● 02.15.09

● Links 15/02/2009: KDE 4.3 Preview; Cuba Uses Sabayon Technology

Posted in News Roundup at 7:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Green computing frequently makes the news either for its cost-saving potential to businesses, or as a way for eco-conscious consumers to reduce their environmental footprint. But UK-based Aleutia, Ltd takes a different approach, using green to produce ultra-low-power-consumption Linux PCs for classrooms and businesses in developing countries. The company’s flagship product is the E2, a compact desktop system that consumes just 8 watts.

• Why does nearly every modern computer – whether it runs OS X, Vista or Linux – take considerably longer to boot than an ancient Amiga?

• With a hard drive, an Amiga could go from power socket to Workbench in around five seconds.

• With a modern multicore processor and a 12-month-old installation of Windows, you’re lucky if your desktop is responsive before the kettle boils.

• I’m also encouraged, as well, to see Dell offering this hybrid line of computer that put Windows and Linux side by side with capable hardware support for both. Don’t think it means much for Linux to be a quick-boot option? Check out some of Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin’s thoughts, which I think help put this potential in perspective.

Desktop Environments

• Air was the wallpaper we introduced in KDE 4.2, but that is just the beginning of something larger. Air is supposed to be different than what Oxygen is, something that tries to appeal to a user base looking for a more “sexy” experience than Oxygen (yeah I know you are out there ), but to still have the capability of merging nicely with what we have now.

Distributions

• Today is a good day, the University of Informatics Sciences – Havana, Cuba, released Nova Linux, the Official Cuban Linux distribution and guess what, it uses Entropy, the most promising Sabayon Linux technology.

• Debian 5 Lenny is an excellent desktop or server option that is worthy of consideration. I have been running the Debian 5 Lenny candidate for awhile and have been very pleased with the stability and features. It actually functions and acts more like the distribution I need and work on than Ubuntu. Not so say that Ubuntu is bad, just that I typically do not need or use the latest applications.

• I decided to get deeper into Puppy 4.1.2 on my Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop.

• [...]

• The end result is that while Puppy 4.1.2. runs quite well at first blush, I need to look closer at why I was so unsuccessful at getting Flash and Java to work. It should be easier than this.

• As I write here I’m downloading the beta 3 of PCLinuxOS 2009, which will be my first go at the Ripper gang’s newest version since 2007. Based on that experience, my expectations are high. I guess that’s what happens when you produce quality stuff, Texstar: people start anticipating better and better.

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #129 for the week February 8th – February 14th, 2009. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu LoCo Teams Meeting, New MOTU’s, Rockin’ LoCo Docs Day, Ubuntu Hug Day, Improved mail server stack: Testing needed, Drupal 5.x and 6.x LoCo Suite Released, Ubuntu Honduras being organized, Launchpod #17, Triage in Launchpad suite, PPA page perfomance improvements, Ubuntu Training for USA, HP Mini Mi Screenshots, Server Team Meeting Feb. 10th, and much, much more!

Devices/Embedded

• Palm has finally decided to abandon its Palm OS operating system after an illustrious run of over twelve years in favour of its new webOS operating system that is expected to power its Pre range of smartphones.

• Hi there! Have you already jumped onto the netbook bandwagon? I currently own a MEDION PC, a MacBook and a Nokia E71, but my inner-geek still craves for a cool little Linux netbook. Sub-notebooks are great stuff: they are, like Linus Torvalds said in a recent interview, “laptops done right”. You can carry them around, they are light, small and cheap so you do not have to worry as much if you lose, or break them. At the same time though, you can do some serious work with thee mini laptops.

Free Software/Open Source

• After months of courting three potential e-mail service providers to replace the current Webmail system, members of the Student E-mail Initiative have chosen not to accept an offer from Zimbra, a subsidiary company of Yahoo!

• If the initiative signs with a new e-mail provider, the choice will be between Google’s Apps for Education and Microsoft’s Live at Edu, according to Stan North Martin, the director of Outreach, Communications and Consulting for the Office of Information Technology.

• Étoilé, a GNUstep-based user environment that enables users to create their own

• I first heard from Flowplayer from the guys at Floobs. Kaitsu, their CEO, said that I might want to check out these guys. The line was something in the lines of ‘…yeah, He’s really good. He worked for us before but wanted to go and develop his own open source project. It’s all cool’. This healthy attitude is something that other industries should copy. Very rarely you hear such a supportive attitude toward someone who takes off to develop his own project.

Google

• Let’s face it, Google’s influence on the Web is quickly approaching that of Microsoft’s on the desktop. This means that, just as Microsoft can’t make major changes to the Windows API without breaking thousands of apps, when Google makes a major change, it breaks thousands of apps too.

• From Search Engine Land comes news that Google is toying with a new, AJAX-ified search result system. Good for the user, right? Maybe. But in the process, it changes the format of the referrer header that the destination Web site will be sent. This means that anyone parsing those referrer strings from Google trying to do analysis of their keywords… well, they will need to rewrite their software to parse the new strings. Is it an easy rewrite? Sure, probably one line of code for most applications, and three or so if you want to include the old and the new referrer strings.

• At Google, we love open source for a few reasons. First, it speeds innovation. Open source lowers the barrier to entry for users, website owners, and application developers. It means there can be another Google, or another Yahoo!, started from someone’s garage in Auckland or Arhus with very little capital required, because the building blocks for success are freely available.

Business

• Over the past 10 years, open source software has become an important cornerstone of the software industry. Commercial users have adopted it in standalone applications, and software vendors are embedding it in products. Surprisingly then, from a commercial perspective, open source software is developed differently from how corporations typically develop software. Research into how open source works has been growing steadily [1]. One driver of such research is the desire to understand how commercial software development could benefit from open source best practices. Do some of these practices also work within corporations? If so, what are they, and how can we transfer them?

• The open source client and server software enable Android handsets to sync contacts, calendars, pictures, music and videos with any backend data source and desktop.

Releases

• The syslog-ng Open Source Edition application is a mature, stable system logging application that has become the most common alternative logging server of the Linux/Unix world. It is estimated to be used by tens of thousands of organizations on hundreds of thousands of computers, which probably makes it one of the most successful Hungarian products.

• These are exciting times for photography on Linux. With Krita 2.0 round the corner and GIMP getting (some) higher bit depth functionalities in its next 2.8 version.

Funding

• Exponents of open source software (OSS) hail the technology as a way to help organizations cut cost in the current downturn, but HR executives are less convinced that the recession has boosted demand for skills needed to manage open source environments.

FSF

• In the earliest days of computers, just about everything could be considered free software. Computers were so large, unwieldy and difficult to understand that any reasonably well-written program would be passed around via punch cards or paper tape. Into that free software world Richard Stallman was born.

• [...]

• “I spent a couple of years punishing Symbolics by attacking it and giving an ultimatum to the people at the AI lab,” he said. “I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life punishing somebody. I wanted to rebuild what was destroyed. I wanted to be able to use computers while having freedom. This is impossible if you have a proprietary program.”

Asia

• The demand for open-source software in the ­country and the expertise required in this area is rising, according to the Multimedia Development Corp (MDeC) which spearheads the MSC Malaysia initiative.

• Open-source software, said networking systems giant Sun Microsystems, is gaining popularity mainly because the advantages of user malleable programs are becoming more apparent.

• Since the source code is ­accessible to users, a company could tweak open-source software to better meet its needs, compared to proprietary software which arguably has to be used as is.

• Uy, also the founder of Touch Group of Companies, is regarded as one of the leaders in open systems services in the Philippinese. He has introduced the use of enterprise grade Linux and other open source software to the country’s top companies as well as small and medium enterprises.

Sun

• The flexibility of open source, and the handy Extensions system, lets the community write functionality for OpenOffice.org without having to make it part of the main program…

• RedOffice is one of the “distros” of OpenOffice.org, along with Go-OOo, Lotus Symphony, OxygenOffice, NeoOffice, EuroOffice, and probably some others.

• RedOffice is developed by a company in Beijing and specifically addresses the Chinese-language market.

• It’s a good point, but again, I don’t think “encouraging…cloud operators to use open source software” does much to prevent lock-in, unless they actually make that software transparent and usable to end-users. Regardless, most, if not all of them, already use open source in abundance due to the quality of open-source components like MySQL.

• No, the real emphasis must be on open data. Perhaps we need to invent open-data licenses, similar to open-source licenses. Perhaps the Open Source Initiative should get involved.

Government

• Buried deep in the details of the US stimulus package is an interesting provision that might go a long way toward helping Open Source software break into the medical area. It says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services should study the availability of open source health technology systems (PDF, page 488), compare their TCO against proprietary systems and report on what they find no later than Oct 1, 2010. Slashdotters may also be interested in the language that starts on page 553 of that PDF to see just what the final package says about broadband.

Leftovers

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