● 05.19.09

● Links 18/05/2009: GNU/Linux and Sugar Victorious on OLPC?

Posted in News Roundup at 6:26 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Users’ appetites where whet by recent events in the industry. Apple CEO ‘Guru Steve’ Jobs had been off to see the very clever Xerox folk just down the road at Palo Alto, to learn more about this amazing new windows, mice and icon universe they’d built. Steve, knowing a slick thing when he sees it, decided that Apple really needed a piece of this pie; partly because Apple’s flagship-cum-cashcow, the Apple ][ family was quickly ailing, partly because the Apple III had bombed severely in the market, but mostly because this graphical environment was just way cool.

• Should the Linux faithful go on the wagon and give up Wine entirely? Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth seemed to imply as much when he said in a recent Q&A that “the free software ecosystem needs to thrive on its own rules.” Yet he also said that both Wine and native Linux ports “play an important role.” Linux bloggers have been hashing out the issue from every conceivable angle.

• Jon Hall, of Amherst, has the most celebrated license plate in New Hampshire.

• Actually, it’s more than that.

• The combination of “Live Free or Die” and “UNIX” on his Jeep Wrangler is the most celebrated New Hampshire license plate in the entire world!

• It was almost exactly one year ago that Nicholas Negroponte announced an agreement between OLPC and Microsoft to bring Windows XP to the XO-1 to great turmoil. I vividly remember the late-night flood of e-mails and IRC chats where everyone was trying to figure out just what that announcement really meant.

• [...]

• I’ve been wondering about what ever happened to these Windows XP-based OLPC trials. I haven’t really heard anything about them in quite some time. Now more recently I’ve asked around and found there is a good reason why I haven’t seen anything: countries are choosing Sugar over Windows XP for their XO deployments.

• The college teaches Ada (“because you can’t cheat at Ada”), C++, Python and Java, he said. And it standardised on FreeBSD: “We love it, it’s the key to our success”. Col Adams said the college uses Windows “as little as possible”.

• This week I’ll be at InterOp Las Vegas looking for the latest and coolest Linux-based technologies that InterOp exhibitors have to offer. My favorites are certainly the “new innovators.” New innovators are small companies who’ve developed their own products and are trying to get noticed in the high-tech space. These are the best and most enjoyable people to talk to at such shows.

• This week’s editorial talks a little about the virus threats on Linux/UNIX systems. In the Linux distribution announcement section you will find the following releases: Slack Mini Server 1.4.3, Zenwalk Live 6.0, Sabily 9.04, SystemRescueCd 1.2.0, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1. In other news: Ubuntu One: the free Online storage service from Canonical; Transmission 1.61 plugs CSRF hole in Ubuntu 9.04. For this week we have also prepared a nice tutorial that will teach you how to fix the VirtualBox USB support. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases.

Desktop

• Since The HeliOS Project is constantly fighting the lack of Internet connections when we install for our kids, htl’s superdebs and SRUN packaging components are ideal. We have implemented the use of Super OS on all of our installs now and plan to continue doing so. Htl has agreed to work as a HeliOS Project development partner and boy howdy was it needed…I couldn’t code my way into a rocking chair.

• Today, the supposedly-affordable-and-tiny 1080p-capable PC has become available at Play.com, and it’s… well, surprisingly affordable. Today’s listings show the base model – equipped with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N230 processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8GB SSD, GeForce 9400M graphics and a Linux operating system – etailing at a cost of £149.99.

Server

• “If you want to provide backup for other hardware, it can be done more easily in an LPAR,” he says. “Some customers are looking at that using the i box to create a virtualized version of Linux X86 workloads in case those machines go down. It provides a live, up-and-running copy, even if it not going to run permanently on the i. It boosts the availability of those Linux workloads.”

• This is not a primary reason for people to use Linux, Robinson admits, but it addresses a need for companies using virtualization to become more resilient on the entry-level machines.

• Commercial Linux distributor Canonical has launched the third release of its Landscape systems management and monitoring service for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. And with Landscape 1.3, the tool can now reach out and manage Ubuntu images on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) utility.

• It’s actually pretty darn easy to run a virtual operating system on a server or on the cloud. The real trick is managing them. That’s why I’m excited that Canonical, Ubuntu’s Linux commercial backer, recently released Canonical Landscape 1.3, an Ubuntu network systems management and monitoring service that will let you control your Ubuntu servers no matter whether they’re on your desktop or a few thousand miles away on the Amazon EC2 (Amazon Compute Cloud).

• I hope that users will be supporting this service. The reason for that is twofold. Firstly Canonical has done much for Linux as an operating system and I think that without Mark Shuttleworths efforts Ubuntu (and indeed the umbrella of Linux) would not be as popular as it is today.

• Looking at some of the comments on Twitter, it appears that peoples love of Ubuntu is making Ubuntu One a natural choice and a way to show support for the distro. Tell me, ever seen this sort of “love” from a Windows user?If this service is a way Canonical can get a return from its OS and ensure a future of upgrades to a great distro, then thats no bad thing.

Kernel Space

• Things definitely are calming down, with just about 300 commits in the last week. And most of them are pretty small too, although the powerpc updates brought some defconfig changes that look largish.

Distributions

• It is with great pleasure that I announce the release of Foresight 2.1.1. Well known for being a desktop operating system featuring an intuitive user interface and a showcase of the latest desktop software, this new release brings you the latest GNOME 2.26.1 release, a newer Linux kernel 2.6.29, a revamped notification area, and a ton of Xorg improvements!

• The Foresight Linux Project team announced, on May 15th, the immediate availability of a new version of their Linux distribution. Foresight Linux 2.1.1, coming three months after the 2.1.0 release, brings notable changes, including the latest GNOME desktop environment and a new Linux kernel.

• Last week’s tips and tricks section provided information on how to “upgrade” a stable Mandriva release to the latest development branch. Although running development trees and upgrading them in regular intervals can be risky and may even render your system unbootable or otherwise unstable, it is an excellent way of participating in the development of your favourite distribution and reporting bugs to upstream projects. Needless to say, some Linux knowledge and experience is required, so this should only be done by those users who know how to fix their bootloader if things go wrong!

Ubuntu

• If you’ve ever rolled out multiple instances of the same operating system you know these roll outs can be a real pain. Much of the time you spend getting all of your rollouts the same. You could always do a network installation. Network installations, of course, depend upon a boot disk that help the client connect to the server containing the image to install. This type of installation is certainly ideal for larger installations.

• A while back I looked at the Christian Edition of Ubuntu (that distribution has been cancelled apparently as per the note on its site). This time around I was pleased to find that there was a Muslim edition available. So I gave it a download and thought I’d add it to our collection of Linux distribution reviews.

• The OWASP LiveCD is a collection of open-source security software for web developers as well as external and internal testers/auditors, that does very much the same job as the BackTrack LiveCD does for network and system penetration tests. Matt Tesauro is the project’s new maintainer and new versions have appeared since its redesign in the autumn of 2008.

Devices/Embedded

• So Archos will apparently be announcing something on June 11th in Paris and the general consensus is that it’ll probably be the Internet Media Tablet with voice support running Android that was announced back in early February.

• Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications vendor Sixnet is shipping a cellular-enabled remote monitoring and control device that runs Linux.

• Igel Technology announced a $186 thin client for small and home office (SOHO) businesses and “unmanaged” environments. The Igel One runs Linux on a Via Eden processor clocked at 400MHz, with 512MB RAM, 1GB flash, and Ethernet and USB connectivity, says the company.

Free Software/Open Source

• The source code version of ConcourseConnect is provided under the GNU Affero General Public License (GPL) and is available for download here. A commercial version providing greater scalability and integration capabilities is available starting at $5,000/yr for on-premise deployments. Concursive also offers a hosted option, with pricing available on request.

• Austin open-source software advocate William Hurley thinks he has the solution to the impasse over the redesign of the city’s Web site.

• In March, the City Council was slated to decide whether to pay Santa Clara, Calif.-based Cignex Technologies $704,088 to redesign the site. But word of the impending contract riled bloggers and Twitter users who were outraged that the city might send Web business to California.

• Following hard on the heels of its major Version 3.0 milestone, the OpenOffice.org team is back with Version 3.1 of its popular, cross-platform-friendly productivity suite.

• We were very pleased to have a chance to interview Dries Buytaert, founder of the legendary Drupal content management system. He shares his thoughts on its success, future and how it came to be in this intriguing and indepth discussion. We had so many questions, that we are only publishing part one while he works on the second half. Here you go.

• Remember when, back in late February, the Cabinet Office released their “Open Source, Open Standards and Re–Use: Government Action Plan”? Myself and many other FOSS commentators were obviously heartily encouraged and have talked about it and examined the policy in some detail.

Openness

• As I have observed recently (probably ad nauseam for some readers – apologies, but it needs saying), the openness that lies behind open source, open access and the rest feeds naturally into at least partial solutions for the political malaise affecting many countries, including, notably, the UK.

• As I blogged recently a major asset in C21 will be trust. I still trust learned societies to behave honorably (and when they do not it is deeply upsetting). I do not now trust commercial publishers to act honorably in all circumstances. The lobbying in Congress, Parliament, Europe by commercial publishers is often directly against the interests of scientists, most notably through the draconian imposition of copyright. The PRISM affair highlighted the depths to which some publishers will go to protect their income rather than the integrity of the domain. For Elsevier to finance PRISM to discredit Open Access science as “junk” while publishing “fake journals” means that no society can rely on their integrity.

• To summarize. Data itself must be completely free. The question is how to ensure that it is.

• The Open Science and Open Knowledge community has been discussing this for about 2 years. We seem to be agreed that legal tools are counterproductive, and that moderation is best applied by the community. This is represented by Community Norms – agreed practices that cause severe disapproval and possibly action when broken.

• Much like the rest of the globe’s Netizens, of course, I knew about Wikipedia. And as a Creative Commons blogger, open-source developer and avid user of all things GNU, Wikipedia’s philosophies were not unknown to me, either. But having just finished the book, The Wikipedia Revolution, I realized how little I really knew about the site and the movements that spawned it.

• I was in Europe for the past week and half, ending up in Leuven, Belgium to speak at the Twiist.be conference. The topic of my talk was “The Open, Social Web.” (PDF)

Leftovers

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Media News, the current owner of the Merc, has announced that it’s now going to start charging for online access to the paper, which seems like a move destined to fail dismally (and quickly).

• Perhaps part of the problem is the execs who work under him. Mathew Ingram points out that at a recent panel discussion the CEO of Sony Pictures, Michael Lynton, said: “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the internet. Period.”

• That would be a massive reinterpretation of copyright law, and would effectively destroy much of what makes the internet useful. This proposal would make it illegal to index the web. It would outlaw search engines. Yes, for the sake of saving some outdated newspaper businesses, these lawyers wish to make it so that before a search engine can index any website, it needs to negotiate permission. This would kill the internet.

• With Craigslist caving on how it manages its “adult” ads, we’ve noted that some politicians are still angry, despite having been a part of the group that bought into the agreement Craigslist made with them six months ago.

Copyrights

• The giveaway begins as the band’s North American tour kicks off with a Friday night (May 15) show at the Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, Florida.

• “Playing live is what we love,” Coldplay said in a statement. “This album is a thank you to our fans — the people who give us a reason to do it and make it happen.”

• Several studios are currently engaged in legal action against Australian ISP iiNet. They accuse iiNet of failing to take steps to stop its subscribers from sharing files by disconnecting them from the Internet. Now anti-piracy group AFACT says iiNet should just admit its customers are pirates, and stop wasting the court’s time.

• Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson is headed to federal court this summer to defend an accused file-swapper, and he plans to mount a novel defense: P2P sharing is simply “fair use.”

• The media may be stuffed full of hand-wringing tales of evil pirate downloaders busily hammering the last nails into the music industry, but new figures show that legal downloads are soaring.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DaySteve Weber, creator of the phrase “anti-rival goods” 15 (2005) [Embedment notice: your Web browser does not supportthe <video> tag. Firefox 3.5 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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