● 07.12.09

● Links 12/07/2009: GNU/Linux Shames Vista 7 and XP in Benchmark

Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Microsft’s monopoly is being threatened from all sides. This is a good thing for consumers. Microsoft will not be able to charge ridiculous amount of money for their software anymore. They will have to change and adopt if they would still like to be an important player in the future. The old ways of gauging customers for huge amounts of cash is over. Today there are plenty of alternatives and customers are switching to them. Microsoft is slowly crumbling and becoming less and less relevant. Now with Google Chrome OS taking its aim directly at Microsoft, it is inevitable for this large monopoly to finally fall apart.

• With the popularity of netbooks and the Android OS, Linux is becoming more mainstream than ever before. If you are dipping your toe into the Linux waters for the first time, or are an experienced developer on the platform, then the new Linux User & Developer website is for you.

• Linux is for gamers too. Too many people believe the popular myth that there are no or very few computer games available for Linux. Actually, there are many games available, in a large variety of genres and styles. There are First-Person-Shooters (FPS), Role-Playing Games (RPG), arcade games, puzzle games, strategy games, flight simulators, and other games. Just run online searches for a list of “top linux games”, or ask the nearest Linux fanatic what his favorites are.

• Often these Linux games do not always have quite as high a resolution or quite as many features as their proprietary, commercial counterparts, but any gamer can have a satisfying experience if he is willing to patiently experiment with the various Linux games that are available.

• Furthermore, due to special “emulator” technically written for Linux, it is sometimes possible to play Windows games on a Linux computer.

• Abundant performance delivered by today’s quad-core processors has shifted the performance bottleneck from the CPU and memory to the disk I/O subsystem in most of day-to-day usage scenarios. In order to optimize system’s responsiveness, performance-hungry computer enthusiasts carefully selecting top-notch, 10K RPM mechanical drives and stunningly fast SSD disks. But, what about the operating system – which one of modern operating systems is capable of utilizing fast hard drives and multi-core CPUs most effectively?

Events

• The Florida Linux Show and Florida Linux Alliance Group team up to present the the Florida Linux Show 2009 Orlando. The Florida Linux Alliance Group or FLAG is a new non-profit 501(c)3 corporation whose mission is to advocate Linux and Open Source Software and Linux education in the State of Florida.

• Although the next Linux.conf.au isn’t until January, 2010, it’s never too early to start planning. Conference organizers have put out a call for papers and miniconfs so if you’ve got an idea you want to share, now’s the time to put together your proposals.

Desktop

• Microsoft has a long history of making contracts with hardware developers that say that they cannot write drivers for non-Windows operating systems or even disclose the methodologies of the hardware to non-Microsoft developers in exchange for promotion deals. This effectively prevents drivers for Linux from being made.

• By cross platform programs I mean programs which are meant to be run on both windows and Linux operating systems. Programs like openoffice, firefox, thunderbird, java, flash, vmware, hardware drivers and many others. These programs are supposed to be able to run on more than one operating system and work in the same manner.

• Click2try enables developers to test, evaluate and host existing and new Open Source software products on pre-configured virtual appliances. Apart from offering on-demand and virtualized developer tools, the website also allows developers to try applications for free and then use them continuously if required with subscriptions.

• The source of the problem is an ITE IT8330G PCI-ISA bridge with IDE controller that is only supported by the ide-generic driver. This is rather obsolete and isn’t loaded in most kernel images including bootable CDs. The latest Ubuntu CD that would boot is the 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) alternate CD.

Server

• LAMP, with its flexibility, simplicity and perhaps most importantly – lack of upfront licensing costs – fueled an explosion in the hosting services market once upon a time. It’s entirely possible that a similarly open source cloud stack could do the same, particularly since far more software is delivered via the network than when the hosting industry first expanded.

Kernel Space

• A new version of the nv driver supports later NVIDIA GPUs. Drivers giving 3D support for later Radeon GPUs are making progress, and so is code for running the X server without root rights. The kernel developers have now issued new stable kernel versions and no longer support the 2.6.29 series.

• Not much has been heard in recent months about the open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA GPUs, properly known as “xf86-video-nv” but usually shortened to just “nv”. Recently, however, NVIDIA man Aaron Plattner released version 2.1.14. Although innovations are few, some of the changes mean that the driver now handles a great many later graphic chips that were previously only supported by the Nouveau driver or the proprietary NVIDIA driver. These include various GeForce 7950 cards, the GeForce models 285 and 295, and many other graphics cards in the 9000 series.

• It’s out there. Larger than I’d like, but the bulk of the changes are due to some late arch updates (MIPS, and powerpc documentation).

• NVIDIA’s Aaron Plattner has just announced the release of the xf86-video-nv 2.1.14 driver, but does it have anything in store? Not really. The NVIDIA open-source X.Org driver update brings support for a couple of new ASICs, fixed mode-setting for some NVIDIA GPUs, and other fixes, but nothing too exciting… At least compared to the ATI X.Org module and other drivers that have picked up kernel mode-setting support and other exciting features.

Applications

• Screencasts – digital movies with the desktop as a backdrop, the mouse as the protagonist and a voiceover – have become an integral part of electronic learning and form the basis of the computer-based training industry. As bandwidth becomes affordable and video-sharing websites start popping up, there’s a huge influx of free and open source tools.

• Until recently, few enterprises were using open source software for back office applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). But last month, an IDC survey of Western European companies found that nearly ten percent were using open source enterprise software. That’s surprisingly high for a market where the industry leaders themselves have only a ten percent share. IDC also reported that the leading open source enterprise applications are growing – by 20 percent or more per year.

• Exaile is a powerful and complete audio player for the GNOME desktop environment, which can easily compete with more popular players like Banshee or Rhythmbox.

• Organising your digital music collection can be a Herculean effort. Yet when you have several gigabytes of tracks to sift through, your only chance of finding what you want to hear is if your music files are properly tagged.

• Don’t panic if your machine can’t tell Barry White apart from the White Stripes, though: the creators of Picard feel your pain. That’s why, by the time Picard is finished with your music collection, each file will know the album it belongs to, the artist who performed it, its track number within the album and a host of other details.

• Sadly, there is no Blu-ray Player for Linux, yet. Last year CyberLink released its own DVD player for Linux.

Gaming

• I’m hoping the story with Caster will help quite a bit, even if it’s only Indie studios I’m working with for a while yet. There IS a market there and it’s underserved. Each win like World of Goo and Caster helps sell the story to other studios and to the mainline publishers. And it’s a story that it doesn’t have to be the way you see it and there’s a seriously underserved market that’s more than willing to pay you money for your product. If they see there’s a market and it may well pay them the extra expenses, you’ll see more stuff happening.

• As we have shared earlier, the company behind Unigine is working on a new game that will run on Linux, which is not too surprising when considering the fact that the company is very Linux friendly.

• The Wine development release 1.1.25 is now available.

Desktop Environments

• As some had already anticipated when Nokia acquired Trolltech, the next version of the Maemo platform will have its application framework based on Qt instead of Gtk+. This news was announced at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. While the switch to Qt may seem a major defeat for the GNOME community, this isn’t exactly true, as many of the underlying technologies will still be GNOME-centric.

• During the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Frank Karlitschek announced the open-pc initiative. The aim of this ambitious project is to cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community. Read on for more information about this initiative from the team.

• The project was initiated in response to the lack of quality in the Free Software-based hardware solutions currently on the market. As many reviewers and end-users have stated, the pre-installed software used by hardware vendors generated a bad image for Free Software with potentially interested end-users. Much of the software was buggy and not widely tested and device drivers were often unstable, non-free or not available at all.

Distributions

• Mandriva Linux One is certainly worth a download for anybody in the market for a desktop Linux distribution.

Devices/Embedded

• In one of the blog responses, “Matt” writes, “The possibilities are indeed intriguing from a Linux point-of-view: This would be the cheapest Linux device I know about, and it has a screen, keyboard, and GSM.”

Phones

• Dell is reportedly developing a pocket Internet device that runs on the Android operating system but has no phone capabilities. Such a device could score in cost and convenience categories, but questions remain about what kind of connectivity options it would provide. Is the PDA dead and gone, or will Dell and Android be able to breath new life into it?

• Despite the lagging economy, smartphones remain a hot market, and open source phones are in the spotlight. According to research from Juniper Research telecom consultants, the number of smartphones shipped with open source operating systems will increase from 106 million this year to 223 million by 2014. Juniper’s study found that open source operating systems and applications “are playing an increasingly important role in the differentiation of new smartphones and are a key factor in the choice of which handset to choose from by users.” Juniper’s findings are being echoed by other researchers.

• The official T-Mobile myTouch 3G site offers a countdown clock for T-Mo customer pre-orders, which just happens to correspond with the day of the media event. Om received the handset earlier and says the phone is worth the wait. Luckily, you don’t have to wait much longer to see more of it, although even pre-orders won’t be arriving until August 3.

Sub-notebooks

• Today marks the knee of the great curve of Microsoft’s decline, it is downhill fast from here. The inflection point went almost unnoticed in 2003, but this time it is obvious to even the most myopic observer. The garbage scow named SS MS was just holed, and it’s listing badly.

• So now the IT media world just went wild over Google’s Chrome OS announcement. Comments are coming in from all over, some overly optimistic, some dismissive. All of these are speculative at best, and none of them carry a lot of weight as Google hasn’t even done a code drop yet, much less a release.

Free Software/Open Source

• Licensed under the GPLv2, Vanilla works on all the major Web browsers and runs on virtually any Web server with more recent versions of PHP and MySQL.

• The most important thing for your open source project’s success is obviously good and useful code. Licensing, however, can make or break your project as well.

• Categories run the gamut from technical (Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins) and entertaining (Best Project for Gamers) to “life-changing” (Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything). Nominated projects are equally wide-ranging and while there are a number of familiar names like KeePass Password Safe and Audacity, quite a few lesser known projects are being given the opportunity to shine. Avogadro, a cross platform, 3-dimensional molecular editor, is up for Best Project for Academia and microblogging client Choqok has been nominated for Best New Project.

Leftovers

• France’s highest constitutional authority ruled in June that Internet access is a fundamental human right, killing the three-strikes provision in the so-called Hadopi anti-piracy legislation. Today the infamous anti-piracy bill is back and in its revamped form has just been adopted by the Senate. “3 Strikes” is back on the table. Again.

• Reporting from Washington — The music won’t stop for Internet radio after a group of webcasters struck an agreement with SoundExchange, the organization that collects royalties for musicians and record companies, over payments for playing music online.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayAlexandro Colorado, international open source evangelist 16 (2004)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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