● 10.13.09

● Links 13/10/2009: GNOME Summit Coming, KDE Would Have Cost $175 Million to Make

Posted in News Roundup at 9:44 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Individual members can now also get up to 40 per cent off Lenovo devices and standard employee purchase pricing discounts from Dell and HP, according to Zemlin.

• The Linux Foundation rolls out some new member benefits this week, along with a membership classification just for students. Though there were already a ton of cool membership perks to begin wtih, new access to employee purchase pricing on products from HP, Dell, and Lenovo is a really terrific addition to the list.

• Recently there has been some chatter on various programming blogs about how we should be using classic Unix features to build more scalable infrastructure. This all started when Ryan Tomayko wrote I like Unicorn because it’s Unix.

• Linux is predominantly known for its use in servers, although can be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from embedded devices , mobile phones and even some watches to supercomputers. Linux distributions, installed on both desktop and laptop computers, have become increasingly commonplace in recent years, partly owing to the popular Ubuntu distribution and the emergence of netbooks.

• The simplest thing you can do is to make sure that your desktop or laptop goes into sleep or standby mode when it’s not in use. First up, make sure that you’re not using a screensaver, or there will be little or no energy consumption difference between idle and in use. Next, KDE and Gnome both have menu items where you can set power preferences; or you can of course set things manually with various XF86 options, hdparm, and so on.

• Nomad Innovations has used Moblin Linux technology to build a camera-mounted 3g and/or WiMAX transceiver aimed at mobile TV news teams. The $50K LiveEdge device is touted as a cost-saving, more flexible alternative to the $500K microwave trucks commonly used today.

• We are all impressed and excited by the success of commercial Linux vendors. Red Hat, Novell, Canonical, Mandriva, Oracle, and a host of other Linux companies are making great strides in delivering performance and value to the enterprise marketplace.

Desktop

• Clonezilla is a partition or disk clone tool similar to Norton Ghost®. It saves and restores only used blocks in hard drive.. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live : It is suitable for single machine backup and restore.

• Given that the silence is finally being broken on this, surely it’s time that banks themselves came clean: for the security of their customers – and themselves – they should really start warning people off Windows, as the Australian police have done. If they don’t, they are being grossly negligent, and showing at best indifference and at worst contempt for the digital well-being of their customers. Who among them will be the first to break this particular silence?

Server

• Certainly not GNU/Linux: the latest Top500 supercomputer rankings show that the GNU/Linux family has 88.60%. Windows? Glad you asked: 1%.

• So, forget about whether there will ever be a Year of the GNU/Linux Desktop: the future is about massive data-crunchers, and there GNU/Linux already reigns supreme, and has done for years. It’s Windows that’s got problems….

Applications

• Have you tried it yet? I’m running the Chromium “Daily Builds” on Kubuntu 9.10. At first, not very long ago, I was quite skeptical about Chromium. It looked unfamiliar, it seemed to lack features. Then, about a week ago, I gave it another try. And boy, has it improved!

• In this post, you will learn about some very basic features that everyone uses, but you may not know all of the various easy methods of accomplishing them. In KDE, there are several ways to copy, move, rename, and archive files. Let’s take a look at a few them.

Desktop Environments

• For this year’s gnome summit I decided to attend. I wanted to see what was going on and keep in touch with various people in the FOSS community. While I’m not a gnome hacker myself, I have made gnome apps, plugins and know some of the people working on new things.

KDE/Qt

• The official KDE Project currently consists of 4.2 million lines of code. Cornelius Schumacher has applied the lines to individual projects and published the stats.

• The current source code of the KDE core module contains 4,273,291 lines exactly, reports Schumacher in his blog. Almost half the lines are taken by the three largest projects, kdebase, kdelibs and kdepim. The KDE-Edu team takes fourth place in the code stakes followed by kdebinding and network modules.

• At the Maemo Summit Conference in Amsterdam, Nokia gave out over 300 N900 phones running Maemo 5. The N900 is the successor to the N810, over a hundred of which were handed out at Akademy a year ago. Read on for some opinions about the N900 and the results of 3 days of hacking.

• Exactly one year ago, on October 12th, the KDE Community Forums were founded. It was about time to give users a place for discussion and support beside the mailing lists, which were mainly used by developers and other contributors. A lot of time has passed since then, and the forums have grown into a healthy community, contributing to the KDE landscape as a whole. Here people can ask KDE-related questions, help other users, find useful information, or just discuss whatever comes to mind.

• Kupfer is a launcher inspired by quicksilver. It allows you to use keystrokes to rapidly perform tasks such as launching applications, manipulating files and data and running scripts. Kupfer’s philosophy is simplicity, speed and usability. It is written in Python and has a flexible plugin architecture.

Distributions

Debian Family

• The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition is sponsored by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Office of Naval Research. It was held at a large acoustic testing pool operated by the US Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Centre.

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• Nova runs a custom software stack atop a single board computer which runs GNU/Linux and relies heavily on Debian.

• At the end of this month (October 29th, 2009 to be exact), Ubuntu will be releasing its newest take on the Linux operating system. This time around, it should be obvious (even to the biggest of skeptics) that Ubuntu is making some serious inroads to the business and enterprise scene.

• Ubuntu 9.10 has a variety of system management tools. Computer Janitor is a utility that helps you find and remove software packages that you might not need anymore and suggests configuration changes that might aid in boosting system performance. System Testing is a utility that tests several components of a system to ensure they are working properly, such as audio, fingerprint readers, peripherals and more.

• Significant changes from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 beta aren’t strictly cosmetic ones. Want to add software to Ubuntu 9.10? This release replaces the Add/Remove feature in the Applications menu with the more contemporary Ubuntu Software Center. Ubuntu 9.10 also replaces the Pidgin IM client with the feature-rich Empathy client. This is part of the updated GNOME 2.28 desktop environment.

Devices/Embedded

• Since VirtualBox automatically configures a working Internet connection, feel free to stop by the Linux Journal Website using your shiny new Android Virtual Appliance!

Sub-notebooks

• For a brief time in 2008, Linux actually owned a segment of the desktop industry: netbooks. When netbooks first showed up, they ran Linux and nothing but Linux. Microsoft panicked and brought XP back from the dead, offering it for next to nothing to netbook vendors and thus successfully fighting off the Linux challenge.

• That was then; this is now. Today, Linux netbooks are still popular, though not as much as they once were. ARM-based netbooks, however, are on their way and, since these systems can’t run Windows, Linux has the potential market all to itself. The real question is, will PC vendors choose to offer low-cost, less than $200 netbooks?

• [...]

• I quote Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer: “Our license tells you what a netbook is. Our license says it’s got to have a super-small screen, which means it probably has a super-small keyboard, and it has to have a certain processor and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

• That’s so Microsoft. Once the company feels like it’s on top, it immediately start dictating to the market how things are going to be from now on. With Linux still around, though, it doesn’t have to be that way.

• I think though there is a market for full-powered netbooks at a $200 price point, and that means Linux. Ubuntu already runs on ARM, and I expect Google’s Chrome operating system to run on ARM-powered systems.

• By taking the Freeplay hand crank and connecting it to the feet which can more easily provide power it should make it much easier to deploy the laptop to countryside / rural areas. As the laptop charges as you use it no additional battery is needed. Photos / full specs will be published on the OLPC Afghanistan website. We are hoping to make this sustainably for XO / other power purposes in Afghanistan employing more Afghan staff. This should work fine with XO 1.5 as well!

• The Asus Eee PC 1008HA is a thin and light netbook that weighs just 2.4 pounds and measures just an inc thick. It was the first Asus netbook to be feature the new “Seashell” style design. And it’s currently only available with Windows XP, even though Asus was a pioneer in putting Linux on netbooks.

• But this weekend Asus did something interesting. The company posted Linux source code for the Asus Eee PC 1008HA. In fact, there are 5 different downloads, ranging in size 299Mb to 488MB. I have no idea what the difference is between one and the other, and I’m not entirely sure what’s contained in the files yet. But if I had to guess, I’d say that Asus is preparing to launch a version of the Eee PC 1008HA that runs Moblin Linux.

Free Software/Open Source

• The history of FOSS can be traced back to academic origins: distributing source code under a permissive license was the de facto rule in academia in the 70′s. Since then, FOSS became a wide spread paradigm throughout the software industry, and its alignment with academic goals tended to be forgotten.

• But the current state of the American public education system is no longer innovative. By now, many have realized that America no longer holds a monopoly on the math and sciences, and some question if we ever did. Other nations have been making such quick progress that a second Sputnik doesn’t seem far-fetched in the near future.

• We can’t risk falling behind on the math and sciences. According to Jefferson, “science is important to the preservation of our republican government, and . . . also essential to its protection against foreign power.” Thankfully, our current President claims to be aware of our education system’s troubles, but is awareness enough?

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• Public education is supposed to provide a model for its students. Freely available software for the public that anyone can use, learn from, modify, and send back to the system for improvement is certainly an ideal and practical model. Here is software that endorses cooperation and functions on peer review — software that promotes creativity and independent thought. Why subjugate the student to the black boxes of proprietary software when they can learn freely with free software?

• Kaltura is also promoting a global ‘open video’ movement, called the Open Video Alliance, showing a deep understanding of the importance to work hard on fostering ecosystems. The license of choice is, as it must be, the AGPL.

• Kaltura’s vision is to be for video what Firefox is to browsers, or WordPress is to publishing, but my guess is that they are probably going to be what Twitter is to texting.

• Cerner said in a release that uDevelop is based on the concept of open-source software development, in which users collaborate on products that are freely available for download. Some of the most popular examples are the Internet browser Mozilla Firefox and the GNU/Linux operating system.

• If you use WordPress then you know what a great blogging platform it is right out of the box. It does everything a blogger could want and more, but hundreds of industrious users have come up with plugins to make it even better. Here are just five of the over 6,800 different plugins the WordPress community has dreamed up.

• For Splashy Web Sites. Along the same lines, if you’re looking for good graphical templates for web pages, two good places to start are Open Source Web Designs and Open Designs. These sites house thousands of graphical templates, most of them XHTML/CSS-based, that you can use for free. On the design front, also don’t ignore creative use of fonts. Check out Lisa’s post on several open source font resources that can make a difference on your web pages, and with your graphics.

• Open source firewall not only offers better customization options, but also reduces the cost of ownership. After an comprehensive search we assorted the top 5 open source firewall.

• In light of questions pertaining to the difference between freedomware and free and open source software, I have put together a slide show using OpenOffice.org. The assumption here is that certain pieces of knowledge, such as the four freedoms (FSF) and how open source originated are already known by anyone wanting to use the slide show to do a presentation.

Mozilla/Firefox

• According to the Novinite website , In terms of market share, Mozilla Firefox is a lot more popular in Bulgaria than it is globally, and appears to be catching with Internet Explorer.

• The upcoming version 3.6 of Firefox will be able to tell if you’re listing to starboard–and pass that information along to applications running in the browser.

Sun

• Sun Microsystems has announced the availability of the 10/09 update for its Solaris 10 operating system (OS). The latest release includes a number of bug fixes, feature updates and expanded support for new processors.

• In addition to several efficiency and performance improvements, Solaris 10 10/09 includes new updates for Solaris ZFS which integrates the ability to use solid-state drive (SSD) technology for data caching and high volume transactional applications. Administrators can now set usage limits, such as by individual file system, user or group.

• Some of the best news on the open source front appears to be that Oracle will nurture MySQL. We’ve said before that MySQL could become an open source on-ramp for Oracle’s proprietary databases. MySQL founder Monty Widenius has speculated that Oracle could possibly kill MySQL. As Oracle OpenWorld starts, though, there are good reasons to believe that Oracle will increase its invesment in MySQL. After many bumps in the road for Oracle’s proposed acquisition, that would be good to see.

• What is in question is what the backing of a giant like Oracle will do for Solaris, Java, MySQL and SPARC. Also, how is Oracle itself going to change? Oracle will now be offering three different RDBMSs (innoDB, Oracle, MySQL), on three different platforms (Linux, Solaris, Windows), and three different hardware platforms (SPARC, x86, AMD64). Oracle is now poised to take on IBM directly, as well as potentially taking on Microsoft’s dominance in the business world. Solaris is a ready replacement for many different types of software installations. It works well on servers and desktops, has a commercial office suite that is very comparable to MS Office, it’s got Java, and it has database solutions galore. It is now possible that we are now adding Oracle to that platform. I hope so much that Oracle can make it all happen. They have the pockets, do they have the brains?

• If MySQL were any old database, putting it in the same camp as the market leader would certainly give pause for thought. But MySQL is not any old database: it’s a free software one, released under the GNU GPL. This changes the dynamics considerably, as this fascinating letter from Mickos to the European Commissioner Neelie Kroes eloquently explains.

Openness

• In early 2008, the European Commission assembled an Expert Group of 13 academics to rethink how the EU funds research and, in particular, “to undertake an evidence-based, ex-post evaluation of FP6.” As group chairman, it appointed Ernst Th. Rietschel, President of the Leibniz Association and Professor Emeritus at the University of Lübeck.

• A prominent member of the open education community, Stephen Downes is a researcher, blogger, and big thinker in open education and access related issues. He frequently debates with other open education advocates via the medium of the Internet, once in a while meeting up in person at conferences to hash out more of the same. I thought I might capture his slice of insight into the future of open educational resources and how he views them evolving in an ideal world.

Leftovers

• Mr. Berners-Lee smiled and admitted he might make one change — a small one. He would get rid of the double slash “//” after the “http:” in Web addresses.

• In the finger-pointing-fest after 9/11, the U.S. intelligence community was scorched for not sharing information, and putting parochial interests ahead of good analysis. Which makes it particularly depressing to see that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is shutting down two of its more important collaboration tools, called uGov and BRIDGE.

• There will always be paper books for die-hard romantics like my friend Jimmy, who actually smells a volume before he reads it and then, when done, can sit for hours in almost-darkness, stroking his calloused poet’s fingers across the smooth wood-pulp and dreaming of the good-old days of cotton paper and cow-skin covers.

• Twitter suspended the account of a security researcher after he posted a message to his followers warning them about a threat, according to ZDnet.

• They are scribblings that may come back to haunt Matthew Tannin. The former high-flying Bear Stearns hedge fund manager – who goes on trial for fraud in a New York court this week – had a habit of recording his inner-most thoughts in emails sent to himself on a private Google Mail account.

• Shark finning was banned by the EU in 2003 but loopholes in the legislation have allowed fishing boats in UK waters to continue finning. It is estimated that hundreds of tonnes of shark fin have been landed since the European “ban” was introduced.

• A few months ago, I asked Simon Johnson, the former International Monetary Fund economist, now a prominent critic of the banking industry, what he thought the banks owed the country after all the government bailouts.

• “They can’t pay what they owe!” he began angrily. Then he paused, collected his thoughts and started over: “Tim Geithner saved them on terms extremely favorable to the banks. They should support all of his proposed reforms.”

• Mr. Johnson continued, “What gets me is that the banks have continued to oppose consumer protection. How can they be opposed to consumer protection as defined by a man who is the most favorable Treasury secretary they have had in a generation? If he has decided that this is what they need, what moral right do they have to oppose it? It is unconscionable.”

• (update Oct 12, GMT) Following press reportage about dumping off the coast of Africa, Waterson & Hicks, a UK law firm acting for Trafigura, a large London based oil and commodity trader, ordered and received this confidential report (the so-called “Minton report”) into toxic dumping practices by its client along and on the Ivory Coast. The report reveals a number of toxic dumping incidents and appears to be the report behind the extraordinary secret October 11, 2009 gagging of the Guardian newspaper.

AstroTurf

• A new, bipartisan consensus is building around the environmental benefits of nuclear energy in America.

• Just a few weeks ago, in a meadow in Rocky Mountain National Park, Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado joined Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona in concluding that nuclear energy “has to be part of the solution” as the country seeks to reduce its carbon footprint and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

• The debate about nuclear energy in Oregon, and across much of America, has been a highly emotional, often partisan affair. This new alliance is a breath of fresh air, representing a fundamental shift in political alignment. Fifty-nine percent of Americans polled by Gallup earlier this year said they support nuclear energy as one way to meet the nation’s electricity needs.

• But if the PWC’s report doesn’t offer much in the way of trustworthy policy analysis, it is an interesting looking at the changing politics of the issue. In short, the insurance industry is getting scared. After many months of quiet constructiveness, they’re launching a broadside on the week of the Senate Finance Committee’s vote. The White House, which had a pleasant meeting with the industry’s leadership last week, was shocked by the report, and so too was the Senate Finance Committee. The era of cooperation seems to be over, and they weren’t given much advance warning. But the report might have another impact, too: The evident anger and fear of the insurance industry might do a bit to reassure liberals that this plan is worth supporting, after all.

• When an insurance company says an 11 percent increase in its rates — during a recession — is too small, it is clear that the health care system has lost its way. Health care must be about patients and medical treatment, not corporate profits. Until the country and especially Congress, which is currently writing and debating health care overhaul legislation, returns to this notion any reform will be more akin to window dressing than the fundamental change that is needed.

Censorship/Web Abuse

• The Department of Justice has finally admitted it in court papers: The nation’s telecom companies are an arm of the government — at least when it comes to secret spying.

• Sony’s DRM hurts the free-game program given to European PSP Go buyers, and a Sony exec explains why the UMD exchange program has been scrapped. The company is still insisting that it plans to take care of its loyal customers, but the PSP Go’s early days have been nothing short of a disaster.

• The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

• Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

• According to the Guardian, despite the 1688 Bill of Rights, it has been gagged from reporting a question to be asked in parliament later this week. The gag was obtained by Carter-Ruck.

• There’s now no doubt that Guardian News & Media is planning a local online news project. Despite parent company Guardian Media Group laying off almost 250 staff in its regional division this year, GNM is hiring for metropolitan “beatbloggers” in Cardiff, Leeds and Edinburgh for local news services set for launch early next year.

• EU lawyers say that Amendment 138 has to go because of a legal technical problem. And they insist on a poor replacement that will do nothing to stop the imposition of copyright enforcement measures. Given that we know the political agenda for both copyright and Internet restrictions, shouldn’t they do better?

• On 28th July 2005, I was unlawfully arrested at Southwark tube station when attempting to take the tube after work to meet my wife. Chief Superintendent Wayne Chance, Metropolitan Police Service Borough Commander for Southwark, has eventually apologised to my wife and I for their actions and the trauma it caused us.

Intellectual Monopolies

• Lawyers representing The Pirate Bay co-founders, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Warg, denied in a Dutch civil court yesterday that the Swedish men currently own the notorious BitTorrent tracker site.

• Nice work from Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson on the ways that entertainment companies have spent the past century decrying new technology, claiming that it would destroy copyright, from the record player to the xerox machine to the VCR to DTV to Napster.

• Two citizens stood up today against the Vancouver Olympics Committee and the City of Vancouver to oppose a bylaw they say will infringe on free speech and erode Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

• While we have written much about the battle over the broadcast performance royalty (or the “performance tax” as broadcasters call is) – whether broadcasters will have to pay artists and record labels for the right to play their music on the air – we have not written much about another looming issue with the royalties that broadcasters must pay to play music on their stations. While broadcasters are very familiar with the ASCAP and BMI royalties, they may not be fully aware that there is a looming dispute over the amount that broadcasters will pay to these organizations in the near future. At a panel that I moderated at the NAB Radio Show, Bill Valez, the head of the Radio Music Licensing Committee, talked about the current negotiations for the renewal of the royalty agreements between radio stations and these two Performing Rights Organizations (“PROs”).

• The Motion Picture Association has sent one of its big shot lobbyists to New Zealand to advocate tougher anti-piracy legislation, and to promote a propagandistic comic book set be handed out to thousands of local kids. Interestingly, the comic doesn’t touch the subject of copyright. Instead it uses false threats to scare children and parents about the dangers of file-sharing.

• An attorney defending against a music-piracy lawsuit didn’t cross ethical bounds by filing motions broadly attacking the recording industry and posting them on his blog, a magistrate judge has ruled, rejecting demands from the RIAA for monetary sanctions.

• The site is “reaching out” to the pragmatists and seekers, as these are the ones who can apparently be “rehabilitated” and with the site’s help, they can take their first step toward legitimacy and restful, sleep-filled nights. And the site just makes a little money helps by “coax[ing] them toward the light.” What’s the harm in that, right?

• In case you can’t tell, I think this is a really silly idea. I have trouble believing anyone (yes, anyone) would do it. The article notes that “interest from the public has not been especially high.” Well, that I understand.

• If you’re downloading and feel that what you are doing is illegal, the first step is to stop it. Then, find a way to help the artist or creator yourself, not through a site that takes 12% of your payment for itself. The slice off the top makes me wonder if this site is any better than the downloaders; it itself benefits monetarily from allegedly illegal downloads. You could argue that it encourages people to download by helping them feel “better” after they’ve done it. The more “unauthorized” downloaders there are, the more there are who might pay through this site, bringing (perhaps some) profit to the site.

• Really? The AP’s response to people linking to and discussing AP articles is to go after sites for money? I am waiting to see which news organization will be the first to go after Twitter for payment for news tweets. Instead of focusing on how to demand payment for the distribution of an infinite good, news organizations should recognize the new opportunities afforded by the free distribution of their content and focus on how to build a business off their scarce goods.

• Rupert Murdoch has thrown down the gauntlet to search engines with his threat to charge the likes of Google for presenting his newspapers’ content in search results.

• It tends to be difficult to generate income both from free and subscription-based content. The reason for that is the abundance of information online. So it is likely that other free media services will even further expand their importance as information sources and marginalise traditional journalistic content providers. It is a fatal process of structural change where we still don’t know if the traditional media online would be a sustainable model.

• Anyone who reads the news knows that Reuters is a major news agency; in fact, it is the world’s largest international multimedia news agency.

• Among other things, the IOC noted that “any reproduction and distribution of images of the Olympic Games and IOC identifications by any means, including over the World Wide Web, without the consent of the IOC is unauthorized.” They further claimed ownership over the Olympic rings and actually over the word “Olympics,” itself. Perhaps most offensive to me personally, the IOC had written in their heavy handed letter to Giles that any images of the Olympic Games actually “belonged” to the IOC.

• The Boston-based Font Bureau is asking for “no less than $2 million” in damages, according to Cityfile, which broke news of the suit here. And here’s a link to the suit, which was filed in Brooklyn earlier this week.

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