● 02.06.09

● Links 06/02/2009: Fedora 11 Previews, New RPM Release

Posted in News Roundup at 10:01 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzGNU/Linux

• Here are my current Linux systems:

• 1. Desktop – Arch Linux * Gentoo/Funtoo (OpenVZ) * CentOS (VirtualBox) 2. IBM Thinkpad T60 Laptop – Sidux Linux 3. Acer Aspire ONE Netbook – Ubuntu EEE 4. Dell Inspiron 8100 Notebook – CentOS 5. T-Mobile G1 – Android 6. Motorola Rokr e6 – MontaVista 7. Nokia N800 Internet Tablet – Maemo

• According to here average has several definitions. However they all generally mean the same thing. So an average user would be a user that consists of the most common traits that all users have. I think that these traits would be.

• Average intelligence. Average health. Average age. Average education. Average job. Average computer skills. Etc.

• I think that you get my drift. Concentrating on three of those traits that I listed, intelligence, education and computer skills. I think that these are most important for our “average user”.

• [...]

• Unless I have missed some earth shattering point I would say that if you give the average user a windows computer and a Linux computer they would be able to use each operating system equally easily. Menu navigation is the same. The way a mouse is used is basically the same. The methods of opening a program is the same.

• In a recent story, my fellow scribe Preston Gralla wrote, “If Linux has an Achilles heel, from the point of view of a Windows user, it’s installing new software.” Now, he’s seen the error of his ways about that, but he also noted that, “I was rewarded with a long list of recommended updates — and what they were, or were used for, is anyone’s guess. For example, … alacarte: easy GNOME menu editing tool. … ” His point was that he didn’t have a clue what this program might be.

• Hmm, lookee here: Microsoft wants to hire a Director, Open Source Desktop Strategy

• The buzz has been building for Boxee lately. Mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, BusinessWeek and NPR are getting hip to the little open-source media center that could quite possibly change the way you experience TV.

• This time of season again: Linux gaming. Today, I will show you several more interesting titles that you may want to run on your Linux desktop. We’ll mainly talk about strategy games, but we’ll also see a few special, unique games, including a pair focused on physics. Hmm, physics, you say? Physics, fun, does not seem to go well together. Wait until you read the article, then. We’ll also review a Java/Flash game, so all those who love to play games through their Web browser, this one is for you. Oh, we’ll also mention an incredible new First Person Shooter toward the end of the article, so don’t run away after four paragraphs!

• Coming from a lifetime as a Mac user you can imagine that I am rather trusting of the OS, especially as a creative tool. In recent years, as Apple has evolved OS X, it has continued to surprise me (in a good sort of way.)

• Regarding their OS X server, given that I have used it since 2001, I was rather excited to try it out in my new web software venture. My impression was it would be as easy to run a web site on OS X server as it is easy to manage a creative project.

• Wrong.

• I have had the distinct displeasure of trying to get a simple php script to run via the command line (instead of a browser.) The first catastrophe was using Leopard server. After the upgrades kept locking the machine such that the only solution was a complete system reinstall (with careful attention to NOT update) we opted to use the standard Tiger client version to run this test.

• Benefits of Linux – extremely easy to use, automatic updates of all your software, everything is completely free, you hardly ever need to install special drivers whenever you get new hardware, it comes with all the software you will need for most day to day work out of the box, installation of additional programs is *extremely* easy, you can change anything you want, you can upgrade any part of the computer (motherboard, etc.) and it will work without reinstallation (you can quite literally take out the hard drive, plug it into another computer and it will work just fine), runs on any system, excellent support.

• Like cake, Linux is a mixture of ingredients. You can mix and match those ingredients to achieve your desired result. As in making a cake, how well your Linux turns out depends on your experience or ability to follow a recipe or instructions.

Sharing

• Every day after until we run out, we will be giving away at least one prize pack daily consisting of a complimentary subscription to LinuxJournal (print subscription for Canadian, US, or Mexico, online subscription for international members), a Google Sticker (sticker in photo may not be the one you receive) and an LNX Oval from ThinkGeek!

• Nearly three years ago, we mentioned Linuxtracker in a short post on BitTorrent sites that list ‘legal’ software downloads. Now, the site is celebrating its 4th anniversary, and with over 1400 torrents it is one of the best places to get your Linux fix.

• Perhaps I’m stretching the definition of “cloud” a bit, but that’s OK because I’m sick of hearing it. But I do think the idea of informal hosting and sharing is a good one; it’s under the radar of Big Brother, and of course with Linux it’s secure, reliable, and not that hard to do.

Applications

• Google Summer of Code project entitled Photobooth-like application for the GNOME-Desktop. (See this GNOME Journal interview with Daniel Siegel). Several additional GSoC projects involved Cheese, these include Cheese integration into Gnome with student Felix Kaser and mentor Daniel Siegel and Extend Cheese with OpenGL effects with student Filippo Argiolas and mentor Daniel Siegel.

• Over the years, the value of Java has been replaced by more emphasis on Flash and Ajax on the web front. But what about Linux users who need applications that can deal with changes in the back-end to desktop environments, amongst other changes? I happen to believe that to some extent, Java can be a really beneficial thing to consider for the desktop. Here are my favorite Java apps in no uncertain order.

• I earlier wrote about Top 5 BitTorrent Clients for Ubuntu Linux, 7 Awesome 3D Graphic Design Applications for Linux and 23 Free Ubuntu Linux Login Screens. Today I’m going to write about some of the best Video editing tools for Ubuntu Linux because Linux itself doesn’t offer any default or built-in video editor application but there are tens of third party software for Linux you can use to add effects to your videos and do a lot more.

Desktops

• SlashGear caught up with Xfce creator Olivier Fourdan, whose desktop environment has not only been selected by Intel for Moblin but can be found on many existing Linux netbooks, and talked Intel, Moblin, the future for netbooks and what challenges he sees for open-source newcomer Android.

KDE

• Camp KDE, the KDE community event of North and South America, has finished. Similar to the European KDE meeting, Akademy, the first two days were based around a series of talks on various topics. After that we moved towards BOF sessions, local discussions and programming. We had a trip to the Appleton Estate, visited Rick’s café and had a lot of fun. The following article details some of the things that kept us busy.

• On behalf of the KDevelop team I am happy to announce that we have reached the next milestone on our way to a final release, KDevelop 4 Beta 1. We feel that KDevelop 4, although in no way feature complete, is now usable and stable enough to get first feedback from a somewhat wider audience. Being a beta there are of course still bugs and missing functionality, but we have excellent language support for C++, integration of the CMake buildsystem, subversion, git and even starts of Qt GUI designer integration.

Distributions

• We all love it when things run on time. There are certain things which need to happen when the clock strikes the hour – buses and trains need to arrive, a cron job on your server needs to spark some script or the other to life, your kids need to be at school.

• At the moment, I have a short list of Linux distros that could replace Xubuntu Hardy on my Mac:

• Fedora 10 I dual-booted Fedora 9 and Xubuntu before but ultimately decided to just use Xubuntu since it performed a lot better than Fedora. Right now, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Fedora 10 will do wonders for my Mac.

• Mepis 8.0 I have great memories using Mepis Linux, so I want to take the plunge and test the upcoming version.

• Sabayon Linux 4 Putting this Gentoo-based distro on my Mac can be suicide since I’m probably on my own when I do this. But since danger is my middle name, I will most likely try Sabayon Linux on my Macbook Pro.

• Sabayon Linux began life as a binary shortcut to a fully working Gentoo system. Early experiences with RR4 – Sabayon’s original name – ranged from “nothing installed” to “data lost.” Fortunately, the developers never gave up and today Sabayon is a beautiful, functional, and stable Linux desktop distribution.

• Take a point in time backup of your computer with Clonezilla. Chris covers the open source drive imaging software.

• I created a basic 75MB ext3 partition on my 1GB USB drive and installed the OS as per the given instructions. I rebooted my machine and through GRUB, was successfully able to boot my laptop from DSL. It detected the required hardware during boot process and launched without a hitch.

Red Hat

• As the financial crisis affects more and more companies, IT budgets are being squeezed significantly, with IT managers’ plans for rollouts of “nice to have” solutions being shelved to concentrate on core services.

• [...]

• Why aren’t more firms rolling out Linux desktops?

• I can only give you my view after several weeks in the job, but the statistics I have from IDC is that there are 38 million to 40 million Linux clients currently in use, with a compound annual growth rate of about 19 per cent in terms of adoption. That’s a fairly healthy number of clients, although how that compares with Microsoft’s current installed base, I don’t know.

• Nine months after the last release, the RPM.org developers have announced RPM 4.6.0, a new version of the RPM Package Manager, one of the main packaging formats for many Linux distributions and part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB). One of the more important features of the RPM 4.6 release is that it is now based upon an cleaner and more maintainable codebase than RPM 4.4, and is being actively developed. For the average user, there should be very little change, apart from some queries being much faster and unsupported features being removed. The update contains many bug fixes and enhancements, including some long standing requests.

Fedora

• Today, Red Hat’s Fedora Project division announces that it has released its new Fedora 11 Alpha version, and has provided OS Today with some of its main features.

• Fedora’s newest release includes a number of new features including the new Windows Cross Compiler and a development release of Gnome 2.26 as the default desktop.

• “The new Fedora ver. 11 Alpha should boot on the majority of systems, and provides a look at what new features are to be included in the next release,” Fedora’s Jesse Keating said today in an emailed announcement.

• Fedora has also brought in Adam Williamson as a community liaison. “I am working for Red Hat as of this Monday. I have been hired into the Fedora QA team essentially to drive community involvement in the Fedora QA process. RH – and, to put a more personal touch on it, Jay Turner, who’s responsible for Fedora QA – felt that Fedora could really benefit from more community involvement in the QA process, so my role is to try and help develop that.” Adam previously did community work for Mandriva.

• Personally, I like the little fellow and Fedora 10 works well!

• I’ve had this discussion a couple of times with some friends about which looks better: Ubuntu or Fedora. So, I decided to take a poll from my readers, and see what you think. Which vendor does a better job at artwork? I’ve provided screenshots of the default wallpaper for each release on both distributions. Now, you may be asking, “Why not [insert your favorite distro here]?” Frankly, because if I were to meet everyone’s needs in that regard, this would be a very large post, and it wouldn’t change your biased mind anyway. Also, the discussion my friends and I have had in the past were Ubuntu vs. Fedora, not Ubuntu vs. Fedora vs. Arch vs. Mandriva vs. Debian vs. etc., etc., etc.

Ubuntu

• Unlike many surveys that land on the desks of IT journos each week, the one done by Canonical and Red Monk was based on a very large number of responses. People from 6,819 companies answered questions about the operating systems they have deployed in their organizations and how these OSes are used to support mission-critical and other workloads. (You can see the results of the survey here). About 55.5 per cent of those polled for the Ubuntu server survey came from Europe, with 28.4 per cent coming from North America, 1.7 per cent from Africa, 5.2 per cent from Asia, and 5.2 per cent from Latin America.

• When Canonical revealed the results of its Ubuntu Server Edition 2009 Survey, some pundits thought the news was designed to attract more customers to Canonical’s server software. In reality, I think Canoncial had a far different — and far wiser — goal for the survey.

• It’s easy to forget that the PS3 is a fully-equipped PC in your living room attached to your house’s best monitor. Installing Ubuntu can help you remember, and play SNES games in the process.

Devices/Embedded

• Myka, which recently began shipping an IPTV set-top box (STB), is offering a $100 discount to entice developers to roll up their sleeves and contribute to its device’s open-source, Linux-based software stack.

• OpenSynergy is readying a Linux-based “car operating system” and an Intel Atom-based evaluation board for automobile infotainment systems. The COQOS platform aims to let Linux-based infotainment applications and AUTOSAR-compliant telematics modules share the same system-on-chip processor, which is virtualized by a “micro operating system” (μOS) layer.

• The LeanXcam runs the open-source µClinux operating system. In addition, a software framework and integrated development environment, designed by Supercomputing Systems, are distributed under the LGPL v2 open-source license.

Phones

• It looks like Android-based phones are going to become more competitive with other smartphones on a very important front: diversified wireless capabilities on “combo” chips. Broadcom announced today that the software that controls its leading Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/FM combination chips is standard in the latest Android operating system. Android handsets already support Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, but only through discrete components, which means, among other things, that handset designs have included compromises, and extra costs for buyers.

• Azingo announced a touch-enabled version of its LiMo (Linux Mobile)-compliant Azingo Mobile middleware and browser stack. Destined for use on Vodafone-delivered handsets, Azingo Mobile 2.0 offers a new runtime, homescreen interface, browser, and UI toolkit that together enable a smartphone-ready touchscreen- and web-widgets interface.

Sub-notebooks

• Yup, the 12″ are now selling with Ubuntu from the Dell website (Click the picture for the link). Our school system purchased a 9″ with Ubuntu, which we were happy with and seek to deploy into elementary schools to rival our eeePCs running Xandros

Free Software/Open Source

• Whether vibrating in place or taking part in protein folding to ensure cells function properly, molecules are never still. Simulating molecular motions provides researchers with information critical to designing vaccines and helps them decipher the bases of certain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s…

• Said Vijay Pande, an associate professor of chemistry at Stanford, “Simulations that used to take three years can now be completed in a few days. With this first release of OpenMM, we focused on small molecular systems simulated and saw speedups of 100 times faster than before.”

• Database security software vendor Sentrigo Inc. released a new open source fuzzing tool, FuzzOr, designed to identify vulnerabilities found in Oracle database software applications.

• Opsera Limited, a leading provider of Open Source software and services, today announced the release of Opsview version 3.0.

Mozilla

• It looks like things are about to get heavier than ever in the smartphone world as Mozilla begins work on designing and building what may be the world’s first crowd-sourced mobile handset. Working closely with Aza Ruskin of Mozilla Labs, Yanko Design’s Billy May has been tasked with heading the design aspect of the project and this is where things get interesting. Anyone familiar with YD knows that May certainly has an eye for design but that doesn’t mean he should go it alone, right? In true Mozilla fashion, the company will begin designing its first ever handset – dubbed Mozilla Phone for the time being – with help and guidance from anyone and everyone.

• In a blog post Thursday, Facebook’s Mike Schroepfer (formerly of Mozilla), said, “It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the web.”

Business

• Everything around us is choking up: Credit, equity investments, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings. The slowdown is strangling innovation, and it is suffocating entrepreneurship.

• But some entrepreneurs have found ways to build their companies on a shoestring using open source software, and they have figured out how to make money off something generally considered free.

• Take Brian Behlendorf, an open source pioneer who recounts those early days. “The term ‘free software’ made it sound like an anti-capitalist movement, yet the reality is we were hardcore capitalists,” he says. “We liked a lot of the attributes of that type of software and felt a rebranding effort was needed. That is when the term ‘open source’ was coined.”

• Next phase? We’re already there, too. It’s called open source, and it forces software vendors to provide ongoing value to justify CIOs spending money with them. Red Hat has led this shift, but it’s a movement that is accelerating as open source permeates all areas of the software stack, from applications like Openbravo (ERP) and MindTouch (collaboration) to core infrastructure like Lucid Imagination (search) and MySQL (database).

Funding

• Singh seems to have tied up some kind of venture funding. “We are expecting our first round of funding to close soon,” Singh said, declining to give further details citing confidentiality reasons. The company will primarily target the US and India market, with offices in San Francisco and Mumbai, “but we have the ability to deliver our services remotely anywhere in the world,” Singh said.

• India’s leading Open Source event is coming to Chennai with an aim to spread awareness about how Linux and other open source technologies can help India survive, and thrive, despite these ‘hard times’!

OpenOffice.org

• Improving OOo performance is obviously important, and beside the renaissance project, this is an other project where we massively want to concentrate on now.

• Grammar checking is a feature that was missed in OpenOffice.org for quite some time. Grammar checking software for several languages is available, either as standalone tools or integrated into other programs. I prefer the name “proofreading” for this kind of software, as usually these programs go beyond checking grammar. Some offer style checking, others may check text against abstract rules. In general the task for this kind of software is to check and improve text regarding anything else than simple spell checking (though it makes sense to include spell checking into the process as this helps to analyze the text).

• Finally, a new version of the ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office is available!

• It’s been a while that we have released version 1.2 – but hey, why is it called 3.0? Did I miss version 2.0?

• Well, the answer is very simple. I thought it would be a good idea to give it the same version number like the underlying version of OpenOffice.org.

• A thousand flowers are blossoming in the world of productivity tools, thanks to the rise of open standards like the Open Document Format (ISO 26300:2006) for storing and sharing content. Innovation is taking place where it was once thought impossible. With diversity comes choice, but also the need to make sure you are working with the best-of-breed solutions – wether they are open source, freeware, software-as-a-service or paid solutions.

Applications

• I am pleased to announce the release of GNU ed 1.2.

• GNU ed is an 8-bit clean, more or less POSIX-compliant implementation of the standard Unix line editor.

• On the other hand, perhaps it is not the need for an open-source client that is missing, but an open-source micro-blogging service to replace Twitter; enter identi.ca, which is available under the AGPL licence. identi.ca has a bridge which allows posts (or “dents”) from identi.ca to also appear on Twitter. Essentially, identi.ca has solved two problems in one go, with the highly open-source community using the service as a testament to this.

Press

• INSPECTOR KNACKER OF THE TOKYO YARD has arrested 18 people for defamatory posts on a comedian’s blog alleging he was involved in a killing.

• Why does the newspaper deserve to be saved? Just because they have been around for a long time? That’s not a good enough reason for me. Or the arguments that society will somehow be lessened by their absence or be less informed without them is arrogant and presumptuous.

• I am sorry to say that most newspapers do not deserve to be saved, yes even the one in my hometown. They have become no more than mouthpieces for their owners and editorial staffs most of the time. They are more concerned with molding public opinion than informing them.

United Kingdom/Europe

• BRITAIN IS BEGINNING to sharply resemble Orwell’s vision of a Big Brother society. While most of us living here have known it for some while, even the doddery old duffers in the House of Lords have now noticed.

• Tom Griffin (London, OK): Welcome to the second edition of the Carnival on Modern Liberty, chronicling the online debate in the run up to the Convention on Modern Liberty at the end of the month.

• It’s been a week that has highlighted the state’s interest in diverse areas of our private lives, especially our online activities. There’s good news for file-sharers though, as long as they’re not dowloading comics…

• I’d like to urge you similarly to comment on Lord Carter’s *interim* report on Digital Britain: if it’s “interim”, that suggests it will be iterated, drawing on feedback. But in contrast to the excellent Power of Information Taskforce site, there seems to be no easy way to offer paragraph by paragraph comments on Digital Britain. Instead, many people (like myself) have simply posted an overall view on the report.

• None of the data stored on identity cards in the European Union is encrypted, according to a study by the European Network and Information Security Agency.

• The BBC has dropped a controversial tracking system from its UK website after privacy activists complained that it was reporting personal information including their post codes to a US company.

Copyrights

• THE RIAA HAS BEEN OUTED as a lying toad as it claimed in a letter sent out on December 23rd last year that it was discontinuing lawsuits when in fact, this was simply not the case.

• Mitch Bainwol’s letter to the Congressional Committees claimed that the Recording Industry Association of America “discontinued initiating new lawsuits in August.”

• As we get our ducks in a row for our new computer science class offerings next year, the high school principal asked me to give him some recommendations on textbooks. I’ve always hated buying technology textbooks since they tend to be outdated by the time you receive them and because we have this great thing called the Internet filled with technology information.

• There is no escaping the reality that community is what really ensures the success of a good project (I’m looking at you, Ubuntu), no matter how technically sound or enjoyable that project is or is not in and of itself.

Leftovers

• 15 years ago, on January 29th 1994 Rob (lilo) Levin first joined the channel #linuxneo on the EFNet IRC network. This date has since been referred to as the conceptual moment, the foundation, the cornerstone which later led to the network you now know as freenode.

• Since that January evening in 1994 — the original channel made some network moves before it became it’s own network; irc.linpeople.org in 1995 — a few name-changes later and we’re freenode. Peaking at just over 52,000 daily users, spread across FOSS and other peer-directed communities.

• IT major IBM announced today that Suntel, a Sri Lankan based telecommunications provider, has selected IBM Lotus software to create a collaborative environment to improve the way employees work together in any mode at any time, raising employee performance and cost-efficiency.

• [...]

• He added that they are also pleased with the contribution IBM has made to the open community through Lotus Suite of products. With Lotus Symphony, which is based on the Open Document Format (ODF), an open industry standard, Suntel no longer relies on a proprietary technology.

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