● 06.02.09

● Links 02/06/2009: SSD Optimised for Linux; Moblin Gets More Partners

Posted in News Roundup at 7:21 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Engineers from SanDisk and Canonical Ltd., creator of the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system, have worked together on system optimizations for the Gen2 pSSD, resulting in improved system responsiveness and longer battery life, SanDisk said in a statement.

• So you have heard of GNU/Linux and/or FLOSS as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. You didn’t have time to try this daunting new technology with 3-d desktops and you didn’t know that “free” means “freedom” not “gratis”, that you are welcome to make money out of it. That’s ok. We will leave all the explanation works to your local LUGs — Linux User Groups. I will just sketch how you can make your foreign customers happy while making profit out of it.

• The kernel developers have added new features to thousands of the Linux kernel’s existing drivers and integrated numerous additional drivers. This further increases the variety of hardware supported by Linux.

• A few days ago, Linus Torvalds released the seventh Linux 2.6.30 release candidate. According to Torvalds, most of the merged changes are minor, and the next big kernel version is nearing completion – although Torvalds does still anticipate an eighth release candidate. The Kernel Log takes this opportunity to discuss what’s new in the driver arena of Linux 2.6.30; the final version of the forthcoming kernel will probably be released in one to three weeks.

• Thanks to GIMP FX Foundry, you can now equip GIMP 2.6 with 117 additional scripts that can work some spectacular extra effects into existing graphics.

• The Gimp FX Foundry SourceForce project made it its assignment to provide scripts for porting into the current GIMP or allow creating them from scratch. The scripts allow GIMP graphics to be endowed with special effects, such as blurring or distorting them in certain ways. The Foundry now provides 117 new scripts for GIMP 2.6 that are not part of the graphic software’s standard installation.

Distributions

Red Hat

• Red Hat has expanded its offerings to give customers value, choice and flexibility with its set of new Java application platform products.

• In a dueling press conference, which was held at the same time as Sun Microsystems’ keynote during its CommunityOne event just down the street at the Moscone Center here, Red Hat announced the expansion of its application server offerings to include workload specific solutions designed to provide increased flexibility and choice for enterprise customers. Red Hat held its event at the Marriott in downtown San Francisco, while Sun kicked off its day-long JavaOne preview event only steps away.

• Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the JBoss Open Choice application platform strategy which aims to provide a single environment for deploying a variety of programming models with a common platform, making it easier to develop and deploy applications.

New Releases

• [31 May 2009] New stable releases version 2009.05 available: grml, grml64, grml-medium, grml64-medium, grml-small and grml64-small.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.28

Devices/Embedded

• I knew there was going to be big Linux netbook news coming out of the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan, but I didn’t know it was going to be this big. Sources at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, tell me that Canonical will be announcing new partnerships with Intel, SanDisk, and RealNetworks. To me, the biggest news is that Canonical will be demonstrating the Moblin version of the UNR (Ubuntu Netbook Remix).

• MontaVista® Software, Inc., the leader in embedded Linux® commercialization, today announced continued support of Moblin, an optimized open source Linux software stack and application framework. MontaVista Linux 6 Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) based on Moblin Version 2 for Intel® Atom™ processor-based platforms help embedded developers bring commercial devices to market quickly and cost-effectively, incorporating the robust Internet and media capabilities offered by Moblin v2.

• In a related action, MIPS said it has joined the Open Embedded Software Foundation (OESF), which seeks to standardize and promote the development of Android platforms for embedded devices.

• “By releasing Android to open source, Google created the opportunity for widespread proliferation of the Android platform, and now the work the OESF is doing will help drive the platform in new directions,” Art Swift, MIPS’s VP of marketing, said in a statement. “We look forward to playing a key role in proliferating Android into digital consumer devices.”

• While two laptops based on Google Inc.’s Android operating system made an appearance ahead of the annual Computex exhibition in Taipei, a senior executive at the search engine company declined to discuss what steps the company is taking to adapt the smartphone operating system for laptops.

• Saying it will improve the netbook user experience on Linux, RealNetworks Inc. is licensing its RealPlayer for Mobile for the popular Ubuntu Linux distro running on x86 and coming ARM-based netbooks, as well as three up-and-coming “instant-on” Linux operating systems.

Free Software/Open Source

• Lots of talk about Google Wave last week, but after reading five articles that all described it in a similar fashion, I still didn’t quite get what all the fuss was about. Finally, at the behest of one of my online friends I looked at the first 40 minutes of the 1 hour and 20 minute presentation from last week’s Google I/O conference, and I finally had an inkling of the potential.

• [...]

• After watching the presentation, I wondered about the complexity of the interface and the number of adjustments you could make, and if this could have an impact on mass adoption (say on the scale of Gmail). Twitter is about as simple as you can get, 140 character limit and click Send and some people still have trouble understanding the nuances. Wave is a magnitude more complex and I wonder if this will hold back adoption beyond the technical elite.

• The HOST program is a collaborative effort involving DHS, Southern Miss, the Department of the Navy and the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) and is designed to facilitate the continued adoption of Open Technology Solutions (OTS) within U.S. Government IT systems. DHS and the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) in San Diego will invest $1.5 million in the HOST program to be administered by The University of Southern Mississippi and coordinated by the Open Source Software Institute.

• “In 2003, IU set a strategy to begin building some of its essential systems by pooling resources with other institutions,” said Wheeler. “We saw that the Internet could reduce coordination costs of working together. The sharing of open source application software could deliver essential features while reducing year-to-year costs, and avoid the future risks of large licensing fees and escalating maintenance costs.”

• One of the hardest things to create in open source software is a project that attracts significant outside development contributions, according to Cnet.

• The development and distribution of open source software, a well-established software development model, is one potential solution to the looming challenges of integration. Characterized by collaboration among individuals and organizations with common interests, shared intellectual property, and a commitment to standards open source has been used in over 1,400 VA facilities and numerous healthcare systems throughout the country.

• Multimedia Development Corp (MDeC) expects revenue from open source-related software and services to increase to RM800 million within two years.

• There was some resistance at first, but the two technicians, 30-year-old Leon Bailey and 23-year-old Jeremy Norris, sold county officials on the use of open-source code – or free

• The economic climate has forced businesses to focus on running on a tighter budget. Disaster recovery (DR) is not immune from the budget crunch (although DR practitioners will preach that it is the one area that should never face cuts). So what lower-cost options are available for building and maintaining DR site-to-site replication solutions?

Releases

• PLplot (see http://plplot.sourceforge.net) is a cross-platform software package for creating scientific plots that has been in continuous development since its inception 17 years ago. On May 23, 2009 the PLplot developers quietly celebrated our ten thousandth commit since our initial software repository was populated back in May 1992.

• Version 9.06 (June 2009) of the Ca3D-Engine has just been released. The Ca3D-Engine is a modern game engine and game development kit with 3D real-time graphics and multi-player network support for Windows and Linux.

Sun

• VirtualBox is an x86 virtualisation product available under the GPL. The product is backed by Sun, which offers enterprise licences with support.

• As we reported last week, the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06 would come on Monday, and sure enough, it has been released by Sun Microsystems. The OpenSolaris 2009.06 release presents network virtualization support with Crossbow, SPARC support, Intel Xeon 5500 series hardware support, MySQL and PHP DTrace probes, improved usability with its package management system, and much more.

• The new release is not considered by Sun to be a replacement for its flagship Solaris 10 operating system, though Sun is now extending commercial support for OpenSolaris 2009.06 for up to five years. The 2009.06 release comes at a critical time for Sun and is likely the last OpenSolaris release before Sun is acquired by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) later this year.

Adobe

• The most logical solution to this problem would be for Adobe to allow open access to view, modify, and distribute to the code programmers will understand used to develop Flash. This strategy would have a multitude of benefits for not only consumers and Adobe as a company, but for society as a whole. Collectively, consumers would like the best possible experience online, and Adobe would like to make as much money as possible. Both of these private interests would be stimulated.

• Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) announced that the pre-release alpha version of Adobe AIR software for Linux® operating systems is available on Adobe Labs (www.adobe.com/go/airlinux). The Linux community of developers can now use proven Web technologies, such as HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash® and Adobe Flex® software, to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy to desktops across operating systems. RIA developers can extend the reach of their desktop applications on Adobe AIR to Linux users without writing additional platform-specific code, providing access to innovative, branded desktop applications that were previously only available to Mac and Windows users.

• Movial, the company that inspires rich, intuitive Internet experiences, today announced that it will integrate, test, and certify Adobe® Flash® technology in embedded mobile environments that utilize ARM based Linux under the Open Screen Project, a broad initiative of more than two dozen industry leaders to deliver a consistent runtime environment across screens. Today’s announcement reflects Adobe and Movial’s close working relationship in enabling Flash technology on a wide variety of Mobile Linux device environments, including netbooks, smartphones and other handheld devices.

CMS

• Welcome to another installment of our what’s coming from the open source CMS projects in the next 30 days.

Business

• Database vendor Ingres has teamed up with Red Hat to offer an open source developer stack with features intended to be comparable to proprietary offerings from the likes of IBM or Oracle.

• The economy isn’t the only reason open source management applications are currently garnering a lot of attention. With vendors building commercial business models around the low-cost tools, now is the time to invest in software that can manage, automate and control enterprise environments.

• The portal is bundled with the free HSQLDB database, which is suitable only for very simple portals. If you plan to store lots of data in the portal, you should migrate to a better database like MySQL.

• OW2, the leading consortium in open source middleware, today announced that the open-source application server JOnAS 5 has passed the Java(tm) Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE 5 ™) Compliance Test Suite thus becoming the first OSGi based open-source application server to be Java EE 5 certified.

• The OW2 Community is once again present at JavaOne. The community will be proudly showing a selection of world-class open source projects for the enterprise information system, all of which benefit from professional support provided by independent companies.

• Infobright, a provider of open source data warehousing solutions, and Pentaho, a provider of open source alternative for business intelligence, have collaborated to deliver an integrated virtual machine that combines Infobright Community Edition with Pentaho BI Suite Community Edition deployed into a virtual machine based on Ubuntu Linux with the Tomcat application server.

• Cost isn’t the only reason IT managers should consider open source IT management applications, industry watchers say, as developers and communities continue to crank out enterprise-scale features, security and support for the free tools.

Government

• The open source philosophy of collaboration should also be reinforced by lab directors. This would require a cultural shift as researchers can be protective of their projects and funding allocations.

• Opening the books as to where the money comes from would also give citizens more confidence that public funds are being used wisely. Earmarks granted by senators to start projects in their districts could be compared to research already in progress.

Openness

• Zackary M.Newmark, an American Director now settled in Spain and working on his next project is Opted by Sandeep Marwah of Marwah studios, India for the direction of new documentary which shall be shot in India, informed Zackary Newmark to the press in 62nd Cannes Film Festival.

• Connexions brings together authors, educators, and learners in a space where they can easily share expertise and experience.

• Connexions allows anyone to create, view, and share educational material in the form of courses, books, and reports.

• [...]

• Benefits of Modular, Interconnected, Open-Source Educational Material

Leftovers

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Conroy, for the uninitiated, is the man behind the great internet filtering idea , a trial for which is ongoing. A list of blacklisted websites, which would be blocked once the filtering took effect, was leaked and caused Conroy quite some embarrassment.

• The whole episode also exposed the minister as something of a neophyte when it comes to technology – what people on the net would call a n00b.

• Britain’s biggest broadband supplier has been accused of limiting download speeds on its cheapest package without giving users a clear warning.

• Barely four months after dropping its proposal of forcing TV channels to show only an “authorized” feed during security emergencies, the government is now seeking to censor news portals and other websites, that too even at normal times.

• So what if cancer researchers have close financial ties to Big Pharma? Scientists have to disclose their associations with drug companies when they publish research in respected journals and they’d never let a little thing like financial ties influence how they interpret outcomes or run a study. Right?

Copyrights

• Advance Patrol was one of the bands used by the prosecution in The Pirate Bay trial as an example of a band harmed by The Pirate Bay. Except… apparently the band didn’t think so. Isak sends in the news that the band has released its latest album on The Pirate Bay, with a message saying how they love

• People are cutting back on lots of spending these days, but one area that was supposedly relatively safe was in-home entertainment expenditures.

• There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country’s economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale.

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