06.01.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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It seems that the folks behind the hugely popular Linux Mint operating system have come up with an announcement that you will soon be able to pick up a Mint-branded computer that is aptly known as the mintBox, where it is more or less a Compulab fit-PC3 that has the Mint brand name on it. Not only that, Compulab intends to share a part of the proceeds with the Mint team in order to further assist their efforts in developing the operating system in order to bring it to greater heights. Right now, Compulab offers its fair share of small form factor PCs under the fit-PC range, with the latest models being hugely line diminutive at a mere 6.3″ x 6.3″ x 1″, and will rely on low power AMD processors as well as Radeon HD graphics to get the job done.
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As we head toward the mid-point of 2012, it’s clear that one of the biggest open source stories of all is the proliferation of diminutive, inexpensive Linux-based computers at some of the smallest form factors ever seen. The tiny $25 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi (shown here) has grabbed many headlines on this front, and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently pledged to give some of the units to U.K. schools along with training for teachers who can pass on Linux knowledge to kids. But the Raspberry Pi is only one of many tiny LInux computers being heralded as part of a new “Linux punk ethic.”
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Desktop
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In my opinion Chromebox and Chromebook are a major threat to Microsoft’s core market — businesses. The desktop as we know it is almost dead and with Microsoft’s switch to Metro will further put a nail in the traditional desktop market. Desktop is being used only by those who either create content and use it for editing audio, video and images. Applications which need massive processing power to handle the workload. The desktop is also used for gaming (though the consoles are picking up).
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If you’re in the market for a Linux-ready PC, May 2012 has been a good month. First eRacks launched a new line of high-end desktops. Then System76 introduced high-power laptop. Now ZaReason, one of the few other big open source OEMs, has both released new hardware and upgraded a popular existing model. Read on for details.
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Google and Samsung have launched fresh hardware aimed at reviving interest in its ChromeOS platform, with a laptop for end users and a desktop box system.
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Kernel Space
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Following the Linux 3.4 kernel benchmarks from last week, available now are the results from a three-way file-system comparison using the Linux 3.4 kernel as well as the Linux 3.2 and 3.3 kernels for reference. The three file-systems being pitted against each other are Btrfs, EXT4, and XFS.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the availability of The Linux Foundation FOSS Bar Code Tracker.
Released as an open source project under the MIT license, the new software tool aims to simplify the way open source components are tracked and reported by using an auto-generated, custom QR code for each product. The QR code contains important information on the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) stack contained in a product, such as component names, version numbers, license information and links to download the source code, among other details.
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Applications
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Whether you want to overclock your PC or flaunt its computing prowess to your tech-crazy buddies, benchmarking is something that has interested tinkerers and newbies alike. The simple process lets users understand the limits of their system, thus making it easier for them to overclock it to the maximum. Furthermore, tech bloggers and reviewers often use benchmarking tools to compare various hardware and gadgets.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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One of the first people I recruited for Valve when they were looking for good Linux referrals was Forest Hale, or better known within Internet communities (including the Phoronix Forums and Phoronix IRC) as LordHavoc. He was the lead developer on the DarkPlaces engine, which is the Quake-derived engine that was used by the open-source Nexuiz game and is now used by Xonotic as well. As can be seen when firing up the old Nexuiz or when running Xonotic, DarkPlaces is both technologically and visually impressive, especially for being a non-commercial GPL-based engine. Under contract he additionally was the lead on the Mac OS X and Linux ports of Quake Live. He’s also done other Linux contract work, but for the work on the open-source DarkPlaces engine is where he’s arguably most known.
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For two weeks, you can pay whatever you want to get these DRM-free games on Windows, Mac, and Linux: Psychonauts, LIMBO, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. If you choose to pay more than the average price, you will also receive Bastion! Each game comes with its soundtrack in both lossless (FLAC) and MP3 formats.
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We are delighted to announce that the Humble Indie Bundle, that was just announced will have all the games available in the Ubuntu Software Center running natively on Ubuntu.
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Desktop Environments
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Xfce’s first release in sixteen months comes at a critical time. After years of being a distant third among Linux desktops, in the last year Xfce has found a new popularity among those looking for alternatives to GNOME 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity.
In fact, according to one survey, Xfce is now the second most popular desktop, and starting to crowd KDE — at least among experienced users.
Under these circumstances, Xfce 4.10 might have been an ambitious release, full of new features and extras designed to attract new users. Instead, like earlier releases, the latest version of Xfce consists of a modest set of visible changes — specifically, a few miscellaneous new features, some improvements to the panel, and some new configuration options — that improve the desktop without visibly altering it to any great extent.
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A full desktop environment is the lazy man’s approach to Linux. Most popular Linux distributions today employ a full desktop environment, while hand selecting each component for specific purposes.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia began as a fork of Mandriva Linux in September 2010 by the former employees and contributors of Mandriva because they were not happy with the governance of the project.
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Mageia has been pretty popular ever since its original release last year. While all Linux distributions give you more choice than any other operating system, Mageia was one of the few distros that has a lot of these choices upfront. This is partly due to it being an offshoot of Mandriva, however the team at Mageia have taken it noticeably further.
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Today Charles-H. Schulz posted a short message on Mandriva’s official blog stating that he will be joining the Mandriva team to help them come back to life. Charles-H. Schulz is a very active member of the Open Source community and is probably best known for his invaluable contributions to OpenOffice.org, The Document Foundation, and LibreOffice.
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The Mageia developers are replacing the background image in Mageia 2 after discovering that they did not have permission to include it. Mageia 2 was released just over a week ago. The current background image, which won the Mageia 2 artwork contest, was submitted by a user who had derived it from an original work by pr09studio. The Mageia community were made aware of the use of the Domination wallpaper early on the morning on 31 May and, after confirming that it was derivative, set about remedying the problem.
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I usually avoid to talk much about my day job and what my company is working on, but I will make an exception for this one. Starting today, I will be assisting Mandriva in its Open Source strategy and its relations with the community.
Mandriva has had rough times lately, but things have improved recently and a few important decisions have been made concerning the overall corporate strategy of Mandriva and its role with respect to the Mandriva Linux distribution and its standing within the broader community. Specifically, the conversation on the future of Mandriva Linux as a distribution, the goals and expectations of its community needs to start. In many ways, it is a discussion that has been delayed, but a conversation that is worth having.
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Gentoo Family
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Red Hat Family
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When people generally think of open-source platforms in Korea, Google’s Android immediately comes to mind due to the wide use of smartphones and tablet PCs in the business-to-consumer space.
But in the business-to-business world, U.S.-headquartered Red Hat provides the world’s leading open-source operating systems for enterprises’ data-processing servers.
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Fedora
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Fedora 17, code-named Beefy Miracle, was released yesterday for all to download and use. Aside for the main edition, which uses the GNOME 3 desktop environments, installation images for three main Spins were also released. These are for KDE, LXDE and Xfce.
Specialized Spins for Security, Scientific-KDE, Design-suite, SoaS, Games, Electronic-lab and Robotics were also released. It is very unlikely that I will review these, but there will be reviews of the main edition and KDE Spin. While the reviews are still being baked, here are a few screen shots from test installations of the main edition and KDE Spin for your viewing pleasure.
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That’s a bold claim for a package with such a ridiculous name. While this is a solid update with significant enhancements under the hood and the latest version of the GNOME desktop, there’s nothing particularly miraculous about it – just as we concluded in the review of the beta build.
A miraculous Fedora 17 would have included full support for Btrfs – the kernel at least supports the filing system – but that’s going to require a major rewrite of the Anaconda installer interface and has been postponed until at least Fedora 18.
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Last October, I received a message via Twitter from a hot dog. This hot dog, calling itself The Beefy Miracle, informed me that the latest version of the Fedora operating system, Fedora 17, was going to be named after it. The voting was close, but Beefy Miracle ended up winning by almost 150 votes, and it was released yesterday.
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For the most part, Fedora Linux releases have had names that weren’t particularly controversial. For instance, Fedora 16 was named Verne and the default desktop wallpaper had a submarine type theme (an hommage to 20,000 Leagues under the Sea). With Fedora 17, which was officially released on Tuesday the codename is Beefy Miracle. It’s a theme that has its own mascot and it’s a fun one.
Yet despite that, the default Fedora 17 desktop has no Beefy Miracle.
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I wrote about an Ubuntu user’s experience with Fedora last year when Fedora 16 came out. It was pretty impressed with Fedora 16, and now Fedora 17 is out so I wanted to share my experience about F17. But, I also realized that how different is it going to be from the previous review. One of my friends helped me out. He threw a challenge at me that what if he takes my Ubuntu box away from and leaves me with Fedora 17, will I survive? Sounds interesting so I took up the challenge.
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Debian Family
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Later than originally planned, Knoppix creator Klaus Knopper has released an update to version 7.0 of his popular Live Linux distribution. The first point update to Knoppix 7.0, which was a special “CeBIT Edition” from March, includes a number of improvements and package upgrades, while removing proprietary packages, such as Adobe Reader.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu developers have decided to remove the migration-assistant package from the stock Ubuntu installer. This software package was supposed to make it easy for transferring files and settings to Ubuntu Linux from Windows.
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Now that Ubuntu 12.04 has arrived, a number of questions have bubbled up from the curious minds of those wondering about the state of Ubuntu. When 11.04 hit, faithful Ubuntu users were up in arms about how bad Ubuntu Unity was. It was buggy, it was far from user friendly, and it seemed a slap in the face to those who had worked so hard and so long on the previous default desktop: GNOME.
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Flavours and Variants
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My first ever experience with Xubuntu started much later. It was Xubuntu 11.10 which found its way to my hard disk.
When the version 10.10 was released, I upgraded my (K-)Ubuntu 10.04 systems almost immediately. It was a painful exercise.
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The big moment has come. If this isn’t it, then nothing will ever be. One year after discovering the fickle truth of the would-be modern desktop, the Mint team has decided to go back to its roots and offer the users what they want – functionality. And so, a whole new desktop concept was born.
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Reviews give us a lot of feedback and we pay special attention to them. They boost our motivation when talking about the good and help us pinpoint areas of improvement when talking about the bad. They also give us an opportunity to react to some of the points they make and to start a discussion where we can explain certain things, justify decisions and give you an insight on what is going on behind the curtain when preparing for a release.
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Phones
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Android
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This week, Google introduced a new Chromebook and a new Chromebox–both systems designed around the company’s Chrome OS. The moves, along with recent comments from Google leaders, illustrate that Google is not throwing in the towel on Chrome OS, despite a lukewarm market reaction to it. Other comments from Google leaders pointed toward an event that many people have scoffed at for years: the eventual merger of the Android mobile OS and Chrome OS.
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The new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes may not have gotten much attention outside of tech circles, but Chrome OS will be everywhere…and soon.
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You might have seen people wearing a nifty iPod Nano as the watch. As an Android user you may wonder if there are similar watches running Android. The answer is yes. There are many Android powered watches which are more than just watches. Sony SmartWatch is one such watch, but it does much more than just telling the time.
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It seems like Android powered HTC One X is the Hummer of smartphones. A YouTube video is showing an Asian HTC One X user putting two nails in a wood with is HTX One X phone. You can clearly see in the video below that he was using the screen to hit the nail. At the price of $577.49 on Amazon.com, HTC One X earns the reputation of the most expensive hammer. HTC One X uses the Corning Gorilla Glass for protection of its display.
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The government is missing opportunities to make significant savings by dismissing open source software when procuring products, Tariq Rashid, lead architect at the Home Office, has said.
Rashid, whose role covers information, applications, infrastructure, open standards, and open source, told the Open Gov Summit in London that he has had “lots of battles internally” with the IT security team at the Home Office around open source.
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People tend to ask me why do I do work for free, while I have a company that provides similar services to those I’m giving away to open source. I must say that I don’t completely agree with their way of perceiving contributions to open source. While it superficially looks like working for free, there are a lot of benefits to gather from it, both concrete and abstract.
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Events
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Have you ever been in a situation when you had to wait for some documents to arrive such as your health diagnosis, documents about your house where you live or you are planning to live in? Were you ever curious how much money your country spends on certain resources? This is interesting and important data.
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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There’s been a lot of talk about open source and the cloud, which makes sense given the proliferation of open source technologies that actually comprise cloud computing.
But what about open source in the cloud? Can cloud computing and storage provide open source projects less expensive access to computing resources?
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Document Foundation (TDF) has announced the relase of LibreOffice 3.5.4, the fifth version of the free office suite’s 3.5 family.
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Today The Document Foundation released the latest version of their Open Source office productivity suite. This release comes with lots of bug fixes and something everybody loves: improved performance. In fact, the release announcement claims that one could experience as much as 100% better performance.
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Project Releases
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Public Services/Government
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A campaign for free software has garnered the support of 267 candidates running for France’s National Assembly in next months’ elections. Most supporters (149 signatures) are Europe Ecology–The Greens candidates. The Pirate Party comes second, with 54 signatures.
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Government IT projects that don’t explore alternatives to closed and proprietary software are getting kicked back and denied funding.
The civil servant running open source, open standards and information management under No 10’s digital change agenda called such spending controls a “key gateway” in complying with new IT procurement rules.
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Licensing
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Conservancy announced today its new coordinated Free Software license compliance effort. As you might guess, in between getting things together for Conservancy conferences, making sure developers get reimbursed on time, and all the other primary work of Conservancy that I’m up to each day, I’ve been spending what hours that I can coordinating this new effort.
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Openness/Sharing
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Freedom doesn’t begin and end with software, though. We are big fans of Free culture in general. There are a few reasons for this. First, we like sharing stuff with people and really enjoy experiencing the creative efforts of others. It’s thrilling and enjoyable and highlights how “Make” and “Play” fit together so well.
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Finance
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I had made the analogy between disease and unemployment: would any reasonable person who understands the cause of a disease oppose a cure? If you knew that a vaccination can prevent smallpox, would you oppose providing vaccinations (at least to those who want them—I do not want to get into a debate about forcing vaccinations as we have never advocating forcing jobs on those who do not want to work)?
Now I do realize this is not quite a fair comparison because it is possible that there are many cures for the disease of unemployment. MMTers advocate the Jobs Guarante (JG) cure. I am open to alternative cures. I just do not hear any coming from the critics.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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In the first official assessement of the Internet access restrictions imposed by Internet access providers, EU telecom regulators depict a very alarming situation. The Internet as we know it is very much at threat, and the EU Commission’s reluctance to take any resolute action on the matter is irresponsible. Like in the Netherlands where the Dutch Parliament adopted a Net Neutrality law earlier this month, Net Neutrality must be enacted into European law.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Votes were cast in three of the four parliamentary committees preparing the EU Parliament’s final decision on ACTA. Citizens’ concerns, as well as Internet innovators & start-ups’ interests have been upheld in “Civil Liberties” (LIBE) and the “Industry” (ITRE) committees. Even the “Legal affairs” (JURI) committee, usually very conservative and keen to support repression on copyright issues, rejected Marielle Gallo’s pro-ACTA opinion. Citizens should rejoice but keep up the pressure for the upcoming steps, up until the final vote scheduled for early July. A massive rejection of ACTA would create a political symbol of global scale.
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05.30.12
Posted in News Roundup at 8:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Kumaran wants to make Linux more popular for desktops as an operating system, and is creating his own distribution system to make it happen. “Linux is faster, virus-free, free of cost, has free updates and never crashes. It is used in laptops using distribution systems like Ubuntu. I’m creating my version of Ubuntu called ‘Freaks 2012′,” he says. Kumaran, a national talent search examination scholar from class 8, began missing school often from the class of six, because of a weak knee. Just as he finished his class 10, he realised that he could not eat anything. “I would throw up, suffer bad stomach aches and not be hungry.
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Desktop
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Across the district, computers used to account for nearly 20% of all electricity use. But since they’ve pioneered a new approach to offering computers in classrooms, they’ve cut computer energy use by more than 75%, avoiding costs in excess of 100,000 per year on electricity.
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Google has upgraded the Samsung family of Chromebooks with more powerful hardware and redesigned UI. Android maker has also introduced a new class of ChromeOS-powered device called Chromebox.
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Server
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If people didn’t want ARM-based servers, Dell wouldn’t build them, and so with the launch of the “Copper” ARM server sled for the “Viking” C5000 microserver chassis we know that people want ARM servers. And this is not some experiment that Dell is doing, either, Steve Cumings, executive director of marketing for Dell’s Data Center Solutions bespoke server unit, tells El Reg.
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Applications
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Red Hat Family
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There’s a Southern expression that goes, “Says easy, does hard.” In this case, it’s easy to say that your company is focused on collaboration and ideas. But many executives conflate the terms “collaboration” and “consensus.” Seeking consensus and creating a democracy of ideas is not what we at Red Hat would call collaboration. In fact, it’s a misstep. Rather, managers at Red Hat make it a practice to seek out ideas from those who’ve shown that they typically have the best ideas — those who have risen to the top of our meritocracy.
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Fedora
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The Fedora Project officially served up their “Beefy Miracle” today. The announcement, chock full of hot dog references, introduced the new release, “At the heat of a thousand hot dog cookers, the seventeenth release of Fedora shall be forged by contributors the world over, and it will be known as: Beefy Miracle. The mustard shall indicate progress.”
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Canonical, the commercial entity behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced the release of an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) image of Ubuntu Server for ARM architecture. The image was originally designed for internal testing and has now been made publicly available for developers who want to experiment with software running under Ubuntu on ARM servers. It enables users to quickly set up a completely configured instance of Ubuntu ARM Server in Amazon’s cloud.
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Phones
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It appears the reports of webOS’ death are once more exaggerated. True, several key members of the Enyo development team have joined Google, but the project is evidently still alive and well. Another release of Enyo is on the way, and the core of Enyo 2 is “solid,” HP insists.
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Android
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…powered by what appears to be Ice Cream Sandwich.
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Designed for “smart devices,” the new panel will feature a 440ppi pixel density, beating out the 330ppi Retina display found on Apple’s iPhone.
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Microsoft has already ruffled more than a few feathers with the exclusionary potential of its forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, and this past week the open source community has been up in arms again.
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Databases
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CMS
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The open source WordPress blogging platform turned Nine years old on Sunday (first WordPress release was May 27, 2003). It’s hard to believe that it has been that long isn’t it? (I’ve been a user for the last 8).
WordPress started out as a ‘simple’ blogging platform that valued the user interface and ease-of-use over fancy knobs and deep features.
The focus on usability and adherence to standards has been the hallmark of WordPress in every release since. It’s a focus that has propelled WordPress to become one of the most widely used open source projects on the web today, powered over 10 percent of all websites.
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Education
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I don’t think it’s enough just to teach children how an e-mail client works without also explaining what’s happening behind the screen. I don’t think it’s enough just to show children how to assign variables or manipulate lists without providing some way for them to think about these rather than just using them. It’s just this sort of understanding which we’ve come to label as computational thinking: there’s a strong case for this providing a unique way of looking at the world, with wide applications across (and beyond) the curriculum:
With scientific method, we took things apart to see how they work. Now with computers we can put things back together to see how they work, by modelling complex, interrelated processes, even life itself. This is a new age of discovery, and ICT is the gateway.
–Douglas Adams, 1999
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Project Releases
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Version 2.7 of Apache JMeter has arrived, adding new system sampling for operating system processes, improved JMS, WebService and Test samplers, and improved graphs and reports. JMeter is a desktop application designed to load test applications and measure performance; it can test web, SOAP, JDBC, LDAP, JMS, Mail or native commands using its multi-threaded framework to concurrently sample many different operations.
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Licensing
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GPL enforcement within the free software community has just stepped up its game.
Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has announced a coordinated effort among several of its member projects to ensure compliance with their Free Software licenses.
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The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that it is heading up a “unified effort” among a number of its member projects to ensure compliance with the free software licences they are distributed under. The conservancy is also launching the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers, which will see Linux kernel contributors request that the Conservancy pursue GPL violators over the Linux kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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Programming
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Apparently, in Python, it is easier to ask for forgiveness rather than seek permission. That is to say, the normal approach when writing Python code is to assume that what you are trying to do will work properly. If something exceptional happens and the code doesn’t work the way you were hoping, then the Python interpreter will tell you of the error so that you can handle that exceptional circumstance. This general approach, of trying to do something, then cleaning up if something goes wrong is acronymically called EAFP (“easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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Since the uprising in Syria began last year, Syrian citizen journalists have risked their lives to fill a media void and bring the news of the oppressive government crackdown to a global audience. This has been done often with little recognition for the activists who have laid their lives on the line to report on the government’s assault on an unarmed civilian population.
In March 2011, the arrest of 15 students who had written anti-government slogans on walls enraged the population of Deraa and sparked the first mass protests against the Assad regime. President Bashar al-Assad, who inherited Syria’s harsh dictatorship from his father, launched a series of crackdowns on protestors across the country, sending tanks into cities and opening fire on demonstrators. The violence has only escalated. This week, the country saw the deadlist attack since the protests began — at least 90 people were killed in the town of Houla. Video of rows of dead children lying in a mosque in their bloody shorts and T-shirts shocked the world. A local activist reached by Skype told the Associated Press that pro-regime fighters known as shabiha stormed the village, raiding homes and shooting civilians. The United Nations estimates that the conflict has left more than 9,000 dead and thousands more displaced.
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Finance
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The worst corruption in the world is on Wall Street.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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When it comes to the issue of “net neutrality” I want to ensure that Internet users can always choose full Internet access – that is, access to a robust, best-efforts Internet with all the applications you wish.
But I don’t like to intervene in competitive markets unless I am sure this is the only way to help either consumers or companies. Preferably both. In particular because a badly designed remedy may be worse than the disease – producing unforeseen harmful effects long into the future. So I wanted better data before acting on net neutrality.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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La Quadrature has sent letters to three key committees of the EU Parliament urging them to work toward the rejection of the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, along with its voting recommendations.
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05.29.12
Posted in News Roundup at 6:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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ZPODD is short for Zero-Power Optical Disk Drive and is one of the features of the Serial ATA 3.1 specification. What this ZPODD technology allows for is to zero-out the power consumption of an idle SATA ODD to further the power-savings benefits. If the SATA device is completely idle, there’s no need to feed it anything.
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Cadillac’s latest model, the 2013 XTS sedan is all set to go on sale from June, marking the company’s first new launch in three years. This latest product from General Motors highlights CUE (Cadillac User Experience), a Linux powered radio and navigation interface designed for infotainment purposes of Cadillac owners. Early reviews suggest the touch inputs to lag slightly, though the voice input feature appears to be top notch, well in contention with the performance standards of BMW’s iDrive and Ford’s Sync.
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Desktop
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I love buying gadgets, and I’m not one to deprive myself. My house has just about every piece of equipment I’ve ever lusted after, from a Mac Mini hooked up to an Apple Cinema Display to a Sony Bravia 3D TV connected to my PS3. I have a MacBook Air, PS Vita, iPad, Nintendo 3DS, Kindle touch—the list goes on.
I wouldn’t want to do without any of them. But out of all my gadgets and computers, there’s one I respect above all others, and it’s an old piece of junk.
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My name is Lee Hachadoorian. I am a geographer who recently completed a PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center. My focus is on using geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial tools for urban analysis. My dissertation was on the relationship between metropolitan fragmentation and spatial inequality/segregation. I currently teach GIS at NYU-Poly and work as a Research Assistant at CUNY Center for Urban Research. I’m a backpacker, yogi, and gamer. I use games in my teaching. Last week I had my students do a treasure hunt in downtown Brooklyn and import their GPS tracks into a GIS software.
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Server
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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As the latest Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics benchmarks to publish, here is a comparison of some of the different desktop environment options of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS when using the Intel Linux graphics driver on the Core i7 3770K with its HD 4000 graphics. The desktop environments being compared include Unity, Unity 2D, KDE, and Xfce. The default Ubuntu Unity desktop with Compiz continues to have problems for the open-source friendly company’s drivers.
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Applications
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Sound is one of those portions of the Linux operating system that is often unappreciated and not even given a second thought. When examined from a technical perspective, the sound frameworks and architectures used within Linux are quite fascinating.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine
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PlayOnLinux 4.1 was officially announced a few days ago, bringing support for Canonical’s Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system.
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Games
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From May 24th to June 1st, World of Goo creator Ron Carmel is arranging a sale of 383 indie games by roughly 180 developers in an enormous event titled Because We May.
The event’s website allows you to view all the offered games and link to their purchase pages. Games are available on Steam, Google Play, App Store, Desura, Indievania and even directly from the developers.
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For those curious what OpenGL gaming frame-rates are like if trying to run LLVMpipe on the latest Intel Ivy Bridge processors, here are some numbers.
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Wolfire Games has been working on a native Linux port of their forthcoming “Overgrowth” game. This title that’s much anticipated by many Linux gamers now finally has the Linux support available with its new 180 build.
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Desktop Environments
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This time we will look at the Xfce 4 dictionary which is naturally included with the Xfce 4 desktop. Use this tool to find detailed information about any words you specify.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In KDE, there are quite a few apps out there to manage your personal photo library with. The prominent ones that come to mind are DigiKam and Qwenview. While both of these applications are fantastic and highly regarded, they miss one huge mark. The average user. DigiKam literally sets the bar as far as Linux editing, collection and workflow is concerned. Qwenview excels at being a general purpose image viewer. Neither of these 2 applications focus singularly on the task of collecting personal photos in an easy and straight-forward way.
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New Releases
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Robert Shingledecker announced last evening, May 24th, the immediate availability for download of the Tiny Core 4.5.3 Linux operating system, including the Tiny Core Plus edition.
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Here’s a quick note to mention that I’ve posted a couple new Installation DVDs for Dream Studio 12.04.
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At LinuxTag 2012, currently taking place in Berlin, the Kanotix development team announced the release of an update to the Hellfire branch and a preview of the Dragonfire branch of its live Linux system. Kanotix appeared in 2003 as a Knoppix derivative and evolved into its own distribution, based on Debian. Designed for use as a general purpose Live CD/USB Linux system and able to boot on a wide range of hardware and with a full range of applications, Kanotix also happily installs onto hard disks to provide a permanently resident operating system.
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François Dupoux proudly announced a couple of days ago, May 26th, the first point release of his popular SystemRescueCd 2.7 Linux-based operating system for rescue and recovery tasks.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mageia 2, the second edition of the Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Linux, was released just two days ago. Made available for download, were Live CD installation images for KDE and GNOME 3, and other ISO installation media that allows you to install desktop environments and window managers other than KDE and GNOME 3.
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It has taken a few days to get both of these distributions loaded on everything I have around here, but I finally have it done, and I can write up a quick summary of the results. The news is almost all good, with just a couple of minor exceptions.
Samsung N150 Plus, Acer Aspire One 522, Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 – On all of these, both Mint 13 and Mageia 2 installed with absolutely no problems, and run flawlessly. All of the hardware is recognized and supported, displays come up at the correct resolution, wired and wireless networking, Bluetooth, Fn-keys, suspend/resume, power management, screen brightness, it all works.
HP Pavilion dm1-3105ez. The accursed Synaptic “ClickPad” system. Well, Mint 13 at least handles it the same way that Ubuntu 12.04 does, meaning that a two-finger tap produces a right-click, but drag-and-drop and scrolling are still difficult to impossible. Mageia 2 doesn’t handle the ClickPad well at all, it has all the typical problems with right-click, drag-and-drop and scrolling.
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Red Hat Family
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As Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst declared at this week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, California, open source and its children – including cloud computing – are laying waste to the economics of how traditional enterprises do business, forcing them to gravitate to information to compete. Red Hat’s role in this tectonic shift? Arms dealer.
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Fedora
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Fedora 17 will be shipping next week. It’s got a bunch of new features, none of which I contributed to in the slightest. What I did work on was improving our support for installation on x86 Apple hardware. There’s still a few shortcomings in this so it’s not an announced or supported feature, but it’s sufficient progress that it’s worth writing about.
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The Fedora ARM team, through Paul Whalen, announced earlier today, May 24th, that the Beta release of the upcoming Fedora ARM 17 edition is now available for download.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Google recently announced its Google Drive which is clearly positioned as a competitor to iCloud, SkyDrive or alternative to services like Dropbox or semi-open source Spider-Oak. A lot of Linux users are upset as there is no client for Linux at the moment. The good news is Google Drive will be coming to Linux soon. That doesn’t mean that Linux users were cloud deprived. Almost every cloud solution has its Linux client, including Dropbox and Spider-Oak, and excluding Ubuntu One. Then we have ownCloud for those who want complete control over their cloud. That makes one wonder what future holds for Ubuntu One, Canonical’s personal cloud offering?
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Ubuntu 12.04, codenamed Precise Pangolin, rolled out last month. The new version of the popular Linux distribution brings updated software and new features, including the highly-anticipated Heads-Up Display (HUD) interface. The HUD is one of several excellent improvements that have helped to make Ubuntu’s Unity desktop shell even better in Ubuntu 12.04
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Whenever there has been new transition, people have resisted to adapt to changes. Same has happened for gnome 3 based desktops. Specially from people who used to use gnome 2 as their primary desktop environment. Change for just the shake of change is not the best solution in most cases. However changes with desktops is something that can make or break the deal.
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Canonical, through Victor Tuson Palau, announced a few days ago that they’ve published an AMI image in Amazon Web Services, providing an ARMhf (hard-float) Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system running on an emulated hardware system.
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Flavours and Variants
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Phones
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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In June of 2010, Cisco announced their entry into the tablet market with the open source Android powered Cius. As is the case with all Cisco announcements, there were bold predictions about how it would change the market yadda, yadda yadda.
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Some people think the Android/Linux phenomenon on ARMed CPUs is all about mobility. Mobility is a good fit. Availability of apps is great. The real story, the one we will tell our grandchildren about is ARM taking over on desktop and server. While touch is advantageous for small gadgets and ARM is great for battery-powered equipment, both of these are useful on systems with monitor, keyboard and mouse (or other pointer) and network/storage servers. Because Linux is unerneath, nothing prevents monitors, keyboard and mice from being added to ARM systems except connectors. “Desktop” units are large enough to hold connectors. The ARM CPUs of today are sufficiently powerful for many tasks done by desktop-users and servers.
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It’s no secret that open source software is playing an increasingly prominent role in businesses around the globe, but a recent survey has uncovered a few surprising findings about adopters’ motivations for choosing it.
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According to a report by the 451 Group, many companies are now identifying freedom from vendor lock-in as an important reason for switching to open source software. In a recent survey by the group, 60% of respondents said that the top factor that made open source software “attractive” was the absence of the dependency on one particular vendor. The second most quoted factor was lower acquisition and maintenance costs (51%) followed by better code quality (43%) and the ability to look at the source code (42%).
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As all geeks know, today is the 35th anniversary of the release of Star Wars (and it’s also Towel Day too). What you may not have known is that today also marks the release of Apache Wookie 0.10.0.
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The Open Source Software Institute, a non-profit group that supports open-source adoption and the National Security Agency (NSA), the organization in charge of all out of country eavesdropping, will co-host an Open Source Software Industry Day on Wednesday, May 30, 2012. The unclassified, one-day event will be held at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Conference Center near Fort Meade, MD, which is where the NSA is based. Alas, pre-registration is already over.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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First came the BlackBerry, bringing the smartphones for suits perfected by RIM to consumers. Next came the iPhone, which quickly hoovered up 23 per cent of the market. But the iPhone came at a price: the freedom of users and coders. It is tightly controlled by Apple, as Adobe quickly found to its cost with Flash.
Next up was Android. In just four years, Android exploited consumers’ desire to poke and stroke their phones to become the world’s most popular smartphone OS – burying the iPhone – with 59 per cent of the market.
Android had a plus: freedom of choice for both coder and consumer thanks to an open-source code base.
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BSD
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BSD systems are the technological neighbors many of us meet daily, but few know much about. Martin Husemann of NetBSD explains, analyses, compares and refers to everything there is to know about BSD and NetBSD. Meet this fantastic operating system through another Monday’s interview on Unixmen.
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Project Releases
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I have big news for all the people whose lives involve video editing. Today, literaly in few hours, LightWorks will be released, which is an Open Source professional non-linear video editor.
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Public Services/Government
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The October 2009 memo on Defense Department use of open source software may have inadvertently created an additional roadblock to it, said attendees of a conference on military use of open source.
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Openness/Sharing
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Scholarly publishing in the English-speaking world has been in turmoil since the reduction in higher education funding in the 1970s affected university presses and libraries. Scholarly publishing is not about money, at least not directly, but about personal reputation, research dissemination, impact and the advancement of knowledge. Open publishing accounts for a relatively small proportion of scholarly publishing, though its impact is growing and affecting the commercial publishing models. Agata Mrva-Montoya
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Even better is the fact that the company got few complaints — meaning that IE support isn’t a big deal anymore.
This is fantastic news for Linux users (who can’t run IE) and good news overall that the hegemony of IE is now a thing of the past. Reality of course is that today, desktop users run multiple browsers and developers go mobile first (WebKit/iOS/Android) first in many instances.
It’s also interesting to see how much more it costs to build an IE website. It’s shocking that it could cost $100,000 more isn’t it?
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Security
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Cambridge University researchers find that a microprocessor used by the US military but made in China contains secret remote access capability
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Copyrights
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Some Microsoft Advocates often refer to Linux/FOSS users with the derogatory term “freetard” and even if we look past at the apparent double standards Bing employs in comparison with requests made of Google and we ignore the millions of Windows users using the uTorrent client and downloading copyrighted material, we need only look to Microsoft themselves and a very interesting article by torrent freak, who, after researching a few Microsoft IP addresses, find that records show, their machines have been very busy downloading copyrighted material for free too. Hypocricy? Would we expect anything less from a company that employs a man someone like Steve Ballmer?
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05.28.12
Posted in News Roundup at 5:02 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The new wave of fun geek toys is inexpensive, hackable, tiny Linux-powered ARM computers, and they’re red hot. This is the year to go small.
The ARM platform has been around for a long time, and nearly everyone has used an ARM-powered device. ARM CPUs come in 32-bit, 64-bit, and multiple core flavors. They are paired with amazing tiny powerful GPUs that deliver high-end video in mobile phones, tablets, media players, game consoles, calculators, routers, backup drives, GPS devices, e-readers, set-top boxes and digital video recorders, robots, 3D printers, home automation, and cameras. ARM Holdings claims that over 20 billion ARM-based chips have shipped since they were developed.
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Desktop Linux is slowly gaining market share but its advancement is excruciatingly slow. The desktop itself is loosing market share to mobile operating systems like Android and iOS primarily because Internet usage is shifting towards mobile devices. A lot of people use their mobile phone as their primary computing device and mobile phone hw is developing leaps and bounds to serve these use-cases (bigger screens, quad-core processors…etc).
Due to its touch-oriented, mobile-centric features + Google’s strong push, Android is rapidly expanding its market share among the mobile operating systems and is the most successful Linux distribution ever.
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Desktop
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The second generation Chrombooks are coming. These Chromebooks are more powerful from the previous generations and run on Intel Celeron processor instead of sluggish Atoms chips. We know this because of some leaks. NewEgg listed SAMSUNG XE550C22-H01US aka Samsung ‘Edison’ Chromebook priced at $549.
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Kernel Space
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The brand once known as the “Standard of the World” has fully embraced the Standard of Geeks for its latest play for the hearts, minds and cash of the upwardly mobile. This is the all-new 2013 Cadillac XTS, and while it certainly isn’t your great-great (great) grandfather’s Cadillac, it’s designed to appeal to everyone from octogenarians to their baby-boomer spawn, and maybe — just maybe — even you….
While the XTS’ spate of processors and controllers isn’t running the open source offspring of Linus Torvalds, the game-changing infotainment intender known as the Cadillac User Experience (CUE) is.
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Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of the 3.4 version of the Linux kernel. While Linus notes that there have been no majorly exciting changes since the last release candidate, it’s worth taking a look at some of the things that have made their way into this release of the Linux kernel and what it means to the Linux community as a whole.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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There’s another Kickstarter-backed game that may be coming to Linux and it’s causing Linux gamers to become extremely excited. In the past day I’ve received no less than 30~40 emails from readers talking about this possible Linux port of Carmageddon: Reincarnation.
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Okay so I am still catching up on the news, Xenonauts the game heavily inspired by one of my all time favourites X-COM has been confirmed it will head to Linux! It’s another kickstarter project but has already hit way over it’s goal so it’s confirmed it will come out!
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Akademy, the KDE community summit, is happening in just a few weeks, from the 30 of June to the 6 of July, in Tallinn, Estonia. The Akademy Organizing Team is pleased to welcome this year’s Akademy sponsors whose support is critical to the success of the conference.
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I’m not going to provide screenshots of the installation process, it has been years since I do not do this. I’m going to tell that installation of the base system of Arch Linux is easy, but you will end up with bare bones system. Just the console and the base Linux system, more like a server than a Desktop system.
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Mageia 2 arrived a few days ago as well. “”We’re the Mageia community, and we are very happy to announce the release of Mageia 2! We’ve had a great time building our community and our new release, and we hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed making it. Here are some of the nice things included in Mageia 2: KDE 4.8.2 SC, the current release of the popular KDE desktop; GNOME 3.4.1, Xfce 4.8.3; VLC 2.0.1; Flash Player plugin 11.2; Chromium Browser 18; GIMP 2.8 featuring the all new single window interface, and Amarok 2.5.”
The public release of Fedora 17 was pushed back to May 29 last week, but in their traditional pre-release Go No Go meeting yesterday, the release team agreed the fourth RC can be tagged final and that “The Beefy Miracle” would be shipped on Tuesday, May 29. kparal didn’t even wait for the meeting to adjourn to go “partying.”
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New Releases
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Red Hat Family
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The RPM project has announced the availability of RPM 4.10.0, which includes great number of changes since the 4.9.x branch. The RPM package management tool was originally developed by Red Hat and is used by many Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, PCLinuxOS and more.
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT), the largest seller of the open-source Linux operating system, fell after an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. projected a slowdown in billings growth.
The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company declined 3.4 percent to $54.43 at the close in New York, for the third-worst performance in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The stock has climbed 32 percent this year.
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Red Hat has lured two of the brains behind JRuby, Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, who once worked at Sun Microsystems.
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It was about two months ago when the now $10 billion open source software provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) blew up – in a good way – for shareholders. The company had just released fiscal Q4 numbers and tech geeks everywhere were all aflutter. Revenue was up – again – and management guidance for the balance of 2012 and 2013 was unwavering.
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Fedora
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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How the whimsical naming scheme of Mark Shuttleworth managed to dodge adding a P-adjective to ‘Penguin’, we’ll never know. As founder of Canonical, the commercial company behind Ubuntu, it’s Shuttleworth who pulls these names from his imaginative hat.
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Flavours and Variants
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The Worlds Favourite Distribution gets a new version based on all the good parts of the Ubuntu LTS, and bundled with two traditional desktop environments
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Fans of Linux Mint 13 can look forward to getting their hands on KDE and Xfce variants before the end of June, if predictions by project leader Clement Lefebrve pan out.
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On May 23, 2012, Linux Mint 13 “Maya” was released. There are two desktop flavors available, the MATE Edition and the Cinnamon Edition. MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop since the GNOME project has abandoned GNOME 2 in order to work on GNOME 3 development. Cinnamon is a project started by Linux Mint in order to include a classic GNOME 2 style interface in a GNOME 3 environment. Both of these flavors are available in 32 bit and 64 bit versions.
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Phones
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However, before it sets its sights on the big players, it first needs to overtake the little players, and one of those is Linux.
Yes, Linux.
So how come Linux has a presence on smartphones? It’s mostly down to Samsung and its Bada operating system. By the end of the quarter, Samsung accounted for over 80 percent of all Linux-powered smartphone shipments. Interestingly, Samsung is also the dominant player when it comes to Android too, accounting for over 45 percent of shipments.
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Android
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Toshiba has unveiled a quad-core powered tablet that may pack a punch, but also – the manufacturer hopes – won’t look out of place at Paris Fashion Week.
The Toshiba AT300 boasts a 10.1-inch LED backlit display with a resolution of 1280×800 pixels, with 10-finger multi-touch support, should you need it. The screen itself is Corning Gorilla Glass, which should ensure it stays scratch free for the foreseeable.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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Embedded below is the video of the Portal Companion Cube on Linux via Google’s Android platform and running on the hardware that makes up the Vivaldi Tablet.
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Years ago it was Extremadura switching to GNU/Linux over a weekend, more recently Andalucia switched. Now Galicia is investing nearly €1 million in promotion of FLOSS for business and government. They have already saved €2.5 million last year.
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The open source Puppet configuration management system is widely used to get software onto servers. Now the developers behind Puppet are going a step further, taking aim at bare metal provisioning in an open source effort with EMC called Razor.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The eighth update to the 4.1.x branch of VirtualBox has been published with compile fixes for the recently released Linux 3.4 kernel. The new version, 4.1.16, of the open source desktop virtualisation application improves the overall stability of the software by rectifying various regressions, including some that could lead to crashes, and a problem that caused some rpm-based packages to have an incorrect help file path on Linux hosts.
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Most observers are applauding Google its successes in the Oracle v. Google case… but not everyone is thrilled about it.
The jury for the Oracle vs. Google trial delivered their verdict for the second phase of the case–the patent phase–and as you probably know by know, found absolutely no patent infringement on the part of Google.
With no patent infringement found, and only minor infringement found in the earlier copyright phase of the trial, Judge William Alsup dismissed the jurors early, since the planned damages phase was pretty much rendered moot by yesterday’s decision.
The trial is not over, of course: Alsup will probably rule on damages himself, and there’s still his ruling on the copyrightability of application programming interfaces to come sometime next week. That API ruling is now arguably the most important remaining part of the case.
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Funding
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As part of a project to create a non-DRM fixed media standard for high-definition video releases, Terry Hancock has launched a Kickstarter campaign which will produce two Lib-Ray video titles and player software to support them (“Sita Sings the Blues” and the “Blender Open Movie Collection”).
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Openness/Sharing
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From the beginnings of human literature, there has been an instinct to identify with the community, the collective, more than with any individual author. Many of our most valuable texts have been created by social groups and belong to those groups. Multiple, anonymous authorship brought China its cherished Classic of Poetry, gave England Beowulf, and even accounts for parts of the Christian Bible, such as the book of Hebrews—author unknown. The Bible, by the way, tells not one definitive account of the story of Christ, but four that contain conflicting details. So despite the current celebrity mystique surrounding the individual, named author, it’s safe to say that at the core of human civilization lie values of collaboration, shared experience, and shared ownership. And certain movements in literature today remind us of those values.
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Programming
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As I reported on Phoronix earlier this month and was widely-carried by other news outlets after that, FreeBSD 10 will using the LLVM/Clang compiler and deprecate GCC. The BSD camp wants to get rid of the GPL-licensed compiler from the Free Software Foundation and replace it with the younger but promising Apple-sponsored and BSD-style-licensed LLVM and Clang; see the earlier Phoronix articles on the topic for greater detail.
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Microsoft doesn’t really expect that 500 million “users” will have Windows 8 next year, but it’s still juggling the numbers.
The company has said reported comments by chief executive Steve Ballmer on Windows 8 uptake in 2013 are a “restatement of data” by a company employee in December 2011, and that these stats relate to Windows 7 licence upgrades.
Ballmer was reported by the AFP to have told the Seoul Digital Forum in South Korea this week: “500 million users will have Windows 8 next year.”
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Finance
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In times like these, companies might need a scorecard to keep track of the alleged misdeeds and missteps of those at the top. Take, for example, an especially problematic seat on the Goldman Sachs (GS) board. On March 19, 2010, Goldman put out a press release announcing the nomination of a new board member — former Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott. Goldman was still feeling the heat in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and Scott had the right résumé and experience. After all, he had led Wal-Mart through its own public relations troubles.
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Copyrights
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There are some welcome provisions in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012, and some worrisome provisions. Pranesh Prakash examines five positive changes, four negative ones, and notes the several missed opportunities. The larger concern, though, is that many important issues have not been addressed by these amendments, and how copyright policy is made without evidence and often out of touch with contemporary realities of the digital era.
There are some welcome provisions in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012, and some worrisome provisions. Pranesh Prakash examines five positive changes, four negative ones, and notes the several missed opportunities. The larger concern, though, is that many important issues have not been addressed by these amendments, and how copyright policy is made without evidence and often out of touch with contemporary realities of the digital era.
The Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012 has been passed by both Houses of Parliament, and will become law as soon as the President gives her assent and it is published in the Gazette of India. While we celebrate the passage of some progressive amendments to the Copyright Act, 1957 — including an excellent exception for persons with disabilities — we must keep in mind that there are some regressive amendments as well. In this blog post, I will try to highlight those provisions of the amendment that have not received much public attention (unlike the issue of lyricists’ and composers’ ‘right to royalty’).
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ACTA
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05.25.12
Posted in News Roundup at 2:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The Linux desktop has long had most of the apps anyone could ever really need. Sure, it doesn’t have some specific applications, like Adobe Photoshop or Quicken, but it had other apps. Such as Gimp for Photoshop and GNUCash for Quicken and QuickBooks that can do the job. Lately, however, companies that have supported Linux are moving away from the Linux desktop and that worries me. These companies and groups are: Adobe, Google, and Mozilla.
The first one doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Adobe has long had a “difficult” relationship with Linux. We, the Linux community, wanted the full Adobe suite and what we got was Adobe AIR, Flash, and Acrobat. Well, we used to get AIR and Flash anyway. In February, Adobe announced that Adobe Flash Player 11.2 would be the last native version for Linux.
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Kernel Space
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The Linux 3.5 kernel will introduce support for the Sound Core3D audio cards that were launched by Creative last year.
Announced last year was the Creative Sound Core3D audio processors as the long-awaited successor to the Creative X-Fi audio processors. When the Creative X-Fi sound cards were introduced more than a half-decade ago, the Linux support for these sound cards were a big issue. There wasn’t any support at first (Microsoft Vista made Creative Labs dupe Linux), Creative then released a binary-only Linux X-Fi driver and to make matters worse was Linux x86_64-only. In the end, Creative’s binary Linux X-Fi driver was unmaintainable so they ended up joining the open-source bandwagon.
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Graphics Stack
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Prior to LinuxTag Berlin later in the week, I have been visiting with Egbert Eich, the SUSE engineer, long-time X.Org developer, and former RadeonHD driver developer. Among the many Linux graphics topics being discussed in Frankfurt-Darmstadt, Egbert and I realized “that project to come up with an open-source graphics card” hadn’t been heard of in years. Hell neither of us could recall the name of the main project even though it was presented just four years ago at FOSDEM.
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Applications
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New Releases
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Just two weeks after the Release Candidate, the final release of Magiea 2 was made available today. Mageia is a spinoff from the Mandriva distribution, which was created by a group of Mandriva developers and contributors because of the uncertainty about the future of Mandriva, and the long (and ever-increasing) delay in new Mandriva releases. In that regard this is a timely release, since there is once again discussion about the current and future state of Mandriva itself. As I see it, the Mageia 1 release was this teams way of proving that they could in fact accomplish what they set out to do, that being to set up a new distribution based on the state of Mandriva at that time. While there was a huge amount of work involved in that, the majority of it involved building the base for the distribution, getting all the bits in place, making sure that it all worked and that a finished product would come out the other end. There was a lot of “updating” in that release, especially because Mandriva itself had fallen pretty badly behind by the time they forked it, but there wasn’t a lot of new development or innovation in it. I see Mageia 2 as being the first time that they could really spread their wings, and they have done a very nice job of it.
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Red Hat Family
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Western Australian regional and remote electricity provider, Horizon Power, and oil and gas producer, Santos, have implemented technologies from open source company, Red Hat.
Santos selected Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux 5 and an open source thin client solution as it was seeking a cost-effective system that enables performance, simplified administration, improved data management, more support and avoiding third-party costs.
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Red Hat Inc. (RHT) (RHT), the largest seller of the open-source Linux operating system, fell after an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. projected a slowdown in billings growth.
The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company declined 3.4 percent to $54.43 at the close in New York, for the third-worst performance in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. The stock (RHT) has climbed 32 percent this year.
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Engine Yard has announced that JRuby core team members Thomas Enebo and Charles Nutter are leaving the company to join Red Hat in an apparently friendly deal between the two firms. According to Red Hat’s Mark Little, bringing the two developers to the company “has been almost 2 years in the making”. In addition to JRuby, they will be working with various teams within JBoss and Red Hat on projects such as TorqueBox, Immutant and OpenJDK. Nutter commented on Twitter saying “I feel like this is my opportunity to really start contributing to OpenJDK rather than just evangelizing”.
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Fedora
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I’m happy to announce the existence of libusbx, a fork of libusb,. a bit late I must admit, as libusbx has been available for a while now, but as one of the people behind it I still wanted to mention it on my blog.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Between Windows and Linux builds, I use each equally. This is partially because I’m a developer and also because Linux allows me to fully customize its desktop environment to meet my needs. This is pretty much the main reason people use Linux aside from the fact the OS is a lightning-fast open-source OS which continuously focuses on improving usability and functionality with every build and is constantly updated significantly. However, rather than changing core elements of usability and functionality, canonical has decided to focus more on simplifying the effort of finding files in a number of unique ways in the latest build released last month.
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While Linux users may suffer the stereotype of being cheap, that isn’t stopping open source OEMs from courting customers willing to pay premium prices for premium PCs. Case in point: eRacks recently introduced a new line of high-end desktops, and System76 followed suit with the debut of the Gazelle Professional Laptop, which, for all its power, actually prices out quite competitively with PCs subject to the “Windows tax.”
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Flavours and Variants
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Dick MacInnis has announced the release of Dream Studio 12.04, an Ubuntu-based distribution with a goal of helping users to create graphics, videos, music and websites.
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With the new version of Linux Mint, released Wednesday, the developers behind the open source Linux distribution have put all energies behind Gnome, offering two versions of the desktop interface.
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The tiny Linux device which has lived up to its hype has now given more reasons to buy this device. In a blog post Liz discloses that the foundation is working on an experimental camera which will be released later this year.
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Wind River’s support offerings for Intel DPDK include standard and premium support. Premium support includes a dedicated team of managers and engineers, service level agreements, detailed reports and extensive onsite coaching assistance. Wind River Test Management and Wind River Simics simulation tools also work seamlessly with the Intel DPDK and Wind River Linux as well as many other Linux distributions.
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As we’ve reported, the diminutive $25 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi is attracting developers and tinkerers, and we’ve also noted that it could succeed where projects like One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) ran into roadblocks–in the educational market. In fact, the tiny devices (see the motherboard shown here) have already drawn interest from educational system and technology industry leaders. Now, in a very promising step for the Raspberry Pi movement, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has pledged to give U.K. schools Raspberry Pis and pledged to train 100 teachers in how to pass Linux skills onto students.
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Even if the Raspberry Pi is under-powered for desktop work, I have only high regard for the stated goal of the design: an affordable platform for the next generation of hardware and software designers. Considering that the higher-end model is a mere US$35 (plus shipping, handling, and tariffs), the actual bang-for-the-buck is amazing.
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Phones
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Android
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“The North American mobile market is changing,” asserted Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot. “Stats show that, for the first time, contract renewals are down. People are switching to pay-as-you-go plans that cost less than half as much per month, often with fewer limitations. These customers are buying their devices outright, not having the cost hidden away in an expensive multiyear contract, and Google’s plan is a natural for them.”
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At this year’s IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, security researchers from North Carolina State University (NCSU) announced the launch of the Android Malware Genome Project. The goal of the new initiative is to find, collect and analyse Android malware and share it with other researchers around the world.
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Owners of Android handsets can be forgiven for feeling frustration over how long it took to get an update from the 2.3 “gingerbread” release. Google’s flat-out effort to improve tablet support led to a 3.0 (“honeycomb”) release that was not deemed suitable for handset use—or for open-source release. It was only with the 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (ICS) cycle that all that new code became available for handsets—sort of. Six months after the 4.0 release, your editor finally got his hands on a device that can run it; what follows is a review of sorts.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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When we played with Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 at Mobile World Congress one complain that we had was there was no place to hold the S-Pen, the core feature of Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1. Considering the fact that S-Pen was the integral part of the tablet the missing slot was a deal-breaker. It’s more like missing SIM card slot for a smart-phone.
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HTC’s official Android 4.0 update list includes the majority of the phones which have been rolled out within the past 12-18 months. We’re glad HTC will be keeping most of its newer phone up to date, but we did miss one important piece which was tucked inside HTC’s list. HTC’s Android tablets (the HTC Flyer, EVO View 4G and Jetstream) will not be updated to Android 4.0.
HTC did not explain why their tablet lineup was being abandoned. When it comes to hardware, the HTC flyer variants and the HTC Jetstream have more than capable of handling Google’s latest Android built. But the issue probably has more to do with HTC’s tablet strategy than anything else.
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Rugged Android Tablet Redefines Tonka-Tough… and UglyDesigned to be used by those who are actively getting shot at in warzones, not just those of us who are clumsy with our gadgets, the new Rampage 6 tablet is even more rugged than Panasonic’s Toughbook tablet. Though, far less capable.
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Uptime monitoring service Pingdom analyzed the top 10,000 websites on the web and unsurprisingly found out that 74.6% of them are served on web servers run by open source software.
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You see, since 2003 open source has been intertwined with Brazil’s government, which claims to have realized hundreds of millions of dollars in cost savings. Critics with something to lose–notably Microsoft–claim that government workers immediately load up their Linux workstations with Windows, making the open-source desktop an illusion. Besides, Microsoft says, its software offers “better value” when the benefits are weighed against the costs.
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When Richard Hughes, founder of Hughski Limited announced an “open source” colorimeter with full GPL source code and even Linux support late last year, he offered a developers’ discount for testers and early adopters. So I was quick to give him a nod on that one. A few weeks ago I was informed that now I could have one if I still wanted it, and I did. And two days ago my ColorHug arrived, and here it is:
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Events
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Web Browsers
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SaaS
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Databases
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NoSQL and NewSQL database technologies pose a long-term competitive threat to MySQL’s position as the default database for Web applications, according to a new report published by 451 Research.
The report, MySQL vs. NoSQL and NewSQL: 2011-2015, examines the competitive dynamic between MySQL and the emerging NoSQL non-relational, and NewSQL relational database technologies.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The Greek municipality of Pilea-Hortiatis, just east of Thessaloniki, is migrating all of its PCs to the free and open source suite LibreOffice, with the help of the Greek Linux User Group. Greeklug explains in a statement published on 27 March that it has finished the migration from a proprietary office suite on 91 PCs. Still to be migrated are 45 PCs.
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Oracle announced a few minutes ago, May 22nd, the immediate availability for download of the popular VirtualBox 4.1.16 virtualization software.
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Education
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This is something that has mattered to me for all my teaching career. When training, I took Terry McLoughlin’s optional philosophy of education module; this was the best bit of the course, certainly the one that had the most lasting effect on me as an educator. After three years of a maths degree to sit in seminars where students took responsibility for introducing each week’s topics seemed revolutionary then. We talked and thought about what education was for, something we find a little time for now in my own lectures at Roehampton. The idea that captivated me then, and remains the touchstone for me still, is that of rational autonomy.
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Business
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Open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendor Actuate has gone on the tech dating game and formed a new collaboration to match its BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) with the Hortonworks data platform to enable big data visualisation technologies.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Free software idealism is a necessary and desirable part of the software landscape, says Richard Hillesley…
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Project Releases
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Nearly three years after the last major release of Nmap, version 6.0 of the open source network scanner has been released. Nmap is a popular utility for scanning and mapping network ranges to extract information about the systems attached to the network and the network’s topology. In version 6.0, the developers have added full IPv6 support while enhancing Nmap’s scripting engine, web scanning, mapping GUI and scanning performance, while also introducing a new tool called Nping.
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Public Services/Government
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The first Open Government Summit will take place on May 30th in Central Hall Westminster, London and will examine how the open source model allows public sector organisations to be more efficient, save money, meet mission-critical IT demands and improve their services.
Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, said: “The advantages of open source for government IT are well documented and will lead to efficiencies and savings in the delivery of public services. How to implement open source solutions most effectively is an important matter, and I am pleased that the summit is devoting time to discussing it.”
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The UK government has finally unveiled the second iteration of its Cloudstore after a number of delays, and has reneged on its pledge to make version 2.0 open source.
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Greek public administrations in practice use almost no open source, in spite of a law approved by the Greek parliament in 2011 that promotes the development of open source. European funded initiatives like Open-Source for European Public Administrations (Osepa) could change that, those involved say.
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Openness/Sharing
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This one is for all those autonomous vehicle makers out there who need a cheap autopilot system to make it go. Among the bits of awesome seen at the 2012 Bay Area Maker Faire, was the ArduPilot Mega 2.0 (APM2) from 3D Robotics, a complete open source autopilot system.
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Open Data
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Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control.
The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other “Open” movements such as open source, open content, and open access. The philosophy behind open data has been long established, but the term “open data” itself is recent, gaining popularity with the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web and, especially, with the launch of open-data government initiatives such as Data.gov.
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Open Access/Content
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Last week, Winston Hide committed what he called “a toxic career move.” Hide, an associate professor of bioinformatics and computational biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, publicly resigned from the editorial board of Genomics, an influential journal in his field.
“No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings,” he wrote in a piece for the Guardian. “I cannot stand by any longer while access to scientific resources is restricted.”
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Open Hardware
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SparkFun is not like BMW. We will never be the company to produce the luxury market version of breakout boards and development tools. I believe the only way SparkFun will survive this quickly changing world is to be malleable. We have to be ready to change.
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Programming
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Developers “more interested” in framework’s data models than operating system or GUI
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One of the things I spend a fair amount of time doing at work is compiling my C/C++ code and looking at the disassembly output. Call me old-fashioned, but I think sometimes the only way to really grok your code is to see what the processor will actually execute. Particularly with some of the newer features of C++11 — lambdas, move constructors, threading primitives etc — it’s nice to be able to see how your elegant code becomes beautiful (and maybe even fairly optimal) machine code.
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Standards/Consortia
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Hardware
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Finance
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Remember the case over Goldman Sachs’s Hudson CDOs, in which U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero wrote a scalding opinion in March? Marrero refused to dismiss fraud claims against the bank, in a ruling that detailed Goldman Sachs’s alleged scheme to shed exposure to subprime mortgages by dumping toxic collateralized debt obligations on an unsuspecting public. This week Goldman had a little something to say about the case, and — surprise! — it’s not an apology.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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You may recall that, back in March, on a whim based on a discussion at SXSW, Alexis Ohanian and Erik Martin (from Reddit) teamed up with Holmes Wilson (from Fight for the Future) to crowdfund a billboard to go up in Lamar Smith’s district in Austin. It turns out that you internet people don’t mind paying after all, and helped fund two billboards which have now gone up in Smith’s district, including one across the street from his office in San Antonio, and a second one on “Lamar Blvd” in Austin
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The head of the Federal Communications Commission said he supports cable companies’ charging for Internet based on how much a subscriber uses the service, and also welcomed a cable industry initiative to share Wi-Fi hotspots around the country.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Next week, parliamentary committees of the European Parliament will vote on ACTA. Citizens keen to see this agreement rejected must act and contact members of the legal affairs (JURI), industry (ITRE) and civil liberties (LIBE) committees, who will cast their votes on the 30th and 31st of May.
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Permalink
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05.23.12
Posted in News Roundup at 3:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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Earlier this month, at a conference dedicated to Ubuntu, Google developer Thomas Bushnell — who works under CIO Ben Fried — detailed the company’s use of Goobuntu, which has long been an open secret but was rarely discussed in public. According to Bushnell, Goobuntu is based on the LTS (long-term support) releases of Ubuntu, with modifications made to improve security and stability. Fried confirms that Google is currently using the “Lucid Lynx” version of Ubuntu (10.04), but that the company is moving to the “Precise Pangolin” release (12.04).
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Back to basics computing the Ordissimo way offers users a simple range of applications that have, the company claims, been hugely simplified to reduce the number of mouse clicks necessary to perform basic tasks.
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Dell’s PC division constitutes 20% of its stock by our estimates. Looking ahead, another potential source for sales is the open-source Linux based Ultrabook, which is aimed at capturing the web and mobile design market share dominated by Macbook. For this earnings report, we however expect a slight fall in PC sales due to seasonality, but guidance on ultrabook trends could spark investor interest.
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Kernel Space
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Red Hat developers Tim Waugh and Richard Hughes have announced what they call a “modern print spooler” for the Linux desktop. The printerd daemon is PolicyKit-enabled and uses D-Bus to communicate with other applications. Waugh points out, that as a design decision, printerd will only accept PDF files as input.
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It’s been a “calm” release cycle, according to Linus Torvalds, but the 3.4 Linux kernel released on Sunday still has plenty of interesting new features. Top of the bill? A X32 application binary interface (ABI) that will help provide better performance for applications that don’t really need huge chunks of memory or 64-bit variables.
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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OpenVAS is a framework that includes services and tools for scanning and the complete managment of vulnerability.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Gamers are not exactly the first group that comes to mind when one thinks of Linux users. Yet eRacks, a PC vendor specialized in open source systems, recently launched a new line of high end desktops, called AresPro, aimed at gamers and other customers with specific needs for powerful computers. Here’s the scoop, and its meaning for the open source channel.
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Desktop Environments
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In the wake of the announcement of the first ever KDE powered tablet, quite a few interesting things are happening in the background. One of them is the formation of a professional Partner Network for devices such as the Vivaldi tablet. Let’s look at this Partner Network in more detail.
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Rock musician and software developer Dick MacInnis, announced a few days ago the availability of the new Dream Studio release which is based on Ubuntu 12.04.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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Mandriva, the company behind the GNU/Linux based distribution with same name, recently announced that they are giving the control of the distribution to the community. CEO of Mandriva SA, Jean-Manuel Croset, wrote, “After reviewing all your messages, suggestions, ideas and comments, Mandriva SA took the decision to transfer the responsibility of the Mandriva Linux distribution to an independent entity.”
The development raised questions about the role Mandriva fork Mageia will play in this community controlled Mandriva. Mandriva clarifies that there will be active collaboration between the two teams. For their server product, Mandriva will collaborate with the Mageia community.
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We’re the Mageia community, and we are very happy to announce the release of Mageia 2!
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The Mageia team has announced the release of Mageia 2, the community-driven fork of Mandriva.
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I am jumping the gun a bit and upgrading my Mageia 1 installation on my personal / business SOHO desktop PC tonight, May 21st, to Mageia 2. Officially Mageia 2 is not due to release until May 22nd. But the online repository for Mageia 2 is in place at my preferred mirror and I know that it is basically ready to go right now. So, I am upgrading. Ironically, I am starting this article from my soon-to-be-retired Mandriva 2011 install on the SOHO router / Bacula backup server. I have X and fluxbox installed on here just for occasions such as this where my main PC is being serviced. I am publishing this and will update as I go, so any of you that follow this site via RSS can make comments if you wish while this is being written.
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Red Hat Family
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While the so-called Information Age has been touted since the public opening of the Internet nearly 20 years ago, the real dawn of the Information Age is just about to start.
That was the central theme of this morning’s Open Source Business Conference keynote from Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO Red Hat, who also told the audience that open source is setting off the explosion of new innovation.
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Debian Family
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Last month, Stefano Zacchiroli was re-elected as leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project for a third term, the first leader to earn such a mandate. Only the founder, Ian Murdock, has headed the project for anything approaching three years.
Debian is the biggest volunteer project of all distributions, has the most ports and provides, arguably, the best distribution; its package management tools are the stuff of legend. It serves as the basis for some of the better known and more widely used distributions, like Ubuntu and Knoppix, and also functions as some kind of conscience of the FOSS movement.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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My mother in law, Sue, has what can be best described as a dog-earred mess of a laptop. A reasonably modern Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows Vista, it was painfully slow to use, crammed with all manner of bloatware and pre-installed rubbish that came with the machine and the applications she installed, and likely hiding some spyware, viruses and other uglyness.
Now, I am not a fan of Windows at the best of times, but this was beyond software preferences: the machine was barely usable. Sue though, being the trooper she is, gritted her teeth and just got on with it, going about her business as usual.
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Flavours and Variants
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There’s been much attention focused lately on Canonical’s recently released Ubuntu Linux 12.04 “Precise Pangolin,” but it’s by no means the only popular Linux distribution out there with a major update in the offing.
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The Raspberry Pi $35 Linux computer, which is equipped with a 700MHz processor, 256MB of RAM, an SD card slot, two USB ports, an Ethernet jack and both HDMI and RCA outputs, will soon feature support for a camera add-on. The current prototype features a 14-megapixel camera that can be connected directly to the Rapsberry Pi through its CSI pins.
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A blog post published by the Raspberry Pi foundation offers the first look at an experimental camera module that is designed to plug into the organization’s popular $35 Linux computer. The camera component, which will likely be available for purchase later this year, is relatively small. The foundation says that it is “ideal for some robotics and home automation applications people have been wanting to build.”
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Couple of days ago, WonderMedia (subsidiary of VIA Technologies, which in turn is a subsidiary of Formosa Plastics) announced its latest SoC processors, the 800MHz WM8950 and the faster 1.2GHz WM8850. We’re not sure why exactly the higher number part is the lower-performing one, but we’ll leave that one to you to figure out.
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Phones
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After we have seen Tizen OS in action on a Samsung slate a few days ago, today we are bringing fresh news about this fresh platform. As probably know, Intel, Linux Foundation, Samsung, Sprint and many other big names of the telecom industry are involved in the Tizen Project.
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At the Open Source Business Conference 2012, the president of mobile data synchronization software company Funambol explained how open source software, such as Google Android, came to dominate the mobile space.
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Android
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Google announces completion of its deal to buy Motorola Mobility and enter the hardware market. The marriage will likely bolster Google’s Android-based smartphone business and Xoom tablet business but maybe not its OEM business. The extent of its success will also be determined by its support in the greater open source community, especially among open source developers, in the Software-as-a-Service era.
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Google has cleared the final hurdle standing in its way of acquiring Motorola Mobility. The government of China has given the pair its blessing, but one of the conditions regulators set was that the Android OS must remain open for at least the next five years. Google will have to file a report with China’s Commerce Department every six months.
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Some readers may remember that back in February we discussed the planned Google acquisition of Motorola Mobility and concerns over the possibility that Google’s Android might not remain an open-source platform. The promising news today for Android enthusiasts is that as part of the recent agreement for China to approve the giant search company’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, Google has said it will maintain a 5-year free and open source plan.
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With the final nod from China, Google has closed the acquisition of Motorola Mobility this morning. Motorola will be run as a separate company, just the way YouTube is run as a separate company. So, there is no fear of Motorola getting an edge over competitors. On the contrary Google recently announced that they will give partners early access to Android to be able to bring products to the market in time. Motorola will remain a licencee just like other Android partners.
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Randall, Randall, Randall. AT&T’s CEO has a habit of getting himself in hot water when he talks about his company’s network, and with his latest remarks about Android, he’s managed to make himself look like a fool yet again.
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Open source continues to make big strides, and leads in key growth segments including cloud, big data, mobile applications and enterprise mobility, according to a survey published yesterday.
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The board is happy to announce that this has occurred, and Simon Phipps is the new President. Alolita Sharma and Martin Michlmayr are again Treasurer and Secretary, respectively, continuing their long service to the organization. The board congratulates them on their selection and thanks them for their future service.
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Software defined networking (SDN) is triggering a major change in the way network administrators think about their networks. With SDN, the data and control planes can be separated enabling more programmable and flexible networks. One of the primary technologies behind SDN is the open source OpenFlow protocol. While the protocol can be supported on multiple types of switches from vendors big and small, it also requires a controller to actually manage and direct OpenFlow. That’s where startup Big Switch Networks comes into play.
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Registering a USB vendor ID normally costs around $2,000 USD while a block of MAC addresses costs $1,600. With there being large sums of IDs left under the OpenMoko Inc company, they’re looking to freely dispose of them for worthy open-source causes.
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The part of my job I enjoy the most is meeting interesting people and companies from all over the world.
One such company is Allevo in Romania. They have decided to open source their core business.
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Reviewing HijackThis is like talking to an old friend for the first time after a lengthy communications hiatus. I lost track of the program’s development shortly after Trend Micro took it over. Not that I or my repair colleagues ever stopped using it–it’s too darn handy when it comes to spotting malware and removing detritus from your system. Now, Trend Micro has placed the program in open source, so perhaps development will continue beyond the version 2.0.4 that it’s been stuck at for a while.
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OpenFlow and its part in the growing SDN ecosphere started out life as a Stanford University research project in 2008.
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This is my first guest post here on Noobpreneur.com and I wanted to start with something that is really close to my heart.
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Events
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I started thinking about the value of information here in San Francisco at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), held May 21-22. It’s the first day of a two-day conference, and some of the leading experts in open source are here presenting, learning, networking and more. During the opening remarks by John Amato, Vice President & Publisher, Computerworld, and Matt Asay, Vice President Business Development, Nodeable, we discovered that about half the attendees are new to the conference, which is great for open source.
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From the 23rd of May through the 26th is the LinuxTag conference that once again is happening (the 6th time) at the Berlin Messe. This trade show and conference that’s sponsored by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle, and Nokia usually has some interesting booths and sessions.
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The EU are pushing Reuters on opening access to their RIC codes, with open access one option, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. It raises a much bigger question though; will Reuters try to use open source as a way to shore up its diminishing trading room status?
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In their Call for Papers (CfP), the organisers of the Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMB) have asked potential speakers to submit presentation papers for the network monitoring conference, which will take place on 17 and 18 October in Nuremberg, Germany. This event is the seventh of its kind and is organised by German IT firm Netways.
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William Davis, Editor of the Bangor Daily News in Maine, USA, discusses how his 50,000-circulation daily newspaper moved from an outdated content management system (CMS) to using web-based tools that has improved its online efficiency.
Mr Davis says that in the old way of doing things, the print CMS didn’t talk to the website or support links. Furthermore, the paper’s bureau-based reporters couldn’t access the CMS, so they would email their stories to editors, who would edit them and add copy-and-paste links, and then any changes would start the process over again.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Spaces, the initiative to create open working spaces for open web and open source developers to gather in and work together, has officially launched the London Mozilla Space. Situated near Covent Garden, the new space is attached to Mozilla’s new offices where a number of the non-profit’s employees can work. The open space includes six meeting rooms, a larger meeting area with a “Splendid Bar”, Wi-Fi, and a space for storing bicycles.
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SaaS
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ownCloud has announced the version 4 of its community edition – adding innovations and enhancements that make the popular project even more flexible, secure and innovative.
ownCloud 4 adds innovative features like file versioning, – which actively saves files, allowing users to “rollback” to previous versions – and a new API — giving developers an easy, stable and supported way to develop applications on top of ownCloud capabilities.
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Databases
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When developing Hive-based applications, developers always have to deal with different HiveQL queries to perform basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) and other operations on Hive table data. The queries also vary from one application to another. For applications where multiple types of Hive tables are used and many of them are created on the fly during the execution of the application, managing a table’s lifecycle and querying data dynamically become very difficult. Developers have to hardcode various HiveQL queries for each operation. This makes developing, managing and maintaining the application very difficult.
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CMS
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Students from around the world will be working on open source coding projects that may be used by content management (CMS) software Joomla, as part of the Google Summer of Code.
There are eight separate student projects, each being worked on by a different student, that have the potential to be incorporated into the open source Joomla platform and core.
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Education
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Seneca Professor Chris Tyler has been named among the first Industrial Research Chairs for Colleges by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
The $1 million renewable five-year grant recognizes Seneca’s expertise and establishes Tyler as a research leader in open source technology for emerging platforms. In this new role, his research will focus on foundational software for new energy-efficient computing platforms, ranging from the revolutionary $35 Raspberry Pi computer to large data centres, with industry partner Red Hat Canada. Emerging ARM computer systems have the potential to reduce energy, space, and cooling requirements by 90 per cent or more.
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Healthcare
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3M Health Information Systems will release a public version of its Healthcare Data Dictionary as open source software, making it free and available worldwide.
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Funding
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Take Eclipse, for example. The Eclipse Foundation organizes the code base, polices the license, and builds a community around its code. Its funding comes from members and sponsors, who are all free to extend the code base to make their own products.
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Project Releases
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The recently released update to Lightspark, version 0.5.7, improves the graphics capabilities of the open source Flash player implementation for Linux. According to lead developer Alessandro Pignotti, this has been done by adding support for the BitmapData copyPixels method, soft masking and memory usage profiling, features that are all used by graphics-intensive Flash games.
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Public Services/Government
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OneBigVoice is an online platform for activists, politicos, and the everyday citizen to raise awareness of the things that matter to them. Through the site, organisations can raise funds for advertising campaigns, provide information on issues, and allow communities of interest to participate, as well as local politicians.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open Access/Content
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Open-source textbooks, long considered a promising way to cut costs but still not widely used, could become more readily available and easily vetted as a University of Minnesota project expands.
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The University of Minnesota is hoping to pioneer a project that would see professors being paid in order to review open source textbooks. The university would offer $500 for each review in order to vet the books, and professors who adopt the books for teaching will also receive $500. Faculty members are welcome to submit their own reviews, but won’t be compensated for the effort.
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Open Hardware
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MAKE’s Hardware Innovation Workshop takes place May 15-16, at PARC in Palo Alto. The Workshop is a one-and-a-half day intensive introduction to the business of making and the makers who are creating these businesses.
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Founded in March, the OSRF has now announced its board of directors. Current directors include Professor Wolfram Bungard, who leads the Laboratory for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Freiburg; Ryan Gariepy, co-founder and CTO of Clearpath Robotics; Brian Gerky, Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage; Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot and currently CEO of CyPhyWorks; and Sam Park of South Korean robotics company Yujin Robot.
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Programming
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Past participants have helped improve everything from popular web frameworks to browser add-ons and even operating systems. Summer of Code is also not a half bad way to get yourself on Google’s radar — the company looks at the results of the program to help it “identify potential recruits.”
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NVIDIA today announced that LLVM, one of the industry’s most popular open source compilers, now supports NVIDIA GPUs, dramatically expanding the range of researchers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and programming languages that can take advantage of the benefits of GPU acceleration.
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Hardware
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Confused, mentally ill or just failing in facility due to advancing age, M$ is clearly not adapting to a new reality but trying to create a comfortable hallucination in which it alone can save mankind from ARM… Reality is that mankind must be saved from M$ by real innovation and unfettered imagination stimulated by FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software).
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Security
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Canonical announced a few hours ago, May 21st, in a security notice, that a new Linux kernel update for its Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system is now available, fixing two security vulnerabilities discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various developers.
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Finance
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An investigative report published Sunday by the New York Times provides a glimpse of the predatory practices of major Wall Street banks that played a central role in the financial meltdown and global economic crisis.
The article, headlined “Testy Conflict With Goldman Helped Push AIG to Precipice,” documents the role of Goldman Sachs, the biggest and most profitable US investment bank, in pushing the insurance giant American International Group (AIG) to the brink of bankruptcy.
Permalink
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05.22.12
Posted in News Roundup at 4:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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System maker Oracle has upgraded its version of the Xen server virtualization hypervisor with its own variant of the Linux kernel to bring it in synch with its Enterprise Linux server operating system distro.
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Kernel Space
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Linux 3.4 follows the Linux 3.3 release by two months and is now officially “stable” after Linux creator Linus Torvalds pushed out seven release candidates.
“I think the 3.4 release cycle as a whole has been fairly calm,” Torvalds wrote in his release announcement. “Sure, I always wish for the -rc’s to calm down more quickly than they ever seem to do, but I think on the whole we didn’t have any big disruptive events, which is just how I like it.”
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Graphics Stack
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation recently mused on the topic of non-free games on Linux, and unsurprisingly he rejects them, even though admitting that they “might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux”. His position has been consistent for decades. What’s important is teaching users about their freedom as software users, and making that a priority, and not so much increasing the Linux market share and mind share.
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Debian Family
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We are pleased to present our first release of siduction in 2012. siduction is released ~4 times per year and is based on the Debian Unstable repository.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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It appears that Mark Shuttleworth, father of the Ubuntu project, gave an interview to Jason Gerard DeRose, the lead developer of Novacut, an open-source video editor app for pro HDSLR users.
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The laptop is available with a 15.6″ 1080p Full High Definition LED Backlit Display (1920 x 1080) for a base price of $899. The base model is powered by 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 CPU i7-3610QM Processor and comes with 4GB DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz.
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Flavours and Variants
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Last week the release candidate for Linux Mint 13 was made available, code named Maya. Based on the recent release of Ubuntu 12.04, Linux Mint 13 takes the core of Precise Pangolin and adds it’s own branding and desktop environments on top of it. It’s these additions, and more, that go towards making Linux Mint so great – and here are five fantastic reasons to look out for the next version of Linux Mint.
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Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, we’re pretty sure you’ve heard about the Raspberry Pi by now — a $25 credit-card sized PC that brings ARM/Linux to the Arduino form factor. As a refresher, the system features a 700MHz Broadcom BCM2835 SoC with an ARM11 CPU, a Videocore 4 GPU (which handles HD H.264 video and OpenGL ES 2.0) and 256MB RAM. The board includes an SD card slot, HDMI output, composite video jack, 3.5mm audio socket, micro-USB power connector and GPIO header. Model A ($25) comes with one USB port, while Model B ($35) provides two USB ports and a 100BaseT Ethernet socket. Debian is recommended, but Raspberry Pi can run most ARM-compatible 32-bit OSes.
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Phones
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In the wake of Meego’s demise a new open source mobile operating system has emerged. Known as Tizen and backed by Samsung and Intel, the Linux-based OS recently hit the version 1.0 milestone and has even been paired with an official reference hardware platform. Unlike the alternative OSes that came before it, Tizen does not use the Qt application framework. Instead, Tizen apps are created using HTML5 and other web standards. It is intended to be used in smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, vehicle entertainment systems, and low-power notebooks.
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Android
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Motorola Mobility announced in a Form-8K filed today with the Securities and Exchange Commission that now that the Bureau of the Ministry of the Commerce of China has cleared Google’s acquisition, the companies will finalize the transaction “within two business days.”
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To truly disrupt Android, other OS makers face an uphill battle. It is no longer 2009, when Android stepped into a mobile market hungry for options beyond the iPhone (then only on AT&T) and the aging BlackBerry and Windows Mobile ecosystems. The market is now well established and the only two players that currently mean anything are iOS and Android.
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Chinese handset manufacturer ZTE has confirmed that a security vulnerability is present in the Android-based ZTE Score M smartphone. The phone includes an application, /system/bin/sync_agent, with a hard-coded password that can, now, be easily found on the internet. The application, when run with the password, gives the user root access to the device and therefore could be used to completely take over a phone.
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It’s official, Samsung’s next superphone is destined for T-Mobile and AT&T. At least, that’s what industry interest group the Bluetooth SIG seems to think. Apparently the body has approved T-Mobile and AT&T flavors of the mighty Galaxy S III.
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More than 50 percent of all software purchased within five years will be open source, according to a survey released Monday by a collaboration of 26 open source companies.
This year’s “Future of Open Source Survey” results signal a tipping point for open source software adoption in the enterprise and non-technical industries such as automotive, health care and finance. In the auto industry, for example, 59 percent of the companies surveyed use open source software and 35 percent said they’re evaluating it.
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Intended to simulate “in theatre” scenarios to stimulate team building skills and wider training and analysis initiatives, the work to test out as many as 400 use cases is being carried out in the Research Lab Simulation and Training Technology Center in Orlando.
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As the Open Source Business Conference gets underway in San Francisco, a survey shows that open-source software is contributing to development in some of the top IT trends of the day.
Mobile computing, cloud computing and analyzing huge amounts of data are among the top IT trends in 2012 and are also the focus of the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) 2012 that begins May 21 in San Francisco.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Well THAT was quick. Just six months after Google Chrome eclipsed Mozilla’s Firefox to become the world’s second most popular Web browser, Chrome finally surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on Sunday to become the most-used Web browser in the world, according to Statcounter.
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Chrome has passed Internet Explorer in browser share according to StatCounter’s latest numbers and Firefox’s recent downward trend appears to be over. Google’s open-source-based Chrome has been steadily gaining share according to StatCounter’s logs and, for the week just past, had a 32.76% share. IE on the other hand has been steadily declining since 2009, and in the same week took a 31.94% share.
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Mozilla
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We here in the Linux blogosphere tend to be pretty good at that, but recently a surprising turn of events left us befuddled. Namely: Mozilla’s decision to leave Linux support out of the initial release of its upcoming Web Apps marketplace.
Mozilla has been nothing if not a friend to FOSS over the years — indeed, it’s one of our very own best successes — and Linux users tend to be among its most ardent supporters.
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SaaS
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Oracle has released version 3.1.1 of its Xen-based virtualisation solution, Oracle VM Server for x86, which uses the Linux 3.0-based Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 2 as its Dom0 kernel.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Open Hardware
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Bring up the term open source to many people, and they’ll immediately think of community-driven software projects, but we’ve covered many open source hardware concepts here on OStatic over the years. And, last year, the official Open Source Hardware (OSHW) definition arrived in version 1.1. Recently, TED fellow Marcin Jakubowski delivered an address in which he discussed the open source blueprints for 50 farm machines, ranging from tractors to harvesters. You can get his thoughts in a video, but these farm-focused ideas are only a small part of the open source hardware scene.
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Programming
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The Perl developers have announced that Perl 5.16.0 is now available, after twelve months of development following the release of Perl 5.14.0. The changes in Perl 5.16 are designed to improve the language without breaking any past software.
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Software giant Microsoft is offering to delete all the crapware which OEMs are forever installing on computers.
Microsoft will do this for a fee. Sorting out your computer so it is bloatware free will cost you $99.
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Finance
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Ultimately the particulars of J.P. Morgan’s losses are so much noise. What they point to is an economic system designed to self-destruct. Add increasing environmental degradation in the face of global warming to structural financial fragility and what capitalism appears to have created is a full-blown suicide machine. And to invert Mr. Haldane’s premise—the $60 trillion in lost production (minimum) was never going to go to us anyway. The trajectory since the 1970s had it going to corporate executives, bankers and machines (automation).
Permalink
Send this to a friend
05.21.12
Posted in News Roundup at 11:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Leonard Tsai (shown), a key executive at Taiwan ODM Compal Electronics, is trying to navigate the unknown waters between today’s Wintel PCs and tomorrow’s ARM/Linux tablets.
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Desktop
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We have hardware manufacturers and OEMs willing to crank out supported systems. The last barrier to adoption are retail chains catering to the Wintel monopoly. Read all about it in a thoroughly researched report by The Association of Open Source Software Companies of Portugal.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Kernel Space
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After another seven Release Candidates, Linus Torvalds proudly announced a few hours ago, May 20th, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.4.
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Just two months back, we got the news of Linux 3.3 Release that had Android support included. And now, Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 3.4. Apart from the new drivers and fixes, among the major features in the 3.4 release, we have several Btrfs updates. It includes support for more than 4KB metadata blocks with better performance. A new X32 ABI ((Application Binary Interface) allows us to run programs in 64 bit mode with 32 bit pointers. The GPU drivers have been updated as well. It supports early modesetting of Nvidia Geforce 600 ‘Kepler’, AMD RadeonHD 7xxx and AMD Trinity APU series, and also support of Intel Medfield graphics.
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The new version sees a number of important changes affecting graphics drivers. The x32-ABI promises the advantages of x86-64-CPUs without the overhead of 64-bit code. Btrfs is reported to be quicker, and Yama prevents processes from accessing each other’s allocated memory.
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Graphics Stack
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ARM has published a new open-source X.Org DDX Linux graphics driver while working to enable support for their next-generation ARM Mali T6xx graphics core.
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Applications
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Version 2.52 of Transmission, the open source cross-platform BitTorrent client that strives to be as simple as possible, is now available for download.
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Shell prompt fans! here’s a microblogging client for Twitter and identi.ca you can use through the command line interface. Twidge allows you to view the recent tweets, add a new tweet, view messages, replies, retweets by those you follow and many other features.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Indie game studio SkyGoblin has released a new point and click adventure game The Journey Down: Chapter One. The game is a commercial remake of their free adventure game with same title but it comes with new content, fully voiced cast and HD art and animations.
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Desktop Environments
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EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is a desktop for UNIX-like operating systems. Main features of EDE are speed and responsiveness, low resource usage and familiar look and feel. Simply said, desktop that doesn’t get on your way.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This week we heard about the death of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. People within the KDE Community were shocked and upset by this tragedy.
Claire was a vibrant person with strong ideals. She will be remembered for pursuing these ideals, and as a good friend and colleague. She also thought a lot about how KDE as an open source community could find connections to the real business world. Her energy, fresh look at things, positive mindset and intense commitment inspired many people. So did her dancing.
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In the world of Linux there’s plenty of choices to choose from, whether it be distribution or desktop environments (KDE, Gnome2, Gnome 3, XFCE) but then there are those who would like a new distro with an older desktop environment.
SolusOS is a Debian “Stable” based distribution that uses GNOME 2 as its desktop environment. Currently SolusOS is only available in 32 bit but will see a 64 bit release in the near future. SolusOS is also an installable Live distribution.
Installation of the distribution was quite straight forward and feels like an Ubuntu based distribution being installed. There were very standard options to choose from when installing your distribution from keyboard language, to setting up your first user account.
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Last year Mandriva partnered with Moscow based ROSA Labs to create a new look for their once popular and user friendly distribution. The result was the attractive but seriously flawed Mandriva 2011 Hydrogen release and a rebranded version called ROSA Desktop 2011. Since then ROSA Labs and Mandriva appear to have parted company. ROSA Labs has forked the Mandriva distribution, creating a distribution that, while still resembling Mandriva 2011 at first glance, actually has gone its own way in many important respects. The first post-Mandriva release, ROSA 2012 Marathon, was officially unveiled last Monday. This is also the first ROSA LTS (long term support) release, offering security and software updates for five years. The release notes state that ROSA 2012 Marathon is intended for enterprise and small business use and is intended to provide stability, not “bleeding edge technology.”
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The XFCE Desktop Environment has risen greatly in popularity over the past few years. Major credit for it goes to the XFCE team who has been putting out releases with incremental updates and advancements but there is a misconception among many people that XFCE is bland. I encourage you to come on a voyage with me and you may discover something splendorous.
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New Releases
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Lucid Imagination has announced the 2.1 release of its open source LucidWorks Enterprise product for search of both structured and unstructured data located across an organisation.
Utilising Apache Lucene/Solr as its base, LucidWorks Enterprise 2.1 adds features such as Crawler Configuration, the ability to schedule external data source crawling and new connectors for high-speed Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Twitter and Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS).
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family
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When the going gets though, as the saying goes, the tough gets going. That is usually a test of character. When it comes to software companies in a financial mess, that old adage can be paraphrased as: When the going gets tough, we dump our software on the (open source) community.
It certainly was true of HP/Palm and their webOS mobile operating system. Oracle did something similar with OpenOffice.org (now Apache OpenOffice). And is that not what Sun Microsystems did with Solaris/OpenSolaris? And recently, there has been calls from some quarters for Research In Motion (RIM) to do the same with its mobile platform.
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Gentoo Family
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Try a source-based Linux distribution so you can tailor it perfectly to your needs. The choices are endless…
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Ubuntu’s Unity interface made a brief appearance in a popular Japanese ‘children’s’ show last weekend.
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I have become a Linux user since 2008 and my first Linux distribution was Ubuntu. Ubuntu is currently the most popular Linux distribution and when somebody is talking about Linux, very likely that he is talking about Ubuntu. I personally have a very complicated opinion toward Ubuntu, I both love it and hate it. In this article, I will enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of Ubuntu to justify my love and hate for it.
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I read this article today by someone called Hoo-Ann and I was very disappointed by how short the article was. I have been using Ubuntu off and on since it was Breezy Badger and I can come up with a lot more to say about the advantages and disadvantages of using Ubuntu. So, as someone that believes if someone else can’t do it “right” then you should it yourself, I’m going to list the (much longer) advantages and disadvantages I’ve personally found with using Ubuntu.
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Anyone who knows the world Linux will surely heard of Ubuntu. A distribution that has done so much for Linux and the Open Source world itself! In fact, thanks to the hard work of Canonical, Ubuntu is one of the first user-friendly distributions that have brought many people in the Linux world. Especially those most skeptical!
But if Ubuntu is a distribution that has done so much in the past, now we must curb our enthusiasm. In fact, for some time now, this same distribution is becoming a lot more criticized by veterans of the Linux world.
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Flavours and Variants
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While the main thing that would make Raspberry Pi’s diminutive $25 / $35 Linux setups better would be if we could get our hands on them faster, the team behind it is already working on improvements like this prototype camera seen above. The add-on is slated to ship later this year and plugs into the CSI pins left exposed right in the middle of each unit. According to the accompanying blog post, the specs may be downgraded from the prototype’s 14MP sensor to keep things affordable, although there’s no word on an exact price yet. Possible applications include robotics and home automation, but until the hackers get their hands on them you’ll have to settle for one pic from the Pi’s POV after the break and a few more at the source linked below.
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Wind River has announced that it has been recognized as the continued real-time operating system (RTOS) and embedded Linux market leader by VDC Research Group in its 2012 “Embedded/Real-Time Operating Systems” report. The report covers the global market for commercially available RTOSes and non-real-time operating systems and other related bundled products and services used in embedded applications.
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It’s the hottest thing in computing, it has a price tag of around $45, and it has finally arrived in New Zealand.
RS Components sales manager Mike Kelly brought a Raspberry Pi Model B into the Computerworld office on Friday to show us how the tiny Linux computer is assembled.
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tive comments, but to me they seem to reflect society’s move away from the concept of “tinkering” with technology. The personal computing revolution was driven by people who were curious as to what makes things tick. They were hackers in the true sense of the world, people who could see hidden potential and find ways to unleash it.
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The next few weeks I want to further explore the BeagleBoard and embedded Linux, in general. To tell the truth, I had planned to do this several months ago when I first got the BeagleBoard, but it didn’t make a very good first impression.
I got one of the A4 version boards (the 2nd run of PC boards, apparently). There was a hardware bug on the board that prevented the Ethernet port from working most of the time. It took a while to find the answer, which was to remove a surface mount resistor. This has been fixed in subsequent releases.
The other problem was the Linux distribution. You can load many different operating systems on the board (including Android, and some non-Linux operating systems like QNX and FreeBSD). By default, however, the board ships with a microSD card loaded with the Angstrom Linux distribution.
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Phones
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Android
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Over the past few months there have been no fewer than three tiny, cheap Linux PCs making headlines, and now there’s a fourth to add to the list.
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Still wishing for some more functionality on Sony’s touch-friendly watch? Well there’s good news if you’re into slider puzzles and music playing apps, as both of these have arrived open source in the SmartWatch’s latest SDK. The music extension will allow devs to start work on their own music player, already including support for Android’s generic music player.
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Sub-notebooks/Tablets
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So, GNU/Linux on netbooks is not dead, just localized… Anticipating claims of “old stock” I looked up this message about interpreting the serial number. The first character is the last digit of the year and the second character is the hex month (1-C). So, this unit starting with “C1″ was made in 2012-01.
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ZaReason, the Linux computer builder, is launching its first tablet called ZaTab. Unlike the company’s desktop computers and laptops that feature Ubuntu Linux, the tab will be powered by Android.
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PuppetDB is the next-generation open source storage service for Puppet-produced data. Today, this includes catalogs and facts, and will be extended in the near future. The initial release provides a drop-in replacement for both storeconfigs and inventory service.
We’ve designed PuppetDB to empower Puppet deployments, and built it from the ground up with performance in mind. It’s built on technologies known for their performance, and is highly parallel, making full use of available resources. It also stores all of its data asynchronously, freeing up the master to go compile more catalogs. Beyond that, we’ve devoted copious time to benchmarking and optimizing the performance.
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The centre, supported by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), has so far taught 40 students basic GNU/Linux skills along with opensource tools to provide image and graphics software. “We use free software to bring home the idea of equality and freedom. Besides teaching computer skills, we also touch upon the issues of caste and gender discrimination. Also, we emphasise that free software does not mean subsidy for the poor. It’s about freedom from copyright. The focus is on freedom and equality offered by the community software as compared to corporate ware,,” says Balaji Kutty, an IT professional and board member of SFLC who also teaches at the centre.
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The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) have developed a simulation tool for the electric industry to analyze geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on their systems.
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Supercomputers are powerful tools for scientists. They are also very expensive, so wasted time can mean a lot of wasted resources. But making the most efficient use of them is not the easiest proposition in the world; it’s not just a case of clicking a button to analyse a protein. However, fitting out the world of supercomputers with a user-friendly, web-based interface is the focus of an open source project based at Western Australia’s Murdoch University.
Last year Murdoch publicly launched Yabi, a tool equipped with a web interface to make using supercomputers simpler.
The computational physics community, as an example, may be very proficient in the intricacies of shell scripts and working with a command line, says Professor Matthew Bellgard, Director of Murdoch’s Centre for Comparative Genomics. “They’ve had a lot of experience in the past running their Fortran code using 4000 cores or 10,000 cores,” he says. However, “there are other domains where scientists don’t necessarily have that skill running command line code or porting their code from one supercomputer to another.”
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Good morning. Open source software is enjoying somewhat of a revival in business environments, although the revival is more about perception than reality. IBM‘s decision to swap out Oracle customer-account management software for similar software from SugarCRM was probably motivated at least in part by a desire to inflict some pain on rival Oracle, but also indicates an underlying confidence in the reliability, stability and scalability of open source software.
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While budgetary constraints and increasing commercial competition has clearly taken its toll on NASA, one area where the iconic government institution has unquestionably made headway is the implementation of open source.
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While there are quite a few budget and even open source logic analyser platforms for recording and evaluating digital signals, each of them usually comes with a custom interface protocol and dedicated evaluation software of varying functionality. Usually, the software only works with one analyser family made by a specific company.
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Open source software has come a long way. From the days when it was seen as a curiosity, to today’s scenario where some of the world’s biggest computer setups run atop Linux including Amazon and Google, it has been an interesting journey. According to IDC, Linux accounts for about 18-20% of the server market by revenues in any given quarter. That’s within striking distance of Unix, which had a market share of 20-22% in the second and third quarters of 2011. Of course, Windows ruled the roost with 45-50% in revenue terms.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Anytime you pay a visit to Mozilla.org, the home page of the open source Mozilla project, you’re landing on a page served by a brand new type of machine. A SeaMicro SM10000 server — a fat box about the size of an air conditioner that houses 64 Xeon processors.
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SaaS
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Openness in the cloud depends on open source code, open data and open APIs, according to Marten Mickos, chief executive of infrastructure-as-a-service software provider Eucalyptus Systems.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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In fact it is about the difficulty to get started at the LibreOffice project, which is a quite bad thing, because we need supporters and contributors of any kind. In the past, the decade of OpenOffice.org, one thing what we missed were the developers (I was not involved at that time, but I heard it several times and I think it is true…). Now, at the LibreOffice project we have easyhacks (At least I assume this, because of THIS Google search). Loads of things have been done about that. Now, I would really want to show you 2 month old numbers from Italo Vignoli’s blog. On March the 15th, there were ~360 people contributing to LibreOffice and ~21 at Apache OpenOffice.
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Education
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Policy makers, industry and many teachers are eager that pupils should learn more about computing. This includes learning how to write computer programs, but also “computational thinking”, a transferable way of solving problems and exploring situations, which has wide applications across and beyond the curriculum. In short, as pupils learn to program computers and the principles of computer science they start to bring the unique insights of algorithms, abstraction and the like to other fields. The same is true for teachers – ideas from computing can dramatically change the way we think about our work, and one of these, agile development, is what I’d like to explore here.
According to many A-level specifications, students are taught that software projects follow the “waterfall” methodology, starting with agreeing requirements, designing and implementing the software, testing it and then keeping things ticking over when it’s deployed to clients.
In other words, the sort of approach that has characterised public sector IT projects like the NHS database. Hmm… This doesn’t sound that far removed from how we’ve designed curricula: a top down list of things “children should be taught”, schemes of work, implementation in the classroom, plenty of testing, and the “service pack” of INSET as and when needed.
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Business
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One of the ironies of the channel these days is that many of the data centers and network operations centers (NOCs) built by solution providers are based on open source technologies. Almost invariably, these platforms are being used to support commercial software and systems that have been deployed at any number of customer locations.
That may sound a bit hypocritical. But in truth it just reflects an economic reality. Many solution providers have plenty of expertise available to them. What they are often short on is funding. When faced with the choice of throwing labor at a solution versus parting with cash to acquire commercial technologies, the decision is almost always to “sweat” the labor investment.
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Opsview has around 19,900 customers using its free open source offering and a further 100 customers paying for all the bells and whistles as well as a support package in the shape of the Enterprise version.
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Imagine what “Risk Factors” a hypothetical Open Source Incorporated would put into the regulatory filings that corporations file every year. The process could well provide insight into what the communities of Open Source should be prepared for.
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First a look at the numbers: Nuxeo reported global customer growth of 40 percent adding new customers that included Electronic Arts and InterContinental Hotel Group. It was North America where Nuxeo really took off, as North America became the company’s biggest market with revenue doubling there. Meanwhile, the community also grew. Nuxeo reported that the number of downloads tripled.
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Funding
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Bocoup incubates Web startups, fosters open-source community [...] Web app and open-source consulting company that also provides space and funding for startups.
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Project Releases
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A new version of Lightspark has been released yesterday. You can give it a try by getting the source code from launchpad. Ubuntu packages should be available shortly from our PPA
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Apache has dished out another serving of Cassandra, the open source NoSQL database popular for handling big data. The improvements speak to a maturing NoSQL database that’s well-suited for big data deployments. This time around, Cassandra has improvements to its query language, and tuning improvements that will help companies trying to boost performance with a mixture of magnetic media and solid state drives (SSD). Its continued development helps maintain open-source dominance in the big data/NoSQL market.
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Public Services/Government
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Ottawa-based open-source community group says proprietary software is wasteful and not conducive to transparency in government
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The UK government has finally unveiled the second iteration of its Cloudstore after a number of delays, and has reneged on its pledge to make version 2.0 open source.
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The government of Aragon, one of Spain’s autonomous regions, is increasing its support for open source, by making it easier for companies to get assistance to create, acquire and deploy this type of applications. It will link public administrations and other enterprises with open source specialists.
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The FDA sits some of the largest datasets in the world on drugs and other regulated products, and the agency’s recently appointed IT chief plans to push for more of those data to become available to outsiders via open source projects. During an appearance in Boston this morning, Eric Perakslis, the FDA’s chief information officer, presented part of his vision for transforming IT that supports regulation of products that comprise more than a fifth of U.S. commerce.
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French government spending on services based on open source software has reached 15% of the public administration IT budget, and continues to grow at 30% per year.
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It maybe says something about the impact of much of the vendor messaging about the Cloud that the European Union felt moved to fund the creation of a formal organisation to promote what really should be blindingly obvious – that regardless of how many sub-divisions of Cloud the vendor community try to introduce for marketing purposes, Hybrid Clouds are the obvious route for business users to follow.
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Openness/Sharing
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Tube is an open-source animated film based on “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the ancient poem from Mesopotamia. Its collaborative animators seek funding through Kickstarter for the film’s completion and release.
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Researchers at a US energy department lab have released an open source tool to detect malicious cyber activity within an enterprise, Government Computer News reports.
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Open source drug discovery might yield results of several scientists who are toiling to find a cure for the poor man’s diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria, say experts. Where traditional drug research by profit-driven companies fail, open source holds a lot of promise of succeeding because of its multi-institutional approach as well as the possibilities of collective work. In a world where a person dies of tuberculosis every 10 minutes, open source drug discovery might provide the answer soon.
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A decade ago, the biopharma industry was nowhere near as open as it is today to joining forces with outsiders to advance research and development. And several efforts in biomedicine have made progress recently with strategies and structures that borrow heavily from the open source movement in software development, IT World reports.
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People interested in donating their own genomic data to science should check out a new standard informed consent form that will let them route some or all of their genetic information to researchers. The goal of the Portable Legal Consent is to create a shared, open-source repository of that data.
The ability to give such gene data to science at large has been a subject of debate lately. Often a person’s medical data is used for one specific research purpose but is off limits for anything else. In this big data era where there are more tools to sort and analyse huge amounts of information, the accessibility of a big genomic data pool for many projects could be a boon to researchers looking to cure diseases or just better understand human biology.
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Western Australia’s Murdoch University has pioneered an open source project designed to build drag-and-drop style web-based user interfaces suitable for supercomputers.
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Real-time information is now a commuter’s fingertips after TransLink rolled out the latest iteration of its Next Bus mobile site.
The new features allow people to find out exactly where their bus is (on an interactive real-time map or through text) and its estimated arrival time.
“The difference is now people will be able to know exactly when their bus is going to be there, as opposed to the scheduled time,” said TransLink spokesperson Drew Snider. “It takes away the uncertainty of not knowing whether the bus left early or is running late. It will also show whether the bus has been cancelled for any reason.”
The real-time tracking system, found at m.translink.ca, is modeled after similar projects in New York, Boston, Chicago and Portland.
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Open Data
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I really think this is one of the shrewdest things that Microsoft is doing at the moment (along with some pretty stupid stuff like fighting true open standards in the UK.) Location is going to become one of the key areas for future applications, as our position is used to modulate the information and services we receive on our main computing devices – smartphones. By supporting OpenStreetMap in this way, Microsoft is ensuring that Google does not end up in the centre of this particular spider’s web. Call it payback for the damage inflicted by Google on Microsoft through its support for open source software.
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But Berkowitz, a web designer, saw the problem as something he could potentially hack. A new breed of technologist increasingly interested in getting government to work more efficiently and transparently, Berkowitz co-created SeeClickFix, a location-based web platform allows residents to document neighborhood concerns and suggest improvements.
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Open Access/Content
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The University of Minnesota bookstore has one of the largest textbook departments in the country, with rows of shelves piled high with titles — everything from Algebra One to Nuclear Physics.
Students can buy Shakespeare’s books for less than $10, but that’s only because the literary rights have long ago expired. The average price of the store’s books is about $50 and some titles fetch as much as $225 — another sign of the rising price of college education.
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Academic publishing in the UK has conventionally been channelled through by a small number of companies who maintain high fees for journal subscriptions. But as open source software continues to provide high quality free alternatives for autodidacts and beyond, the lifespan of this model is increasingly being called into question. The ‘Academic Spring’ is gathering momentum but what does this mean for the future of the peer-review system?
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It’s a major bugaboo in life sciences R&D: Biopharma researchers waste lots of time and resources doing experiments that have already been done, in part because scientists in one lab aren’t sharing results with their counterparts in another lab. Now Australian researchers argue that open source rules for clinical trials could nix the replication and stymied progress which result from keeping data from studies under wraps.
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The open source software movement can serve as a model for freeing up access to, and connecting up, clinical trial data
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Open Hardware
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Open-source software has long since become a key part of government IT programs. One day, open-source hardware might join it in importance.
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The Open Compute Project is ready to shake up the world of data center racks. The open source hardware project today outlined plans for Open Rack, which will seek to set a new standard for rack design for hyperscale data center environments.
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Programming
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Standards/Consortia
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FSFE (Free Software Foundation Europe) is helping a Slovakian business fined for failing to use that other OS and IE for filing taxation information. It will be interesting to see whether or not the courts can order the Slovakian government to do IT the right way, with open standards for communication protocols and file formats.
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The Open Source Initiative agreed what made a standard open back in 2006 and today collaborated with the Free Software Foundation on a press statement about it.
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Digital media playback in Windows 8 has fallen casualty to the savage economics of the PC industry and changing tastes in consumer viewing.
We knew Windows Media Center would be sold at extra cost in Windows 8, but Microsoft now says you won’t be able to play DVDs on Windows Media Player in Windows 8.
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Hardware
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In a BYOD world, this approach is compelling. By hosting the desktop, IT owns a virtualized generic hardware environment yet can supply that environment to a variety of hardware devices-smartphones, tablets, Linux PCs and even smart TVs, which could be used more readily for high-end, off-site conferences in rented facilities or as a cheaper alternative to more expensive conference room solutions.
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Health/Nutrition
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Cigarette-makers had man on the inside of key fire-safety group
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Security
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Finance
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The Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee’s report on the financial crisis is an important document. It is an exhaustive look at certain main aspects of the financial crisis, a report which heavily criticizes Washington Mutual, the now-defunct Office of Thrift Supervision, the credit ratings agencies, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank.
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Thousands of nurses from around the world descended upon Daley Plaza, in the heart of Chicago on May 18, to demand that the richest nations in the world put an end to austerity politics and start asking the people who collapsed the global economy to do more to “heal the world.”
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Censorship
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The High Court said on Monday that Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media would have to block access to The Pirate Bay (TPB), following an earlier ruling in February over the role of the site in copyright infringement.
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For years, the non-profit Tor Project has offered Internet users the world’s most secure tool for dodging censorship and surveillance, used by tens of millions of people around the world. Now two of the project’s researchers aim to help users to not only bypass what they call the “filternet”–the choked, distorted and censored subset of the Internet–but to understand it and map it out, the better to eradicate its restrictions.
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