraction layer and manages computing resources. Google designs the GUI and provides a virtual machine in which portable software runs. Thousands of developers produce software for the “app stores”. ARM designs the CPUs and ARM’s licensees customize ARM’s modular designs as they see fit. The smart phone manufacturers pull together material from dozens of industries and integrates the whole system. The system works and everyone does their best, makes a good living and there is no tax on the OS.

Free Software/Open Source

• Events

  • Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 — Day 4

    Day four was the last day of the LGM. Sad… But it was filled with action packed talks and some good hacking. Of course, today is already Day 5 so I’m a bit late reporting. It’s not because I went to the after-party — instead I went to the hotel room to hack and write this blog. But instead of blogging, I spent all evening helping people to get Krita up and running on #krita. Though I did have a nice beer with it.

  • LGM: Day 4

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Some things Oracle just doesn’t get

    Yesterday at the NLUUG conference I picked up a Solaris 11 Express CD in a nice brownish CD sleeve (I say “nice” because it feels and looks different from the generic white sleeves). Here’s a scan of the back of the sleeve, with a big sticker over the flap (click on image for a larger, readable version).

• Programming

  • Perl 5.14

    A new version of Perl, 5.14, was officially released on 14th May following the successful test period, including the testing of release candidates. This is the first release of Perl 5 using the new annual schedule.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Codec Wars explained

    Let’s assume you have some spare time on your hands. Who should you support then? Naturally, the underdog attitude wins. It’s always the champion of freedom and openness that ought to win our hearts. This war is no exception. Having a well known and open format helps standardize things, reduce monopoly and improve technology.

    Now, as a developer or a website owner, you may have a special interest, since the technology could govern your revenue or success. It’s more than just which algorithm is used. It boils down to Flash versus HTML5. In your case, it’s not just fancy words, it’s the quality of audio and video delivery, it’s the scripting language, the backend, the debugging tools, the ease of use, the portability, everything. Can you be impartial? Hardly.

    In this case, you should support what works best. And this has yet to be determined. Flash has been around for a while. H.264 family of codecs has been around for a while. WebM is a new kid on the block and has a lot of fighting ahead.

Leftovers

• Rain on Microsoft Fog

  Customers on BPOS in the US and worldwide were kicked off their hosted Exchange email systems, being unable to read, write, or access their messages. All users were affected … Perhaps M$ should us a *NIX OS for its cloud. They might have fewer problems. Lately they have had problems with Hotmail, Update, WGdisA and now BPOS. The issue does not seem to be “network connectivity” which folks who hate thin clients harp on.

• Noam Chomsky’s Opinion of Osama Bin Laden Assassination

  operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law … There is much talk of bin Laden’s [9/11] “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

• Health/Nutrition

  • People Behind Vermont’s Slow Progress Towards Health Insurance Reform

  • Tobacco Companies Secretly Added Appetite Suppressants to Cigarettes

    “FDA [has] no requirements until a health claim is made. Then there must be studies on safety, efficacy, mechanism of action, metabolism, etc. If a substance is simply added to a product and no claims are made there is not need for FDA approval.”

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Transnational Murders for El Salvador Gold.

• Cablegate

  • WikiLeaks £12m Legal Gag: a legal analysis

    ast Wednesday, the New Statesman published the legal gag which WikiLeaks sought to impose on its employees and associates.

    This was then followed by an article in the Guardian by James Ball providing further background to this curious document.

  • Wikileaks Watch for May 12

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Energy Companies Make Record Profits

  • Toxic Sewage Sludge Marketed as “Organic Soil”, Given to School Kids

• Finance

  • PR Watch Chases the Banksters, join them.

    Shareholders at major banks are hopping on planes and scurrying across the country for their annual shareholders meetings to avoid the big bank backlash. JP Morgan Chase is fleeing New York for the heartland. Wisconsin’s M&I Bank is fleeing the heartland for Times Square. Let’s tell them that they can run but they can’t hide!

  • Move Your Money away from Banksters

  • The UK’s severe budget cuts have knocked it into a longer recession.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Astroturfing is Alive and Well

    I hope this results in prosecution. Sullying a trademark is a federal offence.

  • The Man Karl Rove Couldn’t Beat – these guys must love Facebook and Twitter.

    [according to a former staffer, Rove] initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on. “… The students at the law school are from all over the state, … This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state.” What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship.”

  • Steven Colbert Demands Unlimited Corporate Finance for Campaign

    “I believe the Citizens United decision was the right one, there should be unlimited corporate money, and I want some of it. I don’t want to be the one chump who doesn’t have any.” Colbert said he expected the FEC to take his request seriously.

  • Burson-Marsteller Sanitizes Facebook. Does anyone thinks real conversations can occur in walled gardens?

    Yet, Burson-Marsteller apparently hasn’t learned its lesson from the influx of criticism surrounding its involvement in the mess. The company has since been caught deleting criticism from Facebook users posting on the company’s official Facebook page.

  • Revolving door reward.

    Just four months after voting to approve the the controversial merger of Comcast and NBC, Baker announced Wednesday she will become senior vice president of government affairs for NBC Universal.

  • Koch Brothers Corrupt Florida State University, George Mason University, Clemson University in South Carolina and West Virginia University Economics Departments- The Finiest Universities Money Can Buy.

  • Buying News Print

    A skin care company that claims to have a cure for acne, psoriasis, folliculitis and other disorders is contacting Virginia media outlets and offering to pay them $100 for each person who sees the company’s press release and signs up to get treatment.

• Censorship

  • “IP” confusion strikes again in the US. Sign this petition against the dreadful “Protect IP” act which confuses copyright and trademark to demands censorship of of the internet at the browser, dns and other levels.

• Privacy

  • The US State of Indiana rules thatpolice may enter your house without warrant and citizens may not resist in any way

  • DOJ Wants Wireless Carriers To Collect Location Data

    The request came, ironically enough, in the middle of a Senate hearing at which lawmakers grilled Apple and Google executives over their collection and use of location-based data from iPad, iPhone, and Android devices.

  • EU Makes GPS Location Private

    The European Union is to categorise location data, routinely harvested by phone and internet providers, as private, a move which will place GPS data in the same category as names, birthdays and other personal data.

• Civil Rights

  • Voter Suppression Bills Sweep the US

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Rambus, DRAM patent troll case grinds on. A reasonable court system would have exterminated this company long ago.

    the CAFC noted that (1) Rambus’s document retention policy was not adopted for purposes of business management, but instead to further Rambus’s litigation strategy; (2) Rambus was on notice of potentially infringing activities by particular manufacturers; (3) Rambus took several steps in furtherance of litigation prior to the key shredding party…

  • Copyrights

    • French Hadopi “3 Strikes” Anti-Piracy Company Hacked

      The private company entrusted to carry out file-sharing network monitoring for the French government has been hacked. Trident Media Guard, which is responsible for gathering data for so-called 3 strikes warnings, now has some of its scripts and secrets out in the wild, an event which has the potential to upset the smooth of Hadopi.

    • The US Library of Congress now streams a small but well organized collection of 100 year old recordings. The service does not work with free software. Compare to the collaborative library Napster built more than a decade ago.

      The Library of Congress has obtained a license from rights holders to offer it as streamed audio only. Downloading is not permitted.

    • Limewire pays $105 million extortion to RIAA.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Desktop

  • The Commodore 64, that ’80s computer icon, lives again

    It was chunky, a hideous tan color, and, by today’s standards, ridiculously feeble.

    It was limited to 64 kilobytes of memory — about the equivalent of one long e-mail.

    And yet 25 years ago, almost everyone seemed to have one.

    It was the Commodore 64, an 8-bit, mass-produced machine that brought personal computing into the home for millions of users in the early- and mid-1980s. People used their C64s, as they were known, for everything from basic office functions to primitive games like “Impossible Mission.”

  • What You Should Know When Migrating From Windows to Linux

    Linux has indeed some important advantages compared to Windows operating systems. Here are two main advantages: both distribution and programs are free of charge and the security level is much better than that provided by Windows. Despite these facts, Linux products do not have a very large market share, but it is continually growing. Actually many laptop and desktop systems already have the preinstalled version on Linux.

  • Google’s Chrome OS machines arrive

    Google has announced that Samsung and Acer will be making the first Chromebooks; instant-on, always-connected laptops that run the company’s open sourced and Linux-based Chrome OS. As well as being available for purchase, Google is offering companies a subscription plan at $28 a month per user, which includes a Chromebook and online services, and a $20 a month subscription offering for educational users. UK pricing for subscriptions will be announced closer to the 15 June launch. The machines are enhanced production versions of the CR-48 notebook which Google gave away to interested parties late last year.

  • How to Make Your Own Chrome OS Chromebook

    On June 15, Samsung and Acer will release the first consumer-oriented Chrome OS laptops, or Chromebooks as Google likes to call them. Both hardware- and software-wise, these netbooks are nothing special: You can download Chrome OS’s open source brother, Chromium OS, for free — and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering.

• Kernel Space

  • Celebrating 20 Years of Linux

    Happy Birthday, Tux! Happy Birthday, Linux! Many of you might not know this but Linux is the underlying basis for many of today’s mobile platforms, Android being one of them. Also, Linux is considered to be as the most “potent” open-source system for PCs, acclaimed by developers and enthusiasts alike.

    Everything started in 1983, as the GNU Project, engineered by Richard Stallman.

  • Video: Inside the Linux Powered Xirrus Wi-Fi

    Interop is one of the largest non-vendor conferences still around.

    All those conference goers connect over the Xirrus Wi-Fi array network that is deployed at the show.

    Have you ever wondered what’s inside of a Xirrus Wi-Fi array?

    Sure there are some Atheros chips, but there is also a grain of open source goodness. That’s right Interop’s Xirrus Wi-Fi deployment is based on a Linux 2.6.x kernel.

  • Graphics Stack

    • X Input 2.1 Not Coming Until X.Org Server 1.12

      X Input 2.1 was originally talked about for X.Org Server 1.10 with its initial multi-touch implementation having been published back in late 2010.

      After this version of the X Input extension missed the 1.10 cycle, it was getting back on track for a xorg-server 1.11 merge. The multi-touch work has already went through several revisions by Daniel Stone and Canonical.

      This work was looking like it would finally land for X.Org Server 1.11 when it’s released in August, but it doesn’t look like it will make the merge window closing in a few weeks. One of the problems causing a delay in the merge deals with touchpads and where touch/mouse events are delivered to different windows.

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • Netflix leveraging HTML5 to offer playback in Linux

  • DNS/IPv6

    • DNSMasq – Best Way to Surf Internet

      After growing tired of slow response times I decided it was time to just run a personal domain name caching service. Bind seemed a bit overkill and it can be quite complicated. Other alternatives are much easier – such as DNSMasq. DNSMasq is available in just about every distro’s repository and is really easy to set up and use.

    • Alternative DNS services: pro and contra

    • World IPv6 day @ home

      This is by no means the “launch of IPv6″ (IPv6 has been available for over a decade since the early days of the 6bone). Instead, this is the opportunity for some large-scale service and content providers to test their IPv6 readiness with a sizable audience over a 24 hours period. Although not the first of its kind, since this event is sponsored by the ISOC and supported by several core content and network providers (some of the participants are big names such as Google, Yahoo, Akamai and Facebook) it has a good chance of becoming the largest IPv6 awareness raising event in history. It is no coincidence that IANA has just allocated the last few available IPv4 blocks to the regional registries, marking the depletion of the IPv4 space (at least when it comes to global allocations, but regional allocation exhaustion will follow soon).

    • Whose Fault is it When Your Internet Dies? Troubleshooting Networks with Linux

      When you can’t access the Internet you can’t install software (unless you have your own local repository), so you should have these commands available on your computers:

      * ping
      * ifconfig
      * dig
      * GNU screen

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to Use Classic GNOME Session on Ubuntu 11.04

    • How to Gather Hardware Information in Linux

    • Login as root on the Ubuntu System

    • Signals in Linux

    • Installing Gnome Shell Extensions in OpenSuse 11.4

  • Games

    • Easiest Way to Play Angry Birds in Ubuntu

      It is called Chrome Web Store. Yes, Angry Birds is now available in Chrome Web Store for free installation.

    • Thoughts on Wine Technology

      If you have used a Unix operating system on a desktop computer for any extended period of time then odds are you have heard of Wine technology. In case you haven’t, Wine is an acronym that stands for “Wine Is Not an Emulator”. In actuality Wine is a “windows compatibility layer”. To put it in laymen’s terms it allows you to natively run Windows binaries in a Unix environment.

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Calligra is the Future of Free Software Office Suites

      A couple of days ago Michael Meeks published a blog called ‘LibreOffice is the future of Free Software Office suites’. Michael is one of the lead developers of LibreOffice and also one of the founders of the Document Foundation, the organization behind LibreOffice. In that blog he makes a number of points that leads to his conclusion in the title:

      * LibreOffice is vendor neutral
      * LibreOffice is robust to participants leaving
      * Linux distributions are safer with LibreOffice
      * LibreOffice has a different, and better QA model
      * Division is (sadly) sometimes necessary
      * The Document Foundation champions ODF
      * We are transparent about our contributors

      Each of those points is a section in the text. If you haven’t read the blog already, you should probably do that now before continuing your reading here. It’s quite long but it’s a good read.

      However…

      What is obvious when reading that text is that Michael only compares LibreOffice to one other free office suite: OpenOffice.org. He probably has a good platform to stand on when saying that compared to OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice is more future secure.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • gnome 3

      Well the new gnome 3 has certainly polarised the community. I must say I generally really like it, but also I’m not yet running it on my default machine. Historically I’ve upgraded my primary laptop to the current development release of Fedora around the beta release. This time I’ve not. Why? Well there’s one major feature that has “Just Worked” for me for as long as I remember and I use it every day I’m in the office that isn’t yet working well in gnome 3 and it would cost me way too much time on an average work day.

      [...]

      There’s lots of other nice things about gnome 3 and I look forward to being able to run it properly to get access to those things.

    • My experience with GNOME 3 so far

      My general feeling towards GNOME 3 is this: ♥. Yes, I love it

    • Don’t like change? Create Gnome 2.32 panel with Gnome shell extensions

      Lets accept it, some users don’t like changes. There are always a subset of users in every DE who don’t like or need a change whatever merits the changes could bring to them. When gnome 3.0 was released and its new shell became the point of attraction, many users were disappointed. They did want their old Gnome 2.32 panels and nothing else.

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • Big Blue plus Red Hat plus Private Cloud equals Purple Reign?

      Just last week, IBM and Red Hat dove head first into Enterprise virtualization, after their March 2010 initial team-up to create a development and test cloud built on IBM hardware and Red Hat’s KVM hypervisor software. So, according to the former press release, this Big Blue to Red Hat connection exists simply to “extend this partnership to include cloud computing – broadening our reach and answering the strong customer demand for cloud computing services.”

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 LTS reaches end of life

          The desktop version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has now officially reached its end of life as previously reported. From 12 May 2011 (yesterday), no new updates, including security updates and critical fixes, will be available. The server edition of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will continue to be supported until May 2013. Code named “Hardy Heron”, version 8.04 of the Debian-derived Linux distribution was released on 24 April 2008. Hardy Heron users are advised to upgrade to a later release to continue receiving updates.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 Open Source OS: Looking at the Pros and Cons

        • Canonical joins GENIVI, creates Ubuntu IVI Remix

          Canonical has announced that it is joining the GENIVI Alliance, the non-profit industry alliance which is creating an open source “In-Vehicle Infotainment” reference platform. Canonical is also creating a GENIVI-compliant Ubuntu IVI Remix, based on the Ubuntu Core subset of the Linux distribution, which supports Intel and ARM processors.

          Talking to The H, Chris Kenyon, VP of OEM services at Canonical, said that automotive suppliers had been asking for something from Canonical in the IVI space for as much as eighteen months. The suppliers already used Ubuntu in their development systems and wanted to be able to use the same technology in the products they delivered. “This is more a pull by them than a push by us” said Kenyon though Ubuntu now had all the right elements for the automotive market. Companies wanted to get their product to market faster and were looking for a platform with a “proven cadence” which was “fundamentally cross architecture”. Ubuntu’s ARM support and Canonical’s work with Linaro along with its work with Qt, a core component in the in draft GENIVI specifications, puts Ubuntu IVI Remix in a strong position to be the “off the shelf” solution for GENIVI members.

        • Is Ubuntu’s Unity Interface Ready for the Masses?

        • Mark Shuttleworth UDS Interview [Video]

        • Pitivi and Computer Janitor to be Removed, New Features Planned for Software Center in Oneiric

          There had been some really nice discussions on the last day of Ubuntu Developer Summit and some new changes are being introduced in Ubuntu 11.10.

          But Google’s Blogger service had an outage for about 30 hours that not only deleted few past articles but also blocked me from posting any new content. Finally couple of hours back, the service has been restored.

        • Expected Changes In Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot [Ubuntu Developer Summit Overview]g

          Ubuntu 11.10 will use GNOME 3. The GNOME 3 Natty PPA will be maintained with bug fixes for GNOME 3.0 and there will probably be an GNOME 3.1 PPA for Oneiric until 3.1 is ready to be included by default.

        • Ubuntu 11.04 – review of unity interface

          Ubuntu is a great operating system and know tons of people who use it every day as their primary operating system, unity, however, is an entirely different matter. I was one of those people who was outraged when it was announced that 11.04 was going to have unity and by default, but what really did it in for me was when I found out unity cannot be removed, it just simply cannot be removed. It’s like cancer. Thinking back I know one other piece of software in a popular operating system that cannot be removed and starts with the letter I and ends with the letter R, and uses the abbreviation IE.

        • Ubuntu Software centre changes planned for Oneiric

          Plans on improving the Ubuntu Software Centre on Ubuntu 11.10 have been outlined at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest this morning.

          Faster start-up times, refined visuals making use of larger icons, and Unity Launcher integration are all tacked for inclusion.

        • Ubuntu 11.10 Will Stay With Evolution But Switch To Thunderbird If It Integrates With The Desktop [UDS]

          Even though in the beginning of the default email client session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, it looked like it’s certain that Evolution will stay as default in Ubuntu 11.10, towards the end of the session things changed and it was decided to stay with Evolution for now BUT switch to Thunderbird as the default email client in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot as long as it integrates with the desktop.

        • RIP Eucalyptus. Ubuntu Standardizes on OpenStack

        • OpenFlow running on Ubuntu Linux

        • Ubuntu adopts LightDM, login screens to get more exciting

        • Flavours and Variants

          • CrunchBang interview with Darth Wound

            A while ago, I was contacted by Darth Wound with regards to answering some questions for an interview about CrunchBang. Now, being asked to do interviews about CrunchBang is not unusual, I must receive several a month at the moment, but I know Darth Wound through the excellent work he is doing with the French CrunchBang forums, so I was more than happy to try and answer his questions.

          • Q&A with Jeff Hoogland, lead developer of Bodhi Linux

            A: I use Linux & FOSS in the classroom. I have Bodhi installed on my netbook, and I use it with the SMART Technologies interactive whiteboard every day. My favorite applications for teaching mathematics, which I use a fair amount are GeoGebra and KAlgebra.

          • Ubuntu Makes Lubuntu Official Derivative

            It’s official: Lubuntu is an official Ubuntu derivative. In a UDS session in Budapest, Colin Watson and Mark Shuttleworth clarified the details with project member Julien Lavergne. There are still no ISO and packages on the official Ubuntu site, but Lavergne will announce on the Ubuntu project development mailing list when the application is in the official repositories and there is an installable image. Lubuntu 11.10 will be the first officially supported version of the derivate.

          • Giving Back: Lubuntu 64bit now Available

            This entry was posted on Thursday, May 12th, 2011 at 11:32 AM and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Phones

    • Android

      • Will Amazon Become the Dominant Player in the Android Ecosystem?

        There is an elephant at the door of the Android ecosystem. Nobody quite wants to look at it or acknowledge the whispers, but Amazon may be set to become the leader in Android devices later this year.

        Officially, Amazon has said nothing about creating its own Android devices. There has been talk of a tablet in the works for a while now but its specs and ship date is shrouded in mystery. But Amazon may have bigger ambitions than just a tablet. Rumors have come out today that not only is the online retail company looking at a slate, but an entire family of Android devices. If this happens, will the waves topple the balance of power of players in the Android ecosystem?

Free Software/Open Source

• Need open source Django CRM? Cuddle up to Koalix

  CRM is an application with a long history of open source development, with many projects written the PHP language. However, a Swiss developer has released one of the first open source CRM systems developed with the Django Python framework.

  The brainchild of Aaron Riedener, Koalixcrm is aimed at taking the complexity out of CRM, particularly for small businesses and individuals.

• Events

  • Android Open Conference launches

    O’Reilly Media announced a new Android Open Conference Oct. 9-11, in San Francisco, designed for anyone who creates, sells, or markets Android-related products. In other open source conference news, the Linux Foundation last week announced keynote speakers, including Linus Torvalds, for LinuxCon Japan, June 1-3, and Linux Expo of Southern California announced events for Software Freedom Day 2011 on Sept. 17.

• Web Browsers

  • WebGL & Security

    Recently Context Information Security Limited gathered a lot of attention for a blog post on the state of WebGL security. For Mozilla, WebGL was first released in Firefox 4, and there are implementations in Chrome, Safari and Opera as well. The blog post outlines an abstract concern that WebGL is inherently insecure because it allows fairly direct access to the hardware, along with two specific attacks, a Denial of Service and a Cross-Domain Image Theft.

  • Chrome

    • Use Encrypted Google Search As Default in Chrome

  • Mozilla

    • Free ‘Browser in a Box’ Runs Firefox 4 with Ultra Security

      Security is an oft-debated topic in the ongoing browser wars, but there’s no denying that malware is a common problem for all of the leading contenders.

    • SHA-512 w/ per User Salts is Not Enough

      More to come on this subject, as our goal is to increase security and the time in which it would take in order to brute or dictionary the hash. Our goal is and always to provide better protection around authentication systems.

    • Upgrade offer boosts Firefox 4 share by 30%

      Firefox 4′s share shot up 11% the first day after Mozilla started offering users the upgrade last week, and climbed 30% in four days.

      The boost moved a long-time Mozilla employee to compare the gains of Firefox and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) since the two browsers debuted last March.

• Databases

  • MariaDB 5.2.6 released

• Healthcare

  • Childhood leukaemia linked to mosquito bites

    BITES from mosquitoes carrying unidentified viruses might explain childhood leukaemia clusters around the town of Fallon in Nevada. And last week, a separate UK report found no link between nuclear power plants and childhood leukaemia.

    The Nevada cluster is the largest in the US. Previous research failed to find a link between the cases and carcinogenic chemicals. The new study of the 14 Fallon cases that arose between 1997 and 2003 – a rate 12 times higher than normally expected in such a period – concludes that military personnel may have brought a virus to the area, which was then spread by mosquitoes. The cluster “fizzled out” once all vulnerable children had been infected.

• Business

  • Semi-Open Source

    • GroundWork Adds Cloud Connector to GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4

      GroundWork Inc., (www.groundworkopensource.com) the leading open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has released GroundWork Cloud Connector for GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4. An automatic, monitoring provisioning system, GroundWork Cloud Connector gives users the ability to monitor Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus cloud instances right along side traditional data center infrastructures.

• Openness/Sharing

  • Open Hardware

    • Why Google Choosing Arduino Matters and is This the End of “Made for iPod” (TM)?

      This week is the yearly Google I/O at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s a meet and greet for lots of people and companies, a big dot-com over-the-top party, and most of all it’s geared towards “web, mobile, and enterprise developers building applications in the cloud with Google and open web technologies… Products and technologies to be featured at I/O include App Engine, Android, Google Web Toolkit, Google Chrome, HTML5, AJAX and Data APIs, Google TV, and more.” Maybe not so much Google TV or Google Wave this year but for open hardware and mobile folks, this was one of the most important weeks in history.

• Standards/Consortia

  • It’s Time for Government to Back the Semantic Web

    Long time readers will know that I have been reporting on the Semantic Web for many years – since June of 2005, in fact, when I dedicated an issue of my eJournal to The Future of the Web. The long interview I included with Tim Berners-Lee remains one of the most-read articles on this site of all time. Ever since then, I’ve periodically given an “attaboy” to the Semantic Web. And guess what? It’s that time again.

    Why? Because the more the Web is capable of doing, the more we can get out of it. And given how much we now rely on the Internet and the Web, we can’t afford to allow either to be less than they are capable of being.

Leftovers

• Security

  • Adobe Flash update puts users in charge of privacy

  • Adobe Delivers Flash Player 10.3: Better Performance and Security Built-In

  • The Cloud is so leaky we should call it The Rain

  • Dropbox ‘deceived’ users over security: Files are open to government searches

  • PSN stumbles back online for developers

• Cablegate

  • Activist who supports soldier in WikiLeaks case sues U.S. over seizure of laptop

    The co-founder of a group advocating for an Army private accused of leaking classified material to the antisecrecy Web site WikiLeaks is suing the U.S. government for unlawfully seizing his computer and copying its contents to aid a criminal investigation of the site.

    Computer scientist David House’s laptop was taken in November at an international airport by two Department of Homeland Security agents without a hint that it contained evidence of wrongdoing, but rather because House was a vocal supporter of Pfc. Bradley Manning, the accused leaker, the American Civil Liberties Union alleged in a complaint to be filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Boston.

• Finance

  • Is Apple’s share price being manipulated?

    It was 3:48 p.m. on Friday April 29 and traders who had purchased Apple (AAPL) April 29 $350 “calls” — options that gave them the right to buy Apple shares in blocks of 100 for $350 per share — were sitting pretty. The stock was trading around $353.50 and those calls were worth more $350 apiece (the difference between the price of the stock and the so-called “strike price” of the option times 100).

    Then, in an extraordinary burst of trading — exacerbated by the rebalancing of the NASDAQ-100 scheduled for the following Monday — more than 15 million shares changed hands and the stock dropped below the $350 strike price just before the closing bell. Result: The value of those calls disappeared like a puff of smoke.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Koch suit vs. pranksters dismissed

    A federal judge in Utah on Monday tossed Koch Industries’s lawsuit against the pranksters who set up a fake website and sent out a bogus press release saying the company had found religion on climate change.

    In a case being watched for First Amendment implications, Judge Dale Kimball of the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City also said Koch can’t disclose the identities of the “Youth for Climate Truth” members or use any other information obtained via subpoena from two Utah-based domain hosting companies.

  • The Order Dismissing Koch Industries v. John Does 1-25

    I thought you’d enjoy to see the order, as text, that the Hon. Dale Kimball just issued in Koch Industries v. John Does 1-25, the case I told you about in April. Yes, it’s the same judge who handled both SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell through the first appeal. I admire him greatly, and when you read this order, so firmly upholding the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the right to anonymity, I think you are likely to join me.

  • FCC Commish-Turned-Lobbyist Can’t See What All The Controversy Is About

    FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker has been receiving a ton of criticism for taking a high level lobbying job at Comcast just months after approving its huge merger with NBC Universal. The response has been almost universally to condemn Baker in a move that smacks of the corruption of regulatory capture and the revolving door between corporations and the government that regulates them. I had been wondering if all of this publicity would lead to Baker backing down and no longer taking the job (only to take a similar job, more quietly, down the road). But, instead, it looks like she’s digging in her heels and insisting that nothing (nothing!) improper is going on here.

• Censorship

  • Comcast Users Blocked From The Pirate Bay
    

    During the last few hours reports have been trickling in from Comcast subscribers who are unable to access The Pirate Bay website. Although there is no sign that Comcast is actively blocking user access to the largest BitTorrent site on the Internet, something is clearly not in order. The Pirate Bay team have confirmed that they are not the ones who are blocking, and they’re investigating the issue.

• Privacy

  • Tech Comics: “Try It the Social Way”

  • Privacy groups applaud Senator Rockefeller’s “Do Not Track” bill

    Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has introduced a new “Do Not Track” bill to Congress that aims to hold companies accountable for collecting information on consumers after they’ve expressed a desire to opt out. Called the Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2011 (PDF), the bill would create a “universal legal obligation” for companies to honor users’ opt-out requests on the Internet and mobile devices, and would give the Federal Trade Commission the power to take action against companies that don’t comply.

    “Recent reports of privacy invasions have made it imperative that we do more to put consumers in the driver’s seat when it comes to their personal information,” Rockefeller said in a statement. “I believe consumers have a right to decide whether their information can be collected and used online. This bill offers a simple, straightforward way for people to stop companies from tracking their movements online.”

  • Anonymous IDs on iPhones, iPads Can Reveal Your Identity

    Security researcher Aldo Cortesi last week published his discovery of a flaw in the unique device identifier (UDID) stored on each iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

  • 7.5 million Facebook users are under 13: study

  • URGENT: Intellectual Property Consortium wants .net domains to be subject to TRADEMARK seizures and to abolish privacy-shielded .NETs

    The Intellectual Property Constituency has asked that, as a condition of Verisign’s ongoing management of the .NET top-level domain, that they should be required to act as private trademark cops.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Overinstaller Awareness Day

    Now, continuing the reforms it introduced last year, the BSA calls these numbers theft and piracy, but studiously avoids describing them as ‘losses’ to industry. That’s because very few people who pirate software would actually buy it at high legal prices, especially in developing countries where price-to-income ratios become astronomical. Instead, the BSA describes the number as the ‘commercial value of pirated software,’ which is technically correct and may even be roughly accurate. But they are no longer making any claims about actual industry losses.

  • Canadians using illegal software less and less

    University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, however, said the numbers make a mockery of industry and American government suggestions that this country is some kind of haven for piracy.

  • Trademarks

    • Microsoft challenging “Apple App Store” trademark in Europe

      Microsoft is jumping into the Apple AppStore battle overseas. On Thursday, Microsoft joined HTC, Nokia and Sony Ericsson in filing filed formal applications for declaration of invalidity in the Community Trade Mark office, the office that oversees trademarks in the Euro Zone.

      Microsoft has already challenged the Apple App trademark in the U.S., the asking the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to refuse the iPhone maker’s registration request on the basis that it’s a generic name, not something to which Apple can lay exclusive claim.

  • Copyrights

    • 3-minute speech limit at EU copyright hearing

      The European Commission threatens to handbag* all speakers who go over 3-minutes at a public hearing on the IPR Enforcement directive (also known as IPRED). A key focus of the hearing will be Internet copyright enforcement and peer-to-peer file-sharing. What will the Commission’s new, ex-IFPI, head of copyright have to say?

    • ACTA

      • Why Innovation Is Under Attack

        3.

        As we confront numerous threats to innovation — ACTA, the PROTECT IP Act, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, the Obama Administration White Paper on IP enforcement — these are just some of the challenges that we face. Figuring out ways to refocus the debate on key issues in innovation, rather than in protectionist efforts, is going to be key.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Podcast Season 3 Episode 9

    In this episode: David Braben creates a low-cost Linux machine. Matt Zimmerman leaves Canonical while Mark Shuttleworth wants 200 million Ubuntu users within 4 years. Discover our discoveries, hear the latest conversion stories from TuxRadar and join us on IRC.

• Kernel Space

  • Aftermath of the Linux compiler and optimizations changes

  • [New Video:] The Linux Foundation Video Site:: Happy Anniversary Linux!

• Applications

  • Liberation

    • Bye Bye Skype, Top 3 Free Replacements

      Skype has always been proprietary so those that prefer to use only Open Source have relied upon free alternatives. Now with Microsoft’s purchase of Skype, Linux users are already predicting the end for them and are looking for alternatives as well. It turns out that the Free Software Foundation has had “Free software replacement for Skype” on their High-Priority List for a while.

      The FSF suggests that folks use one of the free programs available for Linux and help development by sending in bug reports. They cite China’s spying on Skype conversations as a good reason. Does anyone doubt Microsoft is capable of similar? So, even if Microsoft doesn’t give Linux (and Mac) users the kibosh, I wouldn’t trust them and proprietary software with my phone calls.

    • Liberating non-free software with Linux-libre

      The compelling desire for software that was free of expensive licensing, over the past half century,lead to the development of open source software. However, open source in some of its popular forms such as Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu and the rest of the distros though based on the freely available platform , often comes with certain parts of code or source that are under license. Free Software Foundation the alma mater of all open source software, along with like-minded community volunteers chose to start the Linux-Libre Project, which is dedicated to editing the Linux Kernel to maintain it free of licensed open source software.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Manual disk partitioning guide for Kubuntu 11.04

    • Cute systemd trick of the day: auto-mounting remote shares

    • Working pidgin facebook chat for linux 64 bit

    • AMD64 broken on Debian unstable – avoid libc6 2.13-3

    • Tables of Contents, Indexes and Other Special Tables in Scribus

    • Wikihtml2man Introduction (aka html2man, aka wiki2man)

    • Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/lib/php/modules/curl.so’

    • Ostinato – Network packet and traffic generator and analyzer

    • Access GetDeb.net packages in Ubuntu-Software-Center in Ubuntu 11.04

    • Packt’s book on BackTrack 4: Assuring Security by Penetration Testing

  • Games

    • Garshap Developers

      At first it was reported that Garshap is being developed by Fanafzar Game Studios, but now the developers are DeadMage.
      Our longtime LGN news contributer Hamish Wilson made some research and put some light on the matter…

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Planning the first release of KDE Telepathy

      Given the various blog posts, and (somewhat unnecessary) hysteria over the news of Skype I felt like I should give an update on what’s going on in KDE Telepathy.

      Pace over the past 5 months has been ace, we’ve got a lot done, and as mentioned by a few people already – we’re releasing “soon”! We don’t have a fixed date, but instead we will release when a set list of outstanding bugs are fixed. Probably about 4 weeks time. (unless I die of stress organising it all in the meantime)

      [...]

      We have a GSOC student that I’m mentoring over the summer to really nail bringing instant messaging into the core of the Plasma Workspace.

    • KDEMU Certified Scrotum Master

• Distributions

  • Red Hat Family

    • Scala daddy wraps his Java baby in Red Hat-ness

      Martin Odersky – the man who created Scala, the Java-based programming language that now drives such big name web services as Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn – has launched a company that provides service and support around an extensive open source application stack for the language.

      Both the company and the stack are known as Typesafe. Officially unveiled on Thursday, the Typesafe stack includes the most recent releases of the Scala programming language, the open source Akka middleware, and various open source tools designed to facilitate the development of Scala applications. “We want to provide stable versions of the stack, stable supported versions where you can get backports of fixes and improvements”, Odersky tells The Register. “It’s very much the open source support model you see with Red Hat”.

    • Fedora

      • Fosscomm 2011 & Fedora Activity Day

        May was here again, and it was time for our annual Greek Meetup. Fosscomm is the (now-standard) annual meetup of Greek foss communities, and this year it was Patras time to host it. My good friend Vasilis and the rest of his gang have done extraordinary good organizational job (arranging our accommodation, creating custom web apps for the conference, providing extensive info and material etc), and in overall I can say safely that it was the best Fosscomm so far.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian 6.0: Upgrade

      I finally cleared enough time to upgrade my computer from Debian 5 “Lenny”, to the new Debian 6 “Squeeze”. Debian Linux 6 was actually released in February, but I wanted to have a few days of no commitments, just in case my computer would be down for an extended period. And a good thing, too.

      The short version: I successfully upgraded my desktop from Debian 5 to 6. It was not trivial….though it was easier than my last upgrade, from Debian 4 to 5, two years ago.

    • DNS security extensions now available for Debian’s zone entries

      The Debian Project is pleased to announce that its domains debian.org and debian.net are now secured by the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC). The corresponding DNS records have recently been added in the .net and .org zones.

      “This enables users with security aware DNS resolvers to securely retrieve information from the domain name system such as IP addresses, or for those who have shell accounts on debian.org machines, SSH host key fingerprints. Any tampering with DNS replies would be detected by a user’s resolver,” says Peter Palfrader, member of Debian’s System Administrator Team. “DNSSEC is an important step in securing the Internet’s name resolution infrastructure.”

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Canonical switches to OpenStack for Ubuntu Linux cloud

          OK, it’s not too surprising that Canonical, Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has switched to OpenStack for its Ubuntu cloud foundation technology. After all, Canonical started flirting with OpenStack back in February. What is surprising is that Neil Levine, who as Canonical’s VP of corporate services, which included the cloud, has jumped ship to start a new company, Soba Labs.

        • ‘Web Sources Lens’ for Unity puts web search on your Ubuntu Desktop

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Lubuntu 11.04

            Rating: 4/5

Free Software/Open Source

• FOSS Experts, Where Are You Hiding?

  Linux has been around for a long time, but people were waiting for it to be a mature solution. Large product companies would not consider open source, as they doubted its stability—but now, the research and development phase is over. Over the years, FOSS has proved its stability in the industry, and many organisations are switching to using open source solutions rather than conventional proprietary solutions, because of the high costs associated with the latter. FOSS is very mature now, and it is possible to run Linux on a variety of platforms, making it a favourable commercial solution. This has led to a demand for FOSS professionals, especially in organisations that deal with technology and products. With the Android explosion, Linux on hand-held or embedded devices is an upcoming area, and will see much more growth in the coming years, especially because over 50 per cent of smart-phones run on Android today. The main sectors driving this demand are industries like technology, semi-conductors, telecom companies and phone manufacturers.

• LGM – Day 3

• Harnessing the Benefits of Open-Source Sustainability Tools

  OAKLAND, CA — The bedrock of capitalism based around innovation has for years been the idea that when someone invents a unique and in-demand product or service, it should be patented and protected at all costs.

  But a growing number of companies are turning the concept of intellectual capital on its head in the name of sustainability. Count IBM, Nike and the Outdoor Industry Association among the growing list of business interests turning to open source models to lower costs and scale best practices and technologies.

• Mozilla

  • Download & Install Mozilla Firefox 5 In Ubuntu, Fedora, Windows & Mac OS

• Public Services/Government

  • German Foreign Office explains open source elimination

    The German government has given details of its reasons for migrating the German Foreign office from Linux and free software back to Windows and Microsoft software. The SPD (Social Democrats, the main German opposition party) submitted an initial question on “the use of open source software in the Foreign Office and other Government departments”, but, according to the Green parliamentary group, the German government’s response left various questions unanswered.

Leftovers

• Why the mobile phone is obsolete

• Critique of Mobile Phones Culture

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Reports on the ability of green energy get little press coverage.

  • Fish in the Gulf of Mexico follow the Prince William Sound patern.

    Scientists are alarmed by the discovery of unusual numbers of fish in the Gulf of Mexico and inland waterways with skin lesions, fin rot, spots, liver blood clots and other health problems.

  • CRIIRAD, a French research body on radioactivity, warns EU citizens against consumption of rainwater, fresh milk and leafy vegetables by children due to Fukushima fallout. Levels of radioactive iodine-131 concentration are 8-10 times higher on the US west coast.

• Finance

  • How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis that starved million of people, caused havoc for US farmers and rampant energy costs.

    For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. … When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked. Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into “derivatives” … A market in “food speculation” was born.

    In 2006, financial speculators like Goldmans pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market. They reckoned food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked … some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period – but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation.

  • Bankers, enjoying trillions in government bailout for their previous speculative disaster, earned billions this way.

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Tell Scholastic to Quit Selling Coal to School Kids

  • The Wall Street Journal tried to set up a Wikileaks-style leak reception site, but did a lousy job that whistleblowers should not trust.

• Civil Rights

  • A French military vessel leaves stranded immigrates to die at sea while the US private prison industry passes unjust laws to profit by incarcerating them.

    last year the private prison industry secured close to $5 billion through state and government elicited contracts of which an increasing percentage is attributed to migrant detention facilities and bed spaces. An NPR report outlined how CCA aims to translate the anti-immigrant rhetoric and political void into a long-lasting cash drive … CCA founder Tomas Beasly once called his scheme ‘more profitable’ than selling burgers or cars

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Spain as Copyright Trojan Horse for EU

      It’s pretty clear what is going on here: get one or two EU countries to bring in repressive laws that can be cited as precedents, then “harmonise” EU laws so that all European countries do the same.

    • “Canada’s Piracy Rate is at an All Time Low”

      The Business Software Alliance released its annual Global Piracy Study yesterday and while the study is oft-criticized on methodological grounds (Glyn Moody, my 2009 criticisms that revealed no actual surveys in Canada that year), the trend is unmistakable. According to this annual study, Canada’s piracy rate has been on a steady decline as Michael Murphy, Chairman of the BSA Canada Committee, notes “at 28 per cent, Canada’s piracy rate is at an all time low, dropping six percentage points since 2006.”

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Open Ballot: What is Linux’s killer feature?

  As we rev up our podcast engines for the next recording, we want to hear your words: what do you think is the killer feature of Linux? What’s its strongest selling point, the thing that makes it better than its competitors? Perhaps you reckon the kernel’s rock-solid stability is key, or maybe you think the plethora of desktop environments gives it an advantage.

• Desktop

  • LPI Announces New Affiliate in East Africa

• Google

  • Google Launching Chromebook for Business on June 15

  • Google may offer £12 a month Chromebooks on contract

    Google is rumoured to be set to announce a scheme where students can get a Chrome OS toting laptop for a $20 (£12) a month contract, mimicking the way in which many people get the latest mobile phones.

    According to Forbes, Google will announce the deal later in the day at its Google I/O conference, and the package will include Google Apps.

  • It’s Not A Linux Laptop

    I’ve been watching the commentary on Google’s announcements yesterday that their Chrome OS will be available on laptops from partners – ChromeBooks – and that they will offer a scheme where they provide a ChromeBook to businesses and students for $20-$30 per month. It’s clear that some people are not seeing the real deal here. I’ve seen comments on early reviews, Identi.ca and Twitter saying this is just a Linux laptop and asking why it will be any more successful than previous abortive attempts at the same, such as putting Ubuntu on “netbook”-style laptops.

  • Samsung Chromebook: 12 things you need to know

  • Five Reasons why Google’s Linux Chromebook is a Windows killer

    When Google first started talking about Chrome OS, I thought it might be turn into a Windows killer. Well, now we know that the first commercial Chromebooks will be available in mid-June and there’s no question: Google is aiming right at the Windows business desktop market.

  • Why Google Chrome OS is Crucial for the Linux Desktop

    As Google Chrome OS nears a grand release, everyone is excited about a brand new operating system entering the monopolized desktop market. On the other hand, Mark Shuttleworth has set a target of 200 million Ubuntu users in the next four years. With Ubuntu 11.04 ‘Natty Narwhal’ not being as good as expected, Shuttleworth’s plans, if not impossible, may seem a bit too ambitious.

    Many people believe that Chrome OS’s release can further hamper Ubuntu’s stagnating growth. However, if we consider the recent desktop trends, and if everything goes well for Google, Chrome OS might actually be the magic boost Ubuntu so desperately needs. Here’s why:

  • Sergey Brin: Only 20% of Googlers still on Windows

    Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said that only about 20 per cent of Google’s employees are still using Microsoft Windows, and that all of those users are on Windows 7.

    He stressed, however, that he is not sure of the exact percentage.

    Rumors had indicated that within the company, Google had almost entirely banned Windows. Speaking at Google’s annual developer conference on Wednesday, where and when the company announced that it will offer Chrome OS notebook for a subscription fee, Brin said that Google hopes to move most of its employees to Google’s Chrome OS, an operating system that puts all applications inside the browser.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • LB – Episode 69 – Not Dead Yet by Linux Basement

• Kernel Space

  • Btrfs Support For Ubuntu’s Update Manager

    Eventually we will see Ubuntu Linux deploy Btrfs as the default file-system. While we will likely not see the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs with Ubuntu 11.10, there is work underway on Btrfs integration support into Ubuntu’s Update Manager.

    With Fedora 13, Red Hat introduced system roll-back support whereby anytime a yum transaction takes place for installing a new RPM package on a Btrfs root file-system, a snapshot will be created. Btrfs supports efficiently creating copy-on-write snapshots. Fedora has been quicker to adopt Btrfs installation support and its features, but now Canonical is finally supporting this path.

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • Skype-ing out an open source future

      Now, be honest: do you remember that aQuantive deal? Are you aware of any benefit that Microsoft has managed to extract from a purchase with that “shocking” purchase price? No, me neither. Now compare that acquisition with its current move, which has also “shocked” people for its “substantial overpayment”. Sounds like déjà vu all over again.

      But leaving all this shock aside, what will the impact of an undoubtedly important move be for open source?

      Whatever else it might mean, one consequence of the deal is that Microsoft now has less money in the bank, which will have knock-on consequences in all the markets it is active in. Given that it started out with $50 billion, and now has “only” $42 billion, you might think that effect will be minimal. But according to this interesting analysis, most of Microsoft’s money is held outside the US, which means that it’s actually quite constrained in the things it can do with it.

    • Evil Empire Buys Skype

      Now, before any Skype fan-boys get on soap boxes to tell Mr. Vaughan-Nichols and myself just how wrong we are, that Skype is worth every penny being paid and maybe even more, let me dig-up a few facts to explain our position. eBay bought Skype when it was a two year old start-up, in 2005, for $2.6 billion. A few years later, eBay was forced to admit to their shareholders they’d paid way too much. In 2009, they were happy to dump the company onto a group of investors for $2 billion, a $600 million loss. In the first six months of 2010, Skype finally realized a $13.2 million profit, after losing $99 million in 2009.

      As I like to do sometimes, let me quote the great television sage, Thomas Magnum: “I know what you’re thinking…”
      Easy AdSense by Unreal

      You’re thinking that Skype has to be worth gazillions of dollars because practically everyone on the planet is using it and it’s finally making a little bit of money.

    • Linux Community Working On Skype Alternatives!

      The message that Skype is being acquired by Microsoft got GNU/Linux community worried. There are indications that Microsoft may stop the Linux client of Skype. Microsoft won’t have to pull the binaries from the site. They can delay the development of Skype for Linux, either way Skype’s Linux kind is behind its Mac/Windows version.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Removing Files in Linux with rm

    • How to Install KDE In Ubuntu Natty [Quick Tips]

    • The Perfect Server – Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04) [ISPConfig 2]

    • Easily tweak the Unity desktop with ‘GUnity’

    • Suspend broken for X200 and X201 Thinkpad in Natty

    • How to manage networks in KVM – Tutorial

    • Removing Files in Linux with rm

    • How to Tweak Your SSD in Ubuntu for Better Performance

    • Three Ways to Identify Non-matching Records in MySQL

    • Track Multiple Files Simultaneously With MultiTail

    • Save your money: Three bad Linux books

      Not all Linux books are created equal. Some are amazingly good, and definitely worth buying. Others are a waste of money. Three specimens identified in this article are of the latter variety.

      The technical book market has seen legions of Linux-related books come through Amazon and brick-and-mortar store chains like Barnes & Noble. Over the years, I have acquired quite a few of them. On my shelf right now are:

• Desktop Environments

  • glibc – inconsistent interfaces due to arrogance

    To start off, I don’t actually mind arrogant people as long as they back their attitude up with some semblance of sanity, however arrogance without ability pisses me off, and it seems that its the number 1 trait to be a maintainer of glibc.

  • The Desktop Linux Paradox

    Believe me, I used to think Linux on the desktop was one user interface revamp away from hitting it big time. Now I realize the problem is much more fundamental: Linux was never created to serve an end-user market, and end users are hard to serve properly. The only way Linux can be so reworked is if someone removes it from its native environment and single-handedly shapes it into something else.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • New Features in digiKam 2.0: XMP Sidecar

    • I need a new distro version 2

      Recently I’ve been surveying a lot of KDE distros. I tried a lot of live cds and looked at a lot of videos and screenshots. Things have changed a little bit since I last searched for a distro. People have started modifying KDE (KDESC?) a bit more from the defaults but not by much certainly nothing that compares to how much Gnome2/Kde3 were/are customized. In any case I eventually decided I had to settle on something. So I went to my s.o.p for distro selection. Make a list and use each distro long enough to decide if it was something I could use with minimal annoyance. Here are my findings so far.

      [...]

      My next distro was going to be Arch. I have a great many good memories of my time on Arch.

    • Next Gen KDEPIM Coming in June with KDE 4.6.4

      KDEPIM users have been suffering through a variety of bugs and lagging development releases since KDE 4 first hit download mirrors. Developers tried to fix some, but others were just ignored or given up on. Now word is coming out of the project that KDEPIM 4.6 is finally coming, but will that fix users’ problems?

      Bugs have plagued KDEPIM ever since KDE 4 was released over three years ago. Some did get some attentions, but for the most part users were told to wait for the next major release. Well, that next major release is immenent, but according to a recent developer’s blog post, some of the same issues experienced in 4.4 will rear their wiggly heads in 4.6. In addition, other regressions are being reported as well.

    • Some News from the ALERT Project

      The ALERT Project, as already explained, aims to improve bug tracking and resolution in free software communities. KDE is participating as a project partner by providing expertise on how free software communities work and by providing testing and feedback for the ALERT software.

    • Resources and Activities

      After an update by Sebastian Kügler on the status of PlasmaActive, let’s see what’s happening lately on its semantic Contour user interface and backend.

      During Tokamak together Sebastian, we designed a plugin system for delegates of arbitrary Nepomuk resources.

    • What’s new in Plasma Active?

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Deja Dup (backup tool) to become default in gnome 3.2?

      As you probably know after the gnome 3.0 release developers are back on releasing the second iteration of the ‘awesome’ desktop, gnome 3.2. There have been discussions going on in gnome development lists. One of the discussions is about including deja dup backup as default in gnome. This will help to create a unified experience from the start.

    • Deja Dup (backup tool) to become default in gnome 3.2?

    • GNOME Board of Directors Elections 2011

      I can’t believe it’s been this long already, but it is time for yet another Board of Directors Election! Having had the opportunity to serve on the Board for these last 12 months, I want to encourage anyone who have the time and interest to improve the GNOME project to run for one of the seven spots on the Board of Directors! For more information on this, please read the official announcement here!

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • BackTrack 5 Release

    • Zenwalk Live version (ZenLive) 7.0 has been released!

      We are happy to announce the highly awaited Zenwalk Live 7.0, which will allow more people to try out Zenwalk without having to install it first.

      Zenwalk Live 7.0 is based on the sophisticated Slackware-Live-Scripts, being the first distribution using the brand new and not yet official released version 0.3.3

  • Gentoo Family

    • Sabayon 6, Entropy 1, a new Era is about to come

      It’s been some time since my last blog post, but if you’re a Sabayon user, you may know that I’ve been busy with a lot of stuff lately. Entropy eventually entered the final Beta phase: API documentation is complete, Entropy Services infrastructure has been rewritten from scratch taking advantage from the best communication protocol ever invented: HTTP (and JSON as “data format”), Sulfur eventually got its awaited speed boost (1.0_beta15), packages.sabayon.org has been deployed, www.sabayon.org will follow, Python 2.7 is now the default, same for GCC 4.5, and Entropy in general is as rock solid (and fast) as ever in all its 300.000+ lines of code, millions of line changes, that I’ve been able to work out in 4 years. You know, when you’re 20 you think everything is possible. Well, this time I was right and we can, today, all enjoy the most advanced and crazy package manager ever written by a single human being.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Rancore wins JBoss and Red Hat Innovator Awards

    • Why Choose Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Over VMware or Microsoft?

      Talk to Navin Thadani, Red Hat’s senior director, virtualization, and he’ll tell you that RHEV’s attractions are that it offers high-performance server virtualization, it’s scalable, and it’s very secure. And, perhaps most importantly, it offers “solid economics for customers.” What does that mean? It’s less expensive than Hyper-V and VMware, in other words.

      Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) doesn’t seem to sell RHEV based on the features it offers, and that’s probably because it lacks a few key ones. Despite Thadani promising as long ago as February 2010 that “you will be able to do an apples-for-apples feature comparison between us and VMware,” RHEV is still quite a few pieces of fruit short of a full picnic basket vis a vis VMware.

    • Fedora

      • Sometimes I just want my Computer to Work!

  • Debian Family

    • Debian Project at LinuxTag 2011

      The Debian Project is happy to announce that it will be again represented at the LinuxTag event in Berlin, Germany, this year. At the booth members of the project will be available for questions and discussions.

      The Debian booth will be at Hall 7.2b stand 118c. We invites users, developers and everyone else interested to visit it and ask questions, discuss technical issues and meet the Debian project and its developers in person.

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Ubuntu Weekly News Revival

        • Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

          Ubuntu 11.04, codenamed Natty Narwhal, rose from the depths last week. The update brings a number of significant new features to the Linux-based operating system. It includes a much-improved refresh of the Unity shell and a number of other significant improvements throughout the application stack.

          This is the first version of Ubuntu to ship with Unity on the desktop. Due to the far-reaching nature of the changes that accompany the transition to a new desktop shell, this review will focus almost entirely on Unity and how it impacts the Ubuntu user experience. We will also look at how Unity compares with GNOME 3.0 and the classic GNOME experience.

        • Nouveau Gallium3D, LLVMpipe In Ubuntu 11.10?

          - Nouveau Gallium3D will finally be enabled by default, hopefully. For the past few releases it’s been optional in the package repository, but now it’s finally ready to enter the limelight. Why? Largely because upstream Nouveau developers are willing to look at Gallium3D bug reports, according to Canonical. There’s still some concerns by the Ubuntu X developers over the state of the OpenGL driver, but following my comments — and noting that the Nouveau support can be like a game of Russian Roulette depending upon the kernels — they’ll still likely move forward. In enabling this open-source NVIDIA driver, users could then use the new Unity (3D) desktop without the NVIDIA binary driver. The enabling will likely occur soon for Oneiric but if there’s too much fall-out around the time of Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3, the feature could be reverted.

        • [UDS Updates] Evolution For Now, But Thunderbird Will be Default if Proper Desktop Integration Can be Done in Time

        • Ubuntu 11.10 To Switch From GDM To LightDM

          Earlier, during the Natty development cycle we reported that LightDM is being considered as a replacement for GDM. That did not happen for Ubuntu 11.04, but today it has been confirmed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest that LightDM is finally replacing GDM.

        • Lubuntu 11.04 review – If it’s good enough for Mark Shuttleworth…

          This lightweight distro could be the perfect match for your netbook or for that old computer you’ve refurbished. Find out why Mark Shuttleworth has seen fit to welcome Lubuntu into the official Ubuntu family…

          Pros: Lubuntu 11.04 is a mature Ubuntu derivative featuring the LXDE desktop environment and lightweight applications
          Cons: Some software choices are odd, and Lubuntu lacks the Ubuntu Software Center. i586 processors aren’t supported any more
          Homepage: Lubuntu.net

        • LightDM, or: an examination of a misunderstanding of the problem

          LightDM’s a from-scratch implementation of an X display manager, ie the piece of software that handles remote X connections, starts any local X servers, provides a login screen and kicks off the initial user session. It’s split into a nominally desktop-agnostic core (built directly on xcb and glib) and greeters, the idea being that it’s straightforward to implement an environment-specific greeter that integrates nicely with your desktop session. It’s about 6500 lines of code in the core, 3500 lines of code in the gtk bindings to the core and about 1000 in the sample gtk greeter, for a total of about 11,000 lines of code for a full implementation. This compares to getting on for 60,000 in gdm. Ubuntu plan to switch to LightDM in their next release (11.10).

• Devices/Embedded

  • Timesys adds LinuxLink support for MIPS SoC, announces free embedded Linux training series

  • Camera supports multiple machine vision apps

    Ximea GmbH announced Linux-compatible “smart cameras” that include Intel Atom processors and color image sensors ranging from WVGA (752 x 480 pixels) to five megapixels. The Curerra-R devices offer 1GB to 4GB of flash storage, microSD slots, VGA and Ethernet ports, and isolated digital I/O, the company says.

  • Phones

    • Android

      • How Google Is Winning the Hearts and Minds of Software Developers

  • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

    • Cisco gains new carrier for Android tablet, but warns of new layoffs

      AT&T announced it will offer Cisco Systems’ seven-inch Android-based Cius tablet this fall, tuned to its 4G HSPA+ network as part of a new billion dollar plan by the carrier to offer “next-generation services for businesses.” Meanwhile, struggling Cisco announced fiscal 3Q earnings showing a 17.6 percent loss in net income, and warned of more job cuts to come.

Free Software/Open Source

• GNU Radio – Opensource Software Defined Radio (SDR)

  GNU Radio is an open source Software Defined Radio (SDR) project that was started about ten years ago by Eric Blossom, an electrical engineer. The main idea which is behind this project, as its founder says, was to turn all the hardware problems into software problems, that is move the complexity of a radio equipment from the hardware level to the software one, and get the software as close to the antenna as possible.

• What Do Your Processes Say About Your Free Software Project?

  In an effort to broaden my horizons beyond writing code, I’ve been reading a lot of business books lately. Coming from a mostly Free Software background, it’s been an enlightening experience1. One thing sticks out the most: Processes matter, and they matter more than I ever thought.

  It’s common for me to contribute to random projects. Launchpad and Github and the like make it easy (can we get a Launchpad version of this shirt2?). However, I’m not likely to contribute to a project that has a HACKING document longer than any source file in the entire tree. If it takes me longer to figure out how to send a patch than it takes to write the patch, there might be some problems.

• Open source designer Ian ‘Izo’ Cylkowski talks tools, design tips and talent

  If the name sounds familiar then it should. Ian is an active designer within the open source community – for example, he created the logo for the semantic app launch tool ‘Synapse’ and has been working with the Novacut team on creating a brand identity for the project.

• Events

  • First day at Solutions Linux 2011

  • Second day at Solutions Linux 2011

    I attended in the morning the round table on Governance lead by ALexandre Zapolsky (Linagora)

• Web Browsers

  • Chrome

    • Angry Birds for Chrome Browser

      Just noticed that Angry Birds is now online at http://chrome.angrybirds.com
      Plays pretty well in Chromium Browser. Takes a tad longer to load in Firefox. Most people seem to be able to play the game. Some though appear to have some graphic issues. I’m using the fglrx driver along with Flash 10.3 RC without issue. Check it out if you need a little time waster. *Warning* Game can be addictive. Level 20 here I come!!!

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla: It Has a Spinal Cord

      I know I’m a little late with this news, but that’s because I was kind of busy earlier in the week. Anyway, the news (Nate Anderson, Ars Technica) is that the US government (specifically, the Department of Homeland Security) tried to force Mozilla to remove an add-on for Firefox called MAFIAAFire. The DHS a few months ago seized tens of thousands of website domains without a warrant and without due process; only a few (countable on two hands) of those were truly harmful in any way, while the vast majority of those sites were perfectly legal. MAFIAAFire, whose name jabs at the RIAA and MPAA (frequently referred to as the “MAFIAA” in technology circles), essentially redirects searches for the old domains to the new domains where the content is now hosted. The DHS claims that such redirection violates the orders regarding the original seizures.

    • Mozilla Halts Updates For Firefox 3.5

      Mozilla is currently preparing to phase out Firefox 3.5 and said that it will not release further major updates for the browser version.

• Project Releases

  • Review: Boxee Box firmware v1.1 arrives

    Boxee released the second major update to the D-Link Boxee Box’s firmware today. The new v1.1 release adds a variety of content channels for both movies and shows, enhances the device’s browser functionality, improves the consistency of its user interface, and squashes numerous bugs.

    The new firmware (numbered 1.1.0.19036) will be pushed out to users’ Boxee Boxes gradually over the next 48 hours, according to Boxee VP of marketing Andrew Kippen. While there will be numerous mostly unseen fixes, changes, and enhancements under the hood, here’s a run-down of the more noticeable improvements…

Leftovers

• Censorship

  • Is Vietnam blocking Facebook?

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• What Linux Needs Is Some Good Marketing

  That’s a great and powerful thing for Linux in general–regardless of the resistance Unity has encountered from some longtime users–and it amazes me to see how far Canonical has come with its mainstream focus. If Linux is to enjoy more success in “the masses,” then this step had to be taken.

  Now that we seem to be getting this close, however, it’s making me think more than ever about what Linux still needs, and one of the biggest things I see is marketing.

• Linux Heavily Used in the Enterprise by 1999 – And SCO Knew It or Could/Should Have

  Remember how SCO told the court in SCO v. IBM that Linux wasn’t ready for the enterprise until IBM got involved in the year 2000 and allegedly worked to make it “hardened” for the enterprise by donating code? It said that it wasn’t until 2001, with version 2.4 of Linux, that Linux was ready for enterprise use. Linux, SCO said, was just a bicycle compared to UNIX, the luxury car, until IBM did all that.

• Server

  • Portable thin client has dual-core AMD G-Series processor

    Wyse introduced a mobile thin client using AMD’s dual-core G-Series T56N processor, with integral Radeon HD6310 graphics, and soon to be available with SUSE Linux. The X90m7 offers a 14-inch display with 1366 x 768 pixels, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n wireless networking, 2GB of RAM and 4GB of flash storage, plus a “2G/4G capable” ExpressCard slot and optional smart card reader, the company says.

• Kernel Space

  • The kernel column #100 with Jon Masters – 100 issues of kernel updates

    To help celebrate Linux User’s landmark 100th issue which goes on sale tomorrow, celebrated Linux Kernel contributor, Jon Masters, recounts some of the biggest developments in the Linux Kernel over the magazine’s last 100 issues…

    I remember the first article I wrote for Linux User & Developer, way back in issue number one. It was a review of the first OpenOffice.org release, following the announcement by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) that it was open-sourcing its Star Office product. Times have certainly changed. Sun is no more, and indeed OpenOffice.org has itself been forked (somewhat without enthusiasm from Oracle) into LibreOffice. In that same time period, untold changes have occurred within the Linux kernel community, which has grown in both size and complexity, along with its body of code…

  • Graphics Stack

    • A Look At Nouveau Driver Power Usage

      There’s been many individuals asking how the work is going in tracking down the major Linux kernel power regression I brought to light late last month (actually, there’s at least two power regressions in the kernel). Not much progress has been made since then as I’ve been out of the office (and country) so I’ve been preoccupied with other matters, but I do happen to have another power test today to satisfy other reader requests.

• Applications

  • Talking Point: Overlapping Windows

    Back in the 80s, a GUI paradigm called WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) began to establish itself as the new way in which most people interacted with computers. When it comes to one of the most significant elements of that system, overlapping windows, I’m beginning to wonder, has it had its day?

    One of few things that Microsoft can claim to have developed from scratch is an efficient method of application switching called the taskbar, although it’s now in the process of being superseded on most GUIs by the application dock. One side-effect of that form of program management is that it doesn’t penalize the user for running applications fullscreen, and it therefore encourages it. You can glean some ideas about modern user behavior by observing that, in the most popular WM themes and skins, the areas of the window that are used for resizing have almost disappeared. The truth is, if you use Gnome or KDE, you probably run most of your apps fullscreen, most of the time.

  • Proprietary

    • Skype to Microsoft ? It’s time to know XMPP/Jingle

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • How to install django (or run it without installing it at all) without administrative permissions

  • Games

    • Exclusive Hands On Review : Steel Storm ‘Burning Retribution’ Released for Linux

      Alexander Zubov from Kot-in-Action Creative Artel sent us the announcement news about availability of Steel Storm : Burning Retribution a.k.a Episode II on Steam, Desura, Ubuntu Software Center and Kot-in-Action e-Shoppe for the price of $9.99.

• Desktop Environments

  • Starting to see more systems with Xfce 4.8 and KDE 4.6.3

    Xfce and KDE are the two desktop environments that I most commonly use, so it is nice when I see distributions that update these environments and keep them close to the most currently available software. In the case of Xfce, Version 4.8 was released near the end of January, so any distribution that offers Xfce really ought to have Version 4.8 available, and the good news is that most of the distributions that I use are now offering Version 4.8, and most of them have the patches that have been added to Xfce 4.8, and some packages are labelled as high as 4.8.3.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Responses to Qt 5

      It’s great to see so much feedback coming in about my Qt 5 blog two days ago. We’ve read and gone through all the comments, but it’s easier to try to answer the questions and concerns in a follow-up post rather than replying to comments.

      We have now created a mailing list for discussions about Qt 5. If you’re interested, please consider subscribing. This will allow us to have better and more structured discussions around Qt 5 than replies to a blog post.

    • relax

      After my last blog about a possible future KDE Platform 5 due to Qt 5, it was interesting to watch the number of “Oh no, not another big release that will break the interface we know!” type comments. Let me put all of that to rest:

      The Plasma team has no intention, desire or need to start “from scratch” nor engage in a massive redesign of the existing netbook or desktop shells.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • Gnome 3 And Ubuntu Unity Interfaces: Review

      The next Long Term Support version of Canonical’s Ubuntu is set to ship a year from now, with an October release of the OS in between to address usability and hardware fallback issues. A 2D version of Unity is already available in the Ubuntu repositories. As for GNOME Shell, it’s not clear when the new interface will make its way into the enterprise operating systems from Red Hat, Novell or Oracle.

• Distributions

  • New Releases

    • BackTrack 5 Has Been Released, Download Now

      Offensive Security, leaders in Online information security training, proudly announced a few minutes ago, May 10th, the immediate availability for download of the new and highly anticipated BackTrack 5 release, an extremely popular security oriented operating system.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat honors UW-Madison partnership, contribution to research computing

      Red Hat Inc., the world’s largest open-source software company, has given the first Red Hat Cloud Leadership Award to the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and named the CHTC its first Red Hat Center of Excellence Development Partner.

      Red Hat and UW-Madison have worked together for four years to integrate into the company’s products research and software produced by the university’s Condor Project — technology widely adopted worldwide by the scientific community to distribute complex computing problems across existing networks (“grids” or “clouds” of computers).

    • Red Hat Elected to DMTF Board of Directors

    • Red Hat’s KVM: A better way to virtualize the data center?

      When you virtualize your servers, do you divide them by operating system, or is it practical to use a bare-metal hypervisor to support all your x86 operating systems?

      That’s what Red Hat thinks is the best idea – which is why it thinks you would be better off virtualizing using KVM, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

      With Reg users reporting that the cost of licenses, the problems of managing multiple platforms and virtual machine sprawl are hurdles to virtualisation, the enthusiasm for virtualisation – and the success of early efforts – creates its own problems.

    • Fedora

      • More thoughts on the Fedora Feature Process

        This is the second release running that another component of the Fedora Feature process has come and bitten me in the proverbial. This time its the “Major Features”(tm), must be landed by the Alpha release, part of the process.

        For Fedora 14 the feature that abused this requirement was python 2.7. Rather than landing by the Alpha release it landed moments before we locked down for the Beta breaking things horribly and causing massive amounts of work post Beta when we were suppose to be stabilising the release. This affected Sugar amongst massively as that’s the language its primarily written in.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • The Goal is 200 Million Ubuntu Users in 4 Years – Mark Shuttleworth at UDS[Video]

          “Our goal is 200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years”, said Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, while delivering the keynote address to the attendees of the Ubuntu Developer Summit, currently taking place in Budapest, Hungary.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Lubuntu to become official Ubuntu derivative

            According to reports, the Lubuntu Linux distribution will become an official Ubuntu derivative. As a fully supported release, its desktop packages will be made available in the Ubuntu repositories for anyone to install – other official derivatives include Kubuntu and Xubuntu.

            In a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), which is currently taking place in Budapest, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu Devleoper Colin Watson discussed the details of integrating Lubuntu into the Ubuntu ecosystem with project member Julien Lavergne. Topics ranged from ISO building to Ubuntu One and a global menu.

          • Linux Mint 11 “Katya” Review

            After testing Linux Mint 11, one word comes to mind: Continuity. Katya does include several new features and enhancements which improve the product further, no doubt about it, but are they enough for Linux Mint 10 users to dump their current installation and upgrade? I personally don’t think so.

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google Activates 400,000 Android Devices Every Day Now!

          During the Google I/O 2011 keynote address, director of Android product management, Hugo Barra, presented a number of interesting statistics. Google has now activated more than 100 million Android devices worldwide and as of April 2011, Google is activating nearly 400,000 Android devices every single day. That number was just around 100,000 just an year ago!

        • Android 3.1 released, as Ice Cream Sandwich waits in the wings

          At the Google I/O conference, Google announced Android 3.1, an update that fixes bugs, tweaks the UI, improves USB support, and adds an Arduino-based Android Open Accessory gadget control platform. Briefly tipping an upcoming “Ice Cream Sandwich” release that will integrate Android 2.x and 3.x, Google also announced Android Market movie rentals, an 18-month Android upgrade program, and an Android@Home home-automation framework.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets/Laptops

      • Google To Announce Chrome Laptops-$20/Month

        Google tomorrow will announce sales of the new Chrome laptop in a $20 a month “student package” that combines both hardware and online services, according to a senior Google executive.
        The product is almost certainly a precursor to an enterprise offering. Google Apps, an online product with features similar to Microsoft Office (word processing, spreadsheets, calendars, and other productivity software) is sold to business for $50 a year

      • Acer and Samsung unveil Chrome OS ‘Chromebooks’

        Samsung and Acer will start selling the first Google Chrome OS notebooks starting June 15, priced from $349 to $499 but also available as part of monthly business/school subscriptions. The 12.1-inch Samsung Chromebook Series 5 and the 11.6-inch Acer Chromebook offer dual-core 1.66GHz Intel Atom N570 processors, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 16GB solid state disk, memory card reader, a webcam, USB, Wi-Fi, and optional 3G.

Free Software/Open Source

• Time for a new open source definition?

  Andrew C Oliver recently wrote “I think most know by now that a license is insufficient to make something actually open source.”

  What makes this fascinating is that it involves a director of the Open Source Initiative – the stewards of the Open Source Definition – stating that the Open Source Definition is not enough to define software as open source.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • SeaMonkey: More Than Just a Firefox Clone

      SeaMonkey is a good browser choice and solid alternative to the more popular and traditional Linux-based Web browsers. It will seem like home if you come to it from Firefox.

      If you are an enamored add-on user, the more limited extensions inventory may disappoint you. But its configurability can make up for this. All in all, SeaMonkey is a full-feature

    • [Mozilla] Merge dates vs release dates

      The schedule on the rapid release process specifics document generally focuses on merge dates. There is some confusion as to what to expect on those dates, so hopefully this post will make it clear.

      The main takeaway is that the merge date is not necessarily the date users on a particular update channel will see an update available.

• SaaS

  • 
    Cloud Computing Class : Lesson 1

  • Another cloud deal points to changes, openness

    I recently wrote about big changes afoot in the Linux market, the topic of a current special report I’m writing. We’ve seen significant changes in the Linux landscape and market in the past 10-15 years — including its enterprise fight and victory over SCO, its rise to dominance in HPC and, more recently, the faster, broader Linux kernel development that continues to remain strong. However, no change has been as significant as cloud computing.

  • DataStax Releases Dramatically Simpler, More Reliable, High-Performance Hadoop Solution

    Today, DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra™, released DataStax’ Brisk – a second-generation open-source Hadoop distribution that eliminates the key operational complexities with deploying and running Hadoop and Hive in production. Brisk is powered by Cassandra and offers a single platform containing a low-latency database for extremely high-volume web and real-time applications, while providing tightly coupled Hadoop and Hive analytics.

  • EMC Delivers Hadoop ‘Big Data’ Analytics to the Enterprise

  • Mellanox Accelerates Hadoop and Memcached for Web 2.0 Applications

  • Ubuntu Cloud: OpenStack Wins, Eucalyptus Loses

• Oracle/Java/Sun/LibreOffice

  • SGI Expands Support for Lustre File System

    SGI), a trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that it is expanding its support of the Lustre® file system to include Level 3 support, and now provides complete end-to-end coverage for its customers. Lustre is a massively parallel file system, capable of supporting compute clusters of thousands of nodes and many petabytes of storage. The addition of Level 3 support brings the SGI® Lustre® solution for scale-out computing environments to a support level equivalent to CXFSTM, SGI’s own high-performance scale-up clustered file system.

  • Sonatype donates Maven 3.x integration, Eclipse Integration to Hudson

    We’re very excited about the proposed move of Hudson to the Eclipse foundation. To get the project off the right start in its new home, Sonatype has committed to donating all our Maven 3.x related work to the Hudson project. This includes the Maven 3.x integration for Hudson itself, our Eclipse integration, and our Maven Shell integration.

  • Some Observations on Oracle v. Google, by Mark Webbink, Esq.

    Google believed (and believes) it avoided this licensing structure by implementing a clean room version of the Java runtime. The problem with clean rooms is that, while they may help avoid copyright claims, they are not particularly helpful in avoiding patent claims — the ol’ two-edge sword of software. So if you are going to develop a new implementation of something like the Java run-time environment, you have to not only use a clean room in order to avoid copyright claims, you also have to work around any relevant patents (and this doesn’t require a clean room). Suffice it to say that the approach Google has taken has some potential holes in it with respect to patents. Of course, Google believes the Oracle patents are either invalid or not infringed in this instance. [Editorial aside – none of this commentary is intended to imply that patents are a good thing for software; in the eyes of this writer they clearly are not.]

• Business

  • Global OpenICF Open Source Identity Connector Community Launched

    ForgeRock, the open source identity-oriented middleware company, joined with a global community of contributors today to launch a new open source community, OpenICF, to host multi-purpose connectors using the well-established Identity Connector Framework (ICF). The OpenICF Project will make interoperability between identity, compliance and risk management solutions easier and more reliable.

  • Vyatta and Cloud.com Partner to Deliver Advanced Networking in the Cloud

  • Semi-Open Source

    • MuleSoft Leapfrogs Integration Rivals with Mule Studio

    • Talend Introduces Industry’s First Unified Platform for Data Services with New ESB Offering

• Project Releases

  • Puppet Labs Releases MCollective Version 1.2.0

    The 1.2.0 release is the latest production release of MCollective and supersedes the 1.1.4 and older releases. This new MCollective release is fully backwards compatible with earlier releases. It is available for download at http://www.puppetlabs.com/mcollective/introduction/.

Leftovers

• Munich Migration Happily Crawls Along

  Limux is further along than halfway since all of the applications in use are now FLOSS but the operating system on 6000 PCs is now GNU/Linux. At the rate they are going sometime in 2012 12000 PCs will be running GNU/Linux. Apparently they will have 3000 still running that other OS when the migration is complete.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Babar Ahmed tells how the UK police that arrested him in 2003 beat him, then squeezed him in a headlock so he could not breathe. Medical tests support his accusations.

  • UK policemen told their commanders they saw Tomlinson hit shoved to the ground, and the commanders concealed this information from the investigation.

  • An inquest ruled that Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed by the policeman

• Cablegate

  • WikiLeaks’ Assange gets Australian peace prize

    WikiLeaks’ Australian founder Julian Assange, who enraged Washington by publishing thousands of secret U.S. diplomatic cables, was given a peace award on Tuesday for “exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights.”

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife

  • Oil Rush.

    A year after the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Republicans are trying to hasten a repeat performance. They got 4 million dollars from oil companies to promote global heating.

  • Aid funded Palm Oil Rush ruins Africa

  • Japan’s prime minister has decided to cancel construction of planned new nuclear reactors.

  • Peak floods on the Mississippi are a human-made disaster.

  • Video of recent flyover showing oil still in Gulf

  • The Yes Men take on asthma related bullying with Coal Cares

  • Lax NRC oversight in Alabama nuclear citation.

  • Concerns for weapons grade plutonium in US power generation. What do you do with 34 metric tons of plutonium?

  • Action taken to slow 14 subsidized reactors at seven sites across the US Southeast

  • Tokyo Electric building plants in US at taxpayer expense.

    The [Obama] Administration, just months ago, asked Congress to provide a $4 billion loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors to be built and operated on the Gulf Coast of Texas — by Tokyo Electric Power and local partners. As if the Gulf hasn’t suffered enough.

• Finance

  • Yves Smith – Financial Advisor and Former Goldman Sachs Employee

    Yves Smith has written quite a bit on the financial crisis. She has experience on Wall Street, Banking and writing as her bio below will show. To more fully inform you, our reader, I felt it important to share with you some of her published articles in which she educates and informs us. Her current blog, Naked Capitalism is one I feel you should bookmark.

  • Regulators probe Goldman analyst communications

    Massachusetts securities regulators may charge Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) with improperly passing along analysts’ tips to top clients.

    The Massachusetts Securities Division is weighing administrative proceedings against the bank over communications among its analysts, sales staff and clients, according to Goldman’s quarterly filing with U.S. regulators.

  • In Fifty Days, Payments Innovation Will Stop In Silicon Valley

• PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

  • Meet the Nightingale Nurses

    The tobacco industry spends more than $1 million an HOUR to suggest that cigarette smoking is cool, glamorous, and fun.

  • ‘It’s not hard to quit’

  • 
    Rule of thumb: the opposite of what the US Chamber of Commerce says is good for the US.

  • Broadcasting Regulatory Policy CRTC 2011-308

    Proposed amendments to the Commission’s false or misleading news provisions

    The Commission announces that it will not amend the false or misleading news provisions set out in various Commission regulations.

    The Commission reminds the public that complaints that arise regarding the news content aired by broadcasters should be addressed to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC). The Commission will typically intervene in the complaint process only if the broadcaster in question is not a member in good standing of the CBSC or if the complaint has not been satisfactorily resolved by the CBSC.

    The Commission further reminds the public that for the Commission to take action on a complaint relating to the broadcast of false or misleading news, the breach of the false or misleading news provisions must be flagrant.

• Censorship

  • Turkish attempts at Internet controls protested

    “Censorship is always an opportunity, because it reveals a fear of reform. And if an organization is expressing a fear of reform, it is also expressing the fact that it can be reformed,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange boldly stated

  • Pakistan censors foreign journalists

  • Saudi Arabia

  • Iran censors with fake copyright claims.

  • Cutting edge censorship, see also Astroturf/PR.

    Their new hopes for regaining control are the micromanagement and censorship of search engines such as Google, through the criminalization of Web page linking, laws limiting the ability of Internet users to upload content, and related attacks on free speech and the open dissemination of knowledge. – Lauren Weinstein

  • Sri Lanka.

  • Facebook. Control and censorship are the point of Facebook.

  • China formed a new State Internet Information Office. The Great Firewall of China was built by Cisco, Microsoft and the usual suspects.

• Privacy

  • US Senate Mobile Privacy Hearings Confused and Distracted.

    PJ opines: These are the guys who write patent law. Sigh. And could someone check and see who Microsoft gives money to in Congress? There is something very odd about this, considering Microsoft’s privacy policies. Why only Apple and Google called on the carpet? Seriously. It feels like a smear campaign to me. And do you see why Groklaw matters? Folks making important decisions about tech don’t understand tech either, let alone patents. It’s scary

  • Alberta’s privacy commissioner stepping down

    The province is on the hunt for a new Information and Privacy Commissioner after the man who has served in the role for the past decade announced he is stepping down.

    Frank Work has been with the office for all its 16 years and has been commissioner since 2002. His current term concludes at the end of the year, after which “there are some other endeavours I wish to turn my attention to,” he said in a statement Wednesday.

• Civil Rights

  • A new Gaza aid fleet will set out in June, including once again the Mavi Marmara on which activists were killed last time by Israeli troops.

  • RMS put himself on Amtrak’s “no-ride” list when Amtrak made passengers identify themselves. He’d rather take a bus anonymously. Now US Senator Schumer says Amtrak should check passengers against a real no-ride list as if terrorist needed a ticket to blow up trains or riders could create some unpredictable disaster.

  • Utah Court Strikes Blow for Free Speech, Dismisses Trademark and CFAA Claims Against Political Activists

    As we’ve noted before, many trademark owners are none too happy when political activists use their marks as part of a larger statement about the owners’ business or political practices. Sometimes, that unhappiness takes the form of improper legal threats and even lawsuits designed to silence critical speech. In a ruling issued today, a federal judge called a halt to one such lawsuit, affirming the essential balance between trademark rights and free speech.

    The case has its origin in a brief action carried out by members of Youth For Climate Truth (YFCT), a group concerned about climate change. The action targeted Koch Industries, a billion dollar company that has publicly challenged the science behind climate change theories. Borrowing “identity correction” techniques pioneered by groups such as the Yes Men, YFCT issued a press release, purportedly from Koch, in which the company promised to stop funding organizations that deny climate change. The release was posted for a few hours on a website (www.koch-inc.com) that partially imitated Koch Industries’ own website. The action received some media coverage, but no press organization thought the release was real. If Koch were sensible, that should have been the end of it.

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • US attacks on New Zealand drug agency draw anger

    The US Trade Representative’s latest Special 301 report’s criticisms of New Zealand’s drug agency PHARMAC have drawn angry responses in that country.

    The UTSR’s newly-published annual report on intellectual property rights notes that the US pharmaceutical industry “continues to express concerns regarding, among other things, the transparency, fairness and predictability of the PHARMAC pricing and reimbursement regime, as well as the overall climate for innovative medicines in New Zealand.”

  • The Lawful Access Legislation: Does it Really Criminalize Linking & Anonymity?

    The government’s plans to include lawful access provisions within its omnibus crime bill has attracted mounting attention in recent days as many commentators express concern that the legislation could create criminal liability for linking to content that incites hatred and for using anonymous or false names online. The concerns started at the Free Dominion site and have since spread to Brian Lilley at the Toronto Sun and Jesse Brown’s blog at Maclean’s.

  • Trademarks

    • Department of Commerce Releases Worthless Report on Trademark Bullying

      if the “duty to police” might be driving trademark owners to be (over)zealous in their enforcement efforts, maybe we should fix the duty to police. After all, this “duty” isn’t in the statute at all; it’s barely in the caselaw

  • Copyrights

    • Attack on web anonymity

      The Intellectual Property Constituency has asked that, as a condition of Verisign’s ongoing management of the .NET top-level domain, that they should be required to act as private copyright cops. Among the IPC’s demands are that .NET domains should be subject to suspension on copyright complaints and that anonymous or privacy-shielded .NET domains should be abolished. – Cory Doctorow, boingboing

    • Portugese Socialists attempt to outlaw Creative Commons licenses and sharing without charge.

    • Lilley: Tory crime bill an attack on our liberty

      It is said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance and that’s just as true now, after the Conservative win, as it was before.

      I’m sure that some Tory supporters have been dancing in the streets singing Let Freedom Reign, but putting your faith in any one political party is having blind faith.

    • Billboard Article Changes Tune on Canadian Copyright Reform

      Last week, Billboard ran an article on what the Conservative majority government might mean for copyright reform. The article placed the spotlight on the sharp divide between the Canadian Recording Industry Association on one side and much of the remainder of the music industry on the other. While CRIA was one of Bill C-32′s most vocal supporters (aided by its Balanced Copyright for Canada site), many other music associations including collectives, songwriters, and publishers were sharply critical. This divide came through in the original article, noting that CRIA’s Graham Henderson told Billboard.biz that “he believes 90 percent of C-32 was agreed upon by members of the music industry ‘with just a difference of opinions on a couple of things’”.

    • ACTA

      • DHS warned in 2008 that ACTA was threat to US National Security

        ACTA would expend international goodwill by requiring other governments to change organizational and legal structures….[and] sweeping powers … could even harm small U.S. exporters competing with foreign companies favored by local governments.

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Podcast 89 Perseverance

• Kernel Space

  • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.39 (Part 4) – Drivers

    The kernel now supports USB 3.0 hubs, the latest Radeon graphics cards and Intel’s previously problematic GMA500 graphics. Other new additions include drivers for notebooks by ASUS and Samsung, and for audio and multimedia hardware from various other vendors.

    Linus Torvalds released the seventh pre-release of Linux 2.6.39 on Monday night. He wrote: “So things have been pretty quiet, and unless something major comes up I believe that this will be the last -rc”. If Torvalds sticks to his usual work patterns, then 2.6.39 could well be released early next week.

  • Linux 2.6.39 Kernel Is Imminent

    “So things have been pretty quiet, and unless something major comes up I believe that this will be the last -rc,” began Linus Torvalds in announcing the release of the Linux 2.6.39-rc7 kernel.

    [...]

    Bit more information on LKML.org. Overall the 2.6.39 kernel is turning out to be a great release so far, sans the outstanding power regressions.

  • Linux 2.6.39 nears completion

  • Optimus Fun Merged For Linux 2.6.40 Kernel

    In continuation of the recent topic about NVIDIA Optimus coming unofficially to Linux, Red Hat’s David Airlie has just pushed several patches into drm-next that deal with Optimus. These patches will be part of the DRM pull request to then go into the Linux 2.6.40 kernel once its merge window opens.

  • Linux, History, Contributors and Thanks

    One of first things we need to have clear here, is what we are calling Linux is it the GNU/Linux or the just the Linux Kernel. Well usually when people talk about Linux they are referring to GNU/Linux, but what is the difference?

  • Graphics Stack

    • Wayland, X.Org For Ubuntu’s Future

      I had some other Ubuntu testing matters to tend to, but the notes can be found on this page.

      Phoronix readers should already be very familiar with Wayland due to all the articles I’ve written on the topic and even being the first to break the story about Wayland way back in 2008. With that said, here’s the interesting bits from the notes:

• Applications

  • Proprietary

    • Microsoft deal will boost open Skype alternatives

      When rumors began circulating that Facebook was eyeing Skype for potential purchase, more than a few observers began to get nervous.

      Now that Microsoft has bought the VoIP leader, the shock in many circles is palpable. Widely viewed as primarily a defensive move, the acquisition has many wondering how Microsoft will integrate the service with offerings of its own — most notably Windows Live Messenger — not to mention how it will affect the 170 million or so Skype users around the globe.

    • Open Source alternatives for Skype

      So with Skype — already proprietary software, already dubious — probably going to Microsoft (as I read via Simon Phipps to the Grauniad and Johan Thelins) there’s an extra impetus to find something else.

    • Microsoft’s Skype acquisition may impact Linux users

      After a week of rumors about Skype being heavily courted by buyers such as Google and Facebook, it looks like the winning bidder may be Microsoft.

      According to a story the Wall Street Journal broke late Monday evening (and later confirmed early Tuesday morning), Microsoft has closed a nearly $8 billion deal for the popular voice-over-IP company.

      (In the video below, Keith Shaw talks with CIO.com’s Shane O’Neill about Microsoft’s $8.5 billion offer to buy Skype, and what it means for Microsoft’s consumer and enterprise voice offerings.)

    • Microsoft’s Ballmer $7.7-Billion Skype Blunder

      I’m bemused to see that Microsoft’s Grand Poobah Steve Ballmer has blundered yet again. This time, instead of Vista, the operating system that never should have seem the light of day, or Windows Phone 7, the far too little, too late, attempt to play in mobile devices, he’s wasted a cool $8.5-billion (Billion!) on Skype.

      Seriously? Ballmer just burned more money than Oracle did on buying Sun for a video-conferencing and Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) company? Come on! The only thing that Skype has over any of the dozens of other video-conferencing and VoIP companies out there is brand recognition and Skype’s brand is not worth $850-million much less $8.5-billion.

    • What Does Microsoft Buying Skype Mean For Linux?

      After speculations that Facebook is going after Skype, it has turned out that Microsoft too was interested. In fact, today, we heard that Microsoft has bought Skype for $ 8.5 billion.

      One thing that I wondered when I heard this new is what will happen to Skype on Linux. Everyone who has used the Skype client on Linux knows that it is not even anywhere near the level of the Windows and Mac client. The Linux client of Skype is plagued with problems of video chat, voice chat etc. And to top it off, there is the lack of updates.

    • Skype purchase highlights a weakness in “free enough” philosophy

      If you’re a Linux and heavy Skype user, the announcement that Microsoft is purchasing Skype no doubt sent shivers down your spine. You can relax, though: Steve Ballmer says everything will be OK. Reassuring, right?

      Ballmer has assured us that Microsoft will continue to provide Skype for “operating systems and devices not sold by Microsoft,” though I’m not sure that explicitly includes Linux. Let’s assume for a moment that it does include Linux, though — this is an obvious gap for free software nonetheless.

    • Opera — well worth a look

      The Opera Internet browser goes way on back to 1994 but has struggled for fans over the years.

      That’s a shame, too, as Opera is an incredibly useful Internet suite that — once configured — can do away with a heck of a lot of applications that a good number of users access daily.

    • LibreOffice 3.4 Will Have Native Support for Ubuntu Global Menu

      The Document Foundation and LibreOffice developers have been keeping quite busy. The foundation is busying itself getting ready for the LibreOffice Conference in Paris this fall, organizing speakers, accepting papers, and other thankless tasks while developers are coding full steam ahead.

      Version 3.4 will come with several new features besides its usual bug fixes and performance enhancements. For example, Writer will soon support color and line styles in columns and footers. Greek characters mode will be available for bullet lists too.

      Calc will soon be able to support multiple subtotals for a given subset of number ranges on a single sheet. A complete rewrite of the drawing layer will improve “precision on re-positioning and re-sizing of drawing objects.” Impress with sport improved HTML export with images.

    • Is Netflix Coming To Linux?

      Netflix is still not available on Linux platform. One of the reasons being, Netflix says that providers demand strong DRM (digital restriction management) which makes it hard to make content available under Linux.

      This is also one of the reasons Netflix is not available on Android. I think its time for Netflix to follow Apple and force providers to offer content without DRM.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Nix OS on a hetzner root server

    • Cron Vs Anacron: How to Setup Anacron on Linux (With an Example)

    • How to install Ubuntu 11.04 on an encrypted LVM file system

    • Practical SELinux for the beginner: Contexts and labels

    • Best Ways To Password Protect Files In Linux

    • Repository for Subversion over SSH Disappeared after Subversion Upgrade

    • overwriting glibc library functions

    • Cacti implementation on CentOS AMI

    • Manage various archive formats(tar, rar, zip, etc) in Ubuntu using Ark

    • Quick Tip: Use Blender on Multiple Monitors

    • How to install Basenji on ubuntu 11.04 (natty)

    • Troubleshooting kded4 Bugs

    • How To Generate an SSL Certificate For Your Website

    • Speed up Entropy

  • Games

    • Popular RTS Game MegaGlest 3.5.1 Released

      Popular open source 3D real time strategy game MegaGlest 3.5.1 has been released that brings many fixes and updates to the game.

• Desktop Environments

  • Fedora and Gnome 3, Ubuntu and Unity, will openSUSE and KDE benefit?

    Right now it seems like some of the top Linux distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu are heading down a slippery slope.

    Fedora 15 will be based on Gnome 3, it is still early days for the Gnome 3 project and over time I am confident it will get better but many (including myself) feel its not ready for use.

  • Are Usability Studies Hurting the Free Desktop?

    Few FOSS projects are as concerned with usability as GNOME and Ubuntu. For GNOME, the Sun usability study proved a turning point, especially when its lessons were codified and expanded into the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Qt5 .. KDE5?

      As most of those who read my blog have already heard, Qt5 is on its way. The target is 2012 and the focus is QtQuick where there is a high degree of separation between display and data and things are rendered using a hardware accelerated (read: OpenGL) scene graph. This is very much in line with where we are heading with Plasma as well. Exciting times!

    • Muon – KDE Package Manager and Software Center

      During the UDS sessions yesterday about Kubuntu Defaults there was an interesting demo regarding a package manager and software center called Muon.

      [...]

      I know I have left out TONs of features from this but, I wanted to show off something that is bringing Kubuntu forward in the way of assisting users.

    • Amarok 2.4.1 adds new “Preview” feature

      Code-named “Resolution”, Amarok 2.4.1 features the addition of a new “Preview” feature for the Organize Collection dialog, as well as support for remote NFS & SMB/CIFS collections. Users can now change text alignment in the lyrics applet and string filtering has been added to the albums applet.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • [UDS Updates] Gnome 3 Stack to Land in Oneiric, Rekonq Remains as Default Browser for Kubuntu

      In a session at Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest, it was confirmed that Ubuntu 11.10 will be based on Gnome 3 stack (though it has become quite obvious by now).

      The current Gnome 3 PPA for Ubuntu 11.04 will remain with Gnome 3.0 stack however Ubuntu 11.10 will have Gnome 3.1

    • Tron Legacy Theme For Gnome Shell

      Gnome Shell Theme inspired by Tron Legacy Movie. Thanks to half-left deviantart user. I Installed it in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and it’s working fine.

• Distributions

  • 50 Top Linux Distributions

    The list is organized into several different categories. The “major” distributions come first, followed by distros based on Ubuntu, Debian, Red/Hat Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, Arch and Gentoo. Next come some distros that are optimized for cloud computing, some very lightweight distributions, some that are designed to look as much like Windows as possible and finally, some notable distros that didn’t seem to fit into any other category. Of course, some distributions could fit into more than one category, but we tried to place them where they seemed to fit most naturally.

  • CTK Arch: Fast and Furious

    CTK Arch is very interesting distro from my perspective. It is well balanced between graphical and CLI sides of Linux. Maybe I am little bit too unexperienced for it yet, but still can do quite a lot there.
    I will not recommend CTK Arch for beginners. You need to be prepared to take some of challenges. But once you have some basic knowledge, then digging within CTK Arch will give you unrivalled pleasure of control over system!
    I should probably look into CTK Arch (or other Arch-based distros) later, when have more Linux experience myself.

  • On technical support, and other things

    So there seems to have been some discussion, lately, about this blog post by Jeff Hoogland on his experience asking a question in #fedora.

    I noticed that no-one has actually posted the discussion, yet, so I will: you can find the full log from Jeff’s initial question to when he leaves the channel at the end of this post. Note: my log is from bip and prints nicknames in an ugly and unreadable way so I went through and fixed those by hand, any errors in nicknames are my mistake, but I did not alter the text at all.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Fedora

      • Awesomeness!

        There have been a lot of people complaining about the Fedora community (Not planning to name any) and the way it works. I am not going to say that everything they say is false or made up, its their opinion and everyone should have one. Well from my opinion the Fedora community is just plain Awehellovcarfun (Yes I made a new word just to prove my point [Awesome + helping + loving + caring + fun]) Its like a fun family where there are all kinds of people, sure there might be some weird people around, but thats what a family is made up of.

      • Freeing up a Fedora Board seat

        As you can see from the Fedora Board History, I have held Elected Seat #5 since July 2008, and while I am rather proud of what we have accomplished during my tenure on the Fedora Board, I do not feel that it is healthy for a community to be run by the same people forever and ever. Accordingly, I will not be seeking re-election to the Fedora Board at this time. (I reserve the right to run in a future election, but I have no immediate plans to do so.)

      • Will Fedora Ever Learn?

        People can argue that Red Hat has nothing to with how Fedora’s ran. I was also told it’s distinctly outside of Red Hat. Then there’s the statement that the Fedora Unity Project runs the ‘Official’ Fedora Forums and the IRC channel(s), which Red Hat and Fedora have no control over. That’s all fine on paper, fact of the matter is Red Hat owns the Fedora trademark (which in my opinion means it owns the rights and responsibilities to Fedora, period), is its biggest sponsor, and it’s largest contributor. On top of that you have paid Red Hat employees conducting business for Red Hat and Fedora in the various Fedora IRC channels. If all of that wasn’t enough, the current Fedora Project Leader himself, Jared Smith, and every other project leader before him, has been an employee of Red Hat.

  • Debian Family

    • Derivatives

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • What’s happening in Edubuntu for Oneiric?

          Today we had a session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest covering the work in Edubuntu for the next release cycle. Not all of the items are assigned to someone yet (especially with the documentation), so if you’d like to get involved, please give us a ping on IRC or mailing list.

        • Shuttleworth bid to sell copyright policy

          He made the admission during his keynote to the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit which is taking place in Budapest this week.

          The experienced media operator that he is, Shuttleworth ensured that nobody would refer to this aspect of his speech by throwing out a figure of 200 million as being the number of users he aims for in four years – growth of nearly 1700 per cent, given that Ubuntu now has around 12 million users.

          That number has been spouted over and over again in the tech media and his statements on copyright assignment have been totally ignored. Which I think is what he intended – copyright assignment is a ticklish issue from which he has shied away.

        • 10 Useful Application Indicators for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal

          Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is probably the most criticized may be even a tad too under rated Ubuntu release ever. But as we had noted in our previous Ubuntu 11.04 review, it doesn’t feel that bad for everyone anyway. Application Indicators are good way to extend the functionality of brand new Ubuntu 11.04 and here are some of the most useful among them.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • LinuxMint11 “Katya” RC is released! | With Screenchots Tour

            With the release of Ubuntu 11.04, at the end of April, the countdown for Linux Mint new release had begun. As Lefebvre, the founder and developer of Linux Mint, announced the release candidate Katya for version 11 of Linux Mint, the moment of discovery is here.

          • Kubuntu 11.04

            The release of Ubuntu 11.04 has garnered an enormous amount of attention, mostly due to the inclusion of Unity as its default desktop environment. But, as with any new version of Ubuntu, there are alternatives available and one of the most prominent is Kubuntu. Kubuntu 11.04 is a KDE-based distro that might work well as a substitute for those who are uncomfortable with Ubuntu’s Unity.

            [...]

            Rating: 4/5

  • Devices/Embedded

    • SOURCE: Tilera Corporation

      Tilera® Corporation, the leader in manycore general purpose microprocessors, today announced the addition of Wind River support for their TILEPro and TILEGx processors. Such support enables Tilera customers to utilize state-of-the-art commercial Wind River Linux and Wind River Workbench tools and enables easy migration of legacy designs to Tilera’s scalable platform.

Free Software/Open Source

• Verizon Recognized for Technological Achievements and Innovation in Use of Open Source and Middleware Solutions

  Verizon has won in the Superior Alternatives category of the 2011 Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards competition. The award, announced during the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World on May 6 in Boston, recognizes Verizon for “the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.”

  Specifically, Verizon won the award for the company’s implementation of a new standards-based business process-management system for the company’s Integrated Management Platform for Advanced Communications Technologies automated platform, which monitors, troubleshoots and resolves network service interruptions.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • don’t let them* re-define open

      If you can substitute the word “participatory” for the word “open” and still be telling the truth, then you’re using “open” properly. If you cannot, then you are not.

    • Mozilla Aurora – There will be blood – and fun

      Whether Aurora is a pointer in the right direction, only time will tell. It could turn out to be a useless gimmick, a copycat feature with no purpose at all. On the other hand, it could become a powerful tool for developers and web designers. Increased exposure should guarantee fewer surprises, better compatibility and smoother transitions to new versions. This is particularly important for Firefox addon developers, who now must adapt to the new quick release cycle.

      Media hypes aside, I do believe Aurora has its place in the software testing tier. It’s a nice compromise between wider-use betas and wild nightlies, allowing more people to conduct checks and look for bugs without getting scarred by the experience. Overall, in the long run, such practice will draw in more people toward Firefox, or at the very least, make major releases easier and less painful, which is always a good thing.

      Aurora will always be a geek tool, but one with good potential of breeding a new generation of Firefox hardcore fans, obsessed with the thrill of living on the edge, the bleeding edge, where heroes are made or broken. Or at the very least, software is tested.

    • Mozilla Removes User Limit From Firefox 5 Beta

      Mozilla also revealed that there are 417,000 Firefox beta users in total, all of which will be eligible to sign up for the beta channel. If you are not part of the beta program yet, you can sign up for Firefox 5 Beta once it becomes available as a final build on May 17 here.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • 7 Nifty Tricks to Get the Most out of LibreOffice Writer

    Since the death of OpenOffice and the release of Ubuntu 11.04, LibreOffice has gained a lot of popularity in such a short amount of time. Though there is not much of a difference between LibreOffice Writer and its Oracle-owned predecessor, there are some tricks that can help you get the most out of it. Here’s a look at 7 such tricks.

• Licensing

  • Why Samba Switched to GPLv3

    This episode is a recording of Jeremy Allison’s talk, Why Samba Switched to GPLv3 from the 2011 Linux Collaboration Summit, with some commentary from Bradley and Karen on the talk.

  • Samba XP Keynote, Jeremy’s GPLv3 talk, & GPLv2/LGPLv3

• Openness/Sharing

  • First day at Libre Graphics Meeting

    So here I’m sitting at my desk at my “Cosy Studio” in the Therese Casgrain student housing facility/hotel calles Les Studios Hotel in Montreal. Too tired to do anything but nibble cherry tomatoes and drink a beer, after the first day at the Libre Graphics Meeting, 2011 edition.

    Perhaps slightly less busy than last year, and I’m missing a lot of familiar faces, but the quality of the talks has been outstanding so far. I’m working on experimentally getting colord up and running on my OpenSUSE laptop so I can check whether I can generate Qt bindings for the dbus interface to experiment with integration in Krita.

    If the number of questions people want to ask after a presentation is a measure of success, then Lukas’ Krita presentation was a huge success. By that metric, but also by any other metric was a huge success indeed! Lukas showed off all the new stuff we’ve created since LGM 2010 — and was followed by Animtim giving a workshop on creating a comic in Krita. The audience was completely silent as he used Krita’s mirroring feature, sketch brush, vector layers, hatching brush and color modes to quickly create the first panel for a comic. (But admittedly, I came away with notes on three points where Krita must improve, because Krita made Animtim fumble at times.)

• Standards/Consortia

  • PJ, Goodbye and Good Luck

    There was a time when daggers were drawn on Linux and its demise was plotted in dark detail. At that hour stepped out a shieldmaiden with a blog, and that blog was Groklaw. Eight years later, we hear the news that Groklaw will cease new postings after May 16th. My sadness in hearing this news is more than equaled by my gratitude to PJ and her community of researchers and commentators, for their enormous effort and unparalleled achievement over these years. The world is a better place because of PJ. Who can hope to say better?

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers
• Clip of the Day

GNU/Linux

• Return of the Linux Quiz

• We want our freedom!

  We’re celebrating the impending release of issue 100 this week. Kicking off the celebration is previous Linux User editor, Simon Brew who says we shouldn’t be afraid of opening our wallet for open source, but we should fight hammer and tongs to ensure freedom is kept at its core…

• Kernel Space

  • Ixonos Joins Linux Foundation

    Ixonos creates solutions for mobile devices and services for wireless technology suppliers and telecommunications companies, as well as mobile device and consumer electronics manufacturers. It has been actively involved in mobile Linux development efforts since 2006 and joins The Linux Foundation today to maximize its investment in the operating system. The company will collaborate with other leading vendors, users and developers to help advance Linux-based mobile platforms, including Android and MeeGo.

  • Linux Kernel Benchmarks Of 2.6.24 Through 2.6.39

    With the recent look at the major Linux power regressions taking place within the Linux kernel, some initially wondered if the increase in power consumption was correlated to an increase in system performance. Unfortunately, it is clear now that is not the case. With that said though, here’s some performance benchmarks of all major kernel releases going back to Linux 2.6.24 and ending with the Linux 2.6.39 kernel.

  • Linux 2.6.32.40

• Applications

  • Say Cheese, Webcam Effects Demo

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Universal USB Installer, Install, Run Linux From USB

      I just got the replacement battery for my Acer Aspire 3810T and decided to make a clean cut. Instead of continuing to use Windows 7 as the operating system I have decided to install the latest Ubuntu on the notebook. I’m not using the device that often, actually only if I’m on holiday, and I thought it would be a good way to start fiddling around with a Linux desktop OS.

      The Acer laptop comes without optical drive, which means that I have to install Linux from an USB device. But how do you get the Linux installation files on the USB device and ensure that Linux can be booted and installed from the device?

    • How I would make the Toshiba AC100 successful

    • Best Books For LPI Training

    • Linux stat Command

    • Introduction to Network Security Toolkit (NST)

    • Installing KVM Guests With virt-install On Ubuntu 11.04 Server

    • Rebuild KVM/QEMU to support SPICE on Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal)

    • How To Generate an SSL Certificate For Your Website

    • Ebook Publishing Using Linux Tools

    • Introduction to Network Security Toolkit (NST)

    • Create a Simple Scratchpad with Autokey

    • Converting videos in Ubuntu using FFMPEG | The ultimate free video converter

    • Ganglia installation on CentOS

    • Plymouth Manager – GUI tool to change boot theme and resolution

    • How To Record Podcast Using Audacity

    • An easy way to add/change Grub2 background image in Ubuntu 11.04

    • Linux racing game ‘Speed Dreams 2.0′ hits third alpha

    • Gamma-correct image scaling

    • Home directory and full disk encryption in Ubuntu 11.04

    • Option to disable KDE wallet in Rekonq

      I have this habit, or paranoia rather, of not storing my passwords with the browser. I never let the browser remember passwords for me. Maybe this is because a lot of my friends use my laptop at times, and it becomes risky to have autologin on for websites. So whenever I use a browser, the first thing I do is turn off the ‘Offer to store passwords’ option or similar. I was sad that Rekonq, my favourite browser, did not have this feature. So I wrote this patch that adds a setting which allows the user to disable the notification saying “Do you want to store the …” by unchecking a checkbox. Here goes a screenshot -

  • Games

    • Discover the Physics of Gaming on Trine

      Trine is a familiar Alternative Games (for Linux) release as part of the Humble Indie Bundle (third). An original FrozenByte product, it is for those gamers who want the logic of puzzle solving in their hardcore gaming environment. Add to it the fact that it is developed around popular concepts of physics and …that it is today offered as open source Linux game the joy of exploring it visibly doubles, triples!

• Desktop Environments

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

    • Thoughts about Qt 5

      Qt 4.0 was released in June 2005, almost six years ago. A lot has changed in the software industry over these years. While application development back then happened mostly on desktop systems, mobile devices connected to the web have become increasingly popular. User interface technology has moved from static widgets to a fluid touch based experience. Since Qt 4.0 we have released seven minor versions of Qt to stay ahead of development needs, for example by releasing Qt Quick. Within the growing Qt user base, we have had a strong up-take and new needs from embedded and mobile app and UI developers.

    • Kdenlive 0.8 Released

      April saw the release of Kdenlive 0.8. I’ll take you through some of the new features, along with some notes on how I built it for Debian Sid.

      Kdenlive 0.8 is a release that fixes bugs and adds new features rather than being a complete departure from the previous version, probably welcome news to the regular users. New features aside, my hope for this revision is that it can overcome the main shortcoming of Linux video editing programs: poor stability. It didn’t crash while I was testing it, but user feedback in the long term will be the real indicator of improvements that have been made in this area.

    • Blessed by Trinity…

      I am long established fan of KDE3 (Trinity). There might be 2 reasons:
      1) My first ever Linux was SLAX which is based on KDE3.
      2) I prefer old-school menu style with one column in main part with branches for each of them. When I see several columns in main menu I quickly get lost in navigation. It’s like Win95 style compared to Win7 style. Or KDE3 compared to Mint Menu or KDE4 in some Linuxes.
      That’s why every Tux which is blessed by Trinity is interesting for me. That’s why I am very thankful to Sirius Lee who gave me some more ideas in the comments to Pardus review.

  • GNOME Desktop

    • GNOME3 versus GNOME2 debates

      In the past couple of months, I like many others have been caught up in the GNOME3/Unity changes and the various debates of “are they good, are they evil.” I have continually had this case of deja-vu as if the words being said were ones I had heard before but maybe slightly different. While having deja-vu a couple of times is normal, having it constantly means I am probably “Forgetting History” and “Doomed to Relive It” (or some variant of the quote.)

• Distributions

  • What next?

    Yeah, continuing from where i left it off, the Linux journey got more interesting this year. 1st because i wanted a little more adventure and installed Arch. Later on, my motherboard requested for retirement by breaking down, and hence had to either resurrect or renovate it. I chose the latter.

    Installing Arch, was intimidating when i did it on my old box. Venturing into a mouse-less world was a new thing and till i was at the end of the official Arch installation guide, i was skeptical about the whole idea. Once up and running with proper interface and stuff, the experience was better than that of Ubuntu, partly because I know what was, is and will be present in my system, and also coz my veteran system was able to satisfy my demands for a crisp freeze-less response.

  • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

    • Meet Mandriva at the Solutions Linux 2011 exhibition

      Beside the products and partnerships presentations, Mandriva will outline its new strategy and market positionning. The research activities of the company will also be described, showing how Mandriva is preparing the future by innovating in the key areas of Cloud Computing, formal methods applied to the enhancement of the Linux kernel, Enterprise 2.0, smart devices and Green IT.

  • Gentoo Family

    • Poster “Gentoo Abducted”

      Back in 2004 Matteo “Peach” Pescarin did a poster edit of his “Gentoo Abducted” wallpaper. The poster is portrait format and shows a city in background, instead of countryside, if you look close. He has now re-released its SVG sources.

  • Red Hat Family

    • Red Hat gives Windows the boot with RHEV 3.0

      RHEV-M manages Red Hat’s version of the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor (KVM) and is based on Microsoft .NET. The software will be ported to a Java code base in the next version, which will be out in beta later this year, according to previews at this year’s Red Hat Summit. The Microsoft SQL database on RHEV-M’s back end will be replaced by PostgreSQL.

      Users at the recent Red Hat Summit conference said that this change can’t come soon enough. Travis Tiedemann, systems engineer at Union Pacific Railroad, said he’s sticking to Xen virtualization until RHEV runs on Linux. “We’re waiting to bring in the RHEV product,” he said. “When it’s fully Linux, we’ll start looking at KVM.”

    • Red Hat, Eucalyptus, Rackspace leading open source IaaS charge

      The emergence of several open source Infrastructure-As-A-Service platforms must have VMware and Microsoft on edge.

      Linux leader Red Hat joined the fray last week with the public debut of CloudForms, its cross platform multifaceted IaaS platform for building private and hybrid clouds. It is based on Red Hat’s DeltaCloud APIs.

      There are several others, namely Eucalyptus, Cloud.com and Rackspace.

    • Red Hat Elected to DMTF Board of Directors

      The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the organization bringing the IT industry together to collaborate on systems management standards development, validation, promotion and adoption, today announced that open source solutions provider Red Hat has joined the DMTF Board of Directors. The addition of the industry-leading company adds to DMTF’s expanding presence in the IT industry. Red Hat joins AMD, Broadcom, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix Systems Inc., EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle and VMware to continue DMTF’s mission to enable interoperable IT management solutions.

  • Debian Family

    • Debian wheezy: Perl 5.12, X Server 1.10, Nvidia 270.41.06, Java 6.25, Glibc 2.13

      This past week has been quite turbulent for Debian wheezy. Mostly because of the great Perl upgrade from 5.10 to 5.12. This included rebuilding of hundreds of Perl modules to play well with new version of Perl. Most of the time I had all this stuff put on hold, and only yesterday have I found guts to digest all 300 of new packages. For one day I was without trusty pidgin, but today even that popular messenger has been recompiled to work with Perl 5.12. There’s still a small number of perl modules (like libembperl-perl, libgimp-perl, libgstreamer-perl, libjifty-perl, etc…) not yet adapted, but I’m sure we won’t wait long until each and every perl module has been upgraded to fit Perl 5.12.

    • Derivatives

      • SimplyMEPIS 11 adds LibreOffice and a faster Firefox 4

        The MEPIS project announced the release of the Debian Linux based SimplyMEPIS distribution. SimplyMEPIS 11 moves up to Linux kernel 2.6.36.4 and the KDE 4.51 desktop, switches from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice 3.3.2, and provides FireFox 4.0, which was recently recompiled to run much faster on Linux.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu

        • Reviews: A look at Ubuntu 11.04

          In conclusion, I’d have to sum up my experiences with Ubuntu 11.04 as being generally good, but largely inconsistent. As an example, all my hardware was detected and worked properly, but when the OS couldn’t find a suitable graphics card on my desktop machine, it crashed. Attempting to work from the live CD on my laptop caused the machine to hang until I forced the installer window to close. The classic GNOME interface is well put together, but scrollbars now vary in form and accessibility from app to app. The Software Centre is probably the best it’s been, intuitive and helpful, but it seemed to request my password almost randomly. Usually I’d be asked for my account password with every new package installation, but sometimes the prompt would be skipped and I never did find a conclusive pattern.

          The update notification didn’t work on either of my test machines. Unity is, for smaller devices, probably a good UI, but I really feel it needs to be more flexible if it’s going to catch on with full-sized notebook and desktop users. The default applications which come with 11.04 are well thought out and, of course, Ubuntu offers over 33,000 packages in the repositories, making it easy to find what we need. I’m of the opinion there are good features in this release, but 11.04 definitely suffered from being rushed out the door while it was still beta quality. Ubuntu aims to be novice-friendly, but this release is buggy and I think they missed the mark this time around. I’m limiting my recommendation of 11.04 to people who want to play with an early release of Unity.

        • Natty to-do list

          Do you move to the newest release, or stick with what you know already works? Often, applications or devices that work on your current system will no longer do so once you’ve installed a new OS. There is also a period of adjustment when you try to figure out how tasks you have grown so accustomed to doing are done under the new system. Certainly, it seems prudent to wait at least until all the kinks have been smoothed out before jumping into a new operating system.

          For people who write about technology, however, there is really very little choice. So when Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) was released, the question for me wasn’t if I would move to it from Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat), but how I would do it.

        • Promoting Computer Literacy in Indonesia With Help From Ubuntu

          Despite the fact that Indonesia is a country with high use of social media and technology, there are still some regions in the country that lack computer literacy. To remedy this, a social program called Computers For Indonesia (or simply called Comp4id) are giving away old computers for schools in small towns. On Saturday May 7th the “1st Impact Day” event was held, and ten used computer units were donated to SMK PGRI Jatinangor (a vocational high school) in Bandung, Indonesia.

        • UbuntuStudio 11.04 Natty Screenshots tour

          Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu. Ubuntu Studio is aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video and graphic enthusiast as well as professional.

        • Canonical and Lenovo Collaboration

          Canonical are pleased to announce more great collaboration with Lenovo, the world’s fourth largest PC manufacturer.

          There are now over 30 Lenovo ThinkPads certified with Ubuntu, with many of these being completed in the first half of 2011. The great work with Lenovo continues.

        • Canonical Will Collaborate With Lenovo

          Canonical, through John Bernard, has just announced a couple of minutes ago that they will start a collaboration with the popular Lenovo company, the world’s 4th largest PC manufacturer.

          It is now official that Canonical will work closely with Lenovo to certify the Ubuntu operating system on various Lenovo laptops, workstations and servers.

          At the moment there are more than thirty (30) Lenovo ThinkPads that are certified with Ubuntu, and many more will come by the end of this year. To check all the existing Ubuntu-certified Lenovo machines, please click here.

        • Top 10 Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Themed Wallpapers

          Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is here and has already been thoroughly reviewed. And for me, the latest Ubuntu 11.04 is one the favorite Ubuntu ever. Now, here is a really good collection of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal themed wallpapers from around the web.

        • Mark Shuttleworth delivers UDS keynote; sets goal for 200 million Ubuntu users in 4 years

        • What To Expect Of Unity 2D In Ubuntu 11.10

          This morning at the Ubuntu Developer Summit there was a discussion about Unity 2D, the lightweight 2D version of Canonical’s Unity desktop that isn’t dependent upon 3D (OpenGL) acceleration. Work on Unity 2D based on Qt began during the Ubuntu 11.04 cycle, but with Ubuntu 11.10 it should be more polished and comparable to the full-blown Unity desktop experience.

        • Why Does Ubuntu 11.04 Disappoint?

          The 11. 04 preinstalled user interface is called Unity and it is very weak. Video acceleration is very slow, it lets the impression that it does not even exist. Other than that, things are identical to Gnome 3. Gnome 3 is a better option, it has a much better video acceleration, it navigates much faster through the menu and it has some extra apps compared to Unity.

        • My Experience of Moving Ubuntu 11.04 from One Notebook to Another

          Have you ever attempted to move an OS install from one PC to another? I am sure many of you have, and for those who are all too familiar with the process, you’re likely aware of the headaches that can ensue. Different PCs means different hardware, and where any OS is concerned, the chance of a non-bootable OS is sometimes an all-too-real caveat.

          It’s been a while since I’ve had to do something like this, but over the weekend, due to what seems like my netbook giving up the ghost, I moved my Ubuntu 11.04 install over to a different notebook that I managed to get working after it being “dead” for well over a year. Yes, my two notebooks apparently switched positions.

        • Adventures with Unity and Gnome-Shell

          Hooray! Gnome3 is in the standard Arch repositories! Hooray! I install it! Boo! It says my grahpics card is not capable of runnin Gnome-Shell so it drops into fallback mode. What the heck?

        • The size of the Ubuntu 11.10 CD gets debated

        • Ubuntu Aims for 200 Million Users by 2015, Will Need a Miracle

          At the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, Hungary, Mark Shuttleworth — Ubuntu’s founder — just delivered a killer keynote that outlined Canonical’s outrageous goal of reaching 200 million users in the next four years.

          To put that figure into perspective, Ubuntu had 8 million users in 2008, and around 12 million users in April 2010 — and those are combined totals, factoring in both desktop and server installations of Ubuntu. Canonical has not released updated figures since then, but estimates put the total number of Ubuntu installations between 15 and 18 million. Those numbers, incidentally, are derived from unique IP addresses that “ping” the Ubuntu update servers; they don’t take into account any offline installs of Ubuntu.

        • How Ubuntu’s Unity Can Be Improved

          Since its debut, I’ve had plenty of time to work with the latest Ubuntu release known as version 11.04. And even considering some of my earlier harsh criticism, I’ve indeed found some nuggets of goodness within the 11.04 release.

          This got me thinking. It appears the only gripe I have left is addressing Unity itself in some way. As I stated before, I have no problem with Unity being among the available desktop options. But defaulting people automatically to it is just plain foolish. There should be a cleaner indicator for folks that GNOME’s classic experience is still available.

        • Distro Hoppin`: Ubuntu 11.04

          Yes, it is here! Probably the most controversial Ubuntu release since EVER hit the servers, as planned, on the 28th of April. Canonical is, if nothing else, to be admired for the courage of sticking to their original plan and pushing their ideas forward, despite all the unrest they caused. On the other hand, this courage is a bit diluted by the fact that the GNOME project has also undergone a major makeover so users are now pretty much stuck between these two. A much riskier move would’ve been for Canonical to release the Unity-powered desktop well before the GNOME 3 release. On the other other hand, the community has every right to be pissed at the company for ignoring their gripes.

        • Ubuntu Aims for 200 Million Users In 4 Years

          Mark Shuttleworth, father of the Ubuntu operating system, announced yesterday, May 9th, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest that Canonical’s goal is to have 200 million Ubuntu users by 2015.

          Ubuntu Developer Summit for Oneiric Ocelot, the upcoming version of the popular Ubuntu operating system is taking place these days in Budapest, Hungary. Mark Shuttleworth delivered yesterday morning his usual keynote where he set the goal for 200 million Ubuntu users in 4 years.

        • Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition (666.9) review

          Getting ready to review a Linux distribution is usually pretty straightforward. After some background research into the distribution’s history, you download the latest ISO and beseech the head of IT to lend you a netbook or scrounge up some moth-infested, aging desktop PC.

          In the case of Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition (“Linux for the Damned”), however, I had wondered whether I would require some kind of spiritual preparation: Perhaps a confession of my sins to the nearest religious authority. Deadline pressure meant that there was no time for me to unburden myself of my frequent and extensive contraventions of the moral codes of many major religions (and quite a few minor ones). My atheist soul would have to face the distribution unshriven.

        • Will Linux Mint outdo the popularity of Ubuntu?

          It is raining new releases this month as a result of the domino effect caused by the release of Ubuntu 11.04. The latest in line is Linux Mint. Team Mint has always managed to come up with a distro that improved the strengths of Ubuntu many fold while remaining true to the original one. However this time the scene is completely different. The team had recently announced the release of Linux Mint 11, codenamed Katya. Although, its usual to give a feminine name to each Mint release, this one seems to have a meaning. Katya which means “pure” In Russian seems to hint subtly that the Mint team is upto something.

        • Natty Narwhal Offers Unity but No Clarity

          The Unity desktop that comes rolled into Ubuntu’s latest version, Natty Narwhal, could prove very divisive. A change this big will be met by users with a love-it-or-hate-it reaction. Personally, you can put me in the latter category. I did not like Unity in its earlier iterations, especially on the Netbook Remix version. And I like most of its features — or lack of features — a lot less now after seeing them in Natty Narwhal.

        • Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition (666.9) review

          The second point is that distributions like Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition serve to highlight the “free as in freedom” aspect of open source software. Yes, there is no doubt that this distro is a little tongue in cheek and a jab at the Christian Edition of Ubuntu Linux. But, along with the Christian Edition distro, this is an example of taking the powerful open source tools collaboratively developed over the decades and tailoring them to suit a niche market. Why not have a Satanic Edition of Linux? Or a cat fanciers’ edition, for that matter? The freedoms to innovate, customise and build upon are an essential part of the open source experience, delivered to users by the GPL and other free software licences.

          All up, if you prefer your walls black, your music loud and your hair long (and don’t care about Narwhal), then Ubuntu Linux Satanic Edition may be right up your alley. It is, as you would expect, a modern, easy to use operating system that is probably more profound than its creators realise.

        • Flavours and Variants

          • Linux Mint 11 RC Based on Ubuntu 11.04, No Unity, No GNOME 3

            Clement Lefebvre, father of the Linux Mint project, proudly announced last evening, May 9th, the immediate availablity for download and testing of the Release Candidate version of the upcoming Linux Mint 11 operating system.

            Dubbed Katya and based on the newly released Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system, Linux Mint 11 will feature Linux kernel 2.6.38, GNOME 2.32.1 and X.Org 7.6. Unity will NOT be included in Linux Mint 11.

          • Another Executive Departure at Canonical

            Canonical has been much in the headlines with its 11.04 version of Ubuntu, featuring Unity, but the shakeup at the top of Canonical has been much less in the news. The latest executive to announce that he is leaving his post at the company is Matt Zimmerman, who has spent seven years as CTO of Ubuntu. Zimmerman announced his decision in a blog post, and while it’s clear that he will remain an active participant in the Ubuntu community, his departure immediately follows the exit of noted open source executive and blogger Matt Asay, who had been Canonical’s COO. Is Canonical suffering from a leadership problem?

          • Mark Shuttleworth: Our Goal Is 200 Million Ubuntu Users In 4 Years

          • Newly re-Minted

            Last week I installed XFCE on my laptop, to experiment. The machine was running Zorin OS with Gnome, and I just did sudo apt-get install xfce4 to add the new environment as an option. I played with it a while, and I wound up with a desktop I really liked – Compiz, Docky, pretty much everything I’m used to. So one day if Gnome-based distros abandon the traditional desktop paradigm completely – as it looks like will happen – I can switch to XFCE and get a pretty good approximation of what I’m accustomed to.

            However…

  • Devices/Embedded

    • New quad-core, 1.5GHz SoC appears in UTM networking appliance

      Freescale Semiconductor announced a faster, 1.5GHz version of its quad-core QorIQ P2040 processor called the QorIQ P2041, claimed to deliver up to 10Gbps performance and ship with a Linux BSP. The P2041 system-on-chip (SoC) is available in a newly announced, 1U MR-630 networking appliance from Lanner called the MR-630, equipped with 12 or 16 gigabit Ethernet ports and aimed at the unified threat management (UTM) market.

    • New quad-core, 1.5GHz SoC appears in UTM networking appliance

      Freescale Semiconductor announced a faster, 1.5GHz version of its quad-core QorIQ P2040 processor called the QorIQ P2041, claimed to deliver up to 10Gbps performance and ship with a Linux BSP. The P2041 system-on-chip (SoC) is available in a newly announced, 1U MR-630 networking appliance from Lanner called the MR-630, equipped with 12 or 16 gigabit Ethernet ports and aimed at the unified threat management (UTM) market.

    • Wind River taps OpenSAFfire HA middleware for Linux customers

      Wind River announced a partnership with GoAhead Software whereby the two companies will become “preferred integration partners,” selling GoAhead’s OpenSAFfire middleware to embedded Linux customers. The company also announced a “Wind River OpenSAF Quickstart” professional services and technical support package for its OpenSAF customers.

    • Tilera unveils MIPS processor family with up to 100 cores

      Tilera unveiled a roadmap for its Linux-ready Tile-Gx multicore system on chips (SoCs): 16, 36, 64, and 100-core versions of a networking-focused Tile-Gx 8000 series; an upcoming, multimedia-focused Tile-Gx 5000 series; and a Tile-Gx 3000 series aimed at cloud server applications. Tilera also announced Wind River Linux support for its MIPS64-based TilePro and Tile-Gx SoCs.

    • Phones

      • Android

        • Google announces music streaming in beta, movie rentals for Android

          Music and movie rental services are coming to Android devices straight from Google’s labs, the company announced at its I/O conference today. Customers will be able to stream movies from the Android Market and stream their own uploaded music from a service Google is calling “Music Beta.” Users can also “pin” both types of media to their devices for offline consumption.

          Music Beta, which is currently available by invitation only for Android devices with at least version 2.2, allows users to upload up to 20,000 songs to music.google.com. Customers can then stream the music to any Android device, or “pin” it to the device for local storage. Devices will also be able to automatically cache recently played audio content for offline use. The music service will be free “at least while it’s in beta,” so here’s hoping for a Gmail-style development trajectory.

        • Google adds note-taking to Android image recognition app

          Google has added features to its Google Goggles visual recognition software for Android intended to make it more user friendly. Google Goggles 1.4 for Android adds note-taking capabilities, offers improved search history, and has better business card recognition, the company says.

    • Sub-notebooks/Tablets

      • Google Chrome OS: Reviving Netbooks Or Invading Notebooks?

        The VAR Guy is watching and listening closely for potential Google Chrome OS launch news. Chrome OS, a lightweight Web operating system for netbooks and notebooks, may grab the spotlight at this week’s Google I/O 2011 conference in San Francisco. There’s speculation Samsung may unveil a Chrome OS netbook at the conference. But here’s the big question: Can Chrome OS revive the struggling netbook market or will Google simply evangelize Chrome OS for notebooks? Either way, there could be hardware as a service (HaaS) opportunities for VARs and MSPs. Here’s why.

      • More colorful HP netbook gets hi-res option and larger drives, too

        HP announced a revamped version of its Mini 210 netbook that includes upgraded audio plus color that’s skin-deep. Still with a choice of Intel Atom processors and Windows 7 operating systems, the device now includes a social-media-centric upgrade to the available, Linux-based QuickWeb operating system, according to the company.

  Free Software/Open Source

  • EMC Opens by Going Open Source

    EMC World opened today in Las Vegas with a morning full of major announcements from EMC-acquired companies Greenplum and Isilon. This included the world’s largest file system at 15.5 PB, and a full-blown EMC adoption of the open source model for its Greenplum division at the very least.

    The announcements all tied in to the conference theme of Big Data Meets the Cloud.

  • If You Haven’t Seen It, Look Into Google’s Open Source YouTube Channel: OSPO

    As the Google I/O conference kicks off this week in San Francisco, many developers and others are tuning in remotely to streaming events. If you’re an open source developer or user, though, one of the existing ways to get at a treasure trove of archived video-based material from Google is the company’s relatively new open source channel on YouTube, found here. Dubbed Google OSPO and launched late last year, it is chock full of good content and you can set alerts for new content that arrives there that relates to your interests. Here is more on how to get the most out of this tool.

  • May 2011 Project of the Month: OpenPetra

    Non-profits and other charity organizations need all the help they can get, administratively speaking. That’s why it’s great to see something like what the folks at OpenPetra have put together. Flexible and customizable, it helps volunteers and non-profit agencies get the management tasks out of the way and focus on what’s really important: the cause at hand.

  • Open source attacks data stack

    A loose affiliation of open source organisations is forming, which hopes to provide a more serious challenge to monolithic data management and business intelligence systems sold by companies such as IBM, Oracle and SAS Institute.

  • Ubuntu project to transition Ubuntu Cloud to OpenStack

    The Ubuntu project announces today that future versions of Ubuntu Cloud will use OpenStack as a foundation technology. The Ubuntu project is gathered in Budapest, Hungary to discuss future development plans that will culminate in the October release of Ubuntu 11.10. This announcement will move OpenStack to being a core part of the Ubuntu Cloud product, which enables users to build an open source cloud.

  • Events

    • #fosscomm 2011

      A great fosscomm (the annual greek foss community conference) took place the weekend at Patra. The organizing committee did a fantastic job, but besides that it seems that the Greek FOSS community has raised the bar of quality holding some very interesting technical presentations.

  • Mozilla

    • WebGL in Chrome and Firefox is a serious security risk

      A WEB STANDARD enabled by default in the Firefox 4 and Google Chrome web browsers has serious security issues, according to an independent security consultancy.

      WebGL, which stands for web-based graphics library, is a software technology that allows you to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to a web browser without the need for additional software. Enabled in the latest versions of Chrome and Firefox, it can also be switched on in Safari and Opera.

    • It’s Easy to Forget What a Global Phenomenon Firefox Is

      Here on OStatic, and elsewhere, the new version 4 of Firefox has been widely discussed, with some OStatic readers ditching the new version of previous versions due to reported performance problems. Still, it’s easy to forget the global power that Firefox commands, especially in certain targeted areas of the world. In a highly interesting new Computerworld report, for example, Gen Kanai, Mozilla’s contributor engagement director for Asia, discusses the browser’s growing prominence in Indonesia and parts of Asia. In Indonesia, in particular, Firefox is far and away the browser of choice, with neither Internet Explorer or Google Chrome anywhere near its market share level.

• Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • LibreOffice is the future of Free Software Office suites

    This is of course my view, and I hope yours, but naturally it is worth presenting at least some rational and working for this conclusion. Unfortunately, there are so many reasons why TDF and LibreOffice are done right, that I can’t list them all in linear time. However, I’ll try to address some of the major ones recently raised by congenital worriers.

  • Novell will continue to support LibreOffice

    While Attachmate has talked a lot about its plans for Novell after it bought Novell, no one saw Attachmate closing down Novell’s Mono programming effort. Indeed, other than cutting Novell’s work-force by 25%, Attachmate has said little concrete about the company’s open-source plans. I have learned from sources though that LibreOffice, the open-source office suite, will continue to receive Novell’s support.

    Novell developers were leaders in founding the LibreOffice’s parent organization, The Document Foundation and splitting LibreOffice away from the Oracle sponsored OpenOffice project. Their feeling was that Oracle, as Sun had before it, had been neglecting OpenOffice and letting bugs go unfixed and new features go un-added for far too long.

  • Oracle is not Happy; Asks Judge to Reconsider Order Reducing Claims

    The parties have each responded to the judge’s order reducing the number of Oracle’s claims in Oracle v. Google from 132 to 3. And each has provided requested input to the judge on his tentative order on claim construction. If you recall, the judge asked for their input.

  • Oracle’s Subpoena to Apache, Claim Construction Order, and an Annoyed Judge

    I thought you’d like to see the Apache subpoena [PDF] that Oracle just sent them. Specifically, it’s a Boies Schiller production, as you can see at the bottom of page one.

• Business

  • The business case for OpenSim

    A reader asked me today about the OpenSim business case — are there enough users on any of the grids to make it worthwhile for a business to set up a presence there instead of in Second Life?

    The short answer is: no.

    Second Life’s average concurrency is around 50,000. If you log into Second Life, depending on time of day, you are likely to find anywhere between 35,000 and 65,000 other people logged on. (See Tateru Nino’s great statistics page for more details.)

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • Important notice for free software supporters using Gmail

    Are you using Gmail? Nearly 50% of the FSF’s 40,000 strong supporter mailing list has an @gmail.com email address.

    JavaScript, once lauded for adding simple visual effects to web pages, is now used by web sites like Gmail to run powerful programs on your computer. These programs, like any other program running on your computer, should be free software. But right now, the vast majority of JavaScript programs do not respect your essential freedoms to run, study, modify and share them. They take control of your computer away from you; the same control we have been working for over 25 years to protect.

• Licensing

  • Apple delays release of LPGL WebKit code

    Sometime after I posted this entry, Apple went ahead and posted the source code for JavaScriptCore-721.26 and WebCore-955.66.1, the code mentioned in this entry. No explanation on the delay was given, just the code. The immediate issue has passed, which is nice. My closing point about better communication, however, still stands.

• Programming

  • 2018 is the Year of Perl 5.10

    The Perl 5 porters officially ended support for Perl 5.8 on November 5, 2008. Fortunately, Enterprise Support exists to help your legacy Perl 5 installations cope. Distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its offshoot CentOS will continue supporting old versions of Perl 5 for up to ten years since their release (the release of the distribution, not the release of the version of Perl 5 they distribute).

    For example, the most recent CentOS release, CentOS 5.6, includes Perl 5.8.8. (CentOS 5.6 came out just over a month ago. Perl 5.8.8 is seven stable releases out of date.)

  • Google I/O Kicks Off, Focused On Developers

    Throughout its existence, Google has been very dedicated to enlisting developers all around the world to embrace its projects and help with the creative process, and one of its hugest annual events that focuses on this is the Google I/O conference. This week, in San Francisco, Google I/O is in full swing, and there are announcements arriving, and many sessions related to Google App Engine, Android, Chrome, Chrome OS and many other projects. Even if you can’t get to the conference, there are still ways to participate in sessions remotely, and Google will post archived versions of sessions after the event.

  • Baby Steps with Our Text Editor

  • Liveblog: Google I/O Day 1

  • Google announces Android Ice Cream Sandwich will merge phone and tablet OSes

    The next version of Google’s Android operating system, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich, will converge the formerly disparate phone and tablet versions of the OS, Google announced at its I/O keynote today. Ice Cream Sandwich will maintain a single UI across all form factors and will allow developers to create applications for both kinds of devices in one motion. It will follow the rollout of Android 3.1 to the Motorola Xoom tablet and Google TV.

    Google says the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android will “all be open source,” including APIs for face-tracking and other new features. Developers will be able to account for all form factors within this same version of the OS, and Google will be adding a lot of UIs to accommodate Android devices of all shapes and sizes.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Australia shops for search service

    Requirements for the service including conforming to the OpenSearch protocol and support for compressed and uncompressed versions of non-HTML documents like PDF, RTF, CSV, Microsoft Office formats and Open Document formats.

Leftovers

• Time for Apple to Finally Close Cloud-Mobile Loop

• Our Old Stuff is Junk

  In a way, M$ is its worst enemy. As it has convinced people that they must buy a new PC to get anything new in IT, they have also convinced people that a new anything is good: tablet, notebook, smart thingie… and many of these do not come with that other OS. Expect further poor quarters for that cash-cow.

  see TheRegister – Microsoft resuscitates ‘I’m a PC’ ads to fight Apple
  Alert Print Post comment Retweet Facebook
  PCs have come a long way since the PC

  How many cycles of the Wintel treadmill does it take to convince the subject that the next revolution is actually the same as the last one? The problem for M$ is that people are not gerbils and can solve the problem of spending years getting nowhere.

• The Tech Press: We’re not all Arrington Scum

  Michael Arrington continues to try to con everyone, including possibly himself, into thinking he does technology journalism. Normally, I ignore the scum of the technology press. Life is too short. Every field has its fakes, its liars and its prostitutes, but every now and again someone, such as Arrington, falls to the bottom and makes such a splash along the way, that I can’t ignore him.

  Arrington, for those of who don’t know him, is the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a tech “news” site now owned by AOL. TechCrunch and Arrington are famous gossip-mongers—the National Enquirer if you would—of technology journalism. That’s fine by me. I’m not interested in covering MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe supposed romance with Paris Hilton. More power to you if that’s what floats your boat. After all, there are more readers for that than the kind of things, such as Linux and networking, that I cover.

• Where Are They Now? Products Announced During Past Google I/O Keynotes

  The keynotes at Google I/O — Google’s developer conference — are always filled with such promise. Google TV, Google Wave, music in the cloud! But the products themselves haven’t always gone on to meet expectations. With Google I/O 2011 beginning on Tuesday, here’s a look back at what’s happened with past keynote product graduates.

• The next Microsoft in the cloud computing era is …

  Cloud computing lacks both cross-compatibility and standards. Added to vendor lock-in is the possibility of outages, breaches of security or privacy, providers suspending your account, losing data or even going out of business altogether.

  A variety of vendor strategies are in play. Apple and Oracle exemplify the proprietary lock-in model, while Google champions open source without truly being open. VMware combines its high-margin virtualisation business with acquired software companies to create a hybrid model that is both proprietary and somewhat open all at once.

• Security

  • Facebook caught exposing millions of user credentials

    Facebook has leaked access to millions of users’ photographs, profiles and other personal information because of a years-old bug that overrides individual privacy settings, researchers from Symantec said.

    The flaw, which the researchers estimate has affected hundreds of thousands of applications, exposed user access tokens to advertisers and others. The tokens serve as a spare set of keys that Facebook apps use to perform certain actions on behalf of the user, such as posting messages to a Facebook wall or sending RSVP replies to invitations. For years, many apps that rely on an older form of user authentication turned over these keys to third parties, giving them the ability to access information users specifically designated as off limits.

• Defence/Police/Aggression

  • Controversial set of CCTV cameras to be removed from Birmingham districts

    After a long-running campaign, a controversial set of CCTV cameras are finally being removed from Sparkbrook and Washwood Heath in Birmingham. The regions are predominantly Muslim, and local residents had been fiercely opposed to the system. Many wondered why two medium-sized districts in Birmingham required 218 cameras, including 169 advanced Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras which monitor the movement of vehicles.

  • Davis alleges criminal misuse of CCTV cameras by government and police

    David Davis has alleged that the Home Office and Metropolitan Police may have broken the law while using security camera images. The claim was made during Home Office questions in the House of Commons.

• Finance

  • Goldman Sachs Sued By Citizens

  • Goldman’s Blankfein Faces Investors Amid ‘Lingering Problems’

    Lloyd C. Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), has sought to quell shareholder concerns about its bonuses and business practices at the past two annual meetings. Today, he will try again.

    As the fifth-biggest U.S. bank by assets hosts investors for the first time at its building in Jersey City, New Jersey, shareholders are still questioning Goldman Sachs’s actions during the financial crisis, executive pay and business model.

  • Goldman Sachs ‘Totally Freaked Out’ About Volcker Rule, Lobbying Congress Without Remorse For Past Deeds

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc has just a few more months to put its stamp on the Volcker rule, and it is not wasting any time.

    The rule, designed to limit banks from speculating with their own money, will cost Goldman at least $3.7 billion in annual revenue, by one estimate. And billions more could be at stake if regulations now being drawn up are extra-tough.

  • Tallying the Votes at Goldman

    Goldman Sachs shareholders voted on 10 proposals this year, covering everything from climate change to executive pay. Goldman’s general counsel, Gregory Palm, announced the preliminary results at the end of the investment bank’s annual shareholder meeting, which was held on Friday in Jersey City.

  • Goldman Pay Plan Supported by Fewer Shareholders as Blankfein Pay Doubles

    Shareholder approval for Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s 2010 compensation plan, which doubled pay for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein, tumbled to 73 percent from 96 percent a year ago.

    General Counsel Gregory K. Palm announced the vote tally at the end of today’s annual meeting, held for the first time at Goldman Sachs’s building in Jersey City, New Jersey.

  • Goldman Sachs (GS) Lobbying Hard to Weaken Volcker Rule

    With Paul Volcker having given up and riding off into the sunset, GoldmanSachs (GS) and its army of lobbyists is busy doing “God’s work” in weakening any impact he might have, according to this Reuters report. Again, in America the BEST return on investment for large corporations is lobbying – it makes the ROI on their actual businesses look like peanuts. For a relatively few millions, oodles of tax breaks, protections, or new contracts can be secured. For an investment bank the sums to buy up politicians direct policy is relatively tiny – effectively for the salary of a handful of vice presidents per quarter, the world is their oyster. $5M annually for Goldman is not even a rounding error. I am pleased to report the more things change, the more they remain the same.

  • Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is cordial but sniffly

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein was in good spirits on Friday at his firm’s annual meeting, despite battling some testy shareholders and what seemed to be a cold.

    The Wall Street chieftain sipped water and blew his nose through the two-hour proceedings, and declined to shake one investor’s hand after the meeting for fear of spreading germs.

  • Goldman Sachs Faces Off With Shareholders

    Goldman Sachs had its annual shareholders meeting in New Jersey on Friday. So Lloyd Blankfein had the chance to sit in front of a room full of investors and explain why he got a $5.4 million bonus last year even though stocks were down 38 percent. Seriously, this guy must have cajones as big as his bald head. At this point, there are no plans for the CEO to step down.

    Somehow, shareholder compensation proposals that would restrict pay didn’t pass and the directors got re-elected. A Catholic nun, Sister Nora Nash who is part of one of the religious orders that was in attendance, told Fox Business prior to the meeting that the pay “is totally outlandish because of the fact that we live a world where millions are going to bed hungry, they don’t know where their next meal will come from, especially in our inner cities and in the third world.”

    “Never in the history of capitalism has anybody convinced people that a cabal, if you will, of bankers earning obscene amounts of money is good for everybody,” Dezenhall Resources’ Eric Dezenhall told WNYC.

  • Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein is cordial but sniffly

    Goldman Sachs Group Inc Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein was in good spirits on Friday at his firm’s annual meeting, despite battling some testy shareholders and what seemed to be a cold.

    The Wall Street chieftain sipped water and blew his nose through the two-hour proceedings, and declined to shake one investor’s hand after the meeting for fear of spreading germs.

    But while Blankfein might have preferred chicken soup over the continental breakfast on display, his demeanor remained strong and, some might say, resilient.

  • Goldman Sachs Sued By Citizens

  • Vitro, Madoff, Timothy Blixseth, Asbestos Case: Bankruptcy

    (This report contains items about companies both in bankruptcy and not in bankruptcy. Adds Statistics section, Madoff in Updates and DS Waters in Downgrade.)

    May 6 (Bloomberg) — Vitro SAB, Mexico’s largest glassmaker, argued in a court filing on May 4 that its Chapter 15 case should remain in New York because the bankruptcy judge in Fort Worth, Texas, is ill.

    Separately, Vitro’s official creditors’ committee is asking for a delay in the hearing scheduled to begin today in Texas on a motion to approve sale procedures for the four U.S. Vitro subsidiaries that put themselves into Chapter 11 in the face of involuntary petitions filed in November.

  • U.S. Probes Goldman Sachs Findings After Senate Referral

    May 4 (Bloomberg) — U.S. senators formally referred to the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission an investigative report that found Goldman Sachs Group Inc. misled clients about mortgage-linked securities. Bloomberg’s

  • Goldman Sachs May Make ‘Near-Term’ Management Changes, UBS Says – Bloomberg

  • Bloomberg: Goldman Sachs Referred to S.E.C. and D.O.J. (video)

  • Berkshire Will Record $1.25 Billion Gain on Goldman Redemption

    Berkshire was paid $5.5 billion for the securities on April 18, the Omaha, Nebraska-based company said late on May 6 in its first-quarter earnings report. The payment by Goldman Sachs includes the $5 billion Berkshire invested in 2008 and a 10 percent premium.

  • SEC chief keeps options open on private securities

    The top U.S. securities regulator pledged a rigorous review of potentially outdated private securities trading rules, but stopped short of endorsing changes being advocated by Republican lawmakers.

    At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro was pressed to make regulatory changes to help small and medium-sized companies more easily raise capital without going public.

• Privacy

  • Still no timetable for deletion of DNA records

    The planned deletion of the DNA profiles of millions of innocent people still lacks a definitive timetable, it was revealed today. Conservative MP Philip Davies asked the government how much time would be required once the legislation has been passed to remove the DNA of people who have been found innocent but whose records remain on the database. Home Office minister James Brokenshire said:

• DRM

  • Brick Nintendo before they brick you

    Send Reggie Fils-Aime, President and COO of Nintendo of America a strong message that the Nintendo 3DS Terms of Service are unacceptable and that DRM must be dropped. Brick Nintendo before they brick you!

• Intellectual Monopolies

  • Copyrights

    • Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targets 23,000 Defendants

      At least 23,000 file sharers soon will likely get notified they are being sued for downloading the Expendables in what has become the single largest illegal-BitTorrent-downloading case in U.S. history.

      A federal judge in the case has agreed to allow the U.S. Copyright Group to subpoena internet service providers to find out the identity of everybody who had illegally downloaded (.pdf) the 2010 Sylvester Stallone flick — meaning the number of defendants is likely to dramatically increase as new purloiners are discovered. Once an ISP gets the subpoena, it usually notifies the account holder that his or her subscriber information is being turned over to the Copyright Group, which last year pioneered the practice of suing BitTorrent downloaders in the United States.

    • Is Portugal about to make Creative Commons illegal?

      ETA 3. Very interesting details in the comments section. It seems like this already exists in similar fashion in Spain and in Chile (I still think that declaring economic rights inalienable is a horrible idea, it barely works with moral rights). I’d like to see if this has ever been applied in those countries, and if so, if it covers licensing. Probably it does not, as in licensing one is not giving the work away, one is simply granting rights to third parties.

    • Pirate Bay prepares for the battle of the internet

      COPYRIGHT CARTELS inspired legislation has forced The Pirate Bay to announce that it is preparing for lobbying and legal battles.

      The Pirate Bay, which might feel somewhat overshadowed by Anonymous, has posted a rallying call to arms on its blog and, channelling the voice of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, announced that its “finest hour” is upon it.

    • ACTA

      • ACTA copyright agreement may breach EU law, claim academics

        A controversial anti-counterfeiting agreement between the European Union, the US and other countries has come in for fresh criticism after the European Commission failed to address concerns about the treaty’s legality.

        The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was reached last year despite concerns that it would protect ‘big business’ at the expence of the consumer.

        [...]

        ACTA also includes other forms of trademark infringements based on similarity of signs, risk of confusion and the protection for well known trademarks against dilution. This, said FFII’s Wessels, is a clear extension of the EU acquis, which does not cover the criminal measures called for by ACTA.