● 07.23.09

● Links 23/07/2009: KDE 4.3 Milestone; New Linux RC

Posted in News Roundup at 7:39 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• For FOSS devotees who’d like a sprinkling of Linux refreshment this summer, there’s a wide assortment of good Linux news — and a little Linux nonsense — to choose from. Among other things, bask in the knowledge that Red Hat has become the first Linux company to join the Fortune 500. Also, MontaVista has clocked a one-second boot time for embedded industrial apps.

• Back in 2003, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, dismissed GNU/Linux as a “great environment for the hobbyist” but not for the enterprise. The relative success of Linux on Sun’s chosen ground, and the subsequent decline in the fortunes of Sun have proved McNealy’s assessment to be wrong, but Linux undeniably has its roots and inspiration among hackers and hobbyists.

• I am a Linux geek. There I said it. Actually, I am kind of proud of being a Linux geek. I slogged through the bad old days to get here. It seems like every day something new shows up that makes me glad that I chose Linux as my tool of choice.

• As an indication of the performance increase you might expect by replacing a hard drive with an SSD, a quick test using a $99 32GB Crucial Internal 2.5″ Solid State Drive reduced the time required to boot Ubuntu 8.04 to 18 seconds on a test system, compared to the 32 seconds required to boot the operating system using a fast SATA II hard drive on the same system. (This is not intended to be a rigorous test but goes some way to illustrating the significant improvements in read times that an SSD can offer.)

• Can this really be true? Can Microsoft be gaining ground through it all? LinuxInsider couldn’t resist asking around.

• “I don’t think Microsoft is getting its edge back,” Montreal consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack told LinuxInsider.

• “Windows 7 is better than Vista, but still more of a resource hog than XP was,” Mack explained. “Meanwhile, Linux has been lowering its hardware requirements. Previously it managed Vista-level desktop effects with less than XP resources.”

• The software is compatible with currently available editions of Microsoft Windows, as well as Linux, he said. ITRI is looking for partners to start distributing the software.

• In this episode: Google announces its own Chrome OS operating system and the Moblin project gets X Windows running with user privileges. We talk about how we got into Linux and discuss whether we think Google is becoming Microsoft.

• Some would say that comparing Ubuntu or even past them, Mint and PCLinuxOS, is like going to Mickey D’s. It’s like driving in and ordering the combo that has been pre-packaged to accommodate the widest groups typical wants or needs. Nothing wrong with that, lot’s of people like to do things just that way.

Desktop

• Branding is expensive and very important. For example, folk will now buy Skoda cars because they know they are well engineered, good value and belong to the Volkswagen Audi group. Skoda sales-people like the SEAT sales-people remind potential customers that they are really buying an Audi at discount prices. Up-scaling a brand such as Skoda costs serious marketing money and even that required a lift up from an already long term expensively established brand (Vorsprung whatever).

• Despite the best efforts of Red Hat and Ubuntu I doubt whether they have enough financial depth to build brands to rival Microsoft!

• Introducing “Always Up To Date”, our classification for Operating Systems that are ALWAYS updated on the day they ship from On-Disk.com, so you always receive the absolute latest we can provide. This freshness factor results in more secure, better performing installations where every disc is as fresh as a new release.

• The Republic of Macedonia, for example, chose NComputing for its massive, 180,000-seat educational computing initiative, which is the world’s largest Linux-based virtual desktop program.

• Some of the 23 projects currently listed, like BigView, reflect a developer focus. BigView “allows for interactive panning and zooming of images,” but only if you’re running Linux on your desktop.

• christian.einfeldt writes “Alan Lord, a FOSS computer consultant based in the UK, has announced that Amazon UK honored his request for a refund of the Microsoft license fee portion of the cost of a new Asus netbook PC that came with Microsoft Windows XP. Lord details the steps that he took to obtain a refund of 40.00 GBP for the cost of the EULA, complete with links to click to request a refund. Lord’s refund comes 10 years after the initial flurry of activity surrounding EULA discounts, started by a blog post by Australian computer consultant Geoffrey Bennett which appeared on Slashdot on 18 January 1999. That Slashdot story led to mainstream press coverage, such as stories in CNN, the New York Times on-line, and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name just a few. The issue quieted down for a few years, but has started to gain some momentum again in recent years, with judges in France, Italy, and Israel awarding refunds. But if Lord’s experience is any indication, getting a refund through Amazon might be as easy as filling out a few forms, at least in the UK, without any need to go to court.”

Server

• “We are very excited about our relationship with Canonical,” said Woody Rollins, co-founder and CEO of Eucalyptus. “It is a pleasure to collaborate with a company that shares our commitment to innovation and technical excellence.”

• Building on the Call of Duty 4 engine, Call of Duty: World at War thrusts players into the ruthless and gritty chaos of WWII combat like never been before, and challenges them to band together to survive the most harrowing and climactic battles of WWII that led to the demise of the Axis powers on the European and South Pacific fronts. The title re-defines WWII games by offering an uncensored experience with unique enemies and combat variety, including Kamikaze fighters, ambush attacks, Banzai charges and cunning cover tactics, as well as explosive on-screen action through all new cooperative gameplay.

• In this technical brief white paper, IDC describes the importance of manageability in the selection of a blade platform and examines the needs of the market with respect to managing large volumes of homogeneous Linux platforms, with a specific focus on the capabilities of HP’s Insight Control Linux Edition.

Kernel Space

• Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 190.xx Linux beta driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. The NVIDIA 190.16 Beta driver brought a number of VDPAU fixes, PowerMizer control features, a number of new official and unofficial OpenGL extensions receiving GLX protocol support, and there were a number of other fixes and enhancements too. However, now that we have had a chance to analyze this driver, there is more in store than what the change-log shares regarding this driver. There is in fact support for the unreleased OpenGL 3.2 specification.

• Ok, that was a fun week.

• We had a binutils bug, a ccache bug, and a compiler bug. And that was just the bugs that were outside the kernel, but resulted in a broken build.

• But while that was unusual, the rest of the stuff is pretty regular. Lots of small fixes all around. The patch is dominated by a couple of new network drivers, but apart from those, it’s generally pretty small – lots of one-liners and “few-liners”.

• While Luc Verhaegen (one of the original RadeonHD driver developers) has been out of work since right after FOSDEM when he was laid off by Novell due to cutbacks, he hasn’t quit coding. While Luc hasn’t been working on the RadeonHD driver, or any ATI driver for that matter, one of the projects that he has gotten involved with is CoreBoot, the project formerly known as LinuxBIOS.

Applications

• Bordeaux is a Wine GUI configuration manager that runs winelib applications. It also supports installation of third party utilities, installation of applications and games, and the ability to use custom configurations. Bordeaux is written in GTK and requires GTK 2.10 or higher to be installed on a given system. Bordeaux also uses wget and cabextract extensively and they should be installed for Bordeaux to operate correctly.

• In less than two weeks we will be officially releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 “Sandtorg” and this by far is the biggest upgrade ever to our flagship testing and benchmarking software. While the Phoronix Test Suite is most often associated with Linux, this open-source software is also compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and BSD operating systems too, all of which offer new improvements with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. In this article we have detailed some of the major highlights of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and how we seek to drive innovation into PC benchmarking and performance profiling.

Gaming

• It’s no secret that one of the areas that Windows has the advantage of Linux, is gaming. It’s not that Linux as an OS isn’t capable of running quality games, it’s just that game manufacterers don’t think the Linux gamers can make them any money. For that reason, it’s always nice when a game is released with a native Linux version, like World of Goo a couple of months ago, and Savage 2. Now, the same people who are responsible for the latter are working on a game called Heroes of Newerth. It’s being beta tested at the moment, and yes, the good people of S2 Games provide Windows, Mac and Linux version (both 32-bit and 64!).

• A few hours ago we invited everyone to come play this new Linux-native game with us, which happened to be Heroes of Newerth by S2 Games. This game is still under development and details surrounding this title are very scarce as the media (including Phoronix), is not yet allowed to post any media or really talk about the game that much. However, a closed beta is currently going on for this game, both with the Linux and Windows editions. S2 Games was surprised by the interest that was building around this new game of theirs on Linux, so they decided to let us start handing out keys to join the beta program. Well, so far, that is going extremely well.

Desktop Environments

• The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC3, a release candidate of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.

Distributions

• Toorox Linux ships as a live DVD featuring KDE 4.2.4, Linux 2.6.28, and lots of useful applications. It uses KNOPPIX hardware detection, but what makes Toorox stand out is its extra tools and utilities.

• This distro has some great potential. Ubuntu and it’s derivatives may be influential in the English and French speaking world, I can see Pardus being influential in the Turkish and Asian speaking world.

• According to this posting to the fedora-test-list by Liam, there’s going to be some installation testing for the Fedora 12 (Constantine) Alpha candidate next week, on Wednesday July 29. This is a chance to shake out some of the new features in the Anaconda installation application that have come in over the past couple of months. The more testing we can get on the installer early, the more bulletproof we can make it for our final release by the time code is frozen in the fall.

Ubuntu

• For new linux users however I would not recomend this. As such ones will find themselves tinkering with alot of things that work out of the box in other linux distributions.

• Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has recently released a beta version of their online file syncing service – UbuntuOne for public testing. This file syncing service is similar to the popular Dropbox service and it allows you to share and sync file across different computers.

• [...]

• Ubuntu One is still at beta mode and there are plenty of things that are not on par with other online storage solution such as Dropbox. However, with the vision of Ubuntu One and as Ubuntu become more and more popular, I won’t be surprised to see Ubuntu One becoming a major force in the file and data management arena in the near future.

• So, after two months, I’m back with Kubuntu. This time, I’ve installed KDE 4.2. Many of the kinks of the original Plasma version have been worked out. I’ve been reunited with all my favorite KDE apps in their native desktop environment. Even the sound card is working again. I’m happy to be back. The only real holdover from my Gnome days is Evolution. I’ve left Kmail, and for now have taken a real liking to Evolution as the best email app for my needs.

• Prentice Hall has published the fourth edition of The Official Ubuntu Book, covering the latest Ubuntu 9.04 release. As with previous versions, the fourth edition aims to bring new users up to speed on the popular Linux distro, from installation to configuration to exploring Ubuntu’s applications.

New Distributions

• Available on mirrors worldwide from a week ago, Scientific Linux 4.8, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 8, was officially announced last evening by Connie Sieh and Troy Dawson. The new release comes with major improvements and package updates.

• The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.37

Devices/Embedded

• Being a Linux user, you’ll want to log into the administration panel to do some configuration first and then mount your network shares. NFS is the closest thing to a native network file system for Linux and I personally like to use NFS over CIFS.

• Pogo Linux announced the availability of the StorageDirector Z250, Z350 and Z450, the latest storage appliances in the company’s managed-storage product line. The new enhancements include support forIntel’s ( News – Alert) Xeon 5500 series processors and an upgrade to the NexentaStor 2.0 released recently.

Phones

• 1. Linux-based webOS

• With webOS, the Palm Pre offers true multitasking capabilities that will enable users to run multiple applications at the same time. You can easily and fluidly switch between running applications (just like swapping cards) on Palm Pre’s touchscreen display. Meanwhile, the latest iPhone OS 3.0 still has a very limited multitasking feature.

Sub-notebooks

• Now that everybody has jumped on the Netbook bandwagon, a new mobile device parade is pulling into town. Led by Qualcomm, so-called Smartbooks are slated to debut in late 2009. Expected to be slightly larger than the iPhone, Smartbooks are mobile Internet devices (MIDs) that run Windows, Google Android and a range of Linux alternatives.

• What I told them was that I resent being forced to pay a “Microsoft PENALTY” for a pre-installed operating system which I have no choice about, particularly when there has previously been a choice and ASUS decided to take that choice away from their customers.

• NEC, which builds WiMAX radios into several types of mobile devices, has promised to contribute to the Moblin project. Meanwhile, Intel- and Google-backed WiMAX provider Clearwire launched fixed and mobile services today in Las Vegas, its fourth urban market.

• Intel’s work promoting netbooks — the downsized PCs that are gaining in mindshare — was touted by a company official Wednesday, who stressed benefits in boot-up times, graphics, and network capabilities during a technology conference.

• Hacao, made a wise decision by choosing the Pico netbook which is based on the famous MSI Wind netbook. The MSI Wind is one of the most popular, easy to use, netbooks here in the Vietnamese market (though you will tend to see more EeePCs and Aspire Ones in the coffee shops). Pico is a good choice with it large keyboard and monitor screen. My students who own MSI Winds have no complaints.

EBook

• iRex extended its electronic book line back in September last year, but it’s taken us more than a couple of weeks to get used to its new DR1000s Digital Reader and understand that this is really a new class of product, rather than an evolution of the smaller readers of the past.

• I think the Sony e-Reader is a much better choice as a result.

• Yet another reason why people should Just Say No to DRM.

Free Software/Open Source

• Clear the decks, I’m now an avid Firefox user. It took me a long time to give up my treasured Maxthon, an Internet Explorer shell that I truly loved. When Maxthon was first released, it had features years before they were added to IE8–tabs, multi-threading, groups, add-ons — things the kids at Microsoft should have copied eons ago, but didn’t.

• As one can see, working with RAM disks on Solaris/OpenSolaris is fairly simple and can be configured in just a couple of steps. Who knows, you may find situations in your current environment which may benefit from the use of a RAM disk. Note – Do not forget to destroy the zpool and the RAM disks when not in use. The last thing you want to do is waste much needed memory.

• Opponents of SQL had their hands strengthened when Google’s SQL-free technique, “Map/Reduce”, showed it could search databases measured in petabytes. They look on relational databases as antiquated, a technique that can’t cope with today’s quantities of data or meet the requirements of full-text searching. Rather than relations, they rely on key-value pairs.

• Adobe has used the Open Source Conference (OSCON), currently taking place in California’s San Jose, to announce a new strategy for its Flash Platform. Some people are questioning Adobe’s motives.

• McNeill sees a growing placement for Linux support — and thus open source — for back end operations, and Bomgar noted that a lot more traction for Linux is occurring. Both factors mean a need for more tech support.

• July 16, 2009 — Insecure.Org is pleased to announce the immediate, free availability of the Nmap Security Scanner version 5.00 from http://nmap.org/. This is the first stable release since 4.76 (last September), and the first major release since the 4.50 release in 2007. Dozens of development releases led up to this.

• 3. Open Source Operating Systems

• Open source operating systems are easy to sell, however.

• Linux ubiquity is here, and even if you pay for support contracts, the total cost of ownership is significantly lower compared to Windows servers. The stability is proven, as is the interoperability. Phasing out Windows servers by migrating services to Linux is a quick way to save large amounts of money.

• Another common objection to adoption of Linux is staff skill levels. Controversial as it may be, you have to phase out systems administrators that only know Windows. For example, take your average Linux jockey, who has been exposed to the nuts and bolts and knows how the important protocols work, rather than just how one vendor’s GUI works, and thrust new tasks at her. She will quickly master anything and that is the type of sysadmin you want. This rarely works the other way around, yet the Windows-only administrator generally make the same salaries. The sound business decision is fairly straightforward.

• OmniTI today announced the availability of Reconnoiter, a new Open Source monitoring and trending system that handles highly distributed, heterogeneous environments and implement highly efficient probes for a rapidly growing number of services. As a full-service website consulting company that designs and manages sustainable architectures that can support hundreds of millions of users, OmniTI relies on being able to funnel its network monitoring back to a business intelligence system that is capable of graphing, trending, reporting and fault detection.

• With the rising popularity of cloud computing, entire operating systems designed to work in the cloud should come as no surprise. Indeed, virtual computing environments are becoming so predominate that some suspect Google’s development of the Chrome browser — and more recently the Chrome operating system — is nothing more than cloud computing in disguise.

• For any websites, blogs and portal owner, it’s essential to realize that results of their investment and hard work they are making in order to achieve the goals they have set should be closely monitored. The key to tracking the health of your site is web analytics software. To help things out we had already done with the top 10 web log analysis software. Given the line of top software, the O’Reilly Radar report shows open source growing exponentially, making it to the mainstream. With free availability joining the ease of scaling and agile nature, there’s a greater inclination towards open source software. Moving with the trend, we went for an extensive research to pick out the top 3 open source software for web analytics.

• At OSCON 2009 in San Jose, California, Google announced the winners of this years Google O’Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their “dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source”.

Business

• At OSCON in San Jose, Kaltura announced the public launch of its open source online video platform, called Kaltura Community Edition.

• How things are going at the Apache Software Foundation?

• Fascinated by the Ruby on Rails development environment, he devised a sophisticated application layer to run “over” Asterisk which ultimately led to Adhearsion.

• http://ivr.tmcnet.com/topics/ivr-voicexml/articles/60485-adhearsion-voxeo-launch-voxeo-labs.htm

• Adhearsion and Voxeo Launch Voxeo Labs

• Talend Integration Suite is the first open source enterprise data integration solution, designed to support multi-user development, and to scale to the highest levels of data volumes and process complexity. The tool is a subscription service that extends award winning Talend Open Studio with professional grade technical support and additional features to facilitate the work of large teams and industrialise enterprise-scale deployments.

• The two open-source apps, OpenVPN and the Sendmail Mail Transfer Agent, are both extremely popular among business users. According to a Veracode press release, its “A” rating indicates that a software developer has “developed a secure application that has been independently evaluated for software vulnerabilities against industry standards.”

• Since the release of RapidMiner 4.4 in March, Rapid-I again invested a lot of effort into further improving RapidMiner to better meet the growing demand of data analysis, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), and BI (Business Intelligence). A lot of exciting new features found their way into the latest release of RapidMiner and can now be downloaded free of charge.

• I’ve been curious, for a long time, about when truly free open source software would start dribbling on to the DS marketplace. I describe them as truly free because there would be no upsell, but I totally agree with the sentiment that open source software is not free when you consider a skilled IT-type has to be put against the project to make it work and keep it running.

Funding

• 2. Consider open source More and more organizations are running mission-critical parts of their business on open source. What was once thought to be the focus of a small group of uber-geeks has emerged as a viable enterprise option. The open source community boasts many developers, creating the next big breakthroughs. While large organizations may topple (read: Nortel), Open source can live on beyond the corporation. It also delivers cost-savings and avoids vendor lock-in.

CMS

• Built on the open source blog platform WordPress Multi User (WordPress MU) and some custom themes and plugins such as WPDB Profiling, project leaders claim that the new platform has made it considerably easier and cheaper for WNET.ORG to roll out multiple user-friendly sites.

• As I came to learn in the interview, it’s as though Buytaert and Mullenweg were separated at birth. They were born only 6 years apart (The older of the two — Buytaert — was born in 1978 when I was a senior in high school). Both went on to create wildly successful PHP-based content management systems (Mullenweg did WordPress, Buytaert did Drupal). Both men open sourced those content management systems. And today, both are the founders of VC-funded commercial enterprises (Mullenweg’s Automattic and Buytaert’s Acquia) looking to capitalize on their founders’ art and fame.

Government

• As mentioned before, sometimes EU funded projects overlap. Asking around about European open source initiatives, I happened to get in touch with Paul Adams. Apparently Paul is the only person who has worked on each of the three projects to whom the EC asked to collaborate, and I asked him more about such cooperation.

Openness

• A friend pointed out to me the release of Reuter’s Handbook of Journalism. He was seeing this as a blow against paid content. I am still trying to get my arms around what will happen in the paid content world. I can make a case for a few models, but the thing I believe the most in is that revenues for specific content go down, while diving down to specific demographics of the audience will get a higher premium.

Standards/Consortia

• Last November, the EFF took Apple to task for threatening the owner of a wiki site. Apple claimed that an ongoing discussion on the site about how to build interoperability between iPods and iPhones and alternative software other than iTunes violated the DMCA — which requires quite a novel interpretation of the DMCA. After Apple refused to back down, EFF sued in April. Somewhere along the way, it looks like Apple’s lawyers started to realize that it had pretty close to no chance whatsoever and has now withdrawn this particular threat.

• Adobe has released the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) and the Text Layout Framework (TLF) as open source under the Mozilla Public Licence, to address what the company sees as the needs of developers, publishers and media companies.

Leftovers

Censorship/Web Abuse

• How Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books from the Kindle paves the way for book-banning’s digital future.

• Eventually the new website for getting feedback will be open to the public, FCC Chair Genachowski says. For now it’s an internal portal.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A report released by the International Intellectual Property Alliance shows that copyright-related industry has been booming in recent years. But a closer examination of the data shows that the numbers don’t add up so easily.

• Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN has presented its demands to the former Pirate Bay operators and its prospective buyer. Today, in a court case against the three co-founders of the site, BREIN demanded that they block access to all Dutch visitors.

• Myth 5: YouTube is only monetizing 3-5% of the site. This oft-cited statistic is old and wrong, and continues to raise much speculation. In our view, the percentage is far less important than the total number of monetized views, and we are now helping partners generate revenue from hundreds of millions of video views in the U.S. every week (and billions worldwide), more than any other video site has total views. Monetized views have more than tripled in the past year, as we’re adding partner content very quickly and doing a better job of promoting their videos across the site.

• These myths are officially busted.

Associated Bullies

• I must admit that I tend to disagree with a significant percentage of Lichtman’s conclusions on intellectual property, but unlike many copyright maximalists, I tend to believe he’s much more intellectually honest on these issues. His positions don’t seem to come from a “more is absolutely better because it makes me/my clients more money” position, but he honestly tends to believe that greater copyright leads to a greater net outcome, and tends to argue reasonably about it — though, I believe some of that reasoning, and the assumptions that underpin it are faulty.

• [...]

• No, what’s not fair is claiming that any of that is the AP’s to own. None of it. Not a single part of it was. All of that — the hope, the way he was looking, was simply there. What made him choose it was the look on Obama’s face — which is not Garcia’s creative output, and thus cannot be covered by copyright. In fact, the most frustrating thing of all is that Cendali repeatedly claims that Fairey was ripping off Garcia (and the AP), but misses the obvious problem with that argument: which is that if her argument is correct, then the AP and Garcia also ripped off Obama, since it was his creativity in looking the way he did and making the facial expression he did. Once again, such externalities are apparently only acceptable when the AP benefits. But, Cendali seems to ignore that, and Lichtman lets her get off, noting that he basically agrees with her.

• Anyway, not long after that, I saw that the BBC appears to have a very similar article, and it’s quite clear that all they did was rewrite the AP’s article. At one point, they do credit the AP, but the article is almost a direct paraphrase of the AP’s. So does the AP start calling the BBC a parasite, too? Or does it finally realize that no one owns the news, and lots of publications often rewrite the news and have for ages?

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