● 03.27.09

● Links 27/03/2009: OSBC Comes to a Close

Posted in News Roundup at 9:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Moving users to Linux can be tricky, but Jack Wallen has some practical measures that should ease the transition.

• Sheer economics are making the use of the Linux operating system increasingly widespread. It is free, reliable and safe. But when adopting any new operating system, users always have a lot to learn.

• Flash memory prices have tumbled in recent years, which has been good for MP3 players, cell phones, SSDs, and the now-ubiquitous USB thumb drive. Falling flash prices have also been good for motherboards, allowing Asus to cheaply equip some of its latest models with 512MB memory chips that house an ExpressGate instant-on operating system that’s—you guessed it—based on Linux.

• What’s new in this release (see below for details): – RPC over HTTP support. – Improved support for upgrades in MSI. – Debug symbols in WineDbg on Mac OS X. – Many Direct3D code cleanups. – Various bug fixes.

• Parallels Server allows Linux and Windows guest operating systems on top of Intel-based Apple Macs and Xserves, but the future bare-metal hypervisor will run on any x64-based server and will run Windows and Linux side-by-side in VMs, and on Apple iron run Mac OS X as well. Also, hints Beloussov, there could also be support for the x64 version of Solaris Unix. FreeBSD will also be supported, according to this roadmap (PPT) from a Parallels summit.

• Lenovo has released other PCs supporting either Red Hat or Novell SuSE Linux at various points over the years. But Red Hat “is a predominant distributor in the professional workstation space, so Lenovo elected to use them for support on this specific product,” the spokesperson said.

• I was wandering through the mall the other day with my youngest, while her older tween sister was off with a friend in a nearby store, shopping.

• Going to the mall is a painful process for me because I am an Indiana native with a Y chromosome, and we don’t cotton to retail excursions. Get in, find what you need, get out–guerilla-style shopping is our method.

• The future of Linux can be predicted based on the fact that it stands to provide its users the features they looking for, be it Wi-Fi compatibility, games, intuitive UI, et al.

• And it continued to not impress me. They (MS) seem to have the leading principle of getting in the way of the user. Stupid confirmation boxes around every corner. I quickly decided to remove that stupid OS that treats me either like a criminal or like an idiot, or both.

• On the positive side, doing all the installation of Ubuntu was much less fuzz than go through the Windows post installation only. Click, click, click, wait 20 minutes, ready. And in the end I have all the important stuff on my computer. I can’t even imagine how painful it would be to get all the important applications and drivers on Windows (find, download, install, confirm gazillion boxes, reboot, repeat ad infinitum – *shudder*).

• MP3 – 1 hour 31 minutes 23 seconds, 42.0 MB — you can also download all our episodes in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis format from the Outlaw Archives.

• Windows apologists sometimes like to paint Unix as a dying dinosaur. That just shows their ignorance: if anything, Windows is the dinosaur in danger of being wiped out by Macs and Linux. While I might have put a lot more money in my bank accounts had I walked the Windows path, I’m glad that I didn’t. I LIKE Unix. There’s still nothing for me to like about Windows.

• Linux distributions as we know can be made very lean and mean. Fully-featured distributions such as DSL Linux, Xubuntu and Puppy Linux are tiny, and run speedily in paltry amounts of RAM on modest processors. Such distros fair scream along on a relatively high spec PC such as the Eee Box.

Servers

• Many industry leaders are positioning Linux/Unix operating systems and Open Source technologies as the platform for cloud computing. IBM, Sun, Google, Amazon, and RedHat are all developing and supporting Linux-based cloud solutions.

• Microsoft has opposed an industry-wide plan to promote interoperability in cloud computing claiming. Officially it’s because the firm believes the plan is unnecessarily secretive, but there are allegations Microsoft feels threatened by the plan boosting Linux-based systems.

• Bob Sutor, IBM’s VP of open source and Linux, said IBM now has 500 software products that have been ported to run natively on Linux, an indication of the stake IBM has in Linux’s future.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform has a hard limit of 64 processors for x86 systems, up to 512 processors with the largesmp package installed. Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 has a hard limit of 64 processors for x86 systems generally, up to 128 with the bigsmp package installed, and up to 4,096 processors only on specific Silicon Graphics servers.

Applications

• There are Linux games for every taste: first person shooters, board and arcade games, strategy games. But if you prefer to train your intellectual skills instead of blasting monsters or conquering the world, there are a few high-quality puzzle games, too. In this article we will take a look at some of the best puzzle games for Linux.

• I work for a fairly large company. More than 10,000 employees. And we use a lot of closed source software and I always ask them why don’t we use open source tools.

• [...]

• So yeah. We use crappy programs at work because money = good software. If your a “end user” and you’re reading this, I’m here to tell you, you are wrong. The closed source proprietary programs we use at work are some of the worst designed pieces of software I’ve ever seen.

• Enjoy the Penguins!

KDE

• So don’t expect in KDE 4.3 all KDE applications to have been magically converted to this new protocol, but i hope all the plumbing will be there to permit application developers to start considering using this, and i’m really looking forward for other projects to cooperate to have a new unified shiny stuff

• There’s no question computers make our lives easier, especially with all the productivity tools available today. If you use the KDE desktop, then you may already know that there are many wonderful productivity applications designed especially for KDE. Let’s take a look at how some of these apps can help you streamline your work and stay organized while you get things done.

Distributions

• Now the reason I brought up Felton: I’m primarily a Fedora user and prefer Fedora over the rest of those mentioned in the first paragraph. However I use the other distros mentioned above. I’m also game to try others; the history of this blog bears me out — google “eight distros a week” and see what you get. Some of the machines here run GNOME, some KDE, some Xfce, and one on Fluxbox. I’m not an expert at any of them, nor am I married to any of them.

• Naturally, I’m open to sharing what I do know with anyone who asks. With nearly three years under my belt on the GNU/Linux side of all things digital, I realize that I’m a relative “newb” at this. Surprisingly I’m at peace with that, despite the fact I continue to learn.

• Last time I did Screen Shots of ZenWalk, was the 5.2 beta release. Now, not much has change since the 5.2 release as far as the UI is concerned. But other changes have been made… One thing I noticed immediately, was that the installer was simpler and faster.

• And that, I’m afraid, is pretty much where my Igelle adventure ended. It was nice on the live desktop while it lasted but there’s not really that much useful stuff on the live CD to make Igelle a serious contender, and the installer seems to be seriously flaky judging from my repeated attempts at getting it running from either a HDD or a USB drive.

PCLinuxOS/Mandriva

• Another amazing feature is the extreme ease you can create a custom LiveCD/DVD: one click does it all for you! You can expect every program vetted by the PCLinuxOS team to work out of the box, and to work well! Give PCLinuxOS a spin, you won’t be disappointed.

• This is one of three really easy systems to use, and one of the few I would recommend to first time users. My two children use PCLinuxOS regularly when they spend time with daddy. On my GRUB bootloader menu, I put their names, followed by PCLinuxOS to make it easy to see in my multi-distro boot menu. They find it easily and have no problems using it. Is that enough of a testimonial to PCLinuxOS?

• Mandriva, the leading European publisher of Linux distributions, will unveil its latest products at the 2009 Linux Solutions Exhibition from 31st March to April 2nd at Paris Expo – Porte de Versailles, in Hall 2.2, Booth C10-D9.

• The Linux Solutions Exhibition, the annual European meeting place for Linux and free software, offers exhibitors a unique platform allowing them to meet the different participants in the market besides presenting their products, services and technology.

Red Hat

• Red Hat fared even better, soaring 17% on better than expected earnings, and Best Buy surged 12.6% after its quarterly results and outlook both topped forecasts.

• Leading the tech charge was Red Hat Inc. Shares of the open-source software company soared 17.3% after it reported better-than-expected sales.

• Red Hat had an impressive quarter, particularly considering current economic conditions, and the company’s CEO spent much of the week talking about the good times for Red Hat and open source, largely as a result of bad times in the economy, although Whitehurst also sees improvement.

• Red Hat’s shares soared 17.3%, or $2.60, to $17.60 at the close on Thursday. Its shares have jumped 33.4% since the beginning of the year.

• Well after that, the tests went really well. I gave everything a good working through and it’s always a pleasure to see Fedora getting better. Given the turnout, i think that the Test Day is so much of a success that the QA team is gonna be far too busy to even look at my ideas here.

• It would be nice to put a sticker here saying “I participated in a Fedora Test Day”, just like we do with elections.

Debian

• Parsix is a beautiful OS which is derived off of Kanotix and based off of Debian. The install was quite simple and intuitive, though not as simple as Ubuntu based distributions.

• It’s good to see that reportbug 4 finally has a graphical user interface — it’s GTK, but nobody’s perfect

• Anyways, I’m really glad to see reportbug aiming to improve it’s usability.

Ubuntu

• I have great news for you! Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope Beta is now available for download.

• Faster boot times, a better notification system and Gnome 2.26 are the standout features of the beta release of Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) made available by the Ubuntu team this morning. On the server side Jaunty moves steadily into the cloud with Eucalyptus for home-grown cloud services as well as the start of Amazon EC2 services.

• The name’s ridiculous, but “Jaunty Jackalope,” the next release of the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu, is seriously focused on the user experience. Dig what’s new and improved in the beta of Ubuntu 9.04, released today.

• We’ve covered bits and pieces of what’s coming up for Ubuntu 9.04 in the past few months, such as Mac/Growl-like notifications (that you can grab now, if you want), some stylish community themes, and the speedier ext4 filesystem.

• It has been a week since my last post. I have been busy with my work and I say that I am enjoying what I am doing right now. I am making a perl script for the project that I am in. And Ubuntu is helping me do my job progressively.

Quimo

• In the very near future, we’re going to be releasing a Wiki, promoting information exchange between as many small grass-roots charities like ours as possible, and to encourage men and women in communities around the world to join us in bridging the technological divide. Additionally, we’re hoping to release a more feminized version of Qimo, with a female mascot, and more feminized colorscheme, in the next few months, to encourage girls to start using technology. We hope to time this release with the Qimo v2.0 release in early fall. And third, we’re looking to release a High School version, targeting the teenage demographic, sometime in the next year.

• The Helios Project is part of the Ken Starks Linux Advocacy Empire. You might recall some of Ken’s more famous projects such as the Tux500 and Lindependence 2008. Lindependence inspired a number of similar events, and meanwhile Ken and his hardy crew continue with their core work, which is building Linux computers for children and families who can’t buy their own computers.

Devices/Embedded

• Hanlin eReader

• The e-book reader from Chinese company Tianjin Jinke Electronics was released in 2007. Featurewise there may not be much to differentiate it from its peers. It has all the basics: a 6-inch display, 32-MB SDRAM and support for the usual text, docs and images. It runs Linux OS but has no wireless capability. The Hanlin eReader is available under different brand names, such as BeBook in Netherlands.

Phones

• A startup called Rhomobile announced the first formal release of its dual-licensed, open-source framework for smartphones. Rhodes 1.0 enables “write-once” development, using HTML and Ruby, of native smartphone applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, and now Android, the company says.

• Just like its predecessor, the MING A1210 sports a flip form-factor. The A1210 features a 2.8-inch touchscreen display, 3.1-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, FM radio, USB and a microSD card slot. And, just like the original MING, the A1210 runs on a custom Linux operating system. Unfortunately, the tri-band GSM radio will keep this MING A1210 from cracking the US mainstream market.

Sub-notebooks

• As you might expect given that impulse-buy price, this model is pretty bare-bones: 512MB of RAM, a 4GB solid-state drive, and a Linux operating system.

• ARM processor support. In a post earlier this week, I mentioned that Canonical would have a fairly easy time porting Ubuntu to the ARM hardware architecture, due mostly to the fact that the Linux kernel already runs quite nicely on ARM processors.

• While waiting about today for some lunch, I wrote part of this post on the AA1 in the text editor (since Bloggers interpretation of HTML is kinda sucky) and it was really nice to have the AA1 up on Ubuntu 9.04 with the Netbook desktop. Fast, full featured, and if the usage is slightly different, much easier once used to it on the 1024×600 screen. Several people stopped by to ask about the unit and see how it worked… although one of them was because I have an Apple sticker on the lid. That would be nice: an Apple Netbook. Everything I have read says that is not going to happen though. In the meantime, this all works pretty well. Finally.

Free Software/Open Source

• [T]he current health record suppliers as offering pre-Internet era software — costly and wedded to proprietary technology standards that make it difficult for customers to switch vendors and for outside programmers to make upgrades and improvements.

• [...]

• Instead of stimulating use of such software, they say, the government should be a rule-setting referee to encourage the development of an open software platform on which innovators could write electronic health record applications.

• It is very hard to study in such environment. Most works I can complete using free GNU Octave instead of MatLab, Maxima or SAGE instead of MathCad, Gnuplot for building graphs and QCad instead of AutoCAD and assure teachers that there is no need in proprietary, expensive, unreliable software and I can successfully use the free one instead. I can say that I have got no money to purchase most of this software. They can give it to me, but nearly all of it requires Microsoft Windows to work. Problems can appear even when teachers give task itself… again in closed proprietary Word or MathCad format. They can refuse to talk with me, because I deny using of proprietary software on my computers, I can not afford it, I do not trust it and in best case I forced to run it in virtual machine or separate computers, because I have got valuable documents and information on my PC. And currently I am not talking about the ethical and social aspect of such doings: only about price, safety of my information, compatibility with other software, legal use of it (I do not want to be offender).

• In the beginning, the word “hacker” had nothing to do with hi-tech crime.

• Rather than describe a criminal who uses technology to defraud people it was a badge of honour, a mark that someone had a deep understanding of a technical subject – such as computer code.

• Hackers were those that took things apart, saw how they worked and tried to make them better as they put them back together. Many hi-tech historians argue that without hackers there would be no internet.

• Open Source is a community driven approach to building software where the consumer has access to the source code. The source code is the recipe for building the software. Open Source Software begins with a problem that NEEDS a solution. The need can be anything, from a problem the author is trying to resolve for themselves, a customer or just trying a different approach to traditional solutions. The author will come up with an idea to solve the problem, and then implement that idea as software. The author may realize that friends and colleagues could benefit from the solution, or that the solution needs expertise that they do not have. At this point, the author decides to release their solution as an Open Source Project. This three step process from Need to Idea to Project, is how Open Source Projects are created

• Mozilla has announced Taskfox, a new project that aims to deliver some of Ubiquity’s command line features to a future Firefox release.

Business

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a new architectural approach for building distributed systems that deliver application functionality as loosely coupled services. Till recently it was mere hype, but today it’s a reality. The use of SOA has been moved from the laboratory level to enterprises level in order to seamlessly integrate disparate applications and create a common platform for carrying out mission critical business processes for the enterprises. The large enterprises are looking at SOA to maximize their returns by reducing complexity and cost of change and improving the leverage & reuse of assets within and outside the enterprise.

• Zenoss Core is developed by Zenoss, with the classical corporate production model but welcoming third parties contributions (zenpacks). In force of this choice, they have been able to create a unified data model, yet using few open source components.

• At OSBC, a panel of top experts in the commercial open source industry, including executives from Acquia, Novell, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems, and SugarCRM, announced the results of the North Bridge Venture Partners’ annual “Future of Open Source” survey. The survey results, collected from 435 respondents, bring to light a variety of significant issues and topics surrounding open source software, such as the impact of the economic recession, key market drivers, and predictions regarding the types of companies that will drive the next wave of commercial open source success.

• Matt Asay, who chaired this week’s Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco has a good post up with some links to good material from the event. Dries Buytaert gave a great presentation on open source community building and it’s now online, the 451 Group collected some very provocative quotes from thought leaders, and more. Here are a few of the eye-catching missives Matt points to from OSBC, plus some of our own posts related to the event.

• The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) – developers, stewards, and incubators of leading community-driven Open Source projects – announced its tenth anniversary at ApacheCon, its official user conference, trainings, and expo.

• Thrift, a tool that Facebook.com built and donated to the Apache software project, isn’t really a database. In fact, it’s more of a pre-compiler that converts a file describing the data structures into a pile of code in your choice of languages. This code may need some extra libraries (Java comes with some methods that serialize the data to an output stream), but it’s ready to include with your own code. The project includes formatters for many of the major languages (including C, Perl, Java, PHP, and Python), and it aims to honor the various idioms used by the programmers familiar with a language. You give it the schema and it does the rest.

FSF/GNU

• We got lots of great feedback from folks who attended. Some people were new and hadn’t realized just how many different projects and facets there were to the free software movement. Others have been running GNU/Linux for a number of years, but didn’t know about the vigorous effort to replace Flash with a free alternative called Gnash. Rob Savoye (lead Maintainer of the Gnash project) was an energetic and inspiring speaker — he let us know that he’s not content to have a merely workable alternative. Gnash is more interoperable and has stronger security than the proprietary Adobe application it replaces.

Programming/Google

• Google’s Python engineers have launched a new project called Unladen Swallow that seeks to improve the performance of the Python programming language. One of the project’s goals is to replace the Python virtual machine with an LLVM-based JIT.

• Google will soon announce comprehensive support for the Java programming language on its Google App Engine (GAE) offering. We are trying to get more details. Rumors of such a development emerged last year, but we can now confirm that it is going to happen. We have have confirmed the news and expect the announcement later this spring, perhaps at the much-vaunted Google I/O event on May 27-28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

Leftovers

• We’ve already talked about those who run trains in Germany and Australia cracking down on people creating their own iPhone train schedule apps, claiming they violated intellectual property rights of the train operators. This makes very little sense for a variety of reasons. First, it is still quite ridiculous that any sort of factual information can be covered by copyright — but in Europe such “collections” of information can be covered by the database copyrights — the idea that if you put factual information into a “database” that database then deserves copyright protection. Europe has this, while the US does not — and studies have shown that contrary to what copyright supports insist, this increased right has actually hindered the database industry in Europe… but that hasn’t made the law go away.

• That’s it. Nothing special or fancy. It won’t solve the world problems, but it may help a few people. I’m not fully sure about possible legal implications of shipping software around the world, but I don’t see major obstacles that prevents ordinary users, de-facto individual non-profit organizations, from helping fellow humans around the globe.

Education

• Here’s a little breaking news: Today, Google has launched YouTube EDU, which centralizes the content from over 100 universities and colleges (get list here). This robust collection gives you access to lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders, new research and campus tours. At the moment, you can access over 200 full courses from leading universities, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Yale and IIT/IISc. And it’s all searchable within YouTube EDU.

• I never thought I would title a post in all caps, but I can’t believe I’m reading what I’m reading. H.R. 1464, introduced by Bill Foster of Illinois, is titled:

• After quoting a number of findings about how completely out of control the textbook market and textbook prices are, the bill goes on to say:

• Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT.

• Following a more limited open-access mandate at Harvard, the legendary school’s faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• In the United States, the concept of “expectation of privacy” matters because it’s the constitutional test, based on the Fourth Amendment, that governs when and how the government can invade your privacy.

• The Federal Trade Commission kicked off its big DRM conference in Seattle Wednesday morning by saying that the goal was not to “take sides” over the question of whether DRM is good or bad—but the conference nevertheless opened with a warning.

Copyrights

• Shane Richmond, who writes about technology and media for the Telegraph, recently handed over his blog to Martin Kretschmer and Horace Trubrudge for a debate about copyright extension (which is currently being discussed in the UK). Kretschmer is an intellectual property professor who is against copyright extension, while Trubrudge is the Assistant General Secretary of the British Musicians’ Union, and (not surprisingly) favors copyright extension.

• Among the RIAA’s latest targets in its campaign to sue its customer base into submission is a 19-year-old cancer patient. Ciaro Sauro was ruled a music pirate after failing to defend herself in court against charges from the RIAA that she was sharing music files online. Ms. Sauro has said she couldn’t defend herself as she is hospitalized once a week, and vehemently denies the allegations that she is a pirate.

• Throughout history, major steps in the progress of nations have come about through landmark court cases. Whether we take the Dreyfus’s case in France, or the slew of court decisions in the United States in the 60s to end racial prejudice, we see that when public opinion reaches a boiling point, then the law itself changes in a rational way to accommodate the new sense of right and wrong.

• The European Parliament, endorsing the Lambrinidis report1 and turning its back on all the amendments supported by the French government and defended by Jacques Toubon and Jean-Marie Cavada, has just rejected “graduated response” for the third time. France is definitely alone in the world with its kafkaesque administrative machinery, an expensive mechanism for arbitrary punishment.

• The Recording Industry Association of America’s efforts to make nice to ISPs seem to be paying off — even if many of the ISPs are a little embarrassed by their new friend.

• The parliaments of Sweden and the European Union are urging the European Union to make public all documentation related to a secretive global anti-counterfeiting treaty, while the United States has claimed the papers are a matter of national security and therefore a state secret. But now the US has decided to undertake a review of its transparency.

• Prime Minister John Key has announced the government will throw out the controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act and start again.

• French internet users persisting in illicit downloading of music and films could have the plug pulled on their internet if a controversial new law is approved.

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