● 09.13.09

● Links 13/09/2009: MoonOS 3.0 Reviews, Russian Government Migrates to GNU/Linux

Posted in News Roundup at 3:26 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• We haven’t figured out whether they have an open bar over there at Penguicon, or if these Linux users just really need to find new hobbies. Either way, we are sure that you will find some level of entertainment value in the custom Linux skin art below.

• Happy birthday linuX-gamers.net. Everything started 6 years ago. We had better times, but we are still alive.

• I know this topic is somewhat advanced for some of you, but for others hopefully this will be useful. So what is a load balancer? To better understand the term, let me explain to you a bit the meaning of load balancing.

Desktop

• The first system got WinXP Pro. The second system was Debian GNU/Linux. Both systems were loaded with OpenOffice, Firefox, and drivers for an HP Officejet printer.

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• System one took 9 hours 23 minutes and a total of 37 reboots.

• System two took 3 hours 17 minutes and 2 reboots.

Server

• There are other, more quantifiable reasons for the increased amount of Linux virtualization use. Just 56 percent of Windows users believe that virtualization helps to better utilize hardware, while 77 percent of Linux users realize that benefit.

• Linux users also seem to fare better with power and space consumption. When asked if they felt that their data center was running out of electrical capacity, only 26 percent of Linux users agreed with that statement, with 44 percent of Windows users concerned about power. Posed the similar question about floor space, 31 percent of Linux users are looking for more room, and 42 percent of Windows users are feeling cramped.

• Bottom line: IT is happy with Red Hat from a technical standpoint and management is happy because it sees the cost savings with no perceptible impact on operations from the new Linux OS, he said.

• IBM veteran Pat Toole was recently named CIO at the company and given much broader responsibilities than his predecessors in the post, which now oversees a far more centralized IT operation.

Kernel Space

• LinuxCon, the new conference for core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts.

• The new Intel KMS patch-set this afternoon comes from Daniel Vetter and its his new version of the KMS overlay support. In early August we originally brought up Intel KMS overlay support as an alternative means used during video playback, but Daniel has since cleaned up this work to remove some visual corruption that was present in the earlier revisions. While the kernel side of this overlay support is set, there are some DDX changes required for the overlay support, which he will address following the xf86-video-intel 2.9 driver release. The start of this new patch set can be found here.

• A day after they had some press event where they showed off a 24 monitor setup running Linux (we weren’t there), AMD has today released the Catalyst 9.9 driver for Linux. This driver, which is still behind the Ubuntu-Catalyst 9.10 driver that has support for the Linux 2.6.31 kernel and other improvements, has just one new feature: support for new Linux operating systems.

• Rafał Miłecki has published a set of five patches that adds support for reading clock values (both engine and memory), the ability to store power management states (core and memory clocks along with core voltage), detection support for an ASIC’s minimum and maximum clocks, setting the new state (currently only the engine clock support is hooked in), and then lastly is a patch that will automatically down-clock the GPU when the connected display is signaled off by the DPMS (Display Power Management Signaling) support.

• X.Org 7.5 with X Server 1.7 will hopefully make it out into the world later this month and to provide for easy testing of these new X packages, Peter Hutterer continues his work by providing an X.Org 7.5 Super Module.

Applications

• As part of our continuing series on open source blogging tools, today we’re going to take a look at some standalone blogging clients for Linux users. If you want an app that’s been designed specifically for your desktop of choice then be sure to check out posts from earlier this week that cover GNOME and KDE blogging tools.

• One of the things that many people either don’t know how to do, or don’t realize they should do, is to A) get Linux via bittorrent, and B) seed each iso they grab so as to help others not only get their copy, but do so quickly as well. For a long time, one of the tricks of the pros to help do this easily and conveniently has been the ever venerable seedbox.

• TwitterFox 5 – stars With TwitterFox you will always know what your status, and your friends’ status is on Twitter! The TwitterFox extension adds a small icon to your status bar so you can easily check for new messages. TwitterFox, having a 5 star rating from it’s reviewers, and over 2 million downloads, is one amazing extension for Twitter!

• I recently received an e-mail from a friend that has started using Ubuntu. He is rather new when it comes to running a GNU/Linux desktop and has asked me several questions. One of the questions was basically what software do I use and recommend. This is a serious question that a lot of new users will probably want to know.

• Looking for a quick and easy way to set up a Web-based photo gallery? Consider GMFoto. This application lets you create a snazzy Web-based photo album literally in a matter of minutes.

• In 2006 Jo Vermeulen compared Bazaar and Git performance-wise. Up to today Bazaar has a bad reputation regarding speed and from the results of Jo you see at least that Git is incredibly fast, Bazaar is usable but a bit slow on the uptake in some scenarios. Jo strictly did not use any remote operations which are hard to compare, but from some own tests I do know that Git is incredibly fast there, too, while Bazaar can be really slow on the initial clone operations. The latter fact may be history now, as the new 2a repository format has been introduced with Bazaar 1.17 and enabled by default in 2.0 (both are in Portage). It gives improved speed and flexibility while using up a bit more disk space than the old formats.

Desktop Environments

• But what I want to talk about is KDE 4.3! Holy shit it’s so full of awesome!

• We’re a few days before the hard code freeze for 2.28.0, and having tried 2.27.92, I think we have something good there. Actually, better than just good. But well, we still have a few days to fix this pet bug that annoys so many people — I even heard that, in case you’d be a bit late, some release team people can give +1 to freeze break requests if you have the right arguments. And food is always a good argument. But I can’t tell who those people are. Or maybe I can, if you have the right arguments…

Distributions

• SmoothWall Express 3.0 is an open source GNU/Linux firewall which is security-hardened and freely downloadable. By design, it has minimal hardware requirements and a small footprint. It should work with nearly any Pentium class computer with at least 128MB of RAM and a hard disk with a capacity of 2GB or greater. It’ll likely work with that PC you have sitting in your closet that you’ve been too lazy to recycle. You’ll want to have at least two network cards installed for basic use, and three or more if you want to have a DMZ or incorporate a wireless network. Keep in mind though, that your firewall’s reliability is limited by the hardware on which it’s installed.

• Kongoni, named after the Shona word for “gnu,” is based in Africa. For optimal performance with minimal bandwidth requirements, it uses a packaging system called “ports” that downloads programs as source and builds them automatically.

Red Hat Family

• Unlike all the rest of the sessions at the Red Hat Summit, one was more dialogue than lecture. In the RHCE and RHCT (Red Hat Certified Engineer and Red Hat Certified Technician, respectively) Focus Chat with Randy Russell, Red Hat’s director of certification Russell departed from past practice and turned the forum over directly to the small audience rather than directing the talk himself.

• The open source vendor just launched its Red Hat Catalyst program in North America, which will include an interactive Web portal to facilitate the formation of a community around its partner ecosystem, including resellers, system integrators, ISVs and hardware vendors. This is meant to help Red Hat partners penetrate the market around open source – estimated to be around US$30 billion and growing – and create total solutions.

• Oracle has thrown down the hardware gauntlet against IBM to stem the bleeding at soon-to-be-acquired Sun Microsystems—assuming the EU plays along—but Red Hat may be among the big winners amid the server wars.

• No, the reason companies purchase a RHEL subscription comes down to certification that RHEL works with a wide variety of hardware and software, as well as with the Red Hat Network, which delivers updates to an enterprise’s RHEL servers.

• In other words, IT operations pay Red Hat to help manage their Linux servers in production. The money is in operations.

Fedora

• Do your remember Moblin? This project will now be integrated into Fedora Mini – the lightweight Linux distro targetted at Netbooks/Nettops.

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• Fedora Mini could be used to produce various spins for Gnome Mobile development/Intel’s Moblin project.

• Yes, there’s a big news update for FUDCon Toronto 2009, the upcoming Fedora Users and Developers Conference in Toronto from December 5-7 — check out all the details in the announcement.

Debian Family

• Way later than planned (sorry :-(), here’s a summary of the ideas that people have thrown at me for how we can/could/should spend more of Debian’s money. I asked for suggestions both in person and via mail when at DebConf, and we held a BoF there too.

• I make extensive use of google services because these services allow the things I need to be available to me regardless of where I am. I recently had to update some lists and logged on from an internet cafe to complete the work. gOS is, in my opinion, the most flexible LiveCD when it comes to cloud computing. It’s also the first LiveCD that I have used without needing to spend the better part of an hour tweaking settings just to make the system usable.

• All in all, MoonOS, is an alright distro. I can’t say I particularly like the Enlightenment desktop, sure it does have some nice touches, but it is quite heavy and window switching isn’t as easy as GNOME. The custom MoonOS tools take a lot from Linux Mint, but that does give them the user-friendliness and power, but I do get the feeling that some are just re bundled versions. The fact that moonGRUB does not work after an update is an issue, but fixable using the bug report. I won’t be using it, but if you like Enlightenment, I recommend you give MoonOS a try!

• Pros: Absolutely gorgeous remastered version of Ubuntu. Unique aesthetics, good selection of software, easy install. Features customized moonControl, moonGrub and moonSoftware tools. Cons: Install ran very slow in VMWare and I was unable to login after it was complete. It was necessary for me to switch to Parallels and install moonOS 3 again in order to login. Suitable For: Beginner, intermediate or advanced Linux users. Summary: A fantastically beautiful alternative to generic Ubuntu. One of the best remasters I’ve seen to date. Well worth a download just to experience the aesthetic appeal. Rating: 4/5

• In honor of the impending release of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, here are 30 wallpapers to slap on your screen.

• 3. When did you become involved in the forums (or the Ubuntu community)? What’s your role there?

• I became involved in the forums shortly after installing Ubuntu. The very active forum was one of the reasons I chose Ubuntu over some other distros. As soon as I had acquired enough knowledge to start helping out, I began answering questions. This eventually led to me joining the Ubuntu Beginners Team, where I currently serve on the Ubuntu Beginners Team Council, and the Ubuntu Unanswered Posts Team. I have always had an interest in programming and development. With the help of many great developers, I began patching and packaging applications. These activities would lead to me becoming an Ubuntu Contributing Developer in July of 2008, a MOTU in December of 2008, and a member of the MOTU Council in March of 2009. During that time, I also joined many other development-related teams.

Devices/Embedded

• ASUS’s 7″ display is now touch-sensitive. The source code for the Linux device’s Qt interface is downloadable.

• NEC Electronics is sampling a software development kit (SDK) for portable multimedia players and mobile televisions, based on an ARM11-based EMMA Mobile 1 system-on-chip (SoC) and Wind River Linux. Additional SDKs for digital multimedia devices combining EMMA-family SoCs and Wind River Linux are expected to follow in late 2009 and 2010, say the partners.

• Amino Communications announced its latest Linux-based, HD-ready IPTV set-top box (STB), in a compact, fanless box that offers PVR (personal video recorder) functionality. The fanless A532 supports 720p and 1080i video and 1280 x 720 graphics resolutions, and ships with a 160GB hard disk drive (HDD), says the British company.

Phones

• Motorola and T-Mobile announced Mot’s first Android smartphone, as well as a “push” social networking streaming web service called MotoBlur. The slider-format Cliq smartphone offers a 3.1-inch HVGA touchscreen, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera, GPS, 3G HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, and sensors, says Motorola.

Free Software/Open Source

• Let me expand on that last sentence as it is important. Open source software is available for use. It is free due to the conscious decision of the programmer(s). It is able to provide functions equivalent to or better than proprietary software. It is supported and maintained by the programmer(s) for free because they want to. The programmers of that open source software are happy that we use their software. It is not the end users fault to wish to use that free software for any reason.

• September 2nd 2009: Anchor House , a hostel and life skills centre for homeless adults based in Canning Town has reached the final of the Charity Times Awards 2009 for its effective use of open source technologies.

• The Climate Registry, a standards-setting organization for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting in North America, announced the next generation of its online emissions reporting system, supporting both voluntary and mandatory reporting, will be developed through a new technical partnership with Misys Open Source Solutions, a division of Misys plc, a premier IT solution and services company. The new version of The Climate Registry system is due for release in early 2010. It will feature robust and flexible technology capable of introducing a new level of efficiency. The announcement comes at a critical time as a growing number of companies begin relying on voluntary GHG emissions reporting to meet internal operational, analytical and environmental goals.

• SpringSource, the leader in Java application infrastructure and management, today announced that iCIMS, the third-largest provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) talent acquisition solutions, has deployed SpringSource Hyperic HQ, a key part of SpringSource`s full solution set, which covers the entire build, run, manage lifecycle for Java application development. SpringSource Hyperic HQ monitors a variety of application performance metrics for iCIMS` 180 Apache Tomcat servers that power 3,000 customer websites, enabling rapid remediation of issues and providing data to help create new performance enhancements within iCIMS` offerings.

• The history behind CXF is a fascinating study in the evolution of open source development projects in our fast-moving times. The XFire project, originally intended as a Java SOAP framework based on a high performance XML parser, reached version 1.2.6 in May 2007 as an independent project hosted at the Codehaus site. Further development of XFire then moved to the shelter of the Apache Software Foundation, merging with the Celtix project as a standalone Apache project called CXF. Some developers are still using the 1.2.6 version, downloadable from Codehouse.

• “MyMeeting became the first open source application by the Government of Malaysia (GOM) to be licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).

• Investing in people instead of software licenses makes the most fiscal sense in a recession. System administrators employed by companies who invest in them are loyal, empowered, and available to respond to the occasional business crisis. Those who are trained to support free and open source solutions bring their own expertise to your organization. The Ohio LinuxFest is an affordable training opportunity for those interested in learning about free and open source software. www.ohiolinux.org

• David Chisnall talks with Dale Rahn, the OpenBSD ARM port maintainer, about how OpenBSD support for handheld systems has improved over recent years, and why users and OEMs should consider it.

Fog Computing

• Eucalyptus Systems, a startup that developed software that enables businesses to create an internal cloud computing environment that’s compatible with Amazon’s EC2, is releasing its first commercial product, the Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition. EEE leverages VMware virtualization technology, including vSphere and ESX, to give businesses more options in transforming their virtualized data centers into on-premises compute clouds.

• Rich Wolski, UCSB professor and CTO of recently-established Eucalyptus Systems, discusses the company’s first commercial product for the enterprise – an open source private cloud platform that supports Amazon AWS APIs and leverages VMware.

• It is difficult for many closed source software vendors to embrace open source. Why is this so? After all, over the last years we have come to understand the many business benefits of employing open source as part of a software vendor’s strategy toolbox.

• A lot of times there is a need to test applications before you want to actually deploy them. And testing an application often means provisioning a server for it, deploying the required OS and later the application. Instead of going through this lengthy process, you can use the Click2try service.

Business

• Ed Boyajian, the CEO of Westford, Mass.-based EnterpriseDB, cited these companies’ experiences as two examples of successful Oracle migrations to EnterpriseDB’s Postgres database systems during a workshop at the recent Red Hat Summit. In both these cases, EnterpriseDB has helped customers build out their IT infrastructure at significantly lower costs, he said.

• It has been downloaded over 3 million times, and counts approximately 300,000 active phone systems.

• Credativ, a 10-year old open source support company launched by Postgres contributor Michael Meskes, is bringing its act to America.

• Ingres Corporation, the leading open source database management company and pioneer of the New Economics of IT, announced today that The Department of Education and Training in Western Australia (WA DET) is harnessing the power of Ingres Database to build a range of complex applications to manage administrative activities and programs delivered by 11 colleges and 8,000 staff throughout the state. The systems also collectively manage in excess of 1 million student records, with 120,000 students processed through the state`s training systems annually.

• There seems to be quite a bit of confusion with regards to the value of the open source CMS market. For this reason, we’re asking why you use open source cms products?

FSF/GNU

• Horowhenua Library Trust and LIANZA Ikaroa Regional Committee are delighted to announce that Richard Stallman has agreed to deliver a public lecture in Levin on 7th October 2009, 4pm – 6pm.

Government

• Open source software development in Russia is one of the most important directives for Igor Schegolev – the Head of the Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications of the Russian Federation. At a key meeting with Werner Knoblich, Red Hat Vice President for EMEA, he announced support for a Russian Fedora association and for Red Hat development in the Russian Federation. He also expressed support for open source infrastructure and applications, and the development of a repository for industry best practice.

• Half of the funding is still allocated fo r Microsoft products, and a quarter for Novell products, with the remaining 6 billion HUF (£19.3 million) open for acquiring open source and open standards solutions.

• Apart from ULX and Red Hat, the other open source providers chosen in the centralised list of vendors are FEFO, Freesoft, Kventa, Multiráció, WSH and Navigator.

• ULX will deliver open source solutions to two groups of organisations: the first group of public sector organisations who are legally obliged to get their IT needs from the centralised IT providers list, and the other group is the public and higher education institutions.

• There is a new relationship developing between the state and its citizens. Free software is rejuvenating these social relations this century”, said the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in his opening speech of the second edition of the International Free Software and Electronic Government (Consegi) in the capital, Brasília on 26 August.

Licensing

• A survey of 118 enterprise IT and development executives conducted by open source solution provider OpenLogic concludes that the “Open Core” model for open source licensing trails behind dual licensing and open source with commercial support, in terms of acceptability to the enterprise.

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• These findings suggest that what enterprises are looking for ideally is a project backed by a community and multiple vendors, such as the Linux kernel.

Openness

• That’s the title of a panel discussion which took place at London’s BFI last night. Chaired by Russell Davies from the Really Interesting Group the discussion set out to explore the development and future of open source. Conversations rocked up because the head of user experience design for Nokia’s Maemo unit, Harri Kiljander, made up one third of the panel discussing the topic.

• The i2b2 platform helps clinician-scientists manage and analyze clinical data for population-based and genomics research and to run clinical trials. The software is downloadable as executable Windows or Macintosh files or as source code for users to build client and server themselves.

Programming

• Rasmus Lerdorf is undoubtedly the most famous Greenlandic geek alive. Having created PHP as a bunch of hackish scripts to support his website in 1995, he turned it into a powerful, fully fledged language that’s now used by millions around the world.

• Google has released Chrome 4.0.207.0 for Mac and Linux into its developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel). In addition to several bug fixes, the latest Dev release of Google’s web browser adds a new defence for cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

• Facebook is releasing as open source a Web server technology because it wants to make it easier for developers to create applications that let users post status updates in real time, a functionality popularized by Twitter.

• One of the highlights of the behind-the-scenes changes in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the addition of Grand Central Dispatch. Apple have now open sourced the code to Grand Central under an Apache 2.0 licence.

Leftovers

• For those of us on the outside of Sun Microsystems, the future of the Sparc processor and its related server platforms has been the subject of much speculation and debate. But for Sun’s largest customers, the mystery has been over since sometime in June.

• Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems hasn’t been fully sanctioned by anti-trust entities and Oracle already has a message for customers: we’ll continue to care intensively about SPARC and Solaris. Something’s missing here: MySQL.

• Chi Quang Truong, 46, is being charged by police in Natick, Massachusetts with “unlawful wiretapping and possessing a device for wiretapping,” according to this story in The MetroWest Daily News.

• If you’re thinking foreign spy or industrial espionage, think again.

• Try irate customer who kicked up a fuss at a car dealer’s service department.

• And that “device for wiretapping?”

• Try nothing more sophisticated than a handheld digital voice recorder; an Olympus, to be precise.

Intellectual Monopolies

• I was arguing with a friend about this article, which talks about creating artificial scarcity in place of something in infinite supply. They give an analogy – what if we had Star Trek replicators for food, so everyone in the world could always have enough food, and no one would have to pay for it? Who, then, would take this food away from the starving? My friend argued that this would be terrible, taking jobs from everyone who works in the food industry.

• Unfortunately, it’s not a very good analogy. There’s no real substitute for food – people have to eat. Whether or not you consider high-fructose corn syrup to be food, you can’t escape the need for calories to survive. For the analogy to hold, we’d have to replace the entire music industry, or the entire publishing industry, with something free. No one is talking about doing this.

• A bunch of folks have been sending in the story of how some of the major record labels are suing the Ellen DeGeneres show for not paying for clips of music that the show uses during something called the “dance over” portion of the show. Not having ever watched the show, I don’t know, but it sounds like a brief clip of music used as an interlude between parts of the show. As plenty of people are pointing out along with their submissions, this seems pretty silly. It’s not like hearing these brief musical interludes is likely to harm the market for this music. If anything, it sounds like it would only increase interest in that music from the fans watching the show.

• It’s back to school time, and our friends over at the RIAA have a blog post up excitedly talking up its special “curriculum” for teachers. But, of course, that “curriculum” is laughably biased and at times outright wrong. And it makes me wonder: why would any educational institution accept a one-sided curriculum written by the industry that’s clearly designed to promote that industry’s own business? Do schools use science curricula provided by Exxon or Monsanto? As for the actual content included in the curriculum (which, by the way, the RIAA links to incorrectly twice), it’s almost a joke.

• After the music indsutry has tried such brass-knuckle tactics in the past as selling fake CDs brimming with malicious software designed to disable your hardware, and violating the GNU GPL license by misappropriating a copy of Xubuntu Linux to turn into a “University Tookit” which backdoored university networks (the bastards were on the receiving end of that DMCA Take Down Notice for a change), they’re now moving on with a full frontal assault on your child’s education.

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