● 02.20.09

● Links 20/02/2009: Many Linux-powered Phones; KDE 4.2 Stuff

Posted in News Roundup at 1:17 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• After a study of operating system usage of thousands of people I have discovered that Linux has a 46% market share. Linux now surpasses Windows which is shown to have a 43.5% market share. Overall GNU/Linux distributions have taken the lead from Microsoft based on this study. Honest.

• [...]

• To finish up I will leave you with this. In my office GNU/Linux has an 80% market share and FreeBSD has a 20% market share. That is all that really counts for me. It is all that really counts for anyone that has found GNU/Linux, learned its usefulness and uses it every day.

• All in all I couldn’t be happier with my switch. On top of having a much faster, more stable system I have found that using Open Source apps has been a great benefit over the multiple computers I use (so I’m a little behind on that one, what can I say).

• I am a great fan of the Gutenberg project, a noteworthy and honorable effort to digitize copyright-free texts. This project has released into the public domain over 20,000 classic books.

• [...]

• I have explored a number of Debian packages that make reading Gutenberg texts a pleasure. In part two of this article I will explore Gutenberg-related Java-based applications, from speed reading to converting text to other handy formats.

• Episode 21 in which we check out CDlinux, revisit identi.ca and get a phonecall

Education

• Christopher Dawson has been thinking aloud about Linux in the classroom at his ZDNet Education blog. Dawson, the technology director of a school district in northern Massachusetts, had sixty new Classmate Convertible PCs fall into his hands, and wonders if the Linux-powered machines are a better option for the district.

• [...]

• In order to make the most of the available hardware, and increase the number of computers available in the children’s room at the library, I assembled (and simultaneously lobotomized) a few machines to run K12LTSP. K12LTSP is an offshoot of the Linux Terminal Server Project customized for educational environments. It calls for a desktop computer with reasonable specs, and any number of thin clients (ours consisted of old desktops, sans hard drives, that could boot from the network).

• I have yet to test Edubuntu on the Classmate. That will be happening soon and obviously I need to put it through its paces before I make a decision. We know that XP is pretty snappy on the little machines, though, and new firewalls with some pretty heavy duty gateway anti-malware should keep them running safely without performance-sapping client-side anti-virus (we, unfortunately, won’t be able to send them home, meaning that the firewall and weekly scans with ClamWin should do the trick).

• St Michaels Catholic School in Rotorua wants to lease and install a Linux server. According to tender documents released this week, the supplier must have experience with installing Linux servers and associated hardware.

Enablement

• Now, here are some questions about these supposedly major-domo competitors to Microsoft, and I’m sure, that you can easily guess the answers:

• 1) What was it that made Google such a serious net platform player, with enough power and flexibility to serve the world’s Internet needs?

• 2) What was it that made netbooks possible in the first place?

• 3) What gives netbook manufacturers enough leverage to screw Microsoft down on OEM licence costs?

• 4) What is it that makes products like Amazon’s Kindle and hundreds of other e-book, portable media and mobile Internet gadgets possible, all by eschewing Microsoft’s embedded OSes?

• The answer of course, is Linux.

• Without Linux, there would be no Google. No startup could afford to build a platform on hundreds of thousands of servers which required either proprietary hardware (ie, Sun servers, circa 1998) or proprietary system software (ie, Microsoft’s Windows Server.) Further, how comfortable would Google be in competing with Microsoft in the Internet space, if Microsoft ‘owned’ its server platform, the basis of Google’s ongoing business?

• My interest in Linux was not all that different to many others, I suppose. I was eager to try and understand what the fuss was all about back in 1996 while I was still at school and it has kept me interested ever since. At the age of 23 I was employed by Megafreight as their systems administrator. For about a year I struggled with corrupt MS Exchange 5.5 database files and temperamental MS Servers before I decided to implement our first Linux server.

• I had been experimenting with Gentoo as my distro of choice mainly because it was said that Gentoo gives one a better insight into the workings of Linux. It is also a very fast distribution as everything is compiled from source. This was demonstrated when I installed Gentoo on a P4 3.0GHz CPU, 4Gig of RAM and a 160GB IDE disk. We had recently lost our entire mail server due to a corrupt Exchange 5.5 database file and had moved our mail hosting to a fairly new Linux management company called Synaq.

• CK: This project just couldn’t have happened with Microsoft software. The financial, hardware and time requirements made it very suitable for GNU/Linux.

• * Doing it in GNU/Linux made the learning experience attractive to me and, so far, I’m the only resident maintaining it. * There is easily available software to by-pass Microsoft proxy servers and, with kids using the suite, I don’t have the time to monitor them. I need a system that I can lock down and trust in. * Even to run the system in Windows XP would have required serious fund-raising and with that would have come the need to quantify the project’s achievements. This is not that type of project; how do you quantify different age and ethnic groups talking to each other? Part of the attraction for some people is just to come, “footle” and natter.

Games

• So now when I think of computer gaming, and I throw in the inertia and excitement of the GNU/Linux Desktop OS development model, I see a WHOLE NEW world of computer gaming spreading out before the world, and I see so much potential, and it’s AWESOME!!

• Defend the Earth from alien invaders in this action-packed, story-driven space shooter!

• My Game Company is pleased to announce the release of The Adventures of Rick Rocket for Linux!

Thin Clients

• Userful Corp. has won a deal to supply its Linux-based PC-sharing software to 357,000 Linux desktops in schools throughout Brazil.

• Userful’s Multiplier software runs on top of any version of the open-source Linux OS and enables a single desktop PC to be shared by as many as 10 users, all connected by individual monitors, keyboards and mice.

• Someday, all these capabilities will be built into every HDTV unit, but the initial Screen will likely be deployed using some sort of carrier-provided thin client box, perhaps based on a low-power Linux thin client running on something like a BeagleBoard with an Android-based session manager UI with some basic local applications for cached data use or direct content streaming (a la Roku) and costing less than $100 to manufacture.

SCALE 2009

• While both Bradley Kuhn and Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier are delivering keynotes, the lineup of speakers at various sessions this year are top notch.

• For starters, on Friday Edward Cherlin talks about Open Source Textbooks, Cathy Malmrose of ZaReason talks about women’s significant and understated contribution to open source, Stormy Peters tells us how things actually get done in open source and Joe Smith talks about College and Open Source.

• First off, there is no ideal company/community relationship. There are lots of different types of relationships between companies and the communities they work with (or don’t work with) – and no one way is perfect for everyone.

KDE

• My brother installed KDE 4.2 on his sidux system over the weekend, using an experimental repo, and the reports he has given me make me very excited to try it on my own computer. It has a lot of eyecandy, such as some of the features from Compiz, but he says it is very customizable and no problem at all to use. KDE 4.2 definitely sounds different and the screenshots he has sent me show it to be so. It handles multiple desktops differently than did KDE 3.5 and it includes several desktop widgets or gadgets that will certainly come in handy in my computer work. As with KDE 3.5, it also appears that it will be easy to set up for my wife, which is a major plus.

• If you’re using Fedora 10, and are a KDE desktop user, you’ll notice that your latest KDE 4.2 update, requires having a local MySQL server installed. This is due to Akonadi, part of the KDE PIM packages, that now rely on MySQL as a default server, for storing PIM data. Just a few months ago, I mentioned the news that Amarok 2 will also use MySQL as a default database.

• Currently you don’t want to use the effect if fade effect is enabled as well. The two effects have different durations, so the dialog is completly faded while still being rolled up.

Distributions

• For the first time this week I finally had the pleasure of taking Damn Small Linux (hereafter, DSL) for a test drive. One of the companies that I work for required an easy, lightweight and quick solution to salvage an older project. The owner had approached me and demanded that I, ” Get rid of this Compact Windows s*** and get this thing up and running” accomplishing X, Y and Z. A lot of problems had risen as a result of going with Microsoft Windows in the first place. The biggest of which was licensing. Being installed in public areas, this project/solution was to accomplish 1-2 specific task(s) without user interaction and nothing more.

Debian

• The recent release of Debian 5.0 (Lenny) contains a lot of medical software which is interesting for several tasks in medical work. The strongest part remains the support of microbiological applications but also medical imaging and the practice management GNUmed are included now. Perhaps an article on The Register might be interesting as well.

• The idea of a “universal operating system” that runs on just about any piece of hardware on the planet and is 100% modifiable, redistributable, and free of charge is a good one.

• Perhaps one day in the future there will no longer be a need for proprietary codecs, drivers, or firmware and Debian will be able to power all of the above with no outside help. Until that time I am forced to do more work to get my system running, while offshoots such as Ubuntu go the extra mile to include firmware and drivers for my hardware in the default install.

• Having always been a Debian person at heart, I eagerly awaited the latest Debian version to hit the mirrors. When Lenny was released, I downloaded the DVD ISO through torrent and installed it.

Ubuntu

• He may sound innocent, but Leigh Dyer has attempted to get Linux working on an iPod, which means help desk workers everywhere view him as “difficult”. He also knows his stuff. Leigh is a software developer and systems administrator with more than 10 years Linux and Windows experience.

• This tutorial is here because many of you have asked us to publish some instructions on how to revert our “Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Customization Guide.” And, because that guide was quite long, we decided to post a new one.

• Good OS, the Taipei, Taiwan-based company that launched in 2007, could turn out to be bad news for Microsoft.

• The makers of the gOS, Linux-based desktop operating system may now find themselves at the right place at the right time. With a market that is anxiously sizing up the netbook platform – - driven in large part by Intel’s low-cost Atom processors – - the gOS offers a simple proposition: A simple-to-install, free operating system integrated with Mozilla and Google technology for fun and productivity.

• Other expected options are Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista operating systems, 120GB and 250GB hard-disk drives, solid-state drives, Bluetooth, wireless WAN, and an internal GPS.

• I received a link to this online PDF from Intel earlier today. It is an interesting read from one of the bigger players in the Linux world, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical Ltd and a general Open Source enthusiast, Entrepreneur and socially and ethically responsible “nice guy”. He’s also spent a shade under 10 days in space aboard Soyuz TM-34 and the ISS. OK, *now* I’m jealous!!!

• Congratulations! You now have Ubuntu up and running in your workplace. From here, you can tailor the system to your needs (I installed a few design and web development applications and Firefox extensions, for example).

Red Hat/Fedora

• The Fedora Unity project, an independent project with strong links to Fedora, has made new ISO images for the updated Fedora 10 available to download via Jigdo. The ‘re-spins’ contain all updates released for Fedora up to the 10th of February.

Devices/Embedded

• Timesys Factory can base Linux platforms on Freescale-enabled 2.6.23 kernel or the 2.6.28 mainline kernel.

• LogLogic’s Linux-based appliances can mine this huge amount of information for near-instant reports of data breaches or deliver an audit trail on a key document for compliance that allows the audit committee to sign off financial disclosure forms. The company has its own intellectual property tied up in that performance, but it wouldn’t be possible without the flexibility and cost advantages of Linux.

• Texas Instruments (TI) announced an MDP (mobile development platform) using its OMAP3430 system-on-chip (SoC). Available with a Linux BSP (board support package), the “Zoom OMAP34x-II” includes a 4.1-inch multi-touch display, eight megapixel camera, GPS, HDMI output, and a forthcoming pico projection module, says the company.

Networking

• SATEL, a leading manufacturer of radio modems for long range wireless data, announced SATELLAR Digital System, a smart radio modem combining TCP/IP-functionalities, a Linux platform for customer specific applications, and a versatile modular structure.

• Another option might be to use a modern Linux distribution on a notebook equipped with a supported 3G data card (Web reports suggest Telefonica’s Huawei E270 works under at least some Linux distributions). Starting with Fedora 10, Linux gained a version of NetworkManager supporting the easy creation of ad hoc networks, as shown in the screenshot below…

Phones

• Mozilla has been working for years on creating a handset version of its successful Firefox desktop browser. In April last year, however, it said it was making a fresh effort at moving Firefox onto phones and other handheld devices, naming the project ‘Fennec’.

• The new Garmin-Asus venture announced its first two smartphone offerings at the GSM Mobile World Congress and true to earlier promises, they each use a different operating systems, one Linux and the other Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional.

• “I think that the Windows Mobile operating system will fade and they’ll [Microsoft] build a shell on top of Linux,” Mathias predicted. Why? Because of costs.

• Profit margins on mobile phones are tight and anywhere a device maker can save a dime, it will. Windows Mobile is expensive in comparison to Linux, so he predicts that Linux will win out longer-term.

• Enea® (Nordic Exchange/Small Cap/ENEA) made the agreement with Open-Plug at the end of 2008 to deliver the H.324 protocol stack from its Netbricks line of products to their ELIPS Suite product, a ready-to-use mobile platform for mass market phones, and to their ELIPS Telephony Stack targeting Linux-based devices such as MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices).

• Google started Android in 2007 as part of an industry effort to create a free software system for phones. Based on the Linux operating system, Android is open to any programmer who wants to develop features for it. T-Mobile USA Inc., the fourth- biggest wireless carrier in the U.S., offers an Android phone called the G1.

• Malaysian embedded-device firm Gupp Technologies is readying a new version of its Linux-based, dual-mode (WiFi and GSM) “Phreedom” phone. The “Phreedom-Monday” offers improved VoIP quality, according to Trinity Convergence, which is supplying its VeriCall Edge VoIP/multimedia stack for use in the updated phone.

• Tokyo-based Aplix Corp. announced a version of its Java Language Based Environment (JLBE) for the LiMo Platform. JBlend for LiMo enables developers to use existing developer toolkits and IDEs, such as Eclipse, to develop and deploy Java Micro Edition (ME) applications on LiMo (Linux Mobile) Platform phones, says the company.

• NTT DoCoMo is distributing nine new NEC and Panasonic handsets that comply with the LiMo (Linux Mobile) Platform. Designed for its 46-million user Japanese HDSPA FOMA network, the phones all support up to 7.2Mbps downlinks, and most offer touchscreen, Bluetooth, and GPS.

• Want to redesign Neo-branded mobile phones to your own vision and the market needs as you see them? Stop in at the teardown of the Openmoko open source cell phone on Tuesday, March 31 between 1:30 to 2:30 pm at the ESC Theater.

Sub-notebooks

• Frankly, I’m intrigued by the potential Android-Ubuntu showdowns on netbooks and MIDs. There’s nothing better than healthy, heated competition to drive innovation.

• Just a year ago, netbook configurations were typically set to 512MB of RAM, 2GB to 4GB of flash storage, and less powerful microprocessors that limited what apps could run on them. They also tended to have small screens and keyboards. Almost all of them ran some flavor of the Linux operating system.

Free Software/Open Source

• SCAN has progressed significantly over the past three years, and today’s announcement focuses on architecture diagrams, not defects. The data will be available under the Creative Commons license and is available on Coverity’s SCAN site.

• Giving your core product away is certainly an unusual business strategy, yet some succesful software companies are doing exactly that

• [...]

• Red Hat, the company which spearheads the development of the Linux operating system, generated revenues of half a billion dollars in the 2008 financial year, the vast proportion of which was profit, while IT company, Sun Microsystems, spent $1 billion in February 2008 to acquire database provider, MySQL.

• The common thread is that both Linux and MySQL are open source systems. So what is open source?

• For example OpenConcept hosted a survey and John Nash, a retired professor of management at the University of Ottawa hosted a Wiki to collect information from the open source community as part of their submissions, McOrmond said these were not considered as submission by the department.

• He also said there are many people in government who are already involved in open source projects. He mentioned organizations such as GOSLING (Getting Open Source Logic INto Governments) and Canada GOOSE (Canada Government Official Open Source Engagement) volunteer and informal learning communities of civil servants involved in open source research.

Firmware

• Since Rockbox is constantly being developed, I expect to see more features coming real soon. So, that’s about it. I hope some of you out there will get to try Rockbox after reading this. And, to those who have used or are already using Rockbox, we also want to hear your experiences through comment.

• In this Insider Secrets video from CNET.com, Tom Merritt shows you how to give an old Linksys Wi-Fi router new life by replacing it’s factory firmware with an open source version–like Tomato firmware.

Business

• It’s very likely that open-source vendors will increasingly intermingle proprietary code with open-source code in order to improve their top and bottom lines, but I agree with Tiemann: the era of top-to-bottom proprietary lock-in is over. Even Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says so.

• This time it’s Zarafa, developer of collaboration software, that has announced it’s adding native support for the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to its Linux-based e-mail and calendaring server.

• Zarafa’s server already contains support for several other Microsoft and open source products, including Outlook, SugarCRM, OpenERP, and Alfresco.

• In fact, looking under the hood of the big players, you’ll often find open source. Today, many (or is that most?) of the big-ticket security and networking appliances are underpinned by Linux or BSD Unix.

• “Open Source has joined the mainstream,” chairman Richard Seibt concluded when wrapping up the Open Source Meets Business conference, held at the end of January 2009 in Nuremberg, Germany. “We’re no longer referring to market shares that have grown. Instead, we’re talking about large and small enterprises working successfully with open source software,” said Seibt, who is also chairman of the Open Source Business Foundation. Current surveys confirm Richard Seibt’s positive assessment. In 40 percent of all companies that use open source software, it is of mission-critical importance. In a further 43 percent, open source software plays a significant role in the corporate IT environment. This was revealed in a survey presented by Heise Verlag in Nuremberg. Most of the around 1,300 survey participants came from companies that used open source software.

Sun

• Curiously, when I ran NetBSD on the Sparc, the Firefox PACKAGE wouldn’t install. Not a port that needed to be compiled, but a precompiled package built for the 32-bit Sparc architecture. That didn’t give me a whole lot of hope for pkgsrc, which theoretically can be used to bring NetBSD packages into OpenBSD and other OSes. (DragonFlyBSD uses NetBSD packages, and that’s a great way for the FreeBSD-derived DragonFly to have a huge package repository, and it makes me want to try it on my i386 hardware).

Government

• Last week, a group of open source execs sent an open letter to the president, asking that he “make the use of open source software a key component of every new technology initiative the United States government enters into.”

• [...]

• Software isn’t a seat belt, but the stakes are equally high. The signers of the letter to Obama had it right: Open source should be on the short list when the government buys software. And modest government investments in software security would have the secondary effect of putting IT workers back on the job.

• It remains unclear what technologies or standards President Barack Obama will decide to harness to support his open government initiatives. Obama has on numerous occasions pledged that he will make the government as transparent and open as possible – even going as far as to give his administration deadlines on when certain milestones will be reached and state that his administration “will put government data online in universally accessible formats.” Many seem to agree that openness in general is a positive goal, but how to best reach that objective gets foggy.

• “Openness” is a general movement, not just related to open source and standards. That said, openness intersects many areas and it doesn’t take a big leap to go from discussions about open government to procurement policies for IT based on open standards,” wrote IBM Vice President Bob Sutor in a blog post last month. Microsoft CTO Susie Adams agrees there has been a lot of talk about openness as a theme of the new administration and believes Obama “wants to capture an assurance of openness as a way to set direction and vision.” In terms of how the goal of openness relates to technology specifically, she said “a true, open government should rely on a “mixed source” blend of technologies — an approach used around the world.

• The key to the success that VistA has had for many years is the way it was written. As you may know, computer programs are written in special code that translates into instructions for the machines. The code for VistA was what we now think of as “open source” code. Any skilled programmer could use that code to modify existing modules or to create new applications to do new jobs and connect them so that they are an integral part of the whole system. As open source code increases in popularity, we see it used in operating systems (Linux), in Internet browsers (Firefox), and in applications for some new computers like “netbooks.”

Applications

• Without a doubt, the open source project Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems (CMS) around. It provides the infrastructure and manages processes for many well-known web sites, including The Onion and OStatic. In our interview with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, he said that there are 700 core contributors to the project, which he described as on the “same scale as the Linux kernel.” There are also over 2,000 modules for Drupal, making it hugely extensible.

• Ariba said today it is releasing its AribaWeb RIA development framework under Version 2.0 of the Apache license.

Leftovers

• You can turn your icon black, send a few links, try to shake up your friends, and maybe educate or at least awake a few other individuals to the issues that are waiting to gobble us all up, but in the end, that’s it. The fight against the European and Canadian DMCA and the various software patent campaigns have shown that in the end, the industry can wait you out. We might be able to hold them off for one round, maybe even score the odd win or two, but they will just keep coming back for more. They have deeper pockets and a more unified front than the end user (I think they used to be called citizens) does.

• The fight over the controversial amendments to New Zealand’s copyright law is heating up.

• Thursday at noon, some 120 protesters descended upon the parliament in the capital, Wellington, and handed over an e-petition against the amendments with over 12,000 signatories, and a traditional one with 148 names, to the United Future party leader Peter Dunne.

• The Pirate Bay trial is moving forward rapidly and again the day in court has ended early. On the third day the prosecution presented the amended charges. The defendants all called for acquittal while Carl Lundström’s lawyer scored points with the already legendary ‘King Kong’ defense.

• One of Australia’s most popular YouTube users has admitted being paid to spruik Ten’s new show Lie To Me surreptitiously in the latest example of marketers invading the popular video sharing site.

• Is Yelp.com manipulating user reviews to coerce small businesses to advertise with the site? That’s what some business owners in the San Francisco area are claiming, and they’ve taken those complaints to both the East Bay Express and the student-run newspaper the Daily Californian. Yelp denies these allegations and says its sales staff does not have the power to either move or delete reviews.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayGabriella Coleman, an anthropologist studying the Free Open Source Software movement 01 (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

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