● 02.11.09

● Links 11/02/2009: Head Tracking in KDE4, Obama Lobbied for Free Software

Posted in News Roundup at 7:09 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzGNU/Linux

• Using the integrated webcam and opencv it’s possible to track the position of the viewer’s head and tweak the 3d-rendering of the window manager (KWin) to display what appears to be a “true” 3d environment.

• IBM THINKS THE GERMANS are just über and plan to build Europe’s most süper powerful züper computer at the Forschungszentrum Juelich (FZJ), by upgrading an existing machine to petaflops level.

• Funding for the groß BlueGene/P cluster machine will be channeled in from the German Ministry of Research and the Ministry of Research of Northrhine-Westfalia

• For Linux users, it would need to be made clear that USB support does take some configuration before it is ready to roll out of the box. Outside of this concern, VirtualBox does provide the kind of environment that leaves many people wondering why anyone even bothers with costly alternatives.

• For my money…or lack there of, VirtualBox remains best suited for SoHo or home users as it is just not stable enough for serious enterprise use, in my honest opinion. It’s close, but seeing new issues cropping up with each new release leaves me thinking that most IT departments would rather see VMware solutions in place over troubleshooting the latest broken function caused by a VirtualBox update.

• My children have been using Kubuntu for the past three years without any complaints, save one. The network administrator forgot to install Flash so that Nickjr.com and PBSKids.org would work properly after a fresh install awhile back. After I got their games working properly, they have used the desktop with great success doing everything they need.

Adaptation

• Recent articles I have read by people complaining about how things on Linux do not work like they do on Microsoft led me to coin the phrase Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome (MTBS). The problem is that people who have lived, worked, and played in a homogeneous Microsoft computing paradigm are lost and confused when they encounter a different paradigm. These people have only seen the flawed Microsoft ideology for how computing systems should work and so have a difficult time with more elegant systems based on Unix. They see the Linux system with its’ own paradigm and ideology and try to force it into the only paradigm they know, which is Microsoft’s. This will always cause the user problems.

• I get a a lot of terrific comments on this blog. One visitor, colonelcrayon, left a comment regarding the security issues with Windows and Linux. He said, “As I’ve already commented multiple times, security is almost entirely up to the user. A competent user is never in danger.”

Lists

• I know, I know. Not another blog post that lists the “top 10 something or other”. But bear with me.

• I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes a given application awesome. I use a lot of applications every day, many I couldn’t do my job without… but not all of them are awesome.

• It’s hard to describe just what “awesome” is. It could be the reliability of something. Or the sheer joy it brings when you use it. Or that it does something truly unique and inspiring.

• With that in mind… my list of the top 10 most awesome applications for the Linux desktop (in no particular order).

• I earlier wrote about Top 5 BitTorrent Clients for Ubuntu Linux, 7 Awesome 3D Graphic Design Applications for Linux , 23 Free Ubuntu Linux Login Screens and Top 10 Free Video Editors for Linux . It’s always great to have Linux Alternatives to popular applications so I’ve decided to write about some of the most useful System applications for Linux including Cd burners, Aniti Virus, FTP solutions and instant messengers that you can download today.

• Gimp has been famously known as the “poor man’s Photoshop”, and perhaps rightfully so. That’s a complement Gimp won’t mind taking. While it would be an unfair comparison to make between Gimp and Photoshop, Gimp can easily meet needs of most amateur image editors out there and then some. Since its release in 1995 Gimp has come a long way in to being the most powerful image editing tool freely available out there. With these tutorials we hope to vanish some of the doubts you might have had about Gimp’s ability as a powerful image editor.

Audiocasts

• This week: Dan is irrate with Dell but not as much as Putin with Michael Dell himself, Mozilla news, Google FAIL, the usual open source news and much more.

• This week I install Fedora 10 from the live cd installer. It’s a single cd installer compared to the traditional 3 cd or 1 dvd installation method.

Games

• I must admit that I have not played any kind of computer games that seriously for a while. Atleast since I sold my Sony PS2 a few years back and got back into the real corporate world. But Warzone 2100 has completely changed that for me. This game is something special. It seems I cant get enough of it since I downloaded it last night to my Ubuntu Linux laptop. I was literally glued to the screen for well over 6 hours straight.

• Well it was not really a bar, but it was a local pizza shot. Imagine my surprise when the my daughter plugged in the Megatouch machine and it booted a Linux kernel. You can find these machines in most bars in the US. I know a lot of them used to run DOS, but it’s great to see them using a far superior OS. My hats off to the company! So next time you are out having a good time throw a few quarters in a Megatouch to support Linux!

• With the Oscar fever running high, there is towering expectations all around for all the Oscar nominees. So it was only a matter of time before someone jumped into the fray and created a game featuring all the movies, directors and actors nominated for the Oscar award. The beauty of the game is that it is played exclusively in YouTube – the popular video sharing site of Google.

Events

• *CHICAGO – February 10, 2009* – PyCon 2009, the seventh annual conference of the worldwide Python programming community, has opened registration and announced its list of accepted talks. The topics show Python appearing in a variety of places outside its traditional realms.

FOSDEM 2009

• Over the weekend the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) took place in Brussels. In his keynote, Mozilla’s Mark Surman hoped for Open Source’s success and Debian key contributor Bdale Garbee supported its social contract. As an aside, Debian Lenny’s target release date was reconfirmed.

• The volunteer organisers of the “Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting” (FOSDEM 2009) demonstrated the fine art of scalability with a very well organised event. 250 talks for 5000 developers arriving from all over Europe, were held with very few problems. If such an event can have a general technical hot topic, then it was the omnipresent netbook and any number of Android mobiles: open source can slim down, be purged of non-essentials, start faster and look forward to a buoyant open future, running as a stable OS on many new small devices.

Kernel Space

• At FOSDEM 2009 in Keith Packard’s talk on the rebuilt Linux desktop, he shared the progress made in composited 3D, monitor auto-plugging, 2D/3D/media shared objects, kernel mode-setting, and kernel-based 2D drawing. Allowing these problems to be addressed was the Graphics Execution Manager for kernel memory management. The Graphics Execution Manager was used instead of TTM (which we talked about several times before at Phoronix) and it allows for persistent objects, global name, and pageable contents.

• This is an xf86-video-ati RC release for 6.11.0

• Major changes between 6.10.0:

• - – major output rework - – fix bug in rs780 MC setup that could lead to memory corruption - – lots of bug fixes

• The Linux kernel has a fantastic way of dealing with your computer’s hardware. It doesn’t concern itself with the company that sells the hardware or brand names, it is only concerned about the hardware itself. More specifically the actual chipset of the hardware. This means that one single Linux driver automatically supports a particular chipset no matter what company packages and sells products made with that chipset.

Desktop Environments

• This weekend, I decided to check out GNOME Do’s latest 0.8 release with the new Docky task bar. As someone who has managed to avoid all the launcher hype bestowed on programs such as Launch Box, Quicksilver and Ubiquity, I have to admit that in the beginning, I was more than a little bit skeptical about GNOME Do. How useful can this program really be? I mean, all it does is allow you to use keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. I can use the the mouse for that. Right? Wrong. After using GNOME Do for only a few days, it has quickly risen to the top of my must-have applications list.

KDE

• If you run KDE, you may already have encountered Kate, KDE’s built-in graphical text editor. If not, it’s well worth a look the next time you have text files to edit – whether those are code files, HTML files, config files, or just plain note files. There are stacks of useful features, including multi-document support (so you can have as many files open at the same time as you want, or the same file open in multiple windows), and session support (open sets of files together automatically).

• If you use KDE4 and want to find some nice Plasmoids packaged for Mandriva Linux open rpmdrake and search for “plasmoid”, you will get the full list.

Distributions

• There comes a time when for whatever reason a system (Linux or Windows) won’t boot. It was during during one such emergency years ago that I discovered the System Rescue LiveLinux CD. System Rescue is a bootable Linux operating system that will show you what partitions are on a drive and enable you to ‘fix’ them.

• The latest version of System Rescue version 1.1.5 is out today and it includes a few notable improvements over its predecessors. The most important in my view is support for the ext4 Linux filesystem. Version 1.1.5 includes a new Linux kernel with support for ext4 as well as including a version 0.4.2 of the GParted partitioning software that includes support for ext4.

• Finally, I got Funtoo Linux, a derivative of Gentoo Linux, installed on my desktop. Funtoo is a distribution created by the founder of Gentoo, Daniel Robbins. In his website, Daniel describes Funtoo Linux as a:

• Freshly-built Gentoo Linux variant, optimized for your processor, Funtoo Portage unstable branch, includes OpenRC, dhcpcd and git.

• He does not call Funtoo a fork of Gentoo though. I like that since he really wants to keep the Gentoo community intact.

• I have not changed my view of the top desktop systems for my own personal use as the landscape of distros changed at the end of 2008, nor have I changed my view as we are two months into the 2009 year. I have elevated my view of one system – Fedora. I really like the Alpha release of their Fedora 11. It shows that even at an early testing stage, they are one of the few projects that has managed to package KDE 4.2 well. When you couple that with the fact that they are already among the leaders in security and virtualization centered projects, this makes Fedora one of the leading projects to follow.

Debian

• Welcome to this year’s second issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. Topics covered in this issue include:

• * Release update * Debian Summer of Code 08: Where are they now? * Dedicating Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny to Thiemo ths Seufer * Open Source study conducted by Heise Open * … and much more.

• The successor to ‘etch’, Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, codenamed ‘lenny’, is expected to be made generally available this Saturday.

Red Hat

• Red Hat has announced that it has begun shipping the second rev and the first fully functional version of its Enterprise MRG real-time Linux. The Fedora Project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, has also put the alpha of its Fedora 11 development release in the field on time.

• I wanted to take a quick moment to provide a brief “State of the Union” for Red Hat. I’ve been on the job at Red Hat since December 2007, and have had the opportunity to meet hundreds of Red Hat customers, partners, associates and industry leaders. In keeping with the U.S. presidential State of the Union address, I’d like to touch on plans for the upcoming year while also reflecting back to share a few observations from the past 13+ months.

• Red Hat’s accomplishments help us better serve our customers and reflect the tremendous work of our associates. In addition, significant events in the external environment helped shape our business environment and influence our work and lives.

• It’s good news that Red Hat has had the opportunity to talk to senior government officials about open source – in this case, at the ministry of communications – but what’s much more important are the specifics mentioned in the story:

Ubuntu

• I’ve had several business people ask me about using Ubuntu instead of Windows and I’ve always steered them away for one reason. Microsoft Office doesn’t run on Ubuntu. Yes, you can get Open Office and use that, or you could use Google Docs. But you will inevitably run into file sharing issues. If you are absolutely sure that you will not need to share files with anyone using Microsoft Office, and you meet all of the other requirements above, you might want to consider Ubutu as well.

• If you want to play with Ubutu on Windows, you CAN install it in a Virtual PC environment to make sure it will do everything you need it to do before you make the official switch.

Devices/Embedded

• Calao Systems is shipping its tiniest embedded computers yet. The Linux-ready “TinyCore” single-board computer (SBC) modules are offered with Atmel’s ARM9-based processors, including the 400MHz AT91SAM9G20, 200MHz AT91SAM9263, and 180MHz AT91SAM9260, and measure a scant 1.4 x 1.6 inches, says the French embedded systems vendor.

• A vendor of Linux-based IP set-top boxes (STBs) announced that it has sold its two millionth unit. Meanwhile, Amino’s latest “AmiNet130M” model, which offers MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 in HD (1080i) resolution, has recently won two industry awards, says the company.

• Overall I loved the card. It’s really an amazing device and I was highly impressed with it’s feature set. It also installed and ran first time, every time, and did it’s job without hickup, burp, or glitch. In fact, you couldn’t even tell it was in the machine, because it consumed no resources and didn’t interfere with operations. Ok, it consumed a tiny bit of resources with communication and the drivers, but as far as the remaining 99% of what it did, all of that was handled by the card itself.

Phones

• Access China and NEC Electronics are developing a “price sensitive” smartphone reference design incorporating the “new” Mini version of the Access Linux Platform (ALP) mobile stack. The touch- and 3G-enabled design will use NEC’s ARM9-based MP201 system-on-chip (SoC), and a future design may use NEC’s new ARM11-based Emma Mobile 1.

• Access announced several management changes, including a new co-CEO, and the promotion of senior executives from networking subsidiary IP Infusion (including Koichi Narasaki, pictured, Access’s new SEO/CSO). Access tapped Kiyoyasu Oishi, formerly COO, to head up Access Systems Americas, responsible for the Access Linux Platform (ALP).

Android

• The Android developers have released Android 1.1, a bug fix and minor enhancement release of the open source smartphone operating system. For users of Android, which is currently owners of the T-Mobile G1 in the UK and US, the changes include the addition of details and reviews when searching maps, a show/hide dial pad button to make it easier to see the number pad when making a call and support for saving attachments from MMS messages.

• This announcement out of ARCHOS is right up the alley of what I said a week or two ago. The line between MIDs and smartphones will blur as folks don’t want to carry both a phone and Internet browsing device. That’s precisely where ARCHOS is heading with their newest IMT, or Internet Media Tablet.

• Archos announced a portable media player (PMP) that incorporates Google’s Android stack for mobile telephony. Due to ship in the third quarter, the Internet Media Tablet (IMT) is built around a Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP3440 system-on-chip (SoC), supports 3.5G HSUPA service, and offers 500GB of storage, says the company.

• The philosophical reasons:

• * Android is open source. * Because it’s open source, many of my favorite open source apps work with it and not the iPhone yet, like KeePass, for example. (See KeePassDroid.) * Android’s apps are written in Java, and as a Java developer, this delights me. * Android doesn’t tie me to iTunes, which is a fine piece of software, but is just a little too bossy and proprietary-like for my taste.

Sub-notebooks

• Dell fires back at the Taiwanese market leaders with the Mini 9n. Starting at just $250, this Ubuntu netbook is easily one of the cheapest on the market from a brand-name manufacturer.

• It makes sense in pure business-school 101 terms, but I think our culture is turning away from such heavy-handed business strategies as this. Social media, participatory communities and the current financial crisis is giving strength to those companies, brands and individuals who make a fair, honest and authentic contract with their users. (Just look at our recent Presidential campaign.) I’m not sure a pop up window saying, “Sorry, You Can’t Launch Excel Right Now. Please Close Firefox or Upgrade Today” really creates that impression. But is that enough? Will Linux really be able to compete against Redmond? I think this policy may make it slightly easier, but honestly it’s a difficult challenge. David, get out your slingshot of computing freedom.

Free Software/Open Source

• Birmingham has become the first English city to be completely remapped by its own citizens. Maps of the city are freely editable and available at OpenStreetMap (OSM). The OpenStreetMap project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. Birmingham is not the first city to be remapped in this way, but it is the first city in the United Kingdom. Birmingham joins the likes of Paris, Berlin, Canberra and Vienna.

• Back in 2006 I gave a short in talk at a KDE conference in Dublin on the topic of “A Standard ODF Object Model”, essentially laying out my thoughts on why we needed an “ODF Toolkit”. As part of that presentation I listed “20 Prototypical App Dev Scenarios”, my attempt to enumerate all the fundamental patterns of use for ODF. I did a blog post on this list later that year.

• RICHARD MATTHEW STALLMAN has visited India several times during the past eight years or so and given lectures in many parts of the country. He started the GNU (a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix) project in September 1983 to create software that gives users the freedom to use, share, modify and redistribute. Though he was alone in this task at the beginning, today there are tens of thousands of programmers worldwide helping to create such software.

Government

• Vietnams Ministry of Information and Communications has instructed that 100% of all of Vietnams government agencies servers must run free software by June 30, 2009. They also mandate that IT divisions train their staff to use this software and require 50% of the drones to be able to use the technology “proficiently”.

• Executives representing several open source software companies collaborated on an open letter to President Barack Obama in the hopes of moving open source solutions to the top of the list of ways to implement parts of his national economic stimulus plan. The letter asks Obama to make FOSS a “key component” of all new technology initiatives implemented during his administration.

Business

• Today, Funambol, a provider of open source push and mobile sync software, officially introduced the next generation of its MobileWe platform. Funambol’s v8 MobileWe software looks a bit different from its predecessors, and with good reason. This release sports a new AJAX web portal and integrates some very visual features.

• The new portal was designed to better facilitate syncing PIM (contact and calendar) data, email and multimedia files between mobile devices, the internet, and desktop computers. Those who are familiar with Funambol’s software likely picked up on the other new feature from that last sentence: The v8 MobileWe software supports image syncing between devices.

Sun

• OpenSolaris is essentially GNU-Solaris. When talking about the user experience, one could say that since the GNOME desktop is used, running OpenSolaris is no different from running Linux. For the casual Web, e-mail, and office applications user this may be true. For us network and systems administrators, however, we need to be more careful about jumping ships.

Applications

• The team behind open source internet video player Miro have pushed out version 2.0. The new player features a new interface, improved speed and performance, and the ability for users to add links to online streaming video portals like Hulu and CBS.com to the sidebar.

Leftovers

• The movie studios and the MPAA have been pushing hard over the last year to get the FCC to let them use “selectable output control” to basically block DVRs from recording certain broadcasts of movies. Their somewhat creative (but totally ridiculous) argument is that this would allow more consumer choice. Now, you might ask how limiting what consumers can do with products they already purchased can possibly allow more consumer choice, but this is where the MPAA tries to play a bit of a jedi mind trick. It claims that if it’s allowed to block recording of movies, then it would add another window to its windowed release program of movies (i.e., theater -> special locations (airplanes/hotels) -> DVD -> cable TV -> network TV). If they can break your DVR, they claim that they’ll also release it to TV before it’s even out on DVD.

• For pretty much the entire history of radio, everyone has known that getting your songs played on the radio was promotional. It helps sell albums. It helps sell concert tickets. There is no better way to prove this than to just look at the history of “payola” whereby record labels would pay radio stations to get their music heard. Obviously, the recording industry put tremendous value into being on the radio and was willing to pay for the privilege (even if it was illegal).

• Eric Schmidt’s support of Barack Obama made a lot of people rather upset. A new move on Schmidt’s part may placate them, though, as the CEO of Google has agreed to work closely with Britain’s Conservative Party.

• Okay, maybe not Congress just yet. But fresh on the heels of Harvard Law taking it to the RIAA over the recording industry’s litigation scare tactics against the nation’s universities and assumed pirate students. When the best profs at Harvard Law come after you, you know you’re in big, big trouble.

• The AP is facing similar intimidating opposition from the other coast, this time from Stanford Law and San Francisco-based Durie Tangri Lemley Roberts & Kent, who just filed a lawsuit against the Associated Press. The suit seeks a declaration from the court that Shepard Fairey’s artistic transformation of an AP photograph of Barack Obama is fair use. The suit also seeks an injunction against the AP from further action against Fairey or anyone else using or displaying his work—perhaps like the Smithsonian, at the moment.

• After BT (NYSE: BT) concluded its much-delayed trial of Phorm‘s controversial ISP-based behavioural ad targeting technology in December, the advertising company is trying to keep those precious few positive moments up in the spotlight.

• [...]

• Despite European Commission concern, the UK government ruled Phorm legal in September, though some privacy advocates keep pointing to Phorm’s previous incarnation, 121media, as a maker of software classed as spyware. BT, if it goes ahead, will launch the product as BT Webwise.

• Home Secretary Wacky Jacqui Smith has conceded that there is zero support for CCTV cameras in UK communities. In a shock letter to the Guardian, she claims massed phalanxes of irate burghers are poised to join a Tory march on Whitehall to overthrow the hated devices.

• Wikileaks.org, the online clearinghouse for leaked documents, has published a complete database of Congressional Research Service reports, which are private research documents written for members of Congress and their staffers.

• The 6,780 reports date back to 1990 and comprise all of the digitized reports accessible by congressional offices, said Wikileaks, which estimated their value at US$1 billion. They do not contain classified material, but they do cover politically sensitive topics such as social policy, defense and foreign affairs.

• Jon Lawrence points us to an article in Variety where a bunch of movie directors admit that they often look to other movies for ideas to “steal” in making their own movies. Of course, they don’t really mean “steal.”

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayBdale Garbee, Hewlett Packard computer wizard and Debian lead 06 (2004) [Embedment notice: your Web browser does not supportthe <video> tag. Firefox 3.1 supports it.]Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.