● 02.11.09

● Links 11/02/2009: New JBoss Product; Lots of Censorship

Posted in News Roundup at 11:33 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzGNU/Linux

• A competitive market, in which a number of producers offer a variety of similar products that all have their own unique selling points, is good for consumers. That’s because producers gain customers only by tailoring products to match consumers’ demands. Or put another way, consumers can look at a selection of competing products and choose the one that’s best for them. Innovation by one producer is followed by others’ imitations, so over time the overall quality of all the product offerings improves.

• Recently, online poker room Bodog unveiled an Instant Play option designed for Mac and Linux players as well as Windows users who might find it helpful. The Instant Play software loads right in your web browser using Flash. In fact, it took me just 15 seconds to open it. It provides the easiest outlet for Mac poker players to be able to compete with many of the bells and whistles of their Windows counterparts without having to hunt down a program like Parallels or Boot Camp. The Instant Play option, however, does have a few drawbacks.

• Inspired by Roku’s awesome Netflix video download box and impressed with Boxee’s free A/V media center platform, it was merely a matter of time before I’d create the BoxeeBox, an Ubuntu-powered HTPC that I call my “one box to rule them all.” Here’s how it’s done.

• In order to save them some time and possibly prevent them from causing a devastating BSOD I’ve decided to collect their comments and publish them here, so they just need to reference this page. Here we go. 1. You will have to waste hours learning a new OS and applications. (So what is the difference?) 2. I like Windows, it works for me. (Writing this blog with pins stuck in my face works for me, but I can imagine more comfortable ways to do it.)

• An educational software organization in Germany is pilot testing an educational software system based on virtualized Debian/KDE desktops. Kreisbildstelle Stade’s “Desque” system serves up virtualized desktops over “standard” broadband connections, letting students and teachers access their desktops from home or school, the organization says.

• That was a real question, asked by someone considering buying a new computer. It surprised me: I’ve been seeing more people asking if they should consider Mac or Linux (mostly Mac, very little Linux), but this question goes way beyond that. It made me pause; the answer is complicated.

• It’s certainly not “dumb” to buy a Windows machine today. I have to quickly qualify that by saying that I think most people would be better off with a Mac, except (of course) those that need certain Windows only apps on a daily basis. Even those folks could use VM software to run the Microsoft stuff but I wouldn’t recommend that right now unless it’s casual use.

• Way back when I was a wire jerker and learning about electronics there was explained to me a phenomenon called the domino effect. This means that when one part of an electronic component fails, the surrounding parts also fail. Just like a row of falling domino’s, hence the name.

• The same thing can also happen in software. When programs are tightly bound with each other and one program fails it effects all other programs. On some operating systems the only way to recover from that situation is to reboot the computer.

SGI

• We are a leader in HPC and data management. We sell a broad line of mid-range to high-end computing servers, data storage and visualization systems and software that provides additional differentiation to these offerings as well as on a stand alone basis. In addition, we provide customer support and professional services related to our products. We are a leading developer of enterprise-class, high-performance features for the Linux operating system. We provide our customers with a standard Linux operating environment combined with our differentiated Linux extensions that improve performance, simplify system management and provide a more robust development environment.

• Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) (Nasdaq: SGIC) is in a category all by itself when it comes to massive globally shared main memory and globally addressable memory on SGI(R) Altix(R) 4700 systems. With numerous installations in the 4 TB range, and a number more in the 8 TB range, the groundbreaking scalability of SGI systems extends to 21 TB of globally addressable main memory at customer sites. This is over five times the size of memory that other vendors can offer today. The system is designed to accommodate 128 terabytes of globally shared memory under the control of a single instance of the Linux operating system! The system may also be partitioned among multiple instances of Linux and provide globally addressable shared memory among OS instances via SGI’s unique NUMAlink(R) interconnect technology.

Kernel Space

• NVIDIA has released the 180.29 Linux driver for x86 and x86_64 platforms. The release notes list quite a few changes, but in fact they are just copied forward from the earlier beta releases.

• The Nouveau driver has seen a lot of progress in the past year when it comes to new NVIDIA GPU support, improved 2D acceleration, 3D acceleration working for some GeForce series, and various other improvements. All 3D work for this open-source community-generated driver for NVIDIA graphics card is being done within Gallium3D.

Desktop Environments

• Over the last weekend, the Plasma team held their second meeting in Porto, Portugal. The meeting was organised by Akademy Award winner Nuno Pinheiro inviting the Akademy Award-winning Plasma team to his home country. The meeting was kindly hosted by the Departamento de Engenharia Informatica (Department of Software Engineering) of the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto. The Plasma team (and most probably many of the KDE users) are grateful for being provided this opportunity to collaborate on the desktop.

Distributions

• As such, Mint is an up-to-date desktop Linux. It’s based on the Linux 2.6.27 kernel and uses Gnome 2.24 and X.org 7.4 for its graphical interface. Mint comes in two versions. The first, the Main Edition, is the one that comes with support for multimedia codices and drivers for proprietary hardware. The other, the Universal Edition, doesn’t include any proprietary multimedia or hardware support.

• Don’t count out PCLinuxOS just yet. The Ripper Gang announced today the release of the third public beta of PCLinuxOS 2009. According to them, the series of beta ISOs are released under the name of N1PTT to honor the loss of Robert Green, a long time friend of PCLOS community who recently died of cancer.

Red Hat

• Sometimes The VAR Guy is a little slow. Red Hat has achieved two important company milestones, according to CEO Jim Whitehurst (pictured), that The VAR Guy nearly overlooked. It took some time for our resident blogger to realize the significance of Whitehurst’s statement. Take a look for yourself.

• The next few months should see three supported and modular versions of Red Hat’s JBoss application server rolled out, scaling from web to full enterprise-class scenarios.

• Do you know what’s happening in middleware? Budget crunch keeping you from attending industry gatherings? Bring the conference to your desktop. Take a minute (or a few hours) and attend the JBoss Virtual Experience.

Devices/Embedded

• PC BIOS giant Phoenix Technologies announced a new ARM version of its new previously x86-only Linux fast-boot add-on. HyperSpace has now been optimized for the ARM Cortex-A8 architecture running on netbooks, and is initially targeted at Freescale Semiconductor’s new i.MX515 system-on-chip (SoC), says Phoenix.

• The Dell Latitude E4200 and E4300 laptop computers run a version of Linux as an “instant-on” operating system running on hardware with flash memory that is separate to the main Windows Vista or Windows XP operating system running on an Intel Core2 Duo processor. In theory, users can do email and other light applications under Linux, Mozilla and so on, and only switch to the Windows operating system and the Intel processor for the heavier applications.

• Project Pandora is looking increasingly more like it actually might result in providing us with a real world, actual device to play with (ie, not be over-ambitious vapourware after all) while the GP2X Wiz finally gets a commercial release over here in early March. Stay tuned for our first hands on impressions with both of these tasty open source handheld gaming consoles as soon as we manage to get hold of them.

• Elseware, Atari founder and ‘Pong’ man Nolan Bushnell is to be awarded a BAFTA Fellowship Award at next month’s gaming BAFTAs. Bushnell is only the second games designer to be honoured by the Academy in this way. He was also, as an aside, the founder of the Chuck E Cheese pizza chain in the US. A solid-gold FACT!

• Networking middleware vendor IP Infusion announced it will ship a new version of its Linux-compatible, carrier-grade networking software in April. ZebOS Network Platform 7.7 adds support for OpenSAF high-availability (HA) standards, as well as Provider Backbone Bridge-Traffic Engineering (PBB-TE), a technology aimed at large carrier Ethernet networks, says the company.

Phones

• There had been speculation in the past that ZTE was working on a Google Android powered smartphone, possibly for T-Mobile, but we’ve heard little recently to support that notion.

• ACCESS China Inc., a subsidiary of ACCESS CO., LTD., a global provider of advanced software technologies to the mobile and beyond-PC markets, and NEC Electronics Corporation, a leading provider of semiconductor solutions, today announced that they have jointly developed a reference design for smartphones. This solution is compliant with the CDMA2000 1x mobile telecommunications standard and based on ACCESS Linux Platform(TM) mini, developed for price-sensitive and emerging markets, and NEC Electronics’ MP201 application processor.

Sub-notebooks

• The Linux environment was a pleasure to use, and the quirks didn’t take long to get used to. The file structures are similar to what I’m used to seeing in XP, and the programs are close enough that I didn’t have any trouble working on the system. We haven’t run benchmarks on the Mini, so I can’t comment on its performance comparatively. However, Linux is less resource-intensive than the XP on our earlier review unit, which bodes well.

• The HP Mini MI netbook provides one of the slickest available Ubuntu GUIs. Hobbyists have now figured out how to install that pretty GUI on non-Mi platforms.

• [...]

• If you’re a Ubuntu user and are considering giving the theme a spin, make sure to check out the entire thread. Installation and use are not as clear-cut as you might hope and there is a real risk involved, particularly for users who are not experienced with these kinds of mods. You may have to do a little clean-up work on Open Office and a few other packages. But as one poster writes, ” I love this new look!” and you may too.

Free Software/Open Source

• For years now, there’s been talk brewing about the concept of Green IT. Pundits have predicted in years past that sustainable IT would be job one soon, really soon. Gartner said in 2007 that in 2008 it would be THE most important checklist item for IT managers. 2008 has come and gone, and I don’t remember hearing a whole lot about green-ness being the top priority for tech executives. Perhaps that has something to do with sustaining the company being more important than sustaining trees. In any case, it looks like green IT is still in the forefront of executive minds, and with a new administration it may become even more important even than Gartner said it would – it may become the law. So where does open source software fit into the mix? How green is the GPL? Pretty green, if you ask me. In fact, companies that already use open source software are well on the way to greening their IT departments.

• Rigs of Rods is going open source. How cool is that?

• OpenEdit DAM is a web-based, open source digital asset management solution integrated with web content management. Licensed under a royalty free, perpetual and transferable GNU LGPL license, OpenEdit is free to download and use, including all upgrades.

Events

• 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.

• This weekend, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers’ Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what’s hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future.

• SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo, is returning to Los Angeles February 20th through 22nd. I’ve had the opportunity to attend the first event and a few more since then, including SCALE 6x. I look forward to SCALE 7x, and my schedule will allow me to attend the Friday sessions.

Mozilla/Firefox

• This video is a demonstration of the Gestures Module for Mozilla Fennec browser that I’ve been working on the latest days. The video shows the engine working, along with user experience ideas and concepts that I believe to work well with a mobile device and a chromeless browser.

• In this issue…

• * Firefox 3.1 beta 3 test week is on now! * The new (draft) SeaMonkey vision * New Mozilla Education weekly call * Redesigning the Mozilla.org website * Extension developer survey * Graph server rewrite * Ubiquity and Weave documentation * Analytics and Firefox support (SUMO) * New SUMO identity system

Business

• I’m staring at my Netbook right now and I only have Google Chrome installed. It’s running Ubuntu, I’m using Google Docs – this is the first computer I’ve owned that Microsoft didn’t make a penny off of me. But I’m a consumer. The conclusion of the chapter is that you can’t compete with free.

• The buzz on open source is that it can slash IT costs and save budgets. Our Linux expert looks at where and how much can be saved with FOSS — and gives some caveats.

Funding

• Mark Cuban’s Open-Source Funding Rules

• 1. It can be an existing business or a start up. 2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time. 3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days 4. It must be profitable within 90 days.

• Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and all-around rich guy, put an interesting offer on the table this week. Post your business idea on his blog and if he likes it, he’ll toss some cash your way to fund it.

• Cuban expects people to comment on the business plans people come up with, and acknowledges that some plans might even get stolen. “That is the idea,” he says. “Call this an open source funding environment.”

FSF

• Colin Turner is a dedicated Free Software activist and Fellowship member, working as a scientist and teacher at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. He has been advocating Free Software in schools and universities for many years and generously shared some of his experiences with us in this fourth instalment of our Fellowship interview series.

• Let me issue a disclaimer right off. Before I ever typed my first GNU/Linux command in a terminal the Free Software Foundation was fighting the good fight for free software and all the issues surrounding individual freedom and privacy both on and offline. All of us owe it a debt of gratitude for the work is has done and continues to do on behalf of the principles of a free society and free computing. It’s commitment to these things is unswerving but one of the down sides of this unremitting focus is the danger of a loss of perspective on certain campaigning issues. This article takes a look back at one in particular. DRM.

Sun

• I believe Sun has an absolute right to compete with Linux, but its misuse of LAMP does it a disservice and can only serve to antagonize would-be customers who do very much care that their middleware stack runs on Linux. If Sun wants to market Glassfish Portfolio as an integrated LAMP stack it needs to come with Linux services (even if it is just for paying customers, as is the case with MySQL support).

• Without Linux, it’s not LAMP.

• The platform, called Sun GlassFish Portfolio, features open source technologies that have been productized and pre-integrated. Besides the application server, Sun GlassFish Portfolio also is built on open source projects like the Apache Tomcat servlet container, the Ruby and PHP languages, and the Liferay Portal. The components have been tested and offer increased productivity and faster time to market, Sun said. Mission-critical environments and departmental applications can use the platform, the company said. All components of the suite except Sun Enterprise Manager are offered via open source.

Government

• Open source software development in Russia is one of the most important directives for Igor Schegolev – the Head of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation. At a key meeting with Werner Knoblich, Red Hat Vice President for EMEA, he announced support for a Russian Fedora association and for Red Hat development in the Russian Federation. He also expressed support for open source infrastructure and applications, and the development of a repository for industry best practice.

Licensing

• Choosing to release a piece of software under the terms of a free software license is an important step through which many programmers and writers first approach the free software community. However, the myriad of licenses available can sometimes confuse and disorient the user, sometimes making this first step much harder than it should be. Let’s try and make things clearer.

• Free trade? What kind of free do you mean? In the Open Source world, when people are talking about what the term “free software” means, a well-informed geek will tell you about the distinction between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech.

Hardware

• To do this with software requires some complex mathematics called Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) and that’s where the ‘open source’ part of this project comes in very handy.

Office Suites/Applications

• If you work in a business environment then you know the value of the office application. And if you have ever thought about using Linux in your office you know there are boundaries to adoption. The good thing is those boundaries are growing smaller and smaller with every year. The reason those boundaries are shrinking isn’t dictated by an ever-improving kernel. Nope. The acceptance of Linux in the office is directly proportional to the amount of outstanding office applications available.

• But how many people can actually rattle off the names of five linux-based office applications? I would venture to say not many. And that’s where I come in. In this article I will list five must-have office applications that will allow you to introduce Linux into your office. Naturally this list won’t be perfect for everyone. There will always be those with proprietary needs that are simply not met by Linux. But for those who needs are more standard, this list is just for you.

Censorship

• Communications minister Stephen Conroy has named the first six ISPs that will take part in the Government’s trial of ISP side content filtering, and only one of them comes from the top ten.

• UPDATE: The House and Senate stimulus packages passed without copyright filtering language attached, but now the concern is that the language could return in the closed-door conference committee that works out the differences between the bills. Right now, we need you to contact those conferees and tell them to leave out this controversial provision.

• Clearly, a lobbyist whispering in Feinstein’s ear has taken Comcast’s now famous euphemism even further into the realm of nonsense.

• According to Public Knowledge, Feinstein’s network management amendment did not find a home in the stimulus bill that landed on the Senate floor. But lobbyists speaking with the Washington DC-based internet watchdog said that California’s senior Senator is now hoping to insert this language via conference committee – a House-Senate pow-wow were bill disputes are resolved.

• The Tories have admitted a member of staff altered a Wikipedia entry on the artist Titian after a row between Gordon Brown and David Cameron.

Leftovers

• A Brum snapper is a little annoyed with the BBC after it apparently borrowed a copyrighted snap from Flickr showing Birmingham’s crepuscular skyline and used it as a “live” news backdrop.

• The European Commission has given its strongest signal yet that it will hold the UK government to account for its failure to act over BT and Phorm’s secret and allegedly illegal internet monitoring trials in 2006 and 2007.

• Telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding has again demanded answers from the UK as to why no enforcement action has been taken over the wiretapping and profiling of tens of thousands of BT broadband subscribers without any permission or notification. An unsatisfactory response could eventually land the government in the European Court of Justice.

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