● 08.05.09

● Links 05/08/2009: Tiny Core Linux 2.2, Red Hat Awards and Scholarships

Posted in News Roundup at 5:20 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Well, I got me a new refurbished box with very good specs, which is about to become my new home office machine. That’s as soon as Slackware 13.0 hits final distribution release, which should be any day now… (Bought the box with Windows on it, you see) So, while I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for that landmark to come to pass, I did what any Linux user probably does when temporarily owning a copy of Windows (XP Pro here), and checked how it’s doing these days.

• Because, see, I just can’t get enough asstroturfers telling me how swell Windows stacks up to Linux lately. Gotta see for myself what all the hype is about. And since Microsoft is now suffering from the delusion that it competes with Linux, well…

• It didn’t take long before the old Microsoft memories came back. Literally before I could get into the desktop, the first problem hit: It doesn’t recognize the mouse. To be sure, the mouse is an old Wacom tablet with the little wireless mouse on it, pressed into service because, well, my other four mice are busy. It plugs into the USB port. But anyway, I’ve plugged this same mouse into more than six different machines running Linux and it always worked instantly.

• Microsoft has listed companies such as Red Hat and Canonical, both sellers of GNU/Linux, among the reasons for the 17 percent fall in revenue for the fourth quarter, year on year.

• That shared ideology is far more significant than the specifics of particular alliances or clashes over certain parts of the market. Google’s Chrome OS, for example, is really just a minor adjustment of pieces on the chess board of the modern computing industry, neither a declaration of intent against Microsoft nor an attempt to annex GNU/Linux into Google’s worldview.

References

• So you have heard of all the advantages and geeky babble about how Linux is better and you have finally decided to try it? Just one thing, you don’t know an awful lot about Linux to get you started. How about some free downloadable ebooks to teach yourself Linux, that you can download today? Would that help?

• To those of you who are aspiring to become a UNIX/Linux guru, you have to know loads of commands and learn how to effectively use them. But there is really no need to memorize everything since there are plenty of cheat sheets available on the web and on books. To spare you from the hassles of searching, I have here a collection of 10 essential UNIX/Linux cheat sheets that can greatly help you on your quest for mastery:

Kernel Space

• In Torvalds’ mind it’s not conceivable that one could care about freedom out of love and not hate. It’s not conceivable that one could stand to defend his and everyone else’s rights out of compassion, without hating the person who would take them away. That is the view of an extremist.

• It’s very unfortunate that people pay so much attention to Torvalds, as if he was some kind of visionary. Reality is that he’s just a very skilled hacker with delusions of grandeur and complete carelessness about ethics or morality.

X Server

• Back in March we shared that the open-source ATI driver had gained support for the unreleased ATI RS880 IGP. Well, the RS880 ended up being turned into the 785G due to some problems on AMD’s side, but today this new, much more powerful IGP has launched. With that said, another commit made to the xf86-video-ati driver today finishes off the support. The RS880 / 785G IGPs are now properly recognized and the 2D acceleration support is complete.

• Information on the NVIDIA OptiX Application Acceleration Engine is available at NVIDIA.com. NVIDIA also lists four ray-tracing engine examples and do mention Linux for them, but the links are not currently available. These ray-tracing demos will still require Quadro FX hardware and also a NVIDIA 190.xx driver release or newer.

• Well this thread maybe useful for people who are planning to purchase a system for linux use only and which GFX card to choose mainly ATI, NVIDIA or Intel.

Desktop Environments

Distributions

• Tiny Core Linux v2.2 is released. Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux Desktop, which runs very well on a Netbook. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, Fltk & Jwm. The core runs entirely in ram & boots very quickly.

• Finally, I downloaded and played the national anthem of Brazil. I also downloaded a series of science videos oriented toward primary school children.

• Minor installation annoyances aside, overall I was impressed with this distro. It is based on a good, reliable source (Kubuntu) and provides a wide array of educational tools. It even includes kTurtle, a programming environment with a language described as “loosly based on Logo.” The software is good, so here’s to hoping for qualified teachers with a good curriculum to make full use of the resource.

• SimplyMepis, or Mepis for short, is a distribution targeted towards new users that has the intended goal of providing a good distribution that is easy to use. Version 7.0, which was my first experience with Mepis was pretty good. But past success means little if the newer version doesn’t deliver. So let’s see how SimplyMepis 8 does.

Red Hat

• Red Hat has pledged to ensure Malaysia’ open source software economy continues to grow with the launch of its Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) program in the country.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the award-winning finalists in its third annual Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards. The awards are designed to recognize the outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat and JBoss solutions by Red Hat customers, partners and the open source community. From the finalists, one Red Hat Innovator of the Year and one JBoss Innovator of the Year will each be selected and announced during the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, co-located this year in Chicago, Sept. 1-4, 2009.

• The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that John McLean is the recipient of the 2009 Fedora Scholarship, a program now in its second year. The Fedora Scholarship program recognizes college and university-bound students across the globe for their contributions to free software and the Fedora Project. McLean was selected from an impressive applicant pool and plans to attend Duke University this fall and double major in computer science and religion.

Ubuntu

• I’ve stayed quiet in this discussion, though several folks have invoked my name and ascribed motivations to me that were a little upsetting. I’m not responding to that here, instead I’d like to focus on what we can achieve together, and how we can lead a very significant improvement in the health of the whole free software ecosystem.

• …So, congratulations to Clem Lefebvre and the rest of the Mint team; you have successfully lured me back to Linux Mint with this release. (I just finished installing it about a half hour ago lol) Of course Mandriva Linux is a great distro but I missed being Minty Fresh!! So it’s back to being a Mint user for me…Thank you Clem and team!!

Devices/Embedded

• Mercury’s customers use the LinuxLink framework to minimize their time to market through the easy-to-use wizard that facilitates the creation of an initial Linux starting image, as well as the award-winning “Factory” build engine that enables them to develop a completely custom and highly optimized Linux platform.

• • Run Linux off a USB key, back up documents online, and start with a fresh operating system every day.

• Google is getting its Android mobile operating system ready for business users as it targets business smartphone leader Research in Motion’s BlackBerrys and Microsoft. Supporting Microsoft Exchange is a key requirement for Android, and T-Mobile’s myTouch 3G does that. A flood of Android phones is expected, along with OS releases.

Free Software/Open Source

• Tahoe is a secure cloud filesystem that is licensed under the GPL. Its distributed storage model, which resembles peer-to-peer networking, makes it possible to build a shared storage pool using excess drive capacity from multiple computers across the Internet.

• Open-Xchange, an open-source e-mail and collaboration software maker, has set up a test Web site that allows people to pull in their contact information from various social networking services like LinkedIn and Facebook. The goal of the project is give people a chance to take control of their contacts and put all of their personal and work information in one place. By creating what amounts to a connections clearing house, Open-Xchange wants to spur to new types of networking services.

• If Vern Yip is reading this, I still need your help. Though Sweet Home 3D tops Google’s SketchUp in a number of areas, it’s still not much help for someone with no design sense.

• Free and open source software is seeing steady adoption among small to large UK businesses, as they begin to take it to the heart of their organisations for key enterprise applications in a bid to lower IT costs.

• Good enterprise-class open source support and services have also helped to drive adoption, as much as the fact that free and open source (FOSS) software products are continually maturing and improving both on the server and the desktop.

• As the Ubuntu Maryland team did last year, we are planning a day of talks and discussions about Open Source Software and its benefits. While there may be a bias towards the Linux platform in general and the Ubuntu distribution in particular we are open to talks on Open Source projects for any OS platform. In addition we are hoping to have some talks on open formats and standards.

• In this issue…

• * One billion downloads of Firefox * Why we count * What’s the problem with Theora? * Mozilla Add-ons U.S. Tour * Chocolate Factory: care to help? * Weave 0.5 released * Help test new mozilla.org site * Bugzilla 3.4 released

Audio

• Bradley and Karen interview Justin Erenkrantz of the Apache Software Foundation.

Leftovers

DRM/E-Book

• Sony Corp (6758.T) will begin selling this month the cheapest digital book reader for the United States, heating up the competition with Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) in the small but fast-growing market for electronic readers.

• Sony plans to start selling its 5-inch-screen Reader Pocket Edition at $199 — which it called a breakthrough price — and a larger touchscreen reader for $299, through nationwide retail outlets such as Wal-Mart (WMT.N) and Best Buy (BBY.N).

• San Francisco bookstore Green Apple Books has put together a series of humorous videos that point up the advantages of paper books over Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader.

• A deb package is also suitable for Ubuntu and Debian. The source code for download off the project page is under GPLv3.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The British administrator of a former BitTorrent tracker site is out on police bail after his home was raided by police working with film industry investigators.

• While it gets some of the facts wrong (claiming that copyright exists to protect an artist’s income, rather than the truth: it exists to create an incentive to create), it at least tries to balance some of the questions, discussing things like Creative Commons and the public domain.

• AP’s service costs as much (for a newspaper the size of The Gazette) as the salaries and benefits of several staff members who could provide unique local content not available elsewhere. It’s questionable whether the content AP provides is going to maintain that value much longer. If AP focuses on the content role, no amount of copyright protection will keep that role from deteriorating in value.

• Our cautious skepticism about intellectual property laws, particularly when applied to the arts rather than technology, was confirmed this morning.

• The guy who made the iconic Wall Street bull is suing the publisher and authors of a new book about the collapse of Lehman Brothers because they put a picture of the bull on the cover.

• That’s right. There’s a guy out there who thinks he owns the rights to images of 7,000-pound sculpture that has been sitting in the financial district for 20 years. Whatever your opinions about the need for copyright and trademark rules to encourage innovation and reward creativity, it’s really hard to see how this makes any sense at all.

• While Internet radio stations have come to an agreement over music royalty rates, the debate over whether traditional radio stations should also pay up rages on. The Senate Judiciary Committee was the latest panel to play referee during a Tuesday hearing.

• Crippen, in a telephone interview with Threat Level, said the purpose of the jailbreaking was not for illegal piracy, but to allow patrons to use decrypted copies of their own DRM-laden gaming software. The DMCA, however, is not on his side, especially because he is accused of profiting from his hacks.

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