● 02.27.09

● Links 27/02/2009: KDE 4.2 Praises, New GNU/Linux Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 5:48 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Even more definitively: “No!” wrote erroneus on Slashdot. “Rebooting is a chore. Once people start up, they don’t want to shut down to start up another application. It’s not what they are used to.”

• Then again, “if this were done as a VM where the Linux machine were to boot and they installed Windows XP in a VirtualBox or some other VM, then that might be acceptable,” erroneus added. “Then they would have their safer, virus-free environment for email and web browsing and then a VM to host the applications they need to run. This stuff works really well.”

• The fact that 35 percent of respondents at a Linux-oriented conference, reported growth of their Windows OS install base is telling. As enterprises get more comfortable with Clouds, offering an environment to deploy Windows and Linux workloads is a no-brainer. I’m certain that Microsoft realizes this and will announce Linux OS support when the Microsoft Cloud goes live

• CL Desktop is a new Adobe AIR application (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) that pulls Craigslist.com listings into to a skinnable desktop wrapper. CL Desktop has some nice perks overall, with a couple more baubles than you’d find online. However, a few other features are absent or could be improved.

• But now it seems that every corporation has its finger in the open source pie, and every long standing free software developer has been employed by a multi-billion dollar company to work on the project of his or her choice. This change began to happen during the late nineties, prior to Red Hat’s $6 billion flotation on the NASDAQ, but became truly significant when IBM announced its commitment to Linux in December 2000.

• Countering a lack of support for open source software and opening the floodgates for businesses around the world to cut costs on software, MyLinuxSupport (http://www.mylinuxsupport.com) professional support services are expanding options for 24/7 technical assistance for Linux and major open source applications. The MyLinuxSupport resources make it possible for companies tightening their budgets to consider eliminating the cost of proprietary software licenses such as Microsoft Vista or expensive cloud services like Salesforce.com.

• It has been a number of months since CrossOver Games was last updated, but this morning CodeWeavers has issued a new update for this software based upon WINE that allows gamers to run their favorite DirectX and OpenGL Windows titles on Linux.

Kernel Space

• Computers control and transfer data to SCSI devices via SCSI commands. In this article, the author introduces some of the SCSI commands and methods of executing SCSI commands when using SCSI API in Linux®. He provides background on the SCSI client/server model and the storage SCSI command. Next, he explains the Linux generic SCSI driver API and offers an example of using a system that focuses on executing the inquiry command using the generic driver.

• Ext4 is the evolution of the most used Linux filesystem, Ext3. In many ways, Ext4 is a deeper improvement over Ext3 than Ext3 was over Ext2. Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to Ext2, but Ext4 modifies important data structures of the filesystem such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features.

• Last night I managed to finish up a rather satisfying improvement to ext4’s inode and block allocators. The ext4’s original allocator was actually a bit more simple-minded than ext3’s, in that it didn’t implement the Orlov algorithm to spread out top-level directories for better filesystem aging. It also was buggy in certain ways, where it would return ENOSPC even when there were still plenty of inodes in the file system.

Desktop Environments

GNOME

• In a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters discussed the differences between companies and communities and how to bridge the gap. This issue is becoming increasingly important for open source software projects that are trying to build close ties with corporate adopters and contributors.

K Desktop Environment

• Well, I sounded pretty certain in my last post that I was done with KDE 4.1 and Kubuntu 8.10. I was told by a commenter to that post that KDE 4.2 looked pretty promising. I spent this past weekend working with VirtualBox (which itself has matured into a great program – more later) and I got curious about what the Jaunty Jackalope Kubuntu had to offer.

• Dual screen support in terms of my desktop setup seems to be about the same as it had been, but I think that is because I am using the proprietary ATI driver and not the open source one. It works well enough that I don’t have any issues. I really like the feature where if you have a maximized window on one screen you can just drag it over the other screen and it stays maximized. Maybe other versions of KDE had this… but either way it is real handy.

• I can hardly say enough good things about KDE 4.2 and I am really looking forward to the 4.3 release and some additional bug fixes.

Distributions

• Italy-based Koan Software has revised its Linux distribution for embedded and industrial applications, and has joined the OpenEmbedded (OE) community. Version 4.0 of KaeilOS has adopted the OpenEmbedded (OE) build system, and for the first time the distro is offered as a free download.

• It may have been a while but I decided I should really get distro hopping again seriously. I like to try out new software, it’s almost a geeky form of OCD and besides, it makes for great review fodder I hope. Today’s candidate is the latest release of a distro I first looked at some time ago, Sabayon. I’ve had mixed feelings about it in the past, I found 2.2 Professional to be very bloated, capable of interesting innovations but overall slightly disappointing.

• In this article, we will talk about Protech, a high-end hacking toolbox for the enterpreneuring system administrator.

• [...]

• Protech is a mighty tool. I’m thoroughly impressed. The distro is fast and stable, it’s good looking enough to become a desktop if needed, it contains a broad range of excellent tools, as well as some unique programs that you do not normally encounter in most distros.

• What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS.

• Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

• [...]

• Elive is a great distro that gives you functionality, stability and beauty. While there are a few other distros that are based on the Enlightenement desktop manager, this is so far the most elegant distro that I have ever encountered. I am pretty impressed by it and I guess it will remain on my computer for a much longer time than any other OS.

• Kongoni is a completely new distribution to Linux, who is behind this and please give some background on what got you to this place.

• Well, the primary blame is mine. I was the lead developer of the OpenLab distribution for many years, in it’s day it was the longest running African distro ever, and it had some major successes. Unfortunately, being commercial put pressures on it that ultimately weighed on me, I was on the verge of burnout suffering early ulcer symptoms and so eventually I quit – leaving distro development behind entirely for almost two years and moving to Cape Town.

New Releases

• Just ten days after the Valentine’s Day release, Patrick Verner announced today the immediate availability of his Parted Magic 3.7 Linux distribution. This new version fixes several bugs, adds some new features and updates a few software packages.

• The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 6 XFCE Community Edition. Based on Xubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, Linux 2.6.27, XFCE 4.4.2 and Xorg 7.4, Linux Mint 6 “Felicia” XFCE CE comes with a brand new “Software Manager”, FTP support in mintUpload, proxy support and history of updates in mintUpdate, mintDisk and a lot of other improvements. For a complete list of new features read: What’s new in Felicia XFCE CE?

• The Caos team of developers and contributors from Infiscale are proud to announce the public release of Caos Linux NSA-1.0.8, an updated release to the NSA-1.0 tree. Caos Linux is a community-managed and openly-maintained distribution of Linux focusing on areas where Linux naturally leads and excels: high performance computation (HPC), servers (especially LAMP and general Web), and custom appliances (such as file servers and firewalls).

• The NSA-1.0 release identifies the stabilization and validation of the core operating system, fully tested on some of the world’s fastest public and private systems and architectures. And now with NSA 1.0.8 you get bleeding-edge security updates, the new 2.6.28 kernel, updated packages such as OFED 1.4 and gcc-4.3.3, a streamlined Sidekick system configuration toolkit (making the installation of Caos Linux and Perceus even faster and easier), the latest Perceus 1.5 cluster management software, and Abstractual, Infiscale’s cloud virtualization solution. All of these updates are already integrated in the NSA-1.0.8 ISO release of Caos Linux, available now on our download mirrors.

Ubuntu

• Overall, thanks to the recession, the contrast between Ubuntu and Apple couldn’t be starker. For Linux, the future looks peachy. For Apple, it’s beginning to go pear shaped. If you’ll pardon the pun.

• Our first steps in Karmic Koala will be at the infrastructure layer. We’re adopting the emerging standard of Amazon EC2 and providing our users with AMI’s and tools to run on Amazon EC2. We’re also providing users with an open source means of implementing their own in-house EC2-like cloud (Eucalyptus). This is not the end but the beginning of a journey, and we will be looking to build ecosystems at all the layers of the computing stack based upon portability and choice.

• Our Test Center recently took a look at gOS with the aim of examining the operating system as a platform for netbooks, the small notebook-like form factor that’s getting so much buzz these days.

• Reviewers found the OS to be easy-to-use and “intuitive enough for even a Linux novice to navigate.” See the full review here.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux runs on the first e-book reader released this year … and on the second … and the third.

• “Over the next five years, we believe that those three Linux stacks are going to capture the majority of volumes in Linux-based, mobile phone deployments,” Whitmire said.

Sub-notebooks

• Even worse, about a third of netbooks ship with Linux. Microsoft makes nothing from those machines. Microsoft also recognizes that while Linux has offered desktop PC users a less attractive product compared to Windows on the PC (largely due to Linux’ lack of support for Windows games, commercial desktop apps, and some specialized drivers), the barriers holding back Linux on the PC aren’t nearly as significant on netbooks, which don’t play games, aren’t expected to run apps outside of basic things like web browsing and word processing, and have a smaller subset of hardware needs to support.

• “We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is” a Dell spokesperson told Laptop Magazine. Which makes a change from 18 months back when we were reporting that Dell staff didn’t seem to know that Ubuntu was even an option.

• Nokia might be one company that comes out with pretty dizzy phones, but that doesn’t mean they are willing to rest on their laurels. Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo already plans to jump aboard the laptop bandwagon, and could be working on a multi-core Linux MID where we’re looking at a 2011 release date.

Free Software/Open Source

• Given the fact that there are a lot of open source email clients that will do the same job for free, there is a huge incentive for businesses to look at alternatives. I can say definitively that they are. It all comes down to functionality.

• [...]

• So has the financial crises effected the open source movement in a negative manner? In my travels around the intarnut tubes I have not seen any evidence of slowing down or any other financial problems regarding contributions to open source. No one has said, to my knowledge, that they are quitting or have been laid off due to the current financial crises.

• Last week, Moodlerooms announced that it had teamed with Google to integrate the Google Apps for Education service into Moodle.

• An informed democratic society needs open access to the law, but states’ attempts to protect copyright interests in their laws are a major roadblock. This article urges broader access, analyzes the implications and legal arguments for and against copyright in the law, and considers strategies for access advocacy.

• Open source has some specific advantages for New Zealand and in these recessionary times. It provides source code for free that can be modified, subject only to the provision these modifications must be made available to the public. For New Zealand, with its small market, this means customisation to meet regional differences can more easily be undertaken. For example, American zip codes can be changed to postal codes; VAT can be changed to GST; and numeric dates can be set in the correct order.

Business

• Alfresco CTO John Newton was twittering the event and posted these comments from Bob Muglia’s presentation:

• My poster child for this is, predictably, Google. As I discussed last year, I consider Google to be an “open source business” because the business is effectively built on open source. True, its software is no more open than, say, the pieces of the IBM portfolio that embed the Apache HTTP server, but it’s undeniable that Google is a business that is built on, with and from open source software. And while some will undoubtedly challenge their side of the give and take equation, given their contributions from Summer of Code to Mark Callaghan’s MySQL patches I find it hard to argue that they are not benefiting a variety of communities.

FSF/GNU

• Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman made headlines last year when he argued that cloud computing is “worse than stupidity” and called for users to abandon popular Web applications such as Facebook and GMail. We disagreed with Stallman and pointed out that cloud computing is here to stay and that numerous emerging community-driven initiatives have the potential to bring the values of software freedom to the cloud.

• This issue was the primary topic of a presentation made by Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) technical director and community liaison Bradley Kuhn at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). Kuhn has worked closely with Stallman over the years and previously served as the executive director of the Free Software Foundation before participating in the founding of the SFLC. He is best known for his role in authoring GNU’s Affero General Public License (AGPL).

Government

• Politicians of all stripes seem to be espousing open source, but that bluster must be turned into action — and soon, says Mark Taylor.

• First, shadow chancellor George Osborne advocates open source. Now minister for digital engagement Tom Watson promises to use more open-source software, if circumstances permit. The UK public sector just got interesting again.

Licensing

• Farata Systems, a world leader in the RIA space has open sourced their Clear Toolkit framework for developing enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java.

Open (But No Source Code)

• German company EDAG has revealed that it will preview the open source Light Car study concept at the upcoming Geneva Motor Show. The study concept which measures 4 meters long, 1.70 meters wide and which has a wheelbase of 2.90 meters long is fully electric and emissions free. With electric drive systems in the wheels, it can deliver up to 150 kilometers in terms of driving range with power supplied by a lithium ion battery pack.

Standards/Consortia

• Do take a look; if you’d like to re-use any of it, there’s also an ODF version. You’ll note that we think lumping open source in with shareware, trialware and bait-and-switchware is a mistake; it’s not about saving money on licenses, it’s about securing key freedoms. More inside.

• It’s been adopted by Japan, Malaysia, and two states of India, as well as Hong Kong.

• Other countries that have adopted it are South Africa and Russia, according to the ODF Alliance.

• In this group of adopters, Britian is the country with the closest ties to North America. Its economy thrives, if that’s the right word these days, on a similar liberal capitalism and technology-driven development. If Britain can adopt ODF, why not the U.S.?

• The policy on open standards does not say much, but in the Action Plans (#8) it specifically says that ODF (ISO 26300) is required for compliance. OOXML is also mentioned, but merely as “emerging open versions of previously proprietary standards” which is probably the most generous description Ive heard. Its quite clear that the “defacto” binary Microsoft Office docs and Macro enabled OOXML are out.

• Since the introduction of the Following feature on Blogger, it has been adopted by nearly three million blogs, with someone following a new blog every second. Over the past few months, we’ve been striving to make it better, and now we’re proud to announce the integration of Google Friend Connect and Blogger.

Leftovers

• What Mr. Carroll is actually lamenting is the end of the monopoly era for news sources. Citizens now have more sources of news, and advertisers now have more platforms for reaching customers. As anyone who actually has a degree in economics will tell you, more competition is a good thing.

• A few folks have sent in Paul Starr’s long but thoughtful article in The New Republic, which worries that, thanks to newspapers dying, we’ll be entering a new age of corruption, since no one will be watching government officials like investigative reporters have in the past.

Censorship

• We hadn’t heard much about the program since then, but apparently the government has recently decided to shut down thousands of “unregistered” websites, mostly of small businesses.

• It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse.

Copyrights

• MusicFIRST’s latest effort was to drag its dog and pony show to Congress, where it paraded a bunch of musicians in front of Congresscritters to whine about how unfair it was that radio stations helped promote their music without paying them.

• EMI is making the situation even worse. Rather than just suing the companies, it’s also suing investors and the founders personally. This isn’t just highly unusual, it’s a clear attempt to pressure these companies into settling, as no matter how legitimate your stance is, it’s quite a scary thing to be sued personally, and potentially have personal assets at risk. Suing the founders personally is legal bullying. It’s a clear abuse of the legal system to try to force a settlement, rather than an actual attempt to raise a legal issue.

• Is Nicholas Sarkozy One Strike Towards Losing His Internet Connection?

• The latest is that French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, a big supporter of setting up a three strikes law in France, is being accused of violating copyright law himself.

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

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