● 03.17.09

● Links 17/03/2009: Skolelinux in German Schools

Posted in News Roundup at 8:07 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• From now on, the schools in Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate federal state will be running Skolelinux on their computers, based on a decision made a year ago. The project is now announcing its next phase.

• The federal state schools will not only adopt Skolelinux as their operating system, but also use it to develop curriculum in 11 pilot schools. The 10-point plan, roughly translated as “Media Competence Is Our Schools,” involves an adapted Skolelinux version, according to Burkhard Schaefer, consultant for the federal state’s ministry of education, science, youth and culture: “The decision went to Skolelinux because it offered through available pedagogical network solutions from the Debian community a sustainable development based on software concepts.” Rhineland-Palatinate is the second federal state after Hamburg to select a Linux solution for its schools.

• The Sparc64 iron runs Solaris, of course, but it is not clear what is being put on the blade servers. Sun says that it is including the Sun HPC Linux Edition software stack, so this suggests Linux on the blades, and one would hope that Ubuntu is the Linux of choice in South Africa.

• A long time ago I used to actually use a separate computer to install and test Linux distributions. I even built some of the boxes that I used to do the testing with but these days I mostly do my work on Macs. I know, I know…I’ve become a lame Apple whore. Along the way I finally ended up dispensing with testing Linux distributions on separate computers.

• [...]

• While Linux is great, it’s by no means the only operating system to run in VMWare or Parallels. I have Windows XP installed as well and I’ve messed around with a few other operating systems including Windows Vista and PC-BSD. They all run pretty well.

• Of all the alternative operating systems, one stands out when it comes to great performance on lower-spec hardware – Linux.

• Those of you shaking your heads and turning the page, hold on. There are plenty of other options if you can’t stomach Linux, but I can tell you right now they won’t perform anywhere near as well as a well- tuned Linux setup, so bear with me for a moment.

• It’s expected when Microsoft tries to stop the spread of GNU/Linux. It’s my understanding that we as an entity might officially be causing them some grief. Even those who sell, distribute or package MS products are forced at the point of an auditing pen to do Microsoft’s bidding. It all comes down to money.

• A lot of money. Cumulatively, they are only doing what they are supposed to be doing…protecting their market.

• So that’s where I get confused. It’s perfectly understandable for companies “with some skin in the game” to get defensive, but what about those villagers who rally to Castle Redmond’s defense? Sure they are Microsoft Windows users but what point is there in them trying to stop others from at least trying Linux? I mean aside from those obviously being compensated.

• This system works because, with free software, the distribution can make whatever changes it needs to make the software run. It is only a problem for proprietary vendors. If they aren’t willing to work with the system and release their code as free software, that is their choice — but then they shouldn’t complain that the system isn’t set up for them.

• There are dozens, if not hundreds, of open source games that are already native on GNU/Linux. Unfortunately the commercial gaming market lags behind open source game development when it comes to GNU/Linux. Some people using GNU/Linux want the commercial games too. This article is an attempt to assist a move in the direction of GNU/Linux in the commercial gaming market.

• Now it’s time the Linux brand got trampled to death too. The term is ambiguous and unhelpful when you use it outside of the programming and sys-admin industries. OK so we love having a single banner to fly and Linux is a very successful kernel project. But it’s not good to advocate with a conversation that starts off with a lie, that this system your using is Linux. Because then you’ll be constantly trying to explain why Linux doesn’t work here, but does work there, doesn’t do that, except when it does over there. It’s not a coherent system like the name’s use suggests.

• I think we should be more specific and say what we mean:

• * Linux – The Kernel project * FOSS – The Philosophies that underpin the creation of software * Ubuntu, Fedora – The Operating Systems

• Changing from closed source programs to open source programs is a hard thing to do. Many people will resist that change fiercely and will pull every trick out of the book to justify their objections to that change.

• Sometimes they have no choice and when a company is instructed to move from a closed source program to an open source program it is inevitable that, as the old Chinese curse goes, there will be interesting times.

Media

• Well, Blu-ray support may now come to Linux sooner rather than later. Following that Phoronix interview, a few interested parties have offered up Blu-ray drives and media to the FFmpeg developers. Robert Swain has shared with Phoronix this morning that they are now deciding on a suitable FFmpeg developer to receive these donations to begin work on Blu-ray support.

• I recently installed and started using open source Elisa Media Center. Its a great little media player that works wonderfully well with all my media types for video, music, dvd and photos. It even connects to the internet and imports media from websites like youtube and flickr.

Google

• It’s time for another round of Google’s Summer of Code (SoC). The SoC is an effort that first started in 2005 as an effort to get students involved in open source code development.

• Last week I found an Ubuntu package repository for the Chromium browser, the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser. I didn’t get excited until I saw this post, which shows that the packages do contain a working web browser!

Sub-notebooks

• At first, I was on the fence about the article’s argument, but now I agree to some extent. Netbooks were not designed for corporate environments. They started off as Linux-only, with the purpose of Web surfing, email, and video chat. When manufacturers ran into the problem that customers didn’t understand Linux but started wanting Linux, they succumbed to the demand and opened the door to insecurity.

• That’s not to say security applications can’t be used on netbooks. They can, but maybe not as all-in-one suites that hook every system action, which leads to slower OS performance.

• Is Linux on the HP Mini right for anyone other than me? Linux in general seems like a good fit for netbooks — it does everything a typical netbook user will probably need, it’s usually pretty efficient, and it can be customized by vendors in ways that Windows can’t be. (Look at HP’s “Mobile Internet Experience”, for example. Without being told that it’s Linux, you’d never know it.)

Kernel Space

• On Thursday night, Linus Torvalds released an eighth pre-release version of Linux 2.6.29 and hinted that this could be the final 2.6.29 release candidate, with the main development tree now stabilising. He did not, however, completely rule out further pre-release versions, “[...]it seems to be stabilising to the point where I’m hoping that we’re approaching a final 2.6.29, and this might be the last -rc. We’ll have to see.”). Kernel Log is taking this opportunity to complete the “What’s coming in 2.6.29″ series with an overview of driver news from a range of areas.

• Next month at Phoronix Media we will be introducing version 1.8 of the Phoronix Test Suite. Among a horde of new features, new test profiles, bug-fixes, and much more, there is a Phoronix Test Suite GUI (updated screenshots). The GTK2 GUI is nearly completed already, while additional fine-tuning and new features will come to the interface with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 later this year.

Events

• This year the annual KDE community summit, Akademy, is being held in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain, from 3rd to 11th of July. It will be part of a larger event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit co-located with the GNOME community’s annual summit, GUADEC.

• Next week, March 23rd to 26th, EclipseCon takes place in Santa Clara, California. Eclipse is a very large open source community focused on open develpment platforms, and extensible frameworks and tools, overseen by The Eclipse Foundation.

Desktop Environments

• The power of FVWM is not the raw capabilities that it ships with but rather it was the first window manager to introduce the idea of allowing programmers to add to FVWM itself by adding modules. FVWM essentially did three things:

• * Intermingled virtual desktop and desktop paging. * Created the idea of extensibility both pro-grammatically or just plain user level. * Easily allowed other mechanisms to interact with FVWM.

• In other words FVWM was not just a window manager; it was also an X enabler and the work done by it set in motion the beginning of a radical change in the UNIX world, especially in the hacker realm.

• Fresh off the Sugar Labs press release is a new version of the Sugar Learning Platform for children.

Distributions

• This week we follow up on our introduction to Logical Volume Management with a walk-through guide on using it with some of the most popular Linux distributions. In the news section, Slackware presents a massive first update of its ‘current’ tree since version 12.2 was released three months ago, Ubuntu packages Plymouth, the kernel-based mode-setting splash program for ‘Karmic Koala’, openSUSE battles to restore its main download server after a hardware fault, Tiny Core presents a new version of its revolutionary 10 MB desktop distro, and Debian delivers the first glimpses of ‘Squeeze’, the distribution’s next stable release. The issue also focuses on the ext4 file system after reports of possible data loss – is it safe to use it? Finally, two links to interviews with Debian and Ubuntu developers, as well as TuxRadar’s nostalgic look at the best desktop environments of 2000. Happy reading!

• Having a ten years experience of using various Linux distributions I can say with all responsibility, that Arch Linux is one of the most complete Linux desktops I ever used. Moreover, if you care about expanding your computer knowledge, and you’re ambitious, it is just what you need.

• On March 10th, Mandriva announced the immediate availability of Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC1. Though a bit late, we thought it would be nice to please some of our readers and offer them a visual tour of this first release candidate. And we promise that from now on we will keep you updated with screenshots for all Mandriva releases, so stay tuned!

• What’s new in Mandriva Linux 2009.1 RC1? Well, the most important feature of this release is draksnapshot a.k.a. the brand new system restore functionality. Another cool addition is the HDT (Hardware Detection Tool) that allows users to get a complete description of the hardware without needing to install the operating system to the hard drive.

• If you want a minimal Ubuntu install on a older pc, or really make it fly on your new one, give WattOS a try I don’t see how you can go wrong.

Red Hat

• Recently we’ve seen some surprising comments about Red Hat’s stand on software patents and, in particular, about one of its patent applications related to the AMQP specification. It looks like clarification is called for. Our views and our position, as expressed in our work for patent reform, our Patent Promise, and our work with the AMQP project, have not changed.

• Red Hat has worked hard to address the problems of our patent system. We believe there are serious problems with the existing system, particularly as it affects free and open source software. In just the last few months, we have supported new patent reform legislation, submitted a brief in the Bilski case arguing against patenting of software, and created an innovative patent settlement in the FireStar case that gave broad protection to the open source community. We are also proud of our work in helping establish the Open Invention Network, supporting the Peer-to-Patent program, and developing our Patent Promise.

• If you’ve seen our feature list for Fedora 11, you know how extensive it is. These features will likely end up in other distributions as well — which is a purposeful goal of our upstream policies. Jerry-rigging changes in our own distribution that only change Fedora, and that would make our contributors work too hard trying to keep those differences coordinated, would make no sense. Instead we try to work heavily and directly in upstream communities like the kernel, X.org, freedesktop.org, GNOME, and so forth, so the advances we’re making will benefit free software users everywhere. The specific goals for a Fedora release include informing the public about all the work we’ve done to advance these various features for the good of all.

Ubuntu

• Well, here we go again… it appears the Canonical just uploaded some new and very nice desktop themes for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) operating system, in order to please their devoted users. Softpedia is once again the first website to offer you a preview of the new artwork, which will probably be present in the final release of Ubuntu 9.04.

• It ships with Windows XP Home or Ubuntu 8.04 Linux.

• OStatic: What is next for the Ubuntu community? Where would you like to see it go in the future? Are there any outreach efforts or events that you’d especially like to see pushed to the next level?

• Bacon: We are only at the beginning of a long and exciting road. While I am proud of the progress we have made in the community so far, there is still much to do. Every community is like a growing organism: it reacts to stimulus and change in its environment and changes accordingly.

• 1. It’s too inexpensive. In fact, paying is only an option & I don’t feel compelled to pay for it. It’s just not as fun owning an operating system I don’t have to pay for.

• 2. It’s too pretty. The ability to apply any theme, or build my own, ruins my sense of camaraderie with my fellow OS users. Where’s the sense in complete personalization?

• 3. It’s too fun. Computers were never meant to be fun. When they become fun they become dangerous.

Devices/Embedded

• Altera is shipping a development kit for prototyping and developing FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) for embedded systems. The Embedded Systems Development Kit, Cyclone III FPGA Edition is a tri-board kit that can program NIOS II softcore FPGAs capable of running Linux, says the company.

• Up to now the automotive branch has not been famous for its engagement in Linux and Open Source. Now the chairman of the new open source alliance Genivi is talking about motives and plans.

Free Software/Open Source

• Several are actually running the entire working/expert group as an open source project, completely open.

• 4. Open Source Software: The use of open source keeps growing. It is not just about Linux. There are software packages available for just about every corporate need. The cost savings can be dramatic when you make smart choices.

• Simply downloading and building an open-source package because it is free can end up costing you a great deal of time. Treat open source like any other software. Do the research, talk to other users, and find a service provider that can help.

• GIMP 2.6.6 is a bug-fix release in the stable GIMP 2.6 series. This release contains an important fix for compiling GIMP against the recently released GTK+ 2.16.

CMS

• With all the talk about newspapers worldwide facing financial pressures, the time now is right for tools that can be used to move newspaper content online. One such tool is Campsite, a open source content management system for print publications which this week announced a major new release.

• Developed by the Media Development Loan Fund non-profit foundation, Campsite 3.2 is one of a range of media organisation tools produced by the foundation to assist media organisations. The tools include Dream to manage distribution, Campcaster for radio broadcasters and Cream for media customer relations management.

• Ever thought of building your very own CMS from scratch? Consider taking Zimplit CMS and putting your logo on it, or naming it after your favorite goldfish.

Business

• Many people mistakenly think that open-source projects are emergent, self-organized, and democratic. The truth is just the opposite: most are run by a benevolent dictator or two.

• What makes successful open-source projects is leadership, plain and simple. One or two people articulate a vision, start building towards it, and bring others on board with specific tasks and permissions. The best projects are the ones with the best leaders.

• The project, involving academic and research institutions across Europe, has developed free open-source RFID middleware, and is currently working to create a range of tools to facilitate RFID deployment.

• It is a given that the adoption of health information technology (HIT) by health care providers has the potential to effect quantum leaps in the quality and level of health care, medical research and public health. That means increased efficiency, safety and efficacy. Although the economic cost of implementing the electronic health record (EHR) is frequently cited as a major barrier to adoption, many have expressed concerns about matters of patient privacy, the need to protect the confidentiality of physician-patient communications (a sine qua non of high-quality patient care), and interference with workflow, among others, as reasons not to embrace a universal EHR.

• [...]

• What’s more, because of the open-source nature of its license, the code is freely available, and users may make improvements without running afoul of copyright restrictions. Certification by the Commission for Certification of Health Information Technology (www.cchit.org) was announced on May 1. The implications of open-source WorldVistA and other open-source EHR systems (see www.openehr.org) are huge.

• [...]

• In many ways, the discussion of open source in EHR systems mirrors what is occurring in the current debate about electronic voting.

• EyeSteelFilm, the creators of “RiP, a Remix Manifesto”, a documentary about copyright and remix culture, announced today that it has partnered with Kaltura, Inc. (http://www.kaltura.com), developer of the first open source video platform and Raincity Studios, a web 2.0 community developer and web design company, to power full video capabilities on its new online community site www.OpenSourceCinema.org.

Servers/’Cloud’

• MO: I started college at Berkeley in 1979. In 1980, I got a work-study job for the Computer Systems Research Group, which produced the Berkeley Software Distribution — what most people call “Berkeley Unix”. I worked for Bill Joy and Bob Fabry on that project (and the guy in the next office was a kind of geeky grad student named Eric Schmidt…).

• I dropped out for a few years in 1982 and returned to Berkeley as an undergrad in 1988. I got a job working for Mike Stonebraker on the Postgres project, where I was one of the key developers. I got my BA in 1991, MSc in 1992 and left grad school in 1993 to join Stonebraker’s Postgres startup, Illustra. One of the last things I did at Berkeley was to write, with Margo Seltzer, an embedded database engine called Berkeley DB.

• Most important for Linux Journal readers, “EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web service technology making it easy to install and maintain”, they say.

• Zmanda Cloud Backup is a cost-effective backup and disaster recovery solution for SMBs. Because putting together a comprehensive data protection strategy can be difficult for midmarket companies, the company positions Zmanda Cloud Backup (ZCB) has simplified the process.

• Hadoop is the open-source version of the file system and MapReduce technology developed by Google. Google has used such software to rewire its entire search index, making it possible for the company to run ever-faster searches on cheap servers and to ask questions of its vast data stores and receive coherent answers.

Releases

• I’d like to announce the release of the distributed version of the Parallel Processing Shell Script (PPSS). PPSS is a bash script that allows you to run commands in parallel. It is written to make use of current multi-core CPUs.

Government

Europe

• The ministry of Education in Valencia, one of Spain’s autonomous regions and the regional government of La Palma are funding development of Edusig, an open source tool to help teach geography to school children. The application is being hosted on the Osor.eu software development web site since late last month.

South Africa

• “The move to open source software has not been as fast as we would have liked, but we are now entering a new era. In the past, open source deployments were mostly spontaneous and ad-hoc. We now have a more systematic approach.” In years past many government departments pursued their own open source migrations, usually in isolation from one another, and with varying degrees of success.

• [...]

• Now, says Webb, the State IT Agency (Sita) is assuming the role of paving the way for OSS migration by finalising standards and conducting pilot projects to make it easier for all to implement open source software successfully. … Webb also says that Sita expects all government department websites to be running on open source software “very soon”.

United Kingdom

• The UK’s first national conference on open source software in local government is taking place on 1st April 2009 in Manchester.

• The government of the United Kingdom stated in 2004 that its policy was to “seek to use open source where it gave the best value for money to the taxpayer in delivering public services.”

Licensing

• The recently updated Java Specification Requests (JSRs) show that the licensing battle between the Apache Software Foundation and Sun Microsystems (the force behind Java) still hasn’t ended after raging for seven years.

Open (But No Source Code)

• We need open public policing of the financial system. Creating an empowered social network where the community of investors can help protect each other from being ripped off. Empowering a global financial neighborhood watch. Wired Magazine publishes a specific open regulation proposal.

• Sometime during Monday 16th March 2009 OpenStreetMap gained it’s 100,000th registered user account!

• What prosthetic-arm engineering is learning from open source, crowdsourcing, and the video-game industry

Internet

• Mr Lie said Microsoft’s platform dominance gave them an “obligation to promote competition”.

• His company has already complained to the EU that Microsoft is using its dominance to promote Internet Explorer over Opera and other browsers. And Google has lent its support to the complaint.

• Mr Lie said he was concerned that Microsoft would use its Windows Software Update System to distribute the forthcoming new version of Internet Explorer to users.

• “That system should be used for other browsers too, to ensure users have genuine choice.

• A limited number of release candidates for Firefox 3.5 will be released before the final version of the software comes out, probably in around “two to three” months, Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard posted last Friday.

• Firefox is still king when it comes to daily work on the tubes, despite the steady increase in the buzz surrounding the open-source Webkit project, on which Safari and Google Chrome are based.

• Oliver Reichenstein has joined Sean Martell to form a “new tab” visual design team. They’ve already separately produced almost all of these fantastic visual artifacts, and we are looking forward to more. If you’re a designer and interested in this project from a design perspective, this is a great opportunity to get involved in an open source project. Please jump onto either #labs on irc.mozilla.org or link your mockups in the comments section of this post.

• In January 2000, T-Online asked us what we’d do if we could design a browser from scratch. Our answer was “Tabs”. Eight years later Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, asked me what I think a new tab should look like. The answer after days of mailing back and forth: “Forget tabs!”

• You all probably know that Firefox is my favorite browser. It is fast, stable and extensible. It is also quite safe. And it looks good, too. Finally, you may also have heard that Firefox 3.1, the latest version of this phenomenal browser, is coming out soon, promising a revolution in usability and speed. In fact, Beta 3 has been publicly released just a few days ago.

• [...]

• Firefox 3.1 is everything you expected – and then some. It’s going to be a blast. It’s faster, it’s more compliant, it has improved privacy, and a range of new features that make a great product into a greater one. Audio and video tags are particularly interesting, as they open a world of new possibilities when it comes to Web and what it means to us. Throw in a whole bunch of excellent extensions and the options are virtually limitless.

• Stob It is twenty years since Tim Berners-Lee, then a humble techie at CERN, sent a memorandum to his manager entitled Information Management: a Proposal.

• The Register is proud, on this important anniversary, to be republishing that historic document for the first time, so that we can all reflect properly on Sir Tim’s achievement, and feel retrospectively superior to him for the wretched syntax he devised to do HTML tables.

Leftovers

• The case has provoked widespread protest in cyberspace, highlighting the gray area between popularization and piracy. On the Potel page in Facebook, hundreds of users worldwide have expressed outrage at the the “censorship”. One user summed up the opinion of the cyber-citizens: “What is happening is an outrage to the culture of human rights. An obscene display of the mechanisms of control, surveillance and punishment.”

• ETNO is launching a new online content web site today, to raise awareness of attractive online offers put on the market by its members throughout Europe to download music, films or watch TV. ETNO members believe that offering a wide choice of online services is the best way to promote a legitimate use of the Internet and fight against illicit file-sharing.

• “The rapidly growing choice of legitimate online content services illustrates the increasing cooperation between e-communications providers and content owners in order to respond to consumer demand for price-worthy, secure and user-friendly services”, says Michael Bartholomew, ETNO Director.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• The recent threat of legal action from Irish music industry body IRMA to Irish ISP’s that do not comply to the same ‘three strikes’ terms as Eircom, has been labelled as “spurious” by the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland (ISPAI).

• Paul Durrant, general manager of the ISPAI, said there is “no evidence of wrong doing” on the part of Irish internet service providers (ISPs).

• IRMA’s letter, received last month by ISPs across Ireland, asked these companies to follow Eircom in removing customers found to be illegally accessing copyright material. The letter stated that this request is in accordance with Irish and European law.

• Australia’s national net nanny agency has threatened to fine anyone who links to websites on its blacklist, which apparently it keeps secret without even a hint of irony.

• The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) issued a threat last week to fine the online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool AUS$11,000 per day for linking to a blacklisted anti-abortion website.

• Last week Lib Dem MP David Howarth held a meeting in Westminster to present a highly disturbing and potentially explosive report on the way police in the UK are criminalising legitimate protest. The report, produced by the Climate Camp’s legal support team and entitled Policing of the Kingsnorth Climate Camp: Preventing Disorder or Preventing Protest?, documents a concerted campaign by police to deter, smear, intimidate, harass, and criminalise UK citizens who did nothing more than attempt to exercise their right to peaceful protest.

• Comcast appears to have suffered a leak of its user data that went undetected for more than two months. And it was an alert PC World reader who helped uncover the leak, when a document containing what appears to be 8000 e-mail accounts and passwords was found on Scribd.com, according to the New York Times.

Copyrights

• Democrats in Congress and much of the political left have been silent or nearly so despite the evidence. You expect cowardice from Congress, which spent the Bush presidency in a perpetual bent-over posture. The Netroots folks who did so much to elect Obama should be screaming bloody murder by now. Too few are even slightly audible. A shame.

• Hired RIAA attack lawyers Timothy Reynolds (Holme Roberts & Owen) and Daniel Cloherty (Dwyer & Collora) apparently think it’s perfectly acceptable to tell a judge to take a hike.

• The dire economy has hit even the industry’s chief lobbying arm, the Motion Picture Assn. of America, which has been forced to scale back its budget and staff.

• The mysterious “Rights Agency” proposed in the interim Digital Britain report could provide a “gateway” for content owners to sue illegal downloaders.

• Lord Carter’s report last month offered few concrete ideas for tackling P2P file-sharing beyond legislating to formally institute the warning letter campaign ISPs trialled on behalf of the BPI last year. But it also proposed a “Rights Agency” to oversee that process, to develop DRM standards and to incentivise legal downloading. Today, in a follow-up paper, Carter fleshed out how this agency might work…

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