● 04.15.09

● Links 15/04/2009: New GCC and Linux RCs

Posted in News Roundup at 4:47 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• It’s more than a bit ironic that the Linux Foundation, an organisation that drips with bizspeak, has chosen as the winner of its Linux promotional campaign an ad that espouses the virtues of freedom.

• The Foundation – which describes itself “a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux” – hardly makes any reference to the freedom aspect of Linux when it issues statements.

• And this same Foundation has such a great devotion to freedom that it keeps journalists away from its conferences!

• But the seeds of this whole movement were planted by Richard Stallman and his ideas won’t die easily.

• I read with interest your opposition to upgrading to Vista and instead favor an upgrade to Windows 7.

• My name is Ken Starks and I am one of the most active Free Software advocates in the United States. Senator, the state of Texas is paying tens of millions of dollars a year to Microsoft when they have a free, virus-free and stable alternative at their fingertips, literally. Sir, let me pose a question. Why does the state of Texas insist on purchasing a product that proves to be more expensive to maintain than it does to purchase? Anti-virus software, defrag and registry fixers, malware protection…why? Why are we paying for software that demands we purchase other software in order for it to work? That is a question that I would honestly like answered.

• I will tip my hat to the obvious influence of the powerful Microsoft Lobby. They have been there and gone, and their impact on State software purchases is obvious. I am curious to know if the dollar amounts we taxpayers spend on Microsoft software is available for public consumption. Again, Microsoft has lobbied you successfully. Entire nations, states and municipalities across the globe have switched to GNU/Linux and Free Software, yet the US remains the last bastion of Microsoft strength.

• Ubuntu is emerging as an unlikely alternative to deploying Windows 7 or Vista on enterprise desktops as many IT managers express concerns over the upgrade path to the new Windows operating system.

• Dimensional Research was right to call out the Macintosh number, But I see Ubuntu gains as being more significant. Mac is down from 28 percent in 2008, while Ubuntu is up from 21 percent last year and 17 percent in 2007.

• EZblue Software Corp., a leading provider of Linux software products, today announced the release of its EZblue Linux Server software version 3.9 with a built in iTunes compatible streaming server module.

• Acer said that the Acer Travelmate 4530 notebook will be available under this offer. The notebook features an AMD Turion RM70 processor, a 2GB DDR II RAM, a 160GB HDD, and a 14.1″ wide screen TFT. It also has a DVD writer, a 5-in-1 card reader, Bluetooth, and runs on Linux-based OS. It also has a gigabit LAN and Disk Antishock Protection (DASP) Technology with Backpack. The Acer Travelmate 4530 comes with a one-year warranty for Rs. 30,385, plus taxes.

• Dell, which sells servers that run open-source Linux on Intel CPU chips, is taking aim at Sun’s existing customers for its own servers, which run Sun’s non-open-source Solaris operating system on Sun’s Sparc processors.

• Linux has come a long way in terms of hardware compatibility, but you don’t want to be troubleshooting three different network adaptors if you can help it. And it’s the network adaptors that are likely to be the weakest link. Cluster computing is dependent on each machine having access to the same data, and that means that data needs to be shuffled between each of the machines on the network cluster continually.

• Wine is maturing in the bottle: the current version 1.1.19 again offers a multitude of enhancements.

• In the official announcement, Wine growers reveal a slew of enhancements for 1.1.19. These include improved Direct3D support and Esound driver. Winemaker, which makes Windows programs Wine-compatible, now also supports Visual C++ projects.

• 0. Mental migration: It’s an old computer geek joke to start a numbered list with zero, but it serves to symbolize the different mindset required for Linux compared to Windows.

Kernel Space

• The Linux Foundation (LF)’s Collaboration Summit last week in San Francisco featured a variety of announcements ranging from the LF’s new role in hosting Moblin to new collaboration tools to the latest kernel changes. Meanwhile, the LF announced the winners of its “We’re Linux” video contest.

• If you are into compilers and have not already tried out the latest bits from GCC 4.4, you may want to give the GCC 4.4.0 Release Candidate 1 a whirl. GCC 4.4.0 RC1 was tar’ed up yesterday and is now ready for testing.

• GCC 4.4 has a number of benefits over GCC 4.3 in all areas. One of the GCC 4.4 features that excite us is the merging of the Graphite framework, which will ultimately provide automatic parallelization support. Also on the multi-threaded front, GCC 4.4 supports version 3.0 of OpenMP. While still experimental, in this GNU Compiler Collection update there is also better support for the C++0x language.

• New ‘microblaze’ architecture, a somewhat late ‘input’ layer merge, a new intel virtual networking driver and some firmware loading updates. And mn10300 and frv moved their header files from include/asm to arch. That accounts for the bulk, but shouldn’t affect anybody.

Applications

• Linux only: Back In Time, a Linux backup app inspired by Macs’ Time Machine and offering the same kind of no-worry, space-saving snapshot protection, is worth adding to your must-install list.

• Why? First off, the user interface and documentation at its home page beat out similarly Time-Machine-inspired backup apps like previously mentioned Flyback, at least for my money. Second, it’s smart about being friendly with non-developer Linux users—it rewrites all the rules of the underlying rsync command in plain English in its settings, installs a “root” launching shortcut for when you want to back up your core system files, and adds itself to your cron automation engine automatically at the intervals you set it to, no crontab -e or other terminal jobs required.

• I’ve compiled a list of some of the most useful Audio applications you can download totally free of charge for Linux.

Distributions

• Sabayon Linux is a very full featured DVD sized distribution that is really catching on in the Linux community as of late. The most recent release, Sabayon 4.1 Gnome, includes some very impressive features, and applications. I installed Sabayon 4.1 Gnome this morning and found some great stuff, I really have nothing but good things to say about this up and coming Linux distro. You can buy Sabayon on DVD inside our shopping cart. A portion of each Sabayon DVD sale is donated to the Sabayon project.

• This release features the return of 3D acceleration — as free software.

• A Bulgarian open source project has released a Live CD compilation of five popular boot-and-run Linux distributions. Just released in version 3.0, “Ultilex” can be booted from CD/DVD and USB flash devices, and offers Slax, Puppy Linux, Clonezilla, Parted Magic, and the System Rescue CD, says the Ultilex project.

• In this interview we talk with Ricky. In specific, we talk about:

• * Identity of the Fedora community and its relationship with Red Hat * Relationship between Fedora and other distributions * Upstream projects as they relate to Fedora * Public opinion about the Fedora project * Open source involvement in the software industry and university sphere

Mandriva

• With the second Release Candidate out and only two weeks until the big launch, we thought it would be a good idea to give you an overall look at what you should expect from Mandriva Linux 2009.1 (Spring). First of all, Mandriva 2009 Spring will boot much faster, through several fixes (including udev), implementation of a new SpeedBoot mode and support for the powerful EXT4 filesystem. What Speedboot basically does is prioritizing boot processes in order to load the graphical system first and then continue with starting the rest of the processes. As for EXT4, though many users are still kind of wary about this new filesystem, its superior performance cannot be contested. Here at Softpedia we’ve been using it on most of our Linux machines and we’ve yet to encounter any problems.

• So far I am very pleased with this release and think I have switched back to Pclinuxos full time. Good work guys!

• In the past few days, I was lucky to be able to test drive two wonderful Linux distributions that both promises to work “out of the box” — PCLinuxOS 2009.1 and LinuxMint KDE Community Edition 6.

Debian/Ubuntu

• So, where’s Canonical? Admittedly, the company has its hands full developing Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu 9.10 and Landscape updates. But stay patient. Based on some educated guesses, I think Canonical will show more channel progress by mid-2009. In the meantime, Canonical should take a close look at Red Hat and the Open Source Channel Alliance to see how go-to-market partner strategies are evolving.

• In a few days, you will see a new version of the popular Linux distribution, Ubuntu. Ubuntu version 9.04, or fondly called by developers as “Jaunty Jackalope,” is already in beta release and will soon see it bumped to “release candidate” status, before we get the full version before the end of the month.

• 1. You can integrate Ubuntu server edition easily into your existing networks.

• 2. Ubuntu server edition gives you low total cost of ownership, which is very crucial to companies and organizations.

• [...]

• The Debian project developers have announced the release of the first update to Debian 5.0 (codename Lenny), initially released in February.

• Meet Mint 6 Felicia, the community “Fluxbox” remake. The Fluxbox is a window manager that replaces Gnome’s default window manager. It is lightweight, customizable, and fast.

Devices/Embedded

• A Linux SDK and support from MontaVista and Wind River

• The Octeon II Software Development Kit (SDK) is an enhanced version of the existing Octeon SDK, says Cavium. It includes a Linux SMP, GNU Toolchain, and a “Simple Executive” for fast path applications. Other SDK features are said to include performance tools, a simulator, examples, and APIs for hardware acceleration Cavium also offers additional software toolkits and multi-core software architecture and design consulting services.

• Previously the Octeon SDKs have been based on SMP Linux 2.6 distributions from MontaVista or Wind River. Today, both companies announced support for the Octeon II family with their Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 4.0-compliant MontaVista Linux and Wind River Linux 3.0 distributions, respectively.

• Android, as just another Linux distribution, will be attractive to all sorts of companies. That doesn’t mean those devices will be accessing the Android Marketplace, but it will serve to increase the number of experienced Android developers.

Phones

• While netbooks are becoming more powerful—and are in the throes of evolution, some say—ABI asserts that the more important changes have been at the lower end of the market, and that to create more inexpensive devices, designers are turning to Linux and the Google Android operating system.

• Research firm Strategy Analytics expects to see the Android mobile operating system take 12 percent of global smartphone shipment market share by 2012, as well as show growth in other device segments, which is already in evidence this year.

• Android, as just another Linux distribution, will be attractive to all sorts of companies. That doesn’t mean those devices will be accessing the Android Marketplace, but it will serve to increase the number of experienced Android developers.

Sub-notebooks

• With cost-cutting pressures expected to continue into the post-recessionary phase, ABI Research predicts that Linux will benefit from the entry into the market of lower-cost netbooks that run ARM-based processors. The research firm also predicted that by 2012 Linux and “alternative operating systems” (OSes) will overtake Microsoft’s Windows XP in netbook sales. Apart from low-end netbooks, ABI cited the arrival of mobile stacks such as the Linux-based Android that are suited for these platforms as the main reason.

• Pupeee 4.2 is released. This Eee PC optimized Netbook distro is based on Puppy Linux. Puppy Linux (and the Puppeee distro) was written from scratch with 2 goals in mind: speed & ease of use.

Free Software/Open Source

• So in the end, yes, FOSS is destroying the traditional programming model. But what is growing up in its place makes what it’s replacing look silly and foolish, a practice and a product that should have been shed ages ago.

• The open source Globus Project is planning for the future — and is looking to users for help in determining the grid computing group’s direction.

• So they turned to Knowmad Technologies, known for their expertise in Open Source solutions. Knowmad developed and implemented a solution based on Open Source software. Forums, blogs, a wiki and a single sign-on solution were used to make the Web site interactive for its users.

• Fortunately, open-source alternatives have matured to the point where they deliver the value and return on investment that customers are demanding. Channel partners who have not investigated and embraced open-source solutions need to.

• Now is the time to branch into open source. That was the assertion from Maria Pardee, managing director of global integration for BT in her keynote address Tuesday at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo.

• The report, entitled, “Open Source: Understanding its Application in the Voting Industry” reveals the need for policymakers to continue treating proprietary and open source products as separate and distinct.

• When Balfour Beatty Construction needed data integration software to connect its ERP and project management systems, the company considered many of the usual commercial data integration vendors.

• But, thanks to advice from colleagues at General Growth, decision makers at the Dallas-based construction firm also included open source data integration vendor Jitterbit in its evaluations.

• Some definitions of open source explicitly require that open source software be freely available without any limitation or cost (free beer). However, others aren’t as concerned about the “free beer” aspect as they are about the “free speech” aspect of open source. Although most products that are advertised as open source do seem to be available for no cost, this should not be assumed without careful reading of the product’s license.

Mozilla

• Mozilla will release Firefox 3.0.9 as a regular maintenance update for the browser next week, but the company will also roll out the fourth beta version of a much more enhanced version, which will include the TraceMonkey Javascript engine. Previously developed under the Firefox 3.1 name, version 3.5 b4 will be made available in the coming week as well.

• In this issue…

• * Help about:mozilla with a simple click * Firefox Support: Writing concise documents * Mozilla Labs: On rating mechanisms * Mozilla in Brazil update * Experimental add-ons and logins * Firefox.next: Tabs on the side? * Munich Mozilla meetup in May * Taskfox prototype: Ubiquity in Firefox

Video

• Christian Einfeldt is producing a documentary movie called the Digital Tipping Point about how free software is changing global culture. He is releasing all of his footage under a free license, and is inviting participants to grab the video and use it to tell stories about how free software has changed their lives. He also wants the film to be produced using only free software tools.

• This eye-catching, remarkably vivid demo video shows off a Linux SL viewer built by renowned coder Opensource Obscure, using the “render-pipeline” from Linden Lab’s code branch. It was so impressive, I got in touch with Obscure, for more details.

Server

• The archetypal MySQL database chugs along in the server room of a Web 2.0 start-up, powering a small but promising Web site. In fact, a quarter of the 12 million MySQL installations are data warehouses doing business intelligence and analytics for companies.

• Traditional business intelligence solutions can’t scale to the degree necessary in today’s data environment. One solution getting a lot of attention recently: Hadoop, an open-source product inspired by Google’s search architecture. Twenty years ago, most companies’ data came from fundamental transaction systems: Payroll, ERP, and so on.

• Yahoo!’s M45 cluster runs Hadoop, an open source distributed file system and parallel execution environment that enables its users to process massive amounts of data. Apache Hadoop is an open source project of the Apache Software Foundation, to which Yahoo! engineers have been the primary contributors to date.

CMS

• Concrete CMS today announced the general availability of its easy-to-use open source CMS product, Concrete5. The new release builds on Concrete’s foundation offering of a CMS that is as easy to configure as a blog, with the flexibility of a full web development platform. Improvements in Concrete5 include an updated file manager, embedded Picnik image editor, new help system and more. Concrete’s main competitors in the CMS space are Drupal and Joomla, but Silicon Florist says Concrete5 “crushes them in terms of ease-of-use.”

• If you were to believe all the hype surrounding concrete5, an open source Web content management system, then a remarkable new system has just gone on General Availability (GA).

• With its open source CMS — Hippo CMS 7.0 — recently out of the door, Hippo (news, site) has found a partner in the U.S. to help implement the revamped product. CorraTech is an open source software services and consulting shop. The two will work together to deliver web content management solutions to mid-market and enterprise customers.

Business

• Zenoss Inc., a value leader in enterprise network and systems management, today announced that it is a founding member of the Open Source Channel Alliance. Led by Red Hat, the alliance program includes leading commercial open source software vendors including; Alfresco, Enterprise DB, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Likewise, Pentaho, Zmanda, and Zenoss. Through the alliance Zenoss has signed a distribution agreement with SYNNEX Corporation (NYSE: SNX) to distribute and market Zenoss’ portfolio of cost-effective, enterprise-proven network and systems monitoring solutions.

• The Citadel project has released version 7.5 of its GPL3-licensed groupware server. The release improves the web interface and countless other details.

• Herring cites the example of using proprietary products from BEA Systems/Oracle, which are far more expensive to acquire than open-source alternatives and don’t even offer enterprise developers the flexibility to customize to fit their particular business’s changing needs. The strength of the open source community pays off when more than just a few employees of a particular vendor are at work on a solution but rather an entire community. Rollout time is reduced dramatically, Herring notes.

• That’s been the promise of open source storage vendor Cleversafe, which this week is unveiling new technology to further streamline delivery — and potentially improving the process of making content available at massive scale.

• Appcelerator, founded in 2006, uses an open-source platform designed to help developers more quickly create Web apps.

Funding

• Venture capitalists have poured $3.2 billion into open-source companies since 1997, according to a new report from The 451 Group. It’s about time we started delivering a return on that investment.

• Good news: Open source companies are alive and well.

• The Open Source model for business is challenging – but publishing platform developer Ez Systems of Norway has proved that it’s a model that can turn in profits – provided you get the product right.

• So-called open core software is essentially a subset of open source — a vendor gives away a free version under traditional open license and sells a commercial version with advanced features. Some open source purists see this as undermining the purpose of open source, but open core proponents say it’s the key to a new business model.

Security

• Coverity, Inc. announced two new tools for software development today: Coverity Build Analysis and the Coverity Integrity Center. These products are helpful for any type of development, but include features specially designed for companies using open source software in their commercial offerings.

• The developers of the open source virus scanner ClamAV have released version 0.95.1, denoting is as simply a “bugfix release” with no security warnings. However, security service providers such as Secunia and the French Vupen (formerly FrIST) classify it as a critical safety update.

Government

• In August 2008 the IT agency CNTI said that nearly 60% of Venezuela’s government offices had switched from proprietary software to open source, compared with its target of 100% migration by yearend 2008. Some ministries stood out for their progress. Venezuela’s Social Development Ministry had reportedly already migrated 93% of its PCs and all of its servers to open source, having started the migration in 2007.

• OneWorld South Asia (OWSA), the south Asian centre of OneWorld International Foundation, works to facilitate human rights and sustainable development in the region by leveraging a range of media and Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). For its IT projects, this international NGO, rely intensively on Plone, an open source Content Management System (CMS) and Zope an open source application server.

Licensing

• Richard Stallman: I am disappointed that Linux has not moved to GPLv3, since that means the added protections for users’ freedom do not apply to this important component of the GNU/Linux system. I was also somewhat alarmed to discover that Microsoft has procured the continued use of GPLv2 by certain projects by giving them money.

• Nonetheless, GPLv3 is used by many free software projects, and has even convinced some developers to liberate previously proprietary software packages. Overall, I think it is accomplishing its mission.

Standards/Consortia

• The COSS lifecycle defines a specification as a contract between designers, implementers, and users. The weight of the contract depends on where the specification is, in its lifecycle: from raw, to draft, to stable, legacy, and through to retired. COSS editor Pieter Hintjens concludes, this model allows for experimentation, and standardization, which are normally opposed to each other.

Leftovers

• That raises all sorts of questions… MSNBC reporting on the videos is almost certainly fair use of NOM’s videos. But, it was someone else who uploaded the MSNBC clip to YouTube. MSNBC is still running the clip on its own site — but, if anyone had any sort of DMCA claim on the video, one would think it would be MSNBC… not NOM. So, then, is NOM abusing the DMCA takedown process, in demanding an entire video (most of which is not its content) be taken down? Seems like you (or, say, the EFF) could make a pretty strong case for that…

• Should Boston College Linux users be looking over their shoulders?

• In his application, the investigating officer asked that he be permitted to seize the student’s computers and other personal effects because they might yield evidence of the crimes of “Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation” and “Unauthorized access to a computer system.” Aside from the remarkable overreach by campus and state police in trying to paint a student as suspicious in part because he can navigate a non-Windows computer environment, nothing cited in the warrant application could possibly constitute the cited criminal offenses. There are no assertions that a commercial (i.e. for pay) commercial service was defrauded, a necessary element of any “Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation” allegation. Similarly, the investigating officer doesn’t explain how sending an e-mail to a campus mailing list might constitute “unauthorized access to a computer system.”

• Did you buy extra ammunition after Barack Obama was elected President, and are you still concerned that he might ban your guns? Are you concerned that the economic crisis could devolve into a depression, or worse? Do you think the federal government has overstepped its authority under the Constitution? If so, the government thinks you’re a right-wing extremist and a potential terrorist threat.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Beasts Associated were suitably unimpressed by this action and issued a statement (pdf) saying: “As a result of Mr. Reppe behaving in a manner that contravened the terms of the contract, notice of termination of his contract was issued as long ago as the start of December 2008, with the contract due to end on 30 March 2009, once the period of notice expired.

• “No objection was submitted in respect of the termination, and no legal action is pending against the termination.”

• They also warned Reppe that he should move his domains to another registrar as his domains would be placed “in transit” after March 31.

• “Now is not the time… to engage in a debate about the need for net neutrality obligations,” Time Warner Cable tells the FCC. But why not, other than the fact that TWC is taking a beating over bandwidth caps?

• Amazon has said it will not allow online advertising system Phorm to scan its web pages to produce targeted ads.

• The Commission yesterday began infringement proceedings against the UK over the lack of a regulatory response to BT and Phorm’s secret trials of internet interception and profiling technology in 2006 and 2007. The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) is coordinating the government’s response, which if unsatisfactory could lead to heavy fines from the European Court of Justice.

• Fears that Britain is slipping into a surveillance society have been heightened by Brussels initiating legal action after declaring that UK laws guaranteeing data protection were “structurally flawed” and well below the European standard.

Copyrights

• Does the CRIA actually think anyone believes that P2P file sharing is the reason for this? I don’t do any file sharing at all, but haven’t set foot in a physical “record store” in years — because I buy all my CDs online (and, yes, I still buy CDs). To claim that the end of physical retailing can be blamed on file sharing is simply ridiculous.

• Obama is whistling the music industry’s tune

• No copyright content is hosted on The Pirate Bay’s web servers; instead the site hosts “torrent” links to TV, film and music files held on its users’ computers.

• The file-sharing program BitTorrent, which is a legal piece of file-sharing software, uses the torrent links to manage the transfer of files online between those who have parts of the data and those who need parts of the data.

• Yesterday I wrote about how the media industries abuse language in order to justify their broken business models; today I’d like to complement this by looking at their misuse of numbers.

• One of the weapons in the intellectual monopolists’ armoury is citing the economic damage that sharing puportedly causes. What’s remarkable is that the numbers usually quoted – around $250 billion – have been touted for decades, creating a kind of self-referential justification.

• The Author’s Guild v Google suit recently produced a settlement agreement. The agreement has been lauded widely, but what hasn’t gotten as much press is what the agreement says about orphan works — copyrighted works whose author cannot be found, or where it is not clear if the copyright is valid.

• I sympathize with the feeling behind these protests, but they are directed at the wrong target.

• The protestors rightly condemn the Authors Guild for demanding the removal of the screen reader feature, but the way they are doing it makes Amazon look like a victim. Actually it is the main perpetrator.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayNelson Pavlosky, Co-founder of Free Culture.org 09 (2005) [Embedment notice: your Web browser does not supportthe <video> tag. Firefox 3.1 supports it.]Digital Tipping Point is a Free software-like project where the raw videos are code. You can assist by participating. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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