● 03.25.09

● Links 25/03/2009: Lots on KDE4, FSF Awards Granted

Posted in News Roundup at 11:00 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux is free, easy-to-use and is shedding its geeky image, thanks to fans who prefer it to Microsoft’s mighty operating systems. But is it for everyone? Jamie Merrill asks four rookies to put it to the test

• [...]

• “If you talk to a lot of Windows users and ask them what they use, they say, ‘I’m using Firefox and OpenOffice,’ and if you boot up, say, Linux Ubuntu, a community-developed, Linux-based operating system created for laptops, desktops and servers, both those tools are there, so it’s familiar territory, totally safe and free. So the question should ‘why not use Linux?’”.

• Whether you don’t want to invest any more capital in a Microsoft system right now or you just have a desire to find out what this Linux thing is all about – tune in tomorrow where I’ll introduce you to a popular and exciting Linux distribution, show you where to download it, and explain how to burn and boot it.

• Our attempt failed, but it revealed that MS is really afraid of usb-booting. We shouldn’t really care about what MS thinks. We should just mind our own business and boldly go where no windows has gone before. But that happens to be exactly what MS is afraid of anyway

• I too wonder why anyone would be a fan of a company that is so abusive and hostile to its own customers. Is being the biggest gorilla all that matters? Is that what being a success means, and is that really something to admire?

• Richard Stallman is often criticized as being out of touch and too fanatical. But I think that anyone who is really paying attention knows that if anything, that he’s barely hard-core enough. The good news is Linux and FOSS are progressing so quickly, and with so much genuine innovation, we have multitudes of great tools for getting our work done quicker and easier, and for wowing customers of the monopolist who have been led to believe that innovation is charging newer, fancier prices for the same old junk. All the best tools and toys are in the FOSS world now, and everyone is welcome.

• The likely losers in this particularly severe economic downturn are proprietary Unix and many of Microsoft’s server offerings. In the future, we may well look back and see it as an important tipping point when Linux and open source server software finally became the prudent corporate norm.

• A recent slashdot article outlined some of the DRM that can be found in the new Microsoft stab at relevancy – Windows 7.

• I’m hearing that Vista thing didn’t work out so well.

• As a GNU/Linux-only user…one who wouldn’t have one byte of MS code on his machine, I find the criticism valid…I would no more let Microsoft control my computer than I would ever purchase one of their products.

• Interested in scheduling and controlling jobs for AIX, Solaris, and Linux servers from the comfort and security of your System i? Now you can, thanks to Help/Systems, which last week launched a new product called Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise.

• Future plans include combining the Wilken OSBL technology and Ingres Icebreaker, which comprises the Linux operating system and the Ingres database.

• The system comprises—at a minimum—two DSCes and one DSM. The DSM is a 1U proxy connection point, directory service, and Web-based management system. Essentially a Linux server, the DSM is the brains of the operation, configuring and monitoring DSCes, setting up automated device discovery on remote networks, keeping track of how to connect to each DSC, and building secure SSH tunnels over TCP/IP.

• Offered through resellers and systems integrators, Axcient is offering a family of appliances with a range of storage capacities that automatically connect to an off-site data center run by the company. The package includes a Linux-based operating system written by Axcient that’s designed to make it easy to add new services and features, as well as provide centralized management, he says.

• Axcient’s appliance is totally agentless, running its own Linux-based operating system to automatically back up and protect servers and desktop and laptop workstations. The idea, Moore says, is to offer an “easy and intuitive app to centralize and virtualize management of the data protection environment.” Whew!

• Impulse-buy retailer Zazz.com.au has sold computers in the past, but today’s deal is a special one to my heart. For less than $200 including freight you get a Dell Optiplex desktop computer with Ubuntu Linux loaded and guaranteed fully working. However, you only have today to go for it.

• Free software advocate Richard Stallman announces the plan for GNU, a Unix-like operating system that contains no proprietary software. Twenty-six years later, GNU’s official kernel, GNU Hurd, will still be incomplete.

Kernel Space

• At the conclusion of 2008, the 2.6.28 kernel surfaced. Subsequently, the merge window for the next release—2.6.29—opened. As the Linux kernel uses a distributed development process, it’s not always clear what’s coming (or will be integrated) into a given kernel release, but the last two have been interesting from both a short- and long-term perspective. One interesting milestone for 2.6.28 is that it’s the first time Linux has exceeded 10 million lines of source code (see Figure 1, which uses source line count data from Heise Online).

• NVIDIA pushed out the 185.13 Beta Linux driver just four days ago, but already they have released another new Linux driver. This time around, the NVIDIA 180.37.04 driver was released. Most notably what’s introduced with this driver is support for OpenGL 3.1, which was just publicly announced by the Khronos Group a few hours ago. This driver is based upon the 180.3x release stream does not incorporate some of the features found in the newer 185.xx series.

Games

• After more than a year of constant development, The Battle for Wesnoth 1.6 was put out on March 22. This release comes with new graphics and unit portraits, a new campaign, called ‘Legend of Wesmere’, the possibility to log into the multiplayer with the forum account, and many, many other improvements.

• Everyone needs a little down time every now and again. Whether you’re taking a break from hours of programming, trying to calm a conference-induced headache, or just relaxing at home, these Linux-based games offer a nice chance to unwind. The titles listed here are all available in the Ubuntu software repositories; just search for “games” in Synaptic if you want an idea of just how many choices are available.

• The Linux operating system is free; you can download it without paying any licensing fees. You can use it in the home, you can run a business on it, even a data centre. You can embed it within tiny custom hardware. Despite this, Linux hasn’t become a household name. Paradoxically, it may be the perceived dearth of commercial applications which is a cause.

• We last saw the Pandora as an inert prototype, which showed us what the console would look like but not how it would run. Here we see the whole package, albeit in naked, anemic white: the machine boots into its Angstrom Linux OS, opens Quake and plays a game, controlled with the device’s keypad.

Web Browsers

• Linux users can now get an early taste of Google’s Chrome browser through the Chromium project. Although not an official Chrome release Chromium is an open source project on which the official Chrome browser is based. In this form it gives uses a good, although still rough, insight into what Linux users can expect when a final official Chrome release is made.

• Over the past few years, Firefox set the pace of browser innovation. But it has been caught or passed by Chrome 2, Safari 4, and Internet Explorer 8. The competition has been getting faster and has added advanced features like pre-emptive threading and memory protection for tabs.

• Windows and Linux have different ways of handling memory, with Linux usually pre-allocating more than needed and then releasing and Windows adding more memory by demand. This aligns well with the overall behavior of the two operating systems, where Linux usually wins when it comes to memory-intensive tasks.

• In this issue…

• * Firefox Mobile (Fennec) 1.0 beta 1 released * Mozilla Foundation March update * Busy month for the AMO team * Bespin community update * Design Challenge video tutorials * Mountain View Labs Meetup: Thursday! * SeaMonkey 1.1.15 released * Metrics: What is Firefox’s market share?

• As for other upcoming changes to Firefox, Beard told me that many aspects of the current Firefox experience could be in the cloud – for example bookmarks and the “Awesome Bar” (Mozilla’s term for its adaptive learning URL bar). Beard said that portability of the user experience is important in this era of the Web and so they’ll be looking to offer certain functionality and data in the cloud.

Desktops

• Due to the vast number of window managers available for Linux, many new users often feel overwhelmed at the idea of having to learn their way around them. We must emphasize that many people experiment with several window managers before settling down with one that feels right for them, and there certainly is no need to learn all of them. Due to their modular nature, it is common to have several window managers installed at once.

GNOME

• As people probably remember, the current GNOME Foundation Board was elected to serve until June 30th, 2009. We changed the end date from December 31th to June 30th so that the new board could have a face-to-face meeting at the very beginning of its term, during GUADEC. This face-to-face meeting is most useful to energize the board and make things go faster, so it really makes sense to have it occur at the beginning of a board term.

KDE

• Popular CD and DVD burning application for KDE, K3b is gearing up for its first port to KDE4 with a pending 2.0 release, but part of the Qt toolkit had to be forked to make it possible.

• K3b version 1.0 was released for the KDE 3 series in 2007, but since then it has been a non-trivial port to the new KDE4 platform for lead developer Sebastian Trueg.

• For now, the system is being described as a “first public test run” — a beta, if you will — and all KDE users are encouraged to visit the new forum, try it out, and share their thoughts on the process. A reminder, though, from those powers-that-be: The Brainstorm is for feature requests only — crashes, crunches, and other miscellaneous catastrophes should continue to be fed to Bugzilla.

• The parts applet is now based on the Plasma::PopupApplet just like most other applets including the device notifier (Plasma::PopupApplet did not exist when the Parts applet was developed – it was introduced along with Plasma extenders). You can see what it looks like in the left screenshot.

• It has some bugs at the moment, but will be polished in time for 4.3.

• In the last article I was very positive toward the Kontact suit. However, Contacts is the exception to this. The interface is way too cluttered and wastes too much space. From the main interface to the Contact editor, everything seems like it could be fairly better.

• At this point, I’ve yet to reach a verdict on whether or not I like KDE 4. It has some nice features, but I’m having a hard time getting over KMail’s lackluster performance and the absence of a normal desktop. I’ve made a commitment to continue using KDE until the end of the week, however, at which time I’ll write an update containing a more thorough outline of my experience.

Distributions

• The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the second release of the next G:Mini. The G:Mini 3.0 rc01 (2.9.90) is released. The G:Mini formely known as ‘GoblinX Mini Edition‘ is the son of GoblinX and contains only XFCE as the windows manager and GTK/GTK2 based applications. The edition is ideal for those users whose want to remaster the distro or with difficulties in downloading more than three hundred of megabytes (the original size of g:Standard).

• We are thrilled to announce the launch of the beta-test of Mandriva Enterprise Server 5 (aka MES 5).

• While the community distributions Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as Mandriva, prepare for their spring releases, Novell has been busy completing final adjustments to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Smaller Linux distributions are also doing some spring cleaning and publishing updated versions.

• Back in September of 2007 I took a look at what was then the 0.9 version of Granular. It was a pretty good distribution at the time, even for being only beta quality. I’m not sure what’s taking so long to reach the 1.0 status, but it’s finally here, and we’re about to give it a spin and see what the full version looks like and how well it’ll work for new users.

• [...]

• Overall I’m not terribly impressed with this release of Granular.

Red Hat

• Red Hat has told open-source vendors they shouldn’t hesitate when selling against proprietary rivals during the current economic downturn.

• The company’s chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has said that open-source faces a limited window of opportunity, before IT budgets recover inline with a general economic improvement.

• Turn Jim’s statement on its head and it also provides some good advice for those vendors:

• Open source provides an answer Participation solves problems Transparency builds trust

• Jim Whitehurst, who has been CEO of Red Hat for five quarters, cited Delta Air Lines, his former company, in an example of why Linux is enjoying wider success these days.

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) reported earnings of 22 cents per share, ex-items, beating analysts’ estimates for 20 cents per share.

• Due to all the attention that is put on Ubuntu releases, it is often easy to miss what is going on in another distribution, such as Fedora. Fedora, too, though has some interesting features coming in Fedora 11, which should be out in May.

• 20 Second Boot Times It seems that everyone is suddenly realizing that their boot times are too slow.

Debian

• I’m not sure why, but after testing Lenny several different ways, Etch is still better. In fact, Lenny is downright inferior.

• Debian is still my OS of choice. I have it on my workstation in my home office, and my laptop, and is the supporting OS for the MythTV in my living room. I used to use it at work, but after switching jobs in 2005 I am unfortunately working in an all Fedora environment. (It could be worse, of course.)

Ubuntu

• Add Canonical to the roster of companies offering technology to help enterprise customers build their own cloud-computing setups. But unlike most of the better-known players in this nascent market, the twist here is that the technology will be supplied by an open-source shop.

• The goal is to make Ubuntu Amazon-ready for developers champing to get a bit of EC2 action but who are constrained by working inside large and conservative organizations that place restrictions on what applications and data can be run outside their firewall on a third-party’s service.

• I like to run the latest software, so every 6 months when a new Ubuntu debuts I upgrade my system. To keep everything running smoothly I like to start with a clean install, but I always find myself repeating the same modifications. Some of these modifications are essential to get certain features to work, one of them is something I couldn’t do without. Here are my five essential Ubuntu modifications.

• With the spring settling in more and more everyday and flowers blooming all over the place, we thought it would be appropriate to take a first look at the Persian flower distribution that goes by the name of Parsix 2.0r0.

Devices/Embedded

• Seagate is readying a four-bay network-attached storage device for small businesses that runs embedded Linux and stores up to 8TB. The hot-swappable BlackArmor NAS 440 offers an iTunes server and DLNA-compliant media server, RAID 0/1/5/10, dual gigabit Ethernet ports, and four USB ports, says Seagate.

Sub-notebooks

• Mer is an outgrowth of Nokia’s Maemo environment, designed to flesh out the tablet-centric operating system into a full-fledged Linux distribution suitable for embedded and desktop systems of all description. The project’s genesis was an effort to back port the upcoming Maemo 5.0 release to no-longer-supported Nokia N800 and N810 tablets, but it has subsequently evolved to run on BeagleBoards, embedded navigation devices like the Pocket LOOX, and standard x86 hardware.

• Dell keeps saying that one-third of its Inspiron Mini 9 systems are shipped with Linux instead of Windows XP and that the return rates for products using either operating systems are about the same.

• Dell chalks up its success with Linux to the direct sales model, where it can coach customers on the phone about what system may suit them best. But besides patting itself on the back for excellent customer service, Dell is sending a pretty clear signal to Microsoft that it intends to continue with Linux netbooks. Dell makes more profit on the Linux systems.

• Dell has the Inspiron Mini 9 netbook on sale for $199 after $50 off only today. The Inspiron Mini 9 for the low $199 price runs Ubuntu Linux on an Atom N270 (1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB/512) CPU, 512MB RAM and 8GB Solid State Drive. If you would rather have Windows XP, Dell also has a more powerful Mini 9 on sale for $299.

• The Intel-sponsored Moblin project announced an alpha 2 release of its Moblin v2 mobile device stack, which targets Intel Atom-based netbooks. The open-source Linux stack and development toolkit adds a Gnome desktop, updates UI libraries and graphics, and offers tested support for the MSI Wind netbook.

• Back in January Intel had pushed out its first alpha release for Moblin V2. This Intel-optimized Linux distribution targeting systems with Intel Atom hardware was quite unique and offered a number of advantages for being a netbook-oriented operating system. Particularly special about Intel Moblin V2 was its boot-time, which was extremely fast when using a Solid-State Drive. Intel has now put out a second alpha release for Moblin V2, which we are briefly exploring today.

• As promised, I took some screenshots of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, Jaunty Edition.

• With laptop sales outpacing desktops, and mobile phones outselling both, David Chisnall talks about the current state of portable computing and where he thinks it will end up.

Free Software/Open Source

• And why do people open source their own software?

• To put it simply, they failed to sell their software, and this is THE main reason. But I can certainly give you some minor ones too:

• 1. Because they failed to create a software that can be sold for $.99 to millions of people and work on iPhone.

• 2. Because they can’t afford to hire salesmen who are members of the same golf clubs as CEO’s of Fortune 500.

• 3. Because other people already did the same, and having proprietary software hurts your image.

• [...]

Events

• The Program to CodeCon 2009 is now up, and registration is at the early rate of $75 for all three days until April 1st, after which the cost goes up.

• Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

• The Free Software Foundation has announced the winners of its annual Free Software Awards at the Libre Planet 2009 conference.

Business

• Open-source software and middleware, which is now populating every part of modern data centers, has always had to fight a reputation—deserved or undeserved—of being simply too “Wild West” for many enterprises.

• Not so anymore, Alfresco’s general manager for the Americas, Matt Asay, told a near full-house audience in his opening remarks at the sixth annual Open Source Business Conference here at the Palace Hotel.

• Alfresco, started up in 2005 by Documentum co-founder John Newton and John Powell, former chief operating officer of Business Objects, provides an enterprise-ready open-source CMS (content management system).

Sun

• Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, explains why Brazil and South Africa are among the leaders in open-source technology. Polya Lesova reports.

• Friday saw the release of a new extension to the OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet which adds two new solver mechanisms. The new solver extension complements the linear solver component built into Calc in OpenOffice.org 3. A solver allows a user to calculate optimum values given a function and constraints.

Licensing

• Recently my local LUG (LILUG) invited Eric S. Raymond (ESR) to come and speak. For those of you who are not familiar with ESR, he is one of the three largest icons of the Open Source/Free Software movement. Needless to say, it was an honor so see him speak. For the most part, his talk was quite tame but one of the points he raised seemed quite controversial.

• [...]

• The Open Source/Free Software movement is thriving, it does not mean its a good time to kill the GPL. In fact I don’t think there will ever be a time when killing the GPL will do more good than harm.

Programming

• Oracle and Zend already collaborate on a PHP distribution for Oracle so the two are hardly strangers. Oracle participates in the broad Java ecosystem, but if it owned the lead PHP vendor it could take a commanding position in the PHP space and carve out a real niche for itself. PHP is a critical component of the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) web stack and with Zend in hand, Oracle could get a strong grip on its own web stack business.

• Version 2.16 of the GTK+ toolkit, which was recently released, includes some useful new features for text entry widgets. Ars gives you some code examples and a hands-on look at how to use these features in your own programs.

Standards/Consortia

• THE KHRONOS GROUP, chaired by Nvidia crony Neil Trevett, has released OpenGL 3.1 – the cross-platform, royalty-free API for 3D graphics – at GDC in San Francisco today.

• Version 3.1 of OpenGL includes a new version of the OpenGL shading language – GLSL1.40 – and has better programmability, more efficient vertex processing, expanded texturing functionality and increased buffer management flexibility.

• Arguably the best thing about OpenGL 3.1, as the name indicates, is its ‘openness’, with multiple vendors signing up and jumping on the bandwagon. In fact, analyst Jon Peddie reckons over 100 million computer units already have an installed base of graphics hardware that will support OpenGL 3.1, while OpenGL 3.0 drivers are already shipping on AMD, Nvidia and S3 GPUs.

• The 3D web moved closer to reality as Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, joined forces with graphics consortium Khronos.

• Khronos has set up a working group to create a standard for what it calls accelerated 3D graphics on the web.

• [...]

• The development of the standard being proposed by Mozilla will create a mechanism to let JavaScript – the programming language used to write many web-based applications – tap into the widely used OpenGL graphics interface technology.

• Tomorrow, 25th of March 2009 will be the 2nd global Document Freedom Day; “but what exactly is Document Freedom Day?” I hear you ask, I did myself.

Leftovers

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Early reports indicate that the home of the German WikiLeaks Domain owner has been raided by police investigating the ACMA list leak.

• Social-networking site Facebook has criticized government suggestions that intelligence services should monitor the web communications of all UK citizens.

• Facebook chief privacy officer and head of global public policy Chris Kelly told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that the government proposals, which include monitoring social-networking sites, were excessive.

Copyrights

• Despite this well-nigh universal opposition from IP experts the Commission put forward a proposal last July to extend term from 50 to 95 years (retrospectively as well as prospectively). That proposal is now in the final stages of its consideration by the European Parliament and Council. We can only hope that they will understand the basic point that an extension of the form proposed must inevitably to more harm than good to the welfare of the EU and should therefore be opposed.

• In an effort to make curriculum content more accessible to both students and teachers, New York-based startup Flat World Knowledge is going after the textbook industry by offering expertly-written books that educational institutions are free to modify to meet their needs.

• [I]t’s claiming that his post violates the DMCA. That should leave you scratching your head, considering that the DMCA seems almost entirely unrelated to Fairey making a poster. But the AP seems to be claiming that in removing the little copyright notice beneath its photo, Fairey violated section 1202.

• With many newspapers struggling to stay in business, a lot of ideas have been tossed around about how to keep existing papers alive. One idea, which has reached the US Senate in the form of a bill introduced by Senator Benjamin Cardin, is to allow newspapers to operate as non-profits, which would exempt them from taxes on subscription and advertising revenue, while also allowing them to raise funds via donations, similar to how public broadcasting companies operate.

• Plenty of newspapers did try to charge and almost all of them failed. People were never that interested in paying for news online, and plenty of new sources of news were popping up for free online anyway. Charging was a dead-end model from the beginning — and to understand why, all you need to do is understand a little basic economics concerning the difference between infinite and scarce goods.

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