● 10.06.09

● Links 06/10/2009: KDE 4.3.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 6:55 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• The Microsoft machine seems to have been avoiding the netbook market, and there has been much discussion about what this might mean. One recent article, Why Microsoft won’t fight moblin, raises an interesting point about the economic relationship between Microsoft and Intel. While this article discusses the performance ceiling that now confronts all of the hardware companies, it more importantly indicates that Microsoft has become too dependent upon the profits it was able to raise for higher-priced hardware. Unfortunately, for Microsoft, the netbook market is not one of high-priced hardware.

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• The resulting situation is that Microsoft is suffering from a significant drop in revenue, a significant increase in costs, and a product with limited appeal. There just isn’t enough in Windows 7 to justify its cost. Microsoft will earn some revenue by selling it with new machines, as it did with Vista. Microsoft is also in the process of trying to force IT departments to buy Windows 7 by ending support for Windows XP. And, Microsoft is even adjusting its offerings for netbooks.

• But, it doesn’t appear the Microsoft has gotten the point about profit margins and reaching a wider audience. It is not enough to make a product that is technologically accessible to the average user, you have to also offer that product at an accessible price. To reach the widest market, you have to sell at discount store prices. It simply does no good to design a product for a wide market and then price it beyond the reach of that market.

Desktop

• I heard recently, and could not really believe it until I saw it, that Microsoft was encouraging people to throw “Tupperware(R) parties” at their homes in order to launch the new version of Microsoft’s products.

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• Linux can’t do that, since anyone that anxious to get a fresh distribution of Linux just pulls it down off the Internet. This also allows the Linux user to get their beauty sleep instead of standing in line outside some store for hours.

• 5. Linux might actually have a better game selection than the Mac!

• Obviously there was some jest in there but Linux really does have some gems for games out there. Best of all most of them are completely free! Then again some are free for a reason…

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• And the #1 thing I have learned since the start of this experiment? Drum roll please…

• 1. Linux might actually be ready to replace Windows for me

Server

• Jack Wallen had the opportunity to interview three of the eight finalists in the latest Cisco “Think inside the box” contest. Read about what the finalists had to say about developing for open source, the future of Linux, and their projects.

Kernel Space

• The stable team has announced the release of kernels 2.6.27.36, 2.6.30.9, and 2.6.31.2. There are lots of fixes, all over the tree, some of which may have security implications, so users are encouraged to update. “This is the last release of the 2.6.30-stable series. Everyone should now move to the 2.6.31 kernel tree. If there are any issues preventing people from doing this, please let me know!”

Applications

• KeepassX is an application for people with extremly high demands on secure personal data management. It has a light interface, is cross platform and published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

• Emesene 1.5 is one of the best instant messengers available for use with the MSN Network thanks to its massive feature set (which includes full webcam support), super stable nature and all-round ease of use.

• Imagination is a lightweight and simple DVD slide show maker written in C language and built with the GTK+2 toolkit, there are some other GUIs which do the job, but they usually require a lot of dependencies to be installed first and often their interfaces are bloated. Imagination has been designed from the ground up to be fast, light and easy-to-use.

• Twinkle seems to be one of the most ambitious Linux softphones. This free open source softphone offers voice communications and instant messaging using SIP protocol. Twinkle is one of the most widely used SIP softphones. It’s popularity can be given to the fact that it is available in the stable repos in the main distros (Ubuntu, OpenSuse and Fedora). The VoIP application uses Qt toolkit for its graphical user interface. For calls Twinkle uses the session Initiation Protocol (widely used for controlling multimedia communication sessions such as voice calls over IP). It can be used for straight IP to IP calls as well as in a network using a SIP proxy to route your calls and messages. Let’s delve into its key feature of Twinkle to find out where does it stand in the queue of open source softphones.

• Multimedia is important component of an OS and Linux has plenty of options to handle multimedia, especially music. Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python and incorporates many features including support for several portable players.

• Now let us check out DIA- it is a 16.5 MB download from Sourceforge over here. It is also available for Linux and can probably be run on a Mac as well. If you have experience with DIA on either operating system we would love to hear from you in the comments! We will be working with the Windows version in this article.

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• For me this free Visio alternative is wonderful!

• If you’ve ever had to try to create a training demonstration, you know how helpful a screencast can be. If you’re not sure what a screencast is just think of it as a video capture of you working on your PC. This is an incredible educational tool that users can watch to see how to do things. There are a number of tools out there to do this, but only a handful of them are free. Webinaria goes even further and opens its source up to the users.

K Desktop Environment

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

• October 6th, 2009. Another month has passed since the release of KDE 4.3.0, so today the KDE Community announces the immediate availability of KDE 4.3.2, a bugfix, translation and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. KDE 4.3.2 is a monthly update to KDE 4.3. It ships with a desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, development tools and more. KDE’s award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

• Q: You’re speaking to a group of high school students. Why should they consider exploring career options in open source?

• A: Working with open source projects means that you’ll always be on the cutting edge of using new technologies. You’ll find this is good for your resume. But doing Free Software is volunteer work – you get to pick your own projects based on what you are interested in. So take advantage of that and follow your interests. Meet as many people as you can. You’ll find it might turn into paid work, either in or outside of open source.

• People are one of the strong points. In a large project like KDE, you’ll find people from all over the world. It’s neat to be able to say that you know someone from Iran, and to get an eyewitness account of current events there. And it’s fun to travel to conferences. I’ve met all kinds of great folks, and some have turned into close friends.

• The representatives visited the Openmind Conference as part of the trip, which gave them a chance to find out about FLOSS in Finland and to meet and talk with government representatives and people from local companies. The conference was an interesting event with more of a focus on FLOSS in business than development. At Openmind Adriaan gave a talk on software licensing issues for the Free Software Foundation Europe’s Freedom Task Force.

Distributions

• SystemRescueCd creator François Dupoux is committed to keeping his distribution running on the latest and greatest software, because yesterday he released SystemRescueCD 1.3.1 and, as everyone is expecting, it is powered by version 2.6.31.1 of the Linux kernel. Along with that you will find a 2.6.27.35 alternative kernel, a fresh NTFS-3G, 2009.4.4-AR19, and PartImage 0.6.8, which allows you to disable SSL at runtime.

• Well Slackware 13 was released a few weeks back and I had a chance to install it on my laptop. I ran Slackware as my main Linux distro for about 2 years. It’s reputation as being stable and solid are well earned. If you run Slackware for any significant amount of time you will learn the intricacies of how Linux works. The packages that come by default in the latest version of Slackware are pretty up to date and an official 64 bit distribution is now available.

• Depending on the type of person who asks me I generally recommend either Ubuntu or Pardus. Those are both the most well known (here at least) and targeted for those new to Linux. I have also heard of, but never tried, MintOS and PCLinuxOS. They also have the reputation of being easy to use. I would never recommend a Linux distribution like Fedora, Debian or Gentoo unless someone has some experience with Linux. Never mind that all Linux distributions are pretty much the same under the hood. What hooks people is the desktop experience, not the technical elegance of how a Linux distribution is put together.

Red Hat Family

• Today, the Docs team finalized the conversion of the licensing of our documentation and project content from the Open Publication License (OPL) to a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). Docs originally reached a consensus to change the license in June 2009, and after answering questions raised by the community, the Docs team decided to go ahead with the transition.

Debian Family

• There’s a leaner version of Mint which uses XFCE as a desktop environment, but the default distribution is so drop-dead gorgeous I can’t give it up. And if it runs acceptably fast on a bargain-basement netbook, I’m sure it will scream on a properly-spec’d desktop or notebook computer.

• I just wish I had put Linux Mint on my old MacBook before I gave it to my sister in law. She’d had never known the difference…

Devices/Embedded

• It’s got a pretty robust battery life–up to 10 hours, according to Sharp–and runs Ubuntu.

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• The way you use it, though, is more like an ultramobile PC. Holding the NetWalker with two hands, you type with your thumbs. On the right side above the keyboard is an optical pointer that, when you run a finger over it, functions as a mouse.

Free Software/Open Source

• At first sight, news that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is moving from the Microsoft .Net-based TradElect to the GNU/Linux-based MillenniumIT system, is just another win for free software.

• But the details provide some fascinating insights into the world of very high performance – and very expensive – enterprise systems.

• Free and Open-Source Software (Foss) enthusiasts and practitioners will have the opportunity later this month to learn about the latest developments in the movement.

• A grassroots-driven conference called Foss.my will bring together international Foss professionals and enthusiasts from Oct 24-25.

• It will take place at the Asia Pacific University College of Technology & Innovation and the Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology, at the Technology Park Malaysia here.

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• Also there is Richard Matthew Stallman, the father of the free software movement, who will be speaking on the movement and GNU/Linux.

• The open source browser maker is expected to spin out the next iteration of Firefox in November, and next week’s upcoming beta is understood to be the only test build released by Mozilla before 3.6 – codenamed Namoroka and based on Gecko 1.9.2 – lands.

• In the early days, almost all infrastructure services were donated. Today, we host and manage our own infrastructure, greatly supported by the financial donations of our sponsors, but even so, we remain a 100 percent volunteer-based organization, still true to our goals and ideals.

• The Humanitarian FOSS Project (HFOSS), a collaborative three-college program that creates free open source software (FOSS) for the common good, received a major vote of confidence with the awarding of an $800,000, two-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under its Pathways to Revitalized Undergraduate Computing Education program.

• The administration of the Paris region will build a on-line workflow system based entirely on open source software, to be used by all school students, teachers, parents and school administration, Jean-Baptiste Roger, IT adviser at the Paris regional council, on announced last Thursday at the Open World Forum taking place in the French capital.

• With open source already mainstream, companies are now arriving at the point where they are prepared to invest in this area for business applications.

• So claims the chairman of the recent Open World Forum and chief executive of Wallix Jean-Noel de Galzain, who made his comments in an interview with IT PRO.

• Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, today announced it has acquired all rights to the Master Data Management (MDM) technology of Amalto Technologies. As a result of this acquisition, Talend will be the first company to offer an open source MDM solution, providing organizations with the exact features and benefits found in proprietary MDM solutions, at a fraction of the cost.

• Open source does not have to mean “hackers only.” There are helpful guides, documentation, and user mailing lists on the Lucene site, and many other sites across the web. Each of the subprojects has a long list of companies and people offering paid support, from individual programmers with specialized expertise to hosting and configuration services to companies providing a full suite of enterprise-level support, such as Red Hat offers for Linux.

• The Knight Foundation, as part of its efforts to improve online journalism, gave a $1.1 million grant for the launch of Everyblock in 2006.

• Everyblock used the money to build a GPL code base that aggregates local information for use by news sites. Here, for instance, is its recent report on my home zip code.

• Two years ago, computer science graduate student Morgan Quigley had an idea: an open-source programming framework for robots that would improve collaboration between researchers. Now, his Robot Operating System (ROS) has caught the attention of universities and research groups worldwide.

• Menlo Park-based research group Willow Garage has taken the lead on the project, while teams from universities such as Carnegie Mellon, USC, MIT and the Technical University of Munich are also developing ROS.

• The Peercore system, developed in-house over the past nine years, is based on the Ingres open source database technology and an Open Road front end.

• You don’t need an expert economist to see that the AS/400 midrange market is not what it used to be. A once thriving market, it’s now maybe a tenth of its previous size, and more resellers and software vendors leave every day. One of the former IBM AS/400 business partners that has evolved its business plan to suit the times is Randr, Inc., which has made a clean break with the traditional midrange, and moved to open source software.

• When I first saw Moblin, I really questioned Intel’s ability to create a dedicated OS for small devices. The folks at Intel told me that they felt it was strategic for them and would go a long way to providing a specialized OS just for x86-based handhelds in the future.

• Open Source Ticket Request System (OTRS) comes with two separate Web interfaces – Agent Interface and Customer Interface. From Agent Interface all administrative and ticketing tasks can be performed and Customer Interface is where customers i.e, users can raise new tickets from, check status of the already raised tickets, etc.

• In response to growing demand in North America, eXo Platform today opened its first U.S. office and announced a Board of Advisors stacked with software industry luminaries. This move comes on the heels of a partnership with Red Hat enabling eXo to deliver its open source collaboration software to the North American market.

• Mckoi Software announced today that Version 1.0 of MckoiDDB, a distributed database system, is available for download at http://www.mckoi.com/ under the open source GPLv3 license. MckoiDDB is a database management application that provides software developers an engine for organizing large and complex data-sets over clusters of servers, and an API that supports transactions and low latency queries.

• 3Di, Inc., which develops and offers 3D Internet solutions, has launched an open source project, 3Di Viewer “Rei,” for viewing and interacting with OpenSim-based 3D virtual worlds in web browsers.

• Loraine Lawson spoke with Greg Schott, CEO of MuleSoft (previously MuleSource) about the new iBeans open source offering, which gives Java developers a quick and easy way to integrate internally or with some platforms externally.

• PrismTech™, the world leader in Open Source high-performance communications middleware, today announced the availability of the Open Source OpenSplice™ DDS Connector for Apache Camel. This new connector, developed as part of a contract award from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, makes the systems integration and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) connectivity of Data Distribution Service (DDS) applications easier than ever before.

FSF/GNU

• If you’re looking for a little background radio to listen to this afternoon, why not check out the podcast for yourself? It runs to just over 39 minutes and LIANZA Conference gets a mention (yay!). I can’t wait to hear what he says in his keynote address. I wager it’ll generate quite a lot of debate so make sure you get along to that one. You don’t want to miss out on the “watercooler conversation” that’ll go on afterwards.

Licensing

• A Portuguese ISP called SAPO is shipping a D-Link router with new ADSL subscriptions. The router’s model/SKU # is DVA-G3170i. A firmware image is available here and their tech support has the router’s web interface here.

Openness

• On November 13—just before the start of Global Entrepreneurship Week—web developers, designers and business experts will gather in Chattanooga for a forty-eight hour collaborative bootcamp and work together to take a handful of business ideas from concept to launch. The founding parters, which include Launch Memphis, Knoxville Overground, Will This Float? and Chattanooga’s SpringBoard, are calling 48 Hour Launch an “open-source” alternative to the popular Startup Weekend model.

• If curators had greatest-hits albums, “Against Exclusion” would be Jean-Hubert Martin’s. Discoveries from his 1989 exhibition “Magicians of the Earth” (Cyprien Tokoudagba, Esther Mahlangu, Cheri Samba) joined favorites from 2007’s “Arttempo” (Anish Kapoor, Tony Cragg, Berlinde de Bruyckere) in a city that helped propel him to the top by providing material for the groundbreaking “Paris—Moscow” and “Moscow—Paris” exhibitions in the late 1970s. “I wanted to give something back,” Martin said.

Programming

• In diff tool speak, a visual diff tool is a GUI application. Meld is such a tool: a tool for displaying differences between files (and directories) and also for merging the differences. Meld is programmed in Python.

Leftovers

• Apple has resigned from the US Chamber of Commerce due to the American business organization’s criticism of efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

• Kathy and George Norris lived under the specter of a covert government investigation for almost six months before the government unsealed a secret indictment and revealed why the Fish and Wildlife Service had treated their family home as if it were a training base for suspected terrorists. Orchids.

• That’s right. Orchids.

• Software company Autodesk has failed in its bid to prevent the second-hand sale of its software. After a long-running legal battle, it has not been able to convince a court that its software is merely licensed and not sold.

• Radio station gives away Philadelphia Eagles tickets and mentions Eagles in on-air promotions, without authorization.

• If GeoCities — once the most popular face of personal Websites — can disappear, what about YouTube, Google Docs and Facebook?

Intellectual Monopolies

• The Pirate Bay was inaccessible most of the day Monday after a group representing copyright owners forced the BitTorrent search engine’s bandwidth provider to cut off service, according to a published report.

• Mesanna alerts us to a blog post from the wife/manager of pop singer Edwyn Collins discussing the hellish experience she’s gone through trying to offer up Collins’ most famous song, A Girl Like You, on MySpace. Collins owns the copyright and wants the music to be freely downloadable by anyone, but Warner Music claimed that it owns the copyright, even though it does not…

• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is, without question, one of the most frequently abused laws on the books. If the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is the catch-all for internet crime, the DMCA is ten times over for copyright law. If you want something off the internet, the quickest way to be rid of it is to issue a DMCA notice, regardless of whether there is any basis for it or not, and that’s exactly what companies like Autodesk do. There is recourse, however: Anyone who knowingly misrepresents that an infringement has occurred, or falsely represents that a take down was the result of a mistake, is liable for damages for their conduct.

• When 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz decided last fall to help an open-government activist amass a public and free copy of millions of federal court records, he did not expect he’d end up with an FBI agent trying to stake out his house.

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• “I think its pretty silly they go after people who use the library to try to get access to public court documents,” Swartz said. “It is pretty silly that instead of calling me up, they sent an FBI agent to my house.”

• Problem is, there’s an argument that what professors say in class is their intellectual property. After all, if they just read their own lecture notes, then their words have been “fixed in a tangible medium,” to quote the Copyright Act. So the professor automatically holds the copyright, and Magliozzi, or his note-taking helpers, are violating it. By that logic, it’s the same thing as listening to a song being sung, transcribing it, and posting the notes and lyrics on your web site. Copyright violation.

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