● 07.31.09

● Links 31/07/2009: PCLinuxOS LXDE (PCLXDE) 2009 is Out, Microsoft Worries About GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 1:24 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• “Partners such as Hewlett-Packard and Intel have been actively working with alternative Linux-based operating systems,” Microsoft wrote, providing no additional detail.

• While it’s been known for some time that HP – - which sells some notebooks and netbooks and servers with Linux – - and Intel have dedicated some resources to Linux development, this is the first time that Microsoft has singled out its two biggest and arguably most important technology partners for this work. While the language in 10-K reports is traditionally dry, legalistic and boilerplate, for a company like Microsoft to add that information for the first time is notable. It also comes at a time when Microsoft reported a double-digit decline in its client software business even as it reported selling more than 300 million units of Windows Vista over the past two years. (It sold 130 million units two years ago and 180 million units of Vista last year, although it doesn’t specify how many units were sold or activated with “downgrade rights” to Windows XP.)

• So far, the netbook market is heavily dominated by Windows and Intel Atom, though the second wave – ushering in smaller, more mobile devices such as smartbooks and MIDs – could shift towards Linux. Intel is readying itself for this shift, creating its Moblin Linux platform and working with Nokia. It is less clear how Microsoft will respond – it has no plans to shrink down the footprint or margins of its forthcoming Windows 7 for smartbooks, but admits Windows Mobile remains an under-performer.

Desktop

• Not even Woodward suggests as mass-market movement from Windows XP and Vista to virtualized Ubuntu desktops. But he does expect the IBM-Canonical-Virtual Bridges relationship to start generating revenue within a few months.

• The laptop itself is a wonderful purchase and I love mine to death. I set up my own Linux installation with my own restore image using Clonezilla, put a “Powered by Ubuntu” sticker on it, and an Ubuntu logo sticker for the Windows logo key and I’ve essentially made this the ultimate Ubuntu machine. (In my case, Kubuntu). I definitely recommend this to everyone looking for a great machine, but there may be some post purchase work to do once you get it.

• Just wanted to re-enforce what Zhang said earlier today about the bleeding edge GNOME Developer’s Kit, now with extra sauce!

• What is it? It is a continuous build of GNOME packages all bundled up into a distribution (in this case, Foresight Linux) and distributed in a few different formats, such as ISO and VMware.

Server

• The KVM portion of the hypervisor supports full virtualization, booting from ISO or CD/DVD drives and almost every operating system you can imagine. Check out the list for your favorite.

Schools

• Teachers and school administrators who have to be creative about acquiring affordable educational software will find plenty to choose from in the world of open source, says Jack Wallen.

• Good educational software is hard to come by. And with budgets tight, it is understandable that many schools are turning to Linux and open-source software to save money. Most people have no idea how many outstanding educational applications there are for the Linux operating system. Here are 10 of the best.

• Again, I strongly believe that if basic schools here can be introduced to ICT using Open Source software, it will go a long way into helping create an awareness among the next generation of IT users in Africa that there is a very powerful, reliable and free alternative to MS and other closed source commercial applications.

Web Browsers

• Linux: If a lack of third-party plug-in support (i.e. Flash) kept you from trying out Chrome on your Linux system, then avoid no longer. The “early developer version” now supports many plug-ins, and they seem to work pretty well.

• Arora is an open source web browser that uses the same WebKit rendering engine found in Safari and Google Chrome. But unlike those browsers, Arora is already capable of running on Windows, Linux, and OS X, as well as a few other platforms including FreeBSD.

Audiocasts

• My Talk at Southeast Linux Fest.

• In this Screencast, I give an overview of Audacity and recordMyDesktop, the tools I use to record my Podcasts and Screencasts. If you have any questions, you can reach me at david at linuxcrazy dot com, or on freenode irc, channel #linuxcrazy.

• On this week’s show: Launchpad goes open source, the real reason why Microsoft contributed code to the kernel, Intel thinks it has human rights, why the Swedish Pirate Party might endanger the GPL and much more.

Distributions

• Another factor is the kind of mood am I in. Sometimes, I have a lot of free time, and I want to tinker with my system. Other times I am in a hurry and I need a running linux machine quick. Another factor is circumstance. For a working production system where I do most my writing, school work, and entertainment, I want a stable system.

• PCLXDE 2009.4 is a minimal self-booting/installable Linux Live CD that features the LXDE desktop environment along with a small suite of lightweight applications designed for use on low end computer systems. It is small, fast and fun. Designed for P III or better. Does not work on K6/2 processors. But wait there’s more!

• An anonymous tipster sent the following images to us this morning, claiming they are actual images of Chrome OS. We can’t say much for certain at this point, so pass judgment yourselves in the comments.

Fedora

• If you have significant PHP and JavaScript experience and could spend a couple of days helping us resolve these issues, please get in touch with us via the fedora-docs-list, send email to pfrields or sparks (both at fedoraproject dot org), or leave me a comment here.

Ubuntu

• Canonical on July 31 will launch a so-called “Switch to Ubuntu” initiative — including support and migration services — to help individuals and small businesses that are “seeking cost-effective alternatives” to Mac OS X and Windows-based desktops.

• So after my last post, I figured it would be interesting to ask myself, “what would I miss in Linux Mint?” if I were to go back to Windows Vista today. I came up with 5 nontrivial things.

• [...]

• Here’s my list:

• 1. Expose / Windows Picker. Shows me all my open windows with a quick push of a button. It’s like neatly laying out all my notes and paperwork on my desk in a nanosecond. Very useful when I feel like I’ve got too many things going on. I loved it on OS X, and I love it on Mint. 2. Multiple desktops, and I have four. It’s like having four separate tables to throw all my stuff on. So I can put all my project A stuff here, project B stuff there, and all my personal notes and emails over there. Wonderful! I’ve seen a co-worker use a virtual desktop on Windows, but it wouldn’t be a fair comparison because I believe he had to get an additional application to get that working.

• Besides the GTK theme, New Wave also comes with: - GUI New Wave Configurator, - Emerald themes, - Compiz-fusion settings, - Second theme with dark menus, - Firefox skin, - Some metacity tweaks. - Opera theme

Devices/Embedded

• LinuxLink allows customers to choose from the latest GNU-based toolchains enabled with uClibc and glibc libraries optimized for the ARM926EJ-S™ core. The Linux kernels initially available through LinuxLink are both the 2.6.18 and the recent 2.6.30 versions. Newer versions of Linux kernels will be available in LinuxLink as they become available from kernel.org. Device drivers are included for the full range of internal OMAP-L137 peripherals as well as for external devices present on TI’s OMAP-L137 evaluation module (EVM).

Free Software/Open Source

• Another great thing about OSS is that even if the company pulls support for the product (I’m talking to you, Microsoft Response Point) or goes out of business, there is an opportunity for your company (or consultants of your choosing) to continue making repairs and even advancing the tool despite lack of support from a vendor.

• For IT, open source is a way to improve service and reduce costs without the expense. The lower acquisition costs, fast development cycle, continuing enhancements and quick fixes to problems make open source attractive. In fact, a leading industry analyst predicts that within a few years about 80% of all commercial software will include elements of open source technology.

Ingres

• The Ingres VectorWise project team has worked with Intel to evaluate database performance on the new Intel Xeon processor 5500 series based platform. To date, the results of the project have demonstrated dramatic cost and performance capabilities as evidenced by nearly 80 fold speed up on a query modelled after the Q1 query of TPC-H3 suite on the Intel Xeon processor.

• The core innovations in VectorWise are the work, primarily, of two CWI researchers, Peter Boncz and Marcin Zukowski. They set out to produce a 100-fold improvement in database performance. Ingres engineers 18 months ago came upon their research, called the X100 Project. Says Burkhardt: “We saw we could collaborate with them to take an academic project and make it commercial.”

Milestones

• The open-source browser Firefox is expected to pass the billion download mark in the next twenty four hours.

• Lookout Microsoft! Mozilla’s Firefox is closing the gap a bit, as they’re about to pass 1 billion total downloads, and some think they might even pass the mark as early as Friday.

• PortableApps.com founder John T. Haller has announced that his site for portable applications has reached its 100 millionth download milestone. PortableApps.com allows users to easily install various popular open source applications to a USB flash drive or external hard drive. Once installed, the applications can run completely from the drive and be used on any Windows computer.

CMS

• Alfresco (news, site) marked a record month for downloads with its July release of Alfresco Community Edition 3.2. This release lays the groundwork for Records Management features added in preparation for US Department of Defense 5015.2 certification coming in September 2009.

• Formtek, Inc., provider of enterprise document and content management solutions, announced that it has successfully implemented and delivered an open source ECM solution, based on Alfresco Enterprise Edition, to Dorfman-pacific, one of the full-line, in-stock headwear and handbag companies.

• Yes, Magento, like Drupal and OpenX, has its share of big customers, including Germany’s equivalent of REI, Globetrotter. But Magento already has a lot of traction within the mid-market segment that Drupal and OpenX also serve.

AlwaysOn Summit

• Dharmaraj: When it comes to open source, companies needs to own the intellectual honesty behind the code. They wrote it, can they modify it, are they significant contributors to the content…that makes a difference whether an open source company is fundable or not. We typically look for fresh innovative ideas that disrupt existing enterprise or consumer software products that are distributed via SaaS or open source.

Government

• Open source has consistently made headlines in recent years, having drawn much industry attention both from technologists and business decision-makers.

• City hall will be more transparent after council passed a notice of motion opening up the city’s data to the public last Monday.

• The notice instructs city bureaucrats to draft a report on how to make all data collected by the City of Calgary, from traffic statistics to census numbers, more accessible to Calgarians in an open source format, while respecting privacy and security concerns.

• [...]

• It would even cut down on the city’s use of proprietary software, saving money down the road, said Kelly. Opening up the records in open source format would allow developers to take advantage of the information to create new open source programs that could be used by city officials to save expenses.

Licensing

• Here’s a brief background: On various forum posts, John Haller–creator of the PortableApps software suite–has called out LiberKey for trademark and GPL violations related to the licensing of the open-source and freeware apps bundled in its software suite. Although LiberKey has responded to various forum posts on the topics, it’s been difficult to track down their arguments for two key reasons. First, the developers are French. Their official forums are in French and their occasional replies to LiberKey criticisms come in the form of readable–but admittedly crude–English. Second, the developers have yet to release an official stance beyond these difficult-to-track forum replies. However, I contacted LiberKey for their side of the story, and they sent me an official statement they’ve created to respond to the licensing allegations.

Openness

• Great to see a scientist come out with this in an interesting post entitled “What, exactly, is Open Science?”:

• The economics of ‘free’ goods and services cannot be explained in terms of the marketplace, digital or otherwise – humans are more complicated than that

• It is true that the most rapidly developing designs are those where many can participate and where the intellectual property is open. Think about open source software as an example of this. What firms have to remember is that they have many ways to profit from good new products, independent of IP. They’ve got brands; they’ve got distribution; they’ve got lead time in the market. They have a lot of valuable proprietary assets that are not dependent on IP.

• If you’re going to give out your design capability to others, users specifically, then what you have to do is build your business model on the non-design components of your mix of competitive advantages. For instance, recall the case of custom semiconductor firms I mentioned earlier. Those companies gave away their job of designing the circuit to the user, but they still had the job of manufacturing those user-designed semiconductors, they still had the brand, they still had the distribution. And that’s how they make their money.

• It is also true that firms can base their new products on user-developed designs and still capture significant IP protection from internally developed improvements. That is the pattern we found in research we did at 3M. Even when 3M developers sourced the basic idea for a new product line from users, they were able to capture strong IP by patenting their improvements to the user idea.

• But the Web does a lot of this for us outside of science. It’s become easy to write and read, and to use Google as a memory cache. The ability to rapidly find relevant information is part of daily life for us outside of science. But inside of science there is complaint that even within one’s own specialized discipline, there is too much to read, too many journals, too little time. This doesn’t even begin to include the coming deluge of data wrought by the relentless miniaturization and parallelization of a world where data is generated by robotic lab machinery and captured by tiny, ubiquitous sensors.

• *You may have noticed that I’m something of a skeptic about small-scale urban agriculture interventions. But this one? This is different. ‘Cause it’s beer! Small-scale stills and illicit breweries have a history that is literally as long as the invention of alcohol, tobacco and firearms laws! A revenuer-unfriendly gizmo like this has got proven legs!

• It takes a village to raise a robot. At least, that’s the belief of the creators of iCub, a humanoid robot the size of a 3-1/2-year-old child, who are making its development entirely open-domain.

• The iCub is the brainchild of a group of European universities led by the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa, who have been charged by the European Commission to develop a functioning humanoid child. They developed a 2-1/2-foot-tall, 70-pound robot child with 53 mechanical joints that allow it to move its head, neck, arms, fingers, eyes and legs. It can also feel with its fingertips, grip with its hands, and listen.

• Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program, it was announced today by Imageworks’ chief technology officer, Rob Bredow. Five technologies will be released initially:

• * OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering * Field3d, a voxel data storage library * Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking * Scala Migration, a database migration tool * Pystring, python-like string handling in C++

• A new open source, Web 2.0-inspired solution for building and managing business relationships online promises to level the playing field for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Applications

• 28th July, 2009: Today, RiverMuse launches an enterprise class open source fault management platform built upon a next generation architecture designed around maintaining a very low total cost of ownership when applied to modern service delivery infrastructures.

Standards/Consortia

• For some years now, Xiph.Org has been gently advocating royalty free codecs within the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) as a viable and preferred alternative to patent-controlled technologies. Recently more groups within the IETF have also come forward to support free codec standardization work with in the IETF. On July 30th at the next IETF Meeting (IETF 75 in Stockholm[1]) the IETF will hold a codecs BoF to take input on whether or not to form a standards Working Group for royalty free audio codecs. The creation of such a Working Group would have a major impact, opening the door to a Voice over IP stack completely free of licensing and royalty constraints. We’re seeking to set up the same kind of open competition and cooperation we’ve seen on the web that’s given rise to tons of investment and improvement in a very short period of time.

Leftovers

• Finnish Activist Mikko Rauhala has lodged an application to the European Court of Human Rights versus the Finnish state, regarding his right to freedom of expression.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Dear Newspaper Magnates,

• So you’re going to try and charge people for news yet again. Cart, meet horse.

• Journalists didn’t make 20th century newspapers profitable — readers did. 20th century newspapers were never supernormally profitable because of what they wrote: it was the natural monopoly dynamics of classifieds that fueled massive margins.

• AOL now has 1,500 people writing content across its scores of content sub-brands, we’ve confirmed. Around 1,000 of those people are working full time for AOL, the rest are freelancing. That’s more than double the number that they had creating content a year ago, and by this time next year, we’ve heard, the plan is to have 2-3x as many people as they do now.

• It’s time for the news media to face the music. The 20th Century news media turned a blind eye to responsibility. Because they failed to fight for the rest of us, newspapers have to suffer with the rest of us. Consider it penance for a job poorly done.

• A few years ago, newspapers were all blaming Craigslist for their own business model problems. Then, of course, it became popular to blame Google. However, there’s been an odd shift recently, to a claim that the problem is from “pirates” and “parasites.” We see this in the AP’s sudden desire to DRM the news by tracking how it’s used and going after those it feels are using its content unfairly. We see it in the Marburger brothers’ plan to put legal pressure on “parasitic aggregators.” The problem, as we discussed, however, is that these parasitic aggregators are few and far between and the complaints against them just don’t ring true at all.

• THE BOY who lost all his homework on George Orwell’s book 1984 when it was deleted from his Kindle has decided to sue Amazon for getting him in hot water with his teacher.

• That effort has led me to revisit copyright’s constitutional foundations. I find them very shaky, indeed.

• Words matter, which is why the RIAA has always framed copyright infringement in terms of “piracy”. But it has a big problem: most people call it “sharing”; and as everyone was told by their mother, it’s good to share.

• [...]

• Got that? P2P sharing isn’t *real* sharing, because it’s not sharing with your friends; this is *evil* sharing because it’s bad to share with stranger. Apparently.

• Barnes & Noble, which announced its eBook store and forthcoming hardware eReader last week currently features about 500,000 free books from Google, while Amazon’s Kindle can read free books from Project Gutenberg, but doesn’t offer compatibility with the ePub format that Google prefers. Amazon currently offers about 300,000 books.

• Many more books have been added since our initial report on the start of The World eBook Fair on July 4. As expected, Internet Archive is keeping up with their goal of adding another ~25,000 titles, about 1,000 each business day, but another 25,000 comes from the general readership of the patrons. We get messages to add books that our readers have compiled totally on their own–independently of the major eBook producers.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayLuis Casas Luengo, Director of Extremadura’s Fundecyt foundation 11 (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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