● 04.02.09

● Links 02/04/2009: GNOME 3.0 Plans, New KDE Release

Posted in News Roundup at 8:56 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• As in any revolution, the current rulers of the kingdom — Intel and Microsoft, which make the chips and software that run most PCs — face an unprecedented challenge to their dominance. Microsoft is particularly vulnerable, since many of the new netbooks use Linux software instead of Windows.

• [...]

• Netbook makers have turned to Linux, an open-source operating system that costs $3 instead of the $25 that Microsoft typically charges for Windows XP. They are also exploring the possibility of using the Android operating system from Google, originally designed for cellphones. (Companies like Acer, Dell and Hewlett-Packard already sell some Atom-based netbooks with Linux.)

• The cellphone-chip makers argue that the ARM-Linux combination is just fine for a computer meant to handle e-mail, Facebook, streaming video from sites like YouTube and Hulu, and Web-based documents.

• Intel on Thursday plans to turn over the reins of its Moblin Linux-based platform project to the Linux Foundation, putting the work in neutral territory in the hopes of attracting more community support for it.

• The San Francisco-based Linux Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group, will host the online community for Moblin on its Web site and take over stewardship of the project and its community, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation said Wednesday.

• Where a 2 page article in the NY times is referenced. This security article doesn’t refer to windows as being the security risk. And the NY times reporter responds to the inquiry by saying this is a organized systematic espionage article. Which has nothing to do with Linux. No it has nothing to do with Linux, that’s why it’s completely insane. If it were about Linux it would be about a systematic failure in espionage. that’s not all

• Then next to that we have windows virus problem number gazillion running around the internet.

• * Mailbag * Gems from the Mailbag * Talkback * 2-Cent Tips * News Bytes, by Deividson Luiz Okopnik and Howard Dyckoff * Upgrading your Slug, by Silas Brown

• Continuing, recently I was irked by the following article: Multicore chips pose next big challenge for industry. My response to the IDG News Service writer, Do ya think? May I suggest a better headline Multicore chips pose the biggest most monumental and grandest challenge ever to the entire industry. This is not news, this is more of the same old song and dance. In case you have been under a rock, I have been losing sleep over this for over two years now. If you have read my past installments, you know I’’m about to head into one of my multicore rants. I can’t help myself.

• Guest presenter: Mark Shuttleworth

• In this episode: We celebrate the release of Gnome 2.26 and talk about the Chromium browser. Could the Linux community have done more to capitalise on the weak take-up of Windows Vista, and how can we prepare ourselves for Windows 7? And is it a good thing to have two competing desktop environments?

• Envizions announced that it is taking orders for an open-source Linux gaming system, and will start shipping beta units to game developers, resellers, and software partners on April 10. The EVO Smart Console is based on a 2.4GHz Athlon, and includes a Fedora-based Linux distro.

• Anyways, this post is about Compiz 0.9.x (formerly ‘compiz++’). Compiz 0.9.x started in december when onestone announced his core rewrite on the mailing list. It had features like pluggable output backends, written in c++ (and a few nice interfaces that came with it) and other misc bits and pieces. It was designed mostly in mind to overcome a lot of the design problems we were having, like plugin-plugins and a ridiculous amound of code to manage lists. In Janurary, some developers started to toy around with it and at the beginning of this February, we announced that compiz++ would become the base for the 0.9.x series and the 0.9.x series would features some major reworks. We’ve all been quite busy during that time – so we’ve done whatever possible to push the branch forwards.

• These new technologies are also supported by new video playback softwares, which can fully utilize the Graphics Hardware for video playback, providing smooth frames in HD and Blue-Ray movies. The VDPAU supported players include libavcodec, mplayer and ffmpeg.

• I have to wonder what the point is. If Microsoft really wants small businesses to get addicted to Windows Server, the offering should be free (like Linux), or provide some kind of cloud connection services as more small business reduce reliance on on-site IT.

• It sounds like a simple argument to suggest that x86 Linux killed SGI and is killing Sun, but the truth of the matter is that both companies could have made things significantly better for themselves by embracing Linux early on, instead of fighting the tide and waiting until their market position had been vanquished.

• Channel 4′s free TV catch-up service, 4oD, can now be accessed with any Web browser on Windows, Mac and Linux, putting the last 30 days of its programming on its Web site, for free ad-supported streaming.

• This is what you do when you’re a geek with wheels. Jonathan Oxer has hacked his Mazda RX-8 so that he can unlock it, turn it on and even open the trunk — using his iPod Touch. All of this is possible due to the car having built-in 3G, thanks to the Ubuntu Linux’ operating system, which means he can start it up from wherever he is in the world.

• CACE Technologies, Inc., developer of tools to enhance the Wireshark user experience, today announced that they have released a Linux Fedora 10 driver for TurboCap, a feature-rich, full line-rate Gigabit Ethernet solution previously available for Windows-based platforms only.

Kernel Space

• Linux and an RTOS are running side by side on a single ARM processor in a retail phone, claims Chicago-based Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs).

• The firm produces the ‘virtualisation’ software: code which controls access to hardware resources, allowing both the RTOS and Linux to run separately as though there were the only operating system on the processor. Such software is also known as a hypervisor.

• “Accomplished for the first time in a commercially available phone, OKL4′s mobile virtualisation solution enabled Linux and an RTOS to run side by side on a single ARM processor, offering decreased bill-of-materials costs and separation of general public licence and proprietary software code as required by companies’ intellectual property policies,” said OK Labs.

• A key presentation at this year’s embedded systems developers’ event, the Embedded Masterclass, will explore the use of the Linux operating system for electronic systems and realtime computer systems. The event is to be held in Cambridge and Bristol on the 7th and 12th May. www.embedded-masterclass.com

Applications

• In the last two articles (part 1, part 2), I looked at getting started with Kate, and then at some of the more advanced features and configuration options. This final article covers features that you may find useful if you regularly write code or markup.

• Kate

• Kate is the default text editor in KDE, and also one of the most powerful and feature-rich text editors available for Linux. It can also be used successfully as an IDE (integrated development environment) and supports, among many others, spell-checking, highlighting for a huge amount of programming languages, it has an integrated terminal (which inherits Konsole’s settings), encoding support. It supports sessions, plugins, encodings, bookmarks and even the possibility to split the current document horizontally or vertically. Kate is the complete text editor for any KDE user.

• Nautilus

• Nautilus is the default file manager coming with GNOME, the popular desktop environment shipped by default in distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora or Debian. Nautilus has a clean and easy to use interface, and its functionality can be expanded using scripts. It features tabs, three view modes (icon view, list view and compact view), the possibility to sort items by name, size, type, modification date or even emblems (a feature specific to Nautilus), bookmarks, file previews, possibility to browse the network, and media devices support.

• A confession: I like playing with software. I’m not indiscriminate about it — I tend to pick and choose the software that I try out. While I mainline Firefox and Opera for my Web browsing, I’ve sometimes felt the need to check out other browsers.

• Everybody uses email as one of its primary communication means; Free Software desktop users are no exception. In this regard, email clients play a central role in the way we work and generally live in the Internet. These last years have seen some relative decline in the usage of email clients. The use of standard, more mature web technologies such as Ajax have made the online service of email providers much more attractive, while the justified criticism of “everyone’s ” email client, Outlook Express drove many to use the simple online interfaces of some major email service providers.

Desktop Environments

• During the first few months of 2008, a few Release Team members discussed here and there about the state of GNOME. This was nothing official, and it could actually have been considered as some friends talking together about things they deeply care about. There were thoughts that GNOME could stay with the 2.x branch for a very long time given our solid development methods, but that it was not the future that our community wants to see happening. Because of lack of excitement. Because of lack of vision. Slowly, a plan started to emerge. It evolved, changed, was trimmed a bit, made more solid. We started discussing with a few more people, got more feedback. And then, at GUADEC, the Release Team proposed an initial plan to the community that would lead the project to GNOME 3.0. Quite some time passed; actually, too much time passed because too many people were busy with other things. But it’s never too late to do the right thing, so let’s really be serious about GNOME 3.0 now!

• Today I’m going to write about some of the most useful alternative desktop managers you should consider using on your operating system. To start off I have

• Xfce

• Xfce is a fast and a light desktop environment for unix like operating systems. It is specially desgined to improve your work productivity. It has the ability to load and execute applications really fast while conserving system resources.

• [...]

• LXDE

• Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment is an extremely faster, performing and energy saving desktop environment.

KDE

• April 2nd, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of “Cano”, (a.k.a KDE 4.2.2), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. Cano is a monthly update to KDE 4.2. It ships with desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, development tools and more. KDE’s award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

• Debian developer Ana Guerrero, as spokesperson for the KDE team, has announced that KDE4 will appear during the first week of April 2009.

• Guerrero’s announcement on the Debian-KDE mailing list indicated that KDE4 is moving from the experimental to the unstable repository, although the exact date is not quite certain.

Distributions

• I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova. Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA. As someone of Cuban ancestry, this development piqued my interested and I decided to check it out. (I figured such a specialist distro would never be on the cover of LXF). According to its distrowatch page, it is a mix of Gentoo, Sabayon, and Ututo. We’ll see if they chose all of the negative aspects of those distros and thus created Satan’s Distro or if they took all that was good and created what Gentoo has the potential to be. So I launch it up in VirtualBox.

• Regardless, it all works in Arch. NVidia drivers and Twinview settings were copy/pasted from Gentoo, and compositing all works fine. No performance problems in KDE with resizing or dragging windows, no Plasma crashes (yet), no missing icons or invisible notification area. QtCurve works in Qt3, Qt4 and GTK just fine. My sound card worked without any manual configuration at all. My mouse worked without tweaking, including the thumb buttons. Same with networking, the install prompted me for my IP and gateway etc. and then it worked, no effort.

• I grabbed two or three torrents the other day, when I was testing my overworked, underpaid Pentium laptop in its role as rtorrent slave. I mentioned OpenGEU yesterday, which was disappointing because of its heavy Gnome underbelly and overdone desktop glitter. But this one is the complete opposite: function and speed combined with an appearance that underscores its efficiency.

• All in all, I really enjoyed testing this distribution. Not being a big fan of Slackware, I didn’t expect to be so pleasantly surprised by some aspects. Also, Wolvix 2.0.0 makes it way easier to see what Slackware is about. Surely, there are still things that need to be polished, but I was very impressed with the up-to-date software selection and the easy install process. Hopefully, by the time Wolvix 2.0.0 final is released, all the inconveniences will be taken care of.

• Nowadays kids are getting more and more familiar with computers. That takes place through games, movies, pictures and all kind of educational programs. And now, there is a new solution for you to give your kids the possibility to use a computer in a fun way.

• Qimo4Kids.com is a website that was specially developed in order to provide users with all the information they need about a new operative system for kids. This system was created as a version of Linux for kids.

Red Hat

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that rednano.sg, Singapore’s first local search and directory engine, has developed a stable, secure and reliable platform for its online search engine business using a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, including built-in virtualization, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS), as well as Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite.

• A joint venture of Singapore Press Holdings Group (SPH) and Schibsted Group, SPH Search produces rednano.sg, which it aims to be the premier local online search and directory engine for users looking for information about Singapore, its people and its businesses.

Ubuntu

• Mythbuntu is a community built MythTV-focused distribution of Ubuntu. It aims at resolving the difficulties of setting up a standalone MythTV system with Ubuntu. MythTv as Mythbuntu becomes a full-fleshed open source DVR (Digital Video Recorder) application, with a solid developer community in the background. Its development cycle closely follows that of Ubuntu — it is also upgraded every six months.

• I couldn’t say that Canonical is ready to go head to head with Red Hat for the king of the Linux server hill … this year. I can say, though, that that’s exactly what Canonical is planning to do by next year. There are interesting times ahead friends.

• During the Autotask Community Live conference, Ubuntu Linux made a surprise appearance and a surprise encore. Twice during the event, managed service providers (MSPs) told me how they were building their businesses on top of Ubuntu. The two prime examples involve Rezitech and Network Depot. Here’s the scoop.

Devices/Embedded

• Investing in targeted growth product areas: We are focusing engineering, sales, and marketing resources in certain targeted growth product areas, including Linux platforms, Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) solutions in the aerospace and defense industry and multiprocessing capabilities.

• PALM IS opening up the software development kit for WebOS, its next-generation mobile operating system.

Sub-notebooks

• I’ve been totally satisfied with the Sylvania g Netbook Meso. No, the hardware isn’t perfect but the design issues I pointed out are all minor issues which haven’t detracted from my computing experience. Performance is excellent, as in more than good enough for me to use the Meso for literally everything I normally do on a computer without feeling like I’m missing anything. The netbook is solidly built and still lightweight enough to go anywhere.

• Okay, I’ve got quite a nicely working Xfce 4.6 finally set up on my Wind U100.

• Asus and HP are both looking into Google’s Android as an alternative to Windows 7 for a new wave of netbooks.

• Yep, that was a shocker. Nokia is leaving Symbian S60 OS for its mid tier handsets like the E75, various editions of 5800 XM and the likes. The Finnish giant is almost ready to announce a fresh Linux-based OS for its new line-up of high-end handsets and mobile computers. This is planned for August 2009.

Free Software/Open Source

• Since free software and other free culture products are formed by an organic, incrementalist process, they tend to be highly organic in their design as well. Free software is not so much built as it is grown. Thus, when considering a new project, you must think not about how to break it down into implementable chunks that can be assembled into a working product, but rather about how the project can organically grow—moving from working product to working product as it does so—becoming progressively more useful as it is developed.

• At OSBC last week I saw a great presentation by Dries Buytaert on how to build community. Dries is the founder of Drupal. The slides for his presentation (20 MB) include “Dries’ 7 secrets” which I’ll write about here.

• Dries started out by showing us how the Drupal community really is a community excited about Drupal. He had pictures of people carrying around cutouts of people that couldn’t attend a conference, hand made Drupal socks, Drupal cookies, etc.

• But Cloudera has heavyweight backing. It has raised money from venture capital group Accel Partners (though admittedly only a tepid $5 million). And its array of additional investors reads like a list of tech glitterati, including Marten Mickos, former MySQL CEO, and Diane Green, former VMware CEO.

• One of the chicken-and-egg problems that keeps some users from trying out and becoming skilled at good open source applications is lack of adequate documentation. How are you supposed to learn effectively without it? The good news is that for a whole lot of open source applications and operating systems, there are good, free books you can get online. We’ve covered these for the powerful Blender 3D graphics and animation app, for Ubuntu, for Linux hacks, and for the GIMP (graphics). We’ve also covered FLOSS Manuals, which free documentation for many open source applications. In addition to these, one of the best online sources for free books and tutorials is Linuxtopia.

FSF/GNU

• Macraigor is offering full support for Eclipse Ganymede and a free port of the popular GNU toolset, including gcc, gas and gdb, at www.macraigor.com.

• Various machine translation tools are available like Apertium (GNU license), OpenLogos which is the open source version of Logos Machine Translation System, SYSTRAN which is one of the oldest Machine Translation company and Moses (GNU General Public License).

• Google had the scientific/math term kind of savvy user appeal and we wanted something akin to that. One of the real clever product names of all time was the operating system Gnu, which stood for Gnu’s Not Unix, with the G not really standing for anything. Kind of quirky and kind of fun.

Government

• The South African government’s State IT Agency (Sita) Free and Open Source Programme has released its second public newsletter outlining the progress of open source software in government. Among the range of issues covered are details of the progress made in migration the SA Revenue Service over to open source software (we recently covered that) and steps forward in the education arena.

Open (But No Source Code)

• Not wanting April Fool’s Day to overshadow this announcement, we’re posting today about the 250,000 images recently donated to Wikimedia Commons, a sister project of Wikipedia.

Programming

• Python is moving to a distributed version control system (DVCS), but unlike many projects which have moved to Git, Guido van Rossum has selected Mercurial, also known as Hg (the chemical symbol for mercury), as the DVCS for Python

• Continuing in my “State of Eclipse” retrospective, today’s column is about Eclipse’s bipolar nature as both a framework and a product. I think this is a mistake and that we’re doing a disservice to both our users and our members.

• By providing packages and pre-compiled binaries on the eclipse.org download page, we are promoting Eclipse to our users as a product. It’s a product like Firefox or Visual Studio: one click to start the downloader/installer and then, moments later, we’re running a slick looking integrated development environment for Java or C++ or PHP. As an Eclipse user myself, I admit that this product-packaging is very convenient.

• But by providing easy-to-install packaged binaries, we’re also entering a social contract with our users. In today’s web world, the “download now” button implies a tested and supported product, neither of which we offer.

• For many years, the Qt toolkit has been the best GUI toolkit available on the market. Better than the Java client libraries (Swing and SWT), better than Microsoft’s libraries, better than the excellent third-party component libraries for .NET, and superior even to Apple’s Carbon and Cocoa GUI frameworks. As to OSS products, such as GTK or wxWidgets, there is no comparison whatsoever.

• What makes Qt so demonstrably superior are the scope of the library, the quality of implementation and its portability. I’ll get into each of these attributes shortly. But for the moment, I want to discuss the product’s perceived limitations and some recent developments that are of interest.

Leftovers

• The Council of EU is trying to reintroduce a distorted version of amendment 138 to “Telecoms Package”1. It could be interpreted by the archaic industries promoting “graduated response” as authorizing any administrative authority to order restrictions on fundamental rights and freedom. Such a legalization of parallel administrative justice, comparable to the French “graduated response” is unacceptable. The European Parliament must strongly reject this huge threat to EU citizen’s freedom.

• The central argument is important: that you can’t do science with closed source software, because you can’t examine its assumptions or logic (that “incomplete scientific record”). Open science demands open source.

ACTA

• Directorate General for Trade of the European Commission is organising a meeting to inform and consult interested parties about the negotiation of a plurilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• The goal of ACTA is to provide an improved framework for countries committed to intellectual property protection, in view of effectively addressing the challenges of IPR infringement today.

• Next week, the Department of Foreign Affairs will conduct one of the stranger consultations in recent memory. Officials have invited roughly 70 stakeholder groups to discuss an international intellectual property treaty that the U.S. regards as a national security secret and about which the only substantive information has come from a series of unofficial leaks.

• Since then-minister David Emerson announced Canada’s participation in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations in October 2007, the ACTA has been dogged by controversy over the near-total lack of transparency.

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