● 09.01.09

● Links 01/09/2009: Opera 10 and KDE 4.3.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:50 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Virtualization software maker Parallels has unveiled a desktop hypervisor for Windows and Linux machines.

• Centrify Corporation, the leading provider of Microsoft Active Directory-based, identity and access management and auditing solutions for non-Microsoft platforms, today announced the availability of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Centrify Suite 2008 for Linux on IBM System z. With Centrify Suite, enterprises can leverage their existing Active Directory infrastructure and user accounts to easily secure the hundreds to thousands of Linux servers that a single mainframe can host.

• The Deutsche Borse Group manages the International Securities Exchange, an equity options exchange in New York, as well as the Eurex and Deutsche Borse’s own Xetra cash exchange. The Xetra stock exchange platform is also used by the Irish Stock Exchange, the European Energy Exchange, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange among others. It has long used Linux as the basis of these high-speed stock exchanges. Later this year, it is launching a next generation. The new trading infrastructure will use IBM WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging and Linux to make it the fastest stock exchange software on the planet.

• Intel’s Ian Romanick has announced on the Mesa3D development list that he has made available an arb_sync branch of Mesa. As implied by its name, this branch implements support for the GL_ARB_sync extension, which just officially debuted with OpenGL 3.2.

Applications

• Today Opera released the final version of Opera 10, the long-awaited new entry in the company’s browser family. It’s free and comes in 43 languages.

• Opera 10 has arrived and finds itself needing to stand out in an increasingly crowded browser market. Ars goes hands on with the new release to see if Opera 10 has what it takes.

• Gcompris

• Lest I be accused of anglocentrism, here’s a shout-out to Gcompris, a suite of educational games that ships with Edubuntu. For those of you who don’t speak French, the pun is pretty straight-forward: Gcompris sounds like the expression ‘J’ai compris’, which translates to ‘I’ve understood’. Bonus points for a name starting with the letter ‘g’, paying homage to the GNU project and open-source philosophy.

Desktop Environments

• KDE 4.3.1 Provides a Wave of Improvements

• KDE Community Ships Fourth Translation and Service Release of the 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Numerous Bugfixes, Performance Improvements and Translation Updates

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• The Fedora Linux project has integrated Moblin technology for netbooks and nettops. The project is seeking alpha testers to help “make [Moblin] great” for its debut in Fedora 12, which ships this fall.

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has gifted a grant to Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) to create a state-of-the-art, open source computer laboratory. The laboratory, which will be officially dedicated later this year, will be available to all students, faculty and staff to promote the development and use of free and open source software.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux the leading platform for open source computing. At Innovativ Consulting Partners, their commitment to open source is furthered by this partnership, extending options for providing a variety of high-value, low-cost alternatives to meet client business needs.

• JBCAA (JBoss Certified Application Administrator) is the latest certification offering from Red Hat, joining the RHCA (Red Hat Certified Engineer), RHCT (Red Hat Certified Technician) and the other certification programmes that the Linux and middleware company offers. The new certification is the first created specifically for Red Hat’s JBoss middleware products.

Devices/Embedded

• This latest move is incredibly short sighted. By providing this “Install Other OS” option Sony not only gained a huge amount of goodwill from an influential community, but it also allowed it to learn about the open source community – something that is vital for its long-term survival. By cutting off that dialogue, Sony has effectively cut itself off from the future. It’s certainly removed itself from my list of companies with even the slightest relevance to free software.

• Timesys Corporation (http://www.timesys.com), provider of LinuxLink, the first commercial software development framework for building custom embedded Linux based products, today announced it has been selected by Embedded Planet to provide a comprehensive Linux solution for their EP8572A dual-core PowerPC Advanced Mezzanine Card (AMC).

• Sangoma announced Linux versions of its OEM-targeted VoIP media gateway cards, previously available only for Windows. The SIP-compliant “NetBorder Express Gateway” cards offer G.168 telco-grade echo cancellation and support PBX and conferencing servers, says the company.

• Sangoma(R) Technologies Corporation (TSX VENTURE:STC), a leading supplier of hardware and software enabling server-based voice and data communication applications, today announced at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo West 2009 event the general availability under the Linux operating system of its award-winning NetBorder Express Gateway product line. The product was previously only available under the Windows operating system.

• MontaVista Software announced the availability of MontaVista Linux 6 (MVL6), as well as five processor-specific Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) for its commercial embedded Linux development platform. The MSDs, which will soon be joined by dozens more, support ARM1176 and ARM926, Freescale MPC8xxx (PowerPC), Intel x86 (Pentium/Xeon), MIPS32, and Xilinx Virtex 5, says the company.

• MontaVista Software, Inc., the leader in embedded Linux commercialization, today announced the general availability of new Market Specific Distributions (MSDs) of MontaVista Linux 6. By working closely with its semiconductor partners to deliver the right combination of features and functionality for each platform, MontaVista remains committed to providing the broadest hardware support in the embedded Linux market, and aligning the embedded Linux supply chain.

Sub-notebooks

• This weekend, I installed Jolicloud on Leslee’s netbook. Jolicloud is currently in private alpha. I put in for a key quite a long time ago. A few months ago, I finally got accepted. But….I’ve been really busy with the wedding and honeymoon, so it just sat there. Now I regret it. Wow, Jolicloud is phenominal.

• It is shipped with a stripped-down version of the Fedora GNU/Linux operating system and a GUI and set of applications called Sugar, that is intended to help young children collaborate.

• Like the Zaurus, the NetWalker runs the Linux operating system. Unlike the Zaurus, the NetWalker is toting the bang up to date Ubuntu Linux, which is a properly usable desktop OS you will find on many ‘full size’ netbooks

• If your laptop is running Linux you might not be happy with the battery life you are getting. There are numerous reasons for the possible extra drain on your battery. Some of the biggest issues are: Hard drive spin-downs, interrupts, and power management. Figuring out how to make these adjustments to your kernel (or subsystems) to gain a bit of extra battery life would take more time googling than you would probably prefer. Fortunately there is a single application available to take care of this for you. Powertop is one of those tools every user of Linux on a laptop should have installed – especially if your laptop depends primarily on its battery for life.

Free Software/Open Source

• There are many great, easy to use, very popular Open Source projects out there. I am going to go over my top 5 in this article and give a brief description on what they are used for.

• InfoWorld has awarded the 2009 Bossies (Best of Open Source Software Awards). The award is presented to the forty best free business applications. In addition, the US news site also lists the thirty-six best open source applications of all time in its Open Source Hall of Fame.

• As we all know, OSCON provides a multitude of opportunities for those in the Open Source world to learn not just the ins and outs of what’s new, but how to improve their projects on fronts ranging from code to documentation to community members. One such opportunity at this year’s convention came in the form of a panel presentation on press relations, a subject that can be both touchy and treacherous where PR pros are scarce. As that’s the business we’re in, and our readership includes many in target audience, we thought it would be beneficial to pass on.

• OSSCube – a Global Open Source Enterprise for Open Source Solutions is sponsoring OSSCamp during 5th &6th September at NSIT, Delhi. OSSCamp is a series of community-driven unconferences targeted specifically at promoting FOSS implementation and development in India by creating a platform for technologists and enthusiasts to share best practices, experiences, and knowledge.

• A new open source project dubbed StarCluster has been released aiming to simplify the management of virtual clusters hosted on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.

• Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today that MphasiS, a leading applications services, remote infrastructure services, and business processing outsourcing (BPO) services provider, has partnered with Ingres to offer combined Open Source Solutions. Together, Ingres and MphasiS, an EDS company, will offer an end-to-end open source support model to foster flexibility, cost savings, and assist joint customers to move existing applications to open source solutions.

• However, Sony has now given Google’s Chrome browser something that Mozilla has struggled to obtain: a preinstall deal. As CNET reports, Google Chrome is being installed on Windows PCs alongside IE, with other distribution deals likely.

• Finally, a clear choice for consumers.

• A leading bank in India saved Rs 100 crore by moving from MS Office to Open Office. It is simple mathematics—if MS Office costs Rs 11,000 per user, and the organization has 1,00,000 desktops, the company would save a cool Rs 110 crore on licensing costs if it moved to Open Office. Even if we budget Rs 10 crore for training and support costs, the company would end up saving Rs 100 crore.

• I have, however, been told that Drupal is a great open source software for building an ecommerce or even your own community-based portal. Sites like www.Wefew.net and www.asmp.org uses Drupal.

• But what’s so great about Drupal is that it also has a localization feature that allows the developer to contribute to the translation server and let others utilize the translated languages for their site.

• Armed with a new CEO and a pocket full of funding from venture capital partners, MuleSource is aimed at growing its open source enterprise service bus platform. The economy has led many businesses to look to open source for more software needs, but MuleSource must still focus on controlling code bloat and debunking myths about open source software.

• A tool used to measure the traffic risks of ships at sea in the Mediterranean is about be released as open source software and could have far-reaching implications for vessels across the globe. The Safemed Project, funded by the European Union, provides raw data on the movement of ships — oil tankers in particular — that are sailing around the Mediterranean Sea in an effort to track and prevent water pollution.

• There’s just that matter of metrics — will the push yield good results? Engine Yard, a Ruby on Rails hosting and services provider, found it’s well worth the effort.

• Apache 2.2 has been out for a while, and just recently, 2.2.13 was released, featuring the usual slate of enhancements and bug fixes. Happily, the migration to 2.2 seems to be proceeding apace faster than the migration from 1.3 to 2.0, and most people, finally, seem to have jettisoned Apache 1.3.

• Medsphere, the open source implementation of the VA’s VistA software, has gotten a $12 million venture capital infusion to pursue the opportunity. (That’s Medsphere CEO Michael Doyle, shown before he saw the money.)

• The European Commission will conduct a consultation on how best to operate a digital library of Europe’s scanned-in books. Unlike Google’s controversial digitisation programme, the EU’s existing digital library does not scan in copyrighted works.

Leftovers

• Within a few months, Pure Digital could barely keep up with orders. Customers found that the Flip was the perfect way to get homebrew videos onto the suddenly flourishing YouTube, and the camera became a megahit, selling more than 1 million units in its first year. Today—just two years later—the Flip Ultra and its subsequent revisions are the best-selling video cameras in the US, commanding 17 percent of the camcorder market. Sony and Canon are now scrambling to catch up.

• Instead, as Eric Goldman alerts us, the jury has sided with Louis Vuitton and awarded the company $32.4 million in damages from the web hosts.

• VARIOUS pieces of legislation now making their way through Congress would require private pools of investment capital to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The goal is to curtail abuses and protect the public from questionable practices. The proposed laws would cover the range of funds that deal in derivatives, auction-rate and mortgage-backed securities, highly leveraged transactions and a slew of other instruments so complicated as to defy description.

AstroTurf

• I’m ashamed that I let myself get caught up in deceitful and dishonest PR campaigns that worked so well, hundreds of thousands of our citizens have died, and millions of others have lost their homes and been forced into bankruptcy, so that a very few corporate executives and their Wall Street masters could become obscenely rich.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• The 50 pence-a-month levy to pay for better broadband in the countryside, as recommended in Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report, isn’t going to happen. Punters won’t pay it, and the government isn’t going to impose it directly before a general election. Meanwhile, the EU requires Britain to permit the use of 3G at 900MHz, which can’t be done until the ownership of the spectrum is sorted out.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who was hit with a $1.92 million damage award earlier this year for sharing songs through peer-to-peer networks, has again asked the judge in the case to reduce the damage amount on the grounds that it is simply plucked from the air. What kind of “due process” did she receive during her two trials when the first jury fined her nearly $10,000 per song and the second jury chose $80,000 per song?

• Artists and creators need to be able to experiment with new business models, but the copyright crutch gets in the way. They turn to levies and licensing because they can’t imagine how else to make money, but successes have been outside of the copyright system. Canada needs innovative companies to help artists and creators find digital business models, not to chase fictive legislative solutions. If the Canadian record industry isn’t willing to help creators with what’s next, they need to clear out of the way.

• I’ve said for a while now that I have problems with the Pirate Party’s choice of names. While it does get attention, and perhaps helped jumpstart membership interest in what the party had to say, it still feels like a gimmick. Not only that, but a gimmick that limits the party’s overall effectiveness in the longterm. It’s been easy for politicians to simply brush the concerns of the party aside as being laughable from the start, just based on the name. And yet… the movement keeps moving forward.

• Herbert Rusche, the co-founder of the German Green Party and former member of the German Parliament, has joined the Pirate Party. Rusche praises the party for its open structure and its efforts to protect people’s privacy and fundamental rights. Those issues, he says, are the ones established parties fail to address.

Digital Tipping Point: Clip of the DayWilliam Li Wan, Manager of Sun Microsystems Sun China Engineering Institute 01 (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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