● 09.10.09

● Links 10/09/2009: RHEL 6 Videos, More Linux Phones

Posted in News Roundup at 8:49 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Nominations are officially open for the 9th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 14th-18th AMIA Fall conference in San Francisco, CA. Deadline for entries is September 30th, 2009. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by the IMIA Open Source Working Group.

• NEC Electronics Corporation (TOKYO: 6723), the leading provider of semiconductor solutions, and Wind River, the global leader in Device Software Optimization (DSO), today announced an expanded collaboration to jointly develop Linux solutions for the market of portable devices, such as multimedia players and mobile televisions. As the first jointly developed solution, NEC Electronics today introduced a new software development kit (SDK) based on Wind River Linux technology for the company`s EMMA Mobile 1, an optimal system LSI chip for the market of portable devices to process audio and visual (A/V) data. Additional SDKs for EMMA series products based on Wind River Linux technology targeting digital multimedia consumer devices are expected to follow in late 2009 and in 2010.

• So will the Other OS will return? Maybe. Sony recently unveiled the Academic PS3 Dev Kit. Could this lead to the return of the Other OS on a one to one basis? It’s certainly possible that drivers could be written for the change in hardware and then submitted to Sony. If feedback is strong enough they could allow the needed change to the hypervisor code. Time will tell…

Weekly

• This week on Linux Outlaws: Whiskey, Chrome, a Frankencamera, pros & cons of The Cloud, Windows release parties, Jolicloud, Super Outlaw Bros., a Weather Widget and much more…

• The following Linux distributions have been announced last week: Lubuntu 9.10 Beta 14, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5, Tiny Core Linux 2.3, Zenwalk 6.2 and Frugalware 1.1. In other news: the KDE Community announced the first maintenance release of the KDE 4.3 desktop environment. An in-depth review of the Gnote 0.6.2 application is also present in this edition. The weekly ends with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases.

Desktop

• Why would you want to run Linux on a Mac? There are probably a few good reasons — learning about a different OS, using software that’s not available on the Mac platform, or for a Linux class in school. While you can create a bootable partition on your Mac and boot Linux from it, I prefer to do things the lazy way. In this short how-to post, I’ll demonstrate how I installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04, also known as “Jaunty Jackalope.”

• All public Athena clusters except the one in 4-167 were updated to Debathena during the summer, according to Student Information Processing Board member Geoffrey G. Thomas ’10. Debathena allows Ubuntu users to install the same versions on software on their Athena accounts as on their personal computers, and will allow Athena software to stay up to date with their latest Ubuntu versions, said Thomas. Dorm clusters are in the process of being updated, he said.

Server

• Around two dozen wireless sensors monitor temperature, electricity and water usage and transmit the information to a central Linux server. The server makes intelligent decisions based on this information to manage devices around the house.

• At the recent Red Hat Summit in Chicago, Red Hat Senior Solutions Architect Andrew Hardy trotted out three case studies, in which customers from the finance sector consolidated multiple Unix- and Windows-based systems onto Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on the IBM System Z mainframe.

Kernel Space

• Ok, there’s just a few final commits since -rc9 to fix a couple of last regressions and problems, and now the final 2.6.31 is out there. The small diffstat and shortlog is below, the full log and diff from 2.6.30 are being uploaded to kernel.org (and then mirrored out) as I write this. In general, the full set of 2.6.30->31 changes are too numerous to list, but as usual, you’ll find some high-level overviews on kernelnewbies.org.

• As announced on the LKML mailing list at just past 11pm yesterday, Linus Torvalds has released Linux 2.6.31.

• Over three dozen Linux staging drivers are mentioned, but there’s a few interesting comments in particular. For instance, Google’s Android drivers may end up being dropped from the staging tree within the Linux 2.6.32 cycle. While Android uses Linux and Google is quite friendly with Linux and different open-source projects, the developers working on the upstream Android drivers aren’t caring whether or not this code enters the mainline kernel. Instead these developers are just concerning themselves with running the drivers on the Linux 2.6.29 kernel they currently are using. If this continues to occur, the Android drivers will disappear from the staging tree. In a similar situation, Microsoft’s Hyper-V drivers may end up getting dropped in the Linux 2.6.33 release.

• The latest version of Linux offers a whole host of new features – for example a USB 3.0 infrastructure, drivers for the Sound Blaster X-Fi, KMS support for Radeon chips and improved versions of Btrfs and Ext4. As is traditional with new Linux versions in the main development branch, however, this is only the tip of the iceberg.

• If you’ve been paying attention on Twitter and Identi.ca, lately then you’ve no doubt had a few laughs over the hilarious and sometimes slightly (okay, really) offbeat status updates from FakeLinusTorvalds. As Kristin wrote recently, four different people have gone incognito to impersonate the real Linus Torvalds — with his blessing, of course — to poke some good natured fun at one of the community’s most respected people.

• X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 will be arriving months late once it’s released after failing to meet the original April release schedule and then failed twice with two more proposed releases during the summer. However, the latest release schedule, which puts the final release in late September or so, might actually work out this time — in good part thanks to Peter Hutterer.

• The xf86-video-ati 6.12.3 driver release announcement can be read on the X.Org mailing list.

Applications

• A message on the Chromium Blog indicates that Google are beginning the process of rolling out extensions for Google Chrome. Although Chrome and Chromium are regarded as good browsers, critics have pointed to the lack of Firefox style Add-ons as a reason for it not being adopted more widely. Google have been working on implementing extensions and have now moved to turn on the extensions system in the Dev channel builds of Chrome and Chromium.

• As part of our continuing series this week on open source blogging tools, today we’re going to take a look at clients created specifically for the GNOME desktop. If you prefer KDE, then check out yesterday’s post in the series.

• In this article I finish the process we started in the last episode. Read on for the thrilling denouement.

Distributions

Red Hat Family

• Videos, some keynote speeches and talks and PDFs of many of the presentations given at the Red Hat Summit 2009 and JBoss World Chicago 2009 conferences, held in parallel last week, are now available from the conference websites.

• Red Hat open sourced the code for Satellite a year ago to broaden involvement and innovation, and this is the first version created from the ground up as a community-generated, open source product, said Michael deHaan, a Red Hat senior software engineer and leader of the Cobbler project.

• With the recent acquisition of open-source vendor SpringSource, VMware can deliver on the powerful “Build-Deploy-Manage” mantra that SpringSource championed to its 2 million developers.

• The one certainty is that KVM, and by extension all Linux distributions that support it, will benefit from Red Hat’s integration, while the showdown between Ubuntu server edition and RHEL intensifies.

Debian Family

• Eucalyptus Systems – the fledgling open source outfit that mimics Amazon’s so-called compute cloud inside private data centers – has announced its first commercial product.

• Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition (EEE) is based on the open-source Eucalyptus “private cloud” platform originally developed by company co-founder and chief technology officer Rich Wolski and his fellow researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

• With Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition (April 2009), an enhanced version of Eucalyptus that uses the KVM hypervisor was integrated into the distribution. This allowed any user to deploy a cloud that matches the same API that AWS provides. This system is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC).

• One of Linux’s most touted advantages over Windows and Mac systems is that, on distributed systems like Ubuntu, you can install thousands of applications right from your system, without having to Google, download, double-click, and Next, Next, Next through installation screens. That advantage is lost if you put all your applications in a big pile of searchable stuff labeled “Graphics” or “Sound & Video”—or, even worse, ask users to copy-paste repository sources and installation commands into text files and terminals. Those are great backup and uber-geek solutions, but terribly off-putting to those just trying to get a system up and working.

• Some complain that there is simply too much choice in the free software world and far too many Linux distributions. Well, now there’s another called Lubuntu. A derivative of Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop, it’s super light and very fast. Finally, there’s an Ubuntu perfectly suited to those older, low end machines!

• After more than 10 years of using Windows, from Windows 3.1, 95, 2000, ME, NT, Millennium, Server 2003, XP, and *finally* Vista, I herein declare that Windows is a thing of the past.

• I worked for +6 years as an on-site IT Support, and 100% of the troubled computers run Windows. Windows is a great operating system that gets the cycle of consumption going. A highly publicized, well-lubed bloated, conglomerate of absolute garbage. Spyware, malware, defragmentation, bloated registery, 1 missing DLL file brings down an entire Operating System, service calls, endless upgrades, more RAM, more powerful CPU’s, high-end builds *just* to run Windows “smoothly” and “efficiently.”

• I can’t recall the number of times of daunting, expensive upgrades to get Windows itching a bit faster, or teh occasional formats, unexplained Blue Screens of Death, unreliable Microsoft technical support, and the list goes on! You can have the latest, most expensive AntiVirus and Firewall to protect precious Windows that comes crashing under its own weight.

• The Spri Beta 2.11 version is based on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and comes in a 340MB ISO file, quite close in filesize to the Lubuntu beta that we wrote about last week. Nothing special kernel-wise, it’s the default 2.6.28-15 kernel that is in Ubuntu right now, and IceWM’s version is 1.2.37.

Devices/Embedded

• Eurotech announced a Linux-compatible edge controller for aggregating and communicating data from edge devices, sensors, and monitors using its Everyware Software Framework (ESF) Java framework. The customizable Helios computer runs on an Intel Atom Z5xx processor, offers gigabit Ethernet and serial ports, and has five USB ports, says Eurotech.

• Direct Insight announced a SODIMM-sized CPU module that runs Linux on an ARM Cortex-A8 processor. Available with a separate 90 x 90mm breakout board, the SwiftModule-OM includes up to 256MB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage, Ethernet, and optional WiFi, the company says.

Phones

• Among the announcements are plans to integrate products and services into new devices – such as the soon-to-be launched Linux-based N900 and its first laptop, the Booklet 3G – through partnerships.

• Telecom software vendor Enea has launched an Enea Android Competence Center in Lund, Sweden to provide professional software development services for Android. Meanwhile, an eWEEK opinion piece argues that although Android is underestimated by many in the mobile industry, the open source mobile platform could emerge as the smartphone winner.

• This morning at GigaOm’s Mobilize 09 event in San Francisco, Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, Co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of the company’s Mobile Devices division, unveiled Motorola’s Android platform play. Motorola is going to be placing large bets on the open source operating system over the coming years, but is coming out of the gate with just two Android phones.

• In previous articles we have examined the market positioning of the Palm pre and the operating system it rode in on — the webOS. In this article I would like to dispense with the marketing speak and jump in a bit deeper. We are going to look at the webOS from the inside-out by actually modifying one of the built-in applications. Don’t worry, if all goes well, we won’t actually hurt anything. Or, if you prefer you can always deviate from the prescribed course and attempt to make permanent changes to your device. The choice is yours. I am going to be working via the development environment’s Emulator, but the changes we are making here may also be made to a rooted device. Let’s get started.

Free Software/Open Source

• Built on open source, OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring

• Hello and welcome. Microsoft has begun to train Best Buy associates on the virtues of Windows 7 over GNU/Linux for netbooks.

• Since Software Freedom Day is on September 19th, 2009(2 weeks away), Best Buy seems like a great place to hand out CDs and flyers encouraging people to try GNU/Linux on their laptops and desktops before they buy. In the coming days, we’ll be putting up resources to help you at your local Best Buy to make this project a huge success!

• The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and Boston-based IT consulting firm Optaros Inc. won an innovation award in a contest sponsored by Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the quasi-public authority announced in a press release today.

• You can find a list of projects that Credative supports here. It supports GnuCash (accounting), MySQL, PostgreSQL, GNOME, KDE, Moodle, OpenOffice, Asterisk (VoIP/PBX), almost all major Linux distros, Apache, Thunderbird (e-mail), and even many development languages, ranging from Bazaar to Git, among others. In fact, if the support is good for Credativ’s whole list, the combination of free, open source software and dependable support could be achievable for many businesses, small and large.

• The purpose of the FY10 Open Source task force is to develop a white paper focused on open source deployments and opportunities of this technology solution within HIE.

• Eucalyptus Systems has announced it will support VMware’s ESX hypervisor and vSphere 4 virtual machine infrastructure as the foundation for a private cloud.

• More fundamentally, Congress, the states and cities should look for ways to have governments own and manage their voting machines, as the reform group FairVote has advocated. It makes no sense to allow private companies to count votes using secret, proprietary software. The federal government and the states should also require that all electronic voting machines produce a paper record of every vote and mandate random hand counts to ensure the reliability of the results.

• The adapter promised to take a computer built from standard PC components and allow Mac OS X to be installed on it, without the usual patching and tweaking required for a regular “Hackint0sh”. However, as one EFI-X owner has discovered, it seems the company did little more than repackage Chameleon/Boot-132 bootloader code onto a DRM-encrypted USB stick.

• Hoping to make it easier for American citizens to log into and use federal web sites, the US government has embraced not one but two digital identity standards: OpenID and InfoCard.

Leftovers

• Appeared as a full page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. You have to admit Larry Ellison that he has a sense of humor.

AstroTurf

• The Consumer Energy Alliance still fears a low carbon fuel standard could be reinserted or that states such as Minnesota and California might enact their own.” The front group defends tar sands oil, which comes from Canada, as “North American Energy,” and misrepresents the low-carbon fuel standard as a “ban” on “domestic [sic] supplies of transportation fuels.”

• It seems that every few weeks, another Goldman Sachs executive goes to work for a government agency, with bankers landing in positions of power at the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, and pulling the levers of the massive trillion-dollar federal bailout.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• Hackers reportedly knocked over the website of Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd for a few minutes on Wednesday in an apparent protest against government plans for compulsory internet content filtering.

Intellectual Monopolies

• IPv6 traffic levels surged over the last 12 months, with the 15-fold increase down to just one application and one ISP, according to a study by Arbor Networks.

• Support for IPv6 in µTorrent version 1.8, a version of the world’s most popular BitTorrent client released in August 2008, had a huge effect.

• Tim Kuik, managing director of Dutch anti-piracy gang BREIN, has publicly admitted that he’s currently using a Sony VAIO laptop previously confiscated from a ‘hacker’. Although he doesn’t elaborate on how he obtained the machine, it is hard not to conclude that it has been misappropriated.

• It shows an out-of-date understanding of economics. While it may mean that you can’t directly create a (paid) market in that private good, it opens up and enables many more markets. Going back to the food analogy: if you had many more people in the world who weren’t hungry, and didn’t have to spend all their money on food or food production, would that be good or bad for the economy? It seems rather obvious that it would be good, as money could be spent on higher level things that expand the economy.

• An alliance of music stars, songwriters and record producers has spoken out against UK government proposals to kick file-sharers off the internet.

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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.