● 10.29.09

● Links 29/10/2009: Ubuntu 9.10 Released, Android Momentum Noted, 100,000,000 Downloads of OpenOffice.org 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 6:41 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

• Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition just been launched to a clamoring world by O’Reilly and at 917 pages including index it beats the heck out of resorting to the “man” command. My one complaint (you may well relate to this) is that my eyes aren’t what they used to be and the font size the book is set in is at my limit of resolution without glasses. As I can’t see well enough to find my glasses, this is a problem. All you whippersnappers will be fine. This book is a great resource. A 5 out of 5.

• A: I’m Juliet Kemp; I’m a sysadmin and freelance writer on Linux. I’ve been using FOSS for getting on for a decade now, and working as a sysadmin for nearly as long. I recently wrote a book of Linux systems administration tips – Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach – and write regularly for http://serverwatch.com, http://www.linuxplanet.com, and Linux Format.

• For those of you who were with us back in 2002, you may remember a wall calendar we produced in celebration of issue 100 of Linux Journal. It was such a fun calendar that for years to come readers would ask me when we were going to print another. I always joked “ask me in another 100 issues”. When Executive Editor Jill Franklin reminded me that issue 200 was coming up in 2010, I realized I was going to have to hold true to my promise (and lots of other “ask me in 100 issues” promises).

Kernel Space

• KSplice is an incredibly useful application that allows important updates to be installed (such as new kernels, etc) without requiring the need for a reboot.

X/GPU

• In late September there was a call by Peter Hutterer for a new X.Org release process that consisted of a six-month release cycle for the X Server, all development work to be done in feature branches and not Git master, and a three-stage development cycle. The agreed upon version was pretty much the same as Peter’s version, but it also called for the X.Org drivers to be pulled back into the X Server (around version 1.10).

• Thanks to Alan Coopersmith’s efforts, X11R7.5 was released a few days ago. Except – what does that mean?

• A recent trend I’ve noticed is this myth that compiz is bloated.

• My argument here is that compiz is not bloated but rather it is modular.

• [...]

• Metacity with no compositing comes in at about 2.6 MB. It’s lightweight but it does not need to deal with having a plugin system loaded in. Stepping things up a bit, let’s turn on compositing.

Applications

• The Inverse Team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 1.8.5. This is a maintenance release of PacketFence which focuses on stability and includes many bug fixes and several small enhancements.

• Klipper – Similar to Glipper, this clipboard manager adds features to the native desktop app, but for the KDE environment. It’s part of the official KDE base module, but you can also grab it as a standalone tool. Klipper buffers your copy history so even though the last snippet you grab is the first one pasted, you can refer back to other snippets if you need to. Actions based on regular expressions can be set in the Preferences section, or you can customize existing shortcuts any way you want.

• EVO, the first open source game console, is expected out of beta Nov. 5, 2009. EVO is the first fully supported open source game console designed for both mainstream and open source users. The company sold several beta units to resellers and customers with excellent feedback.

Games

• The arrival of HoN and the announcement by id developer Timothee Besset that he will be overseeing a Linux build of the idTech 5 3D engine are both a huge boost for the Linux gaming community.

• As the game opens you find yourself broken and discarded in the dump outside the city wall. Your first task is to reassemble yourself. Once that is accomplished, you can begin your quest to return to the city and your girlfriend. Your adventure unfolds as you solve puzzle-like problems in order to progress. For example, how do you trick the guard to lower the drawbridge? Or how might you enter a tunnel that remains sealed except for the few seconds when a train cart passes?

KDE

• The upcoming Amarok 2.2.1 release is turning out to be quite an impressive one, especially considering how short of a release cycle we have put ourselves on. The changelog is full of good stuff already!

• The application that has received the most bugfixes is once again Krita. Also KWord has seen numerous improvements in many places, and the Microsoft Word filter has once again been improved. The same goes for KPresenter and its Powerpoint import filter and KSpread.

Distributions

• Gentoo is a source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways. Linux Magazine benchmarks three of the most common GCC optimizations; -Os, -O2 and -O3, and throws in Ubuntu for good measure.

• What’s interesting is that it actually came as a package for Ubuntu which could indicate that Chrome OS might be some variation of Ubuntu.

• Welcome to the first part of my mini-guide for creating a killer KDE4 desktop with Arch Linux. In this multi-part article, I’ll first give you a general overview of installing this awesome distribution, and then in subsequent parts I’ll kick it up a notch and walk you through installing the best KDE features out there and even clone some features of other KDE distro’s while we’re at it.

• PCLinuxOS also known as PCLinux Operating System or Pclos is a Free Linux distribution which is targeted at home users. This Linux distribution was founded in October 2003 by Texstar. Since its initial release, PCLinuxOS has come a long way. PCLinuxOS is distributed as a LiveCD and can also be installed to a local hard drive.

Ubuntu

• Overall, then: Ubuntu 9.10 is a very stable and despite a few quirks – like needing to enable AppArmor settings by hand – a worthy successor to Ubuntu 9.04.

• If you don’t already know all of the details about Ubuntu 9.10, you aren’t reading Phoronix enough with our plethora of coverage. Though some of the highlights for Ubuntu 9.10 include new artwork, GNOME 2.28 integration, many updates to its graphics stack, the Ubuntu Software Center, GRUB2 integration, and much more.

• Open source system Ubuntu is primed for the release of its 9.10 system, Karmic Koala, just as Microsoft has released Windows 7.

• Ubuntu is made by Canonical, an offshoot of popular open source OS Linux.

• In February, Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 9.10 would be codenamed the “Karmic Koala”. Today, after months of development and buzz, the Karmic Koala is being officially released into the wild.

• The open source OS’s developers are simultaneously releasing the server, desktop and netbook editions of Ubuntu 9.10 today, offering what Shuttleworth earlier this week referred to as a complete platform that he hopes will become the default alternative to Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.

• When you think “Ubuntu”, you almost certainly think of it as a desktop distribution. Make no mistake, Ubuntu 9.10 is a great desktop distribution — but that’s not what Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is focusing on with this release and the next, long-term support version, which will follow this one. No, Canonical has its eyes on the prize, and that’s the server market.

• The sad truth is that, except for Novell with SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), the big-name Linux distributors tend to focus on servers. After all, as Red Hat has shown, that’s where the real money is.

• You’ve installed Ubuntu 9.10, now what? Here are my top 10 tips for getting a fresh install feeling your own…

• Last, if you are going to install Ubuntu on a netbook or some other system with a very small screen, when you boot the LiveCD choose the “try Ubuntu without changes” option, instead of going directly to the “Install Ubuntu” option. Once it is booted, set auto-hide on both the upper and lower panels, by right-clicking on each of them, choose Properties, and then click auto-hide and OK. Then start the installation from the desktop icon. You’ll be happy to have the little bit of extra screen space this gains you for the installation window.

• Since these are upgrades, there is very little to no change in appearance, with the exception of the login screen. Instead of the previous hideous brown, it’s now a hideous blue (and I like blue).

• Ubuntu is filled with tiny usability improvements such as this that help make it as intuitive and powerful as possible.

• Ubuntu 9.10 is a worthwhile upgrade to everyone using this distribution.

• If you’ve been following the Ubuntu release cycle you know that the .10 release is forth coming. Slated to hit the World Wide Web on October 29th, 2009, 9.10 promises to have quite a number of new features that should please even the most discerning of Linux users.

• When I booted into my Ubuntu Linux 9.10 desktop, I heard the Ubuntu theme play. So sound worked fine right from the start. No need to fiddle with any settings to get it working. Ditto with networking.

• There’s a lot to like about Ubuntu 9.10, and its emphasis on design and ease of use. Pundits say confidence is running high within Canonical. And Internetnews openly wonders if Ubuntu 9.10 can become the “default alternative to Windows.”

• As with every release of Ubuntu (…, Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty, Karmic), there’s a wiki page for incoming artwork submissions and concepts (themes, icons, etc.). On the wiki you can post your artwork submissions and concepts for the Ubuntu release planned for April, 2010, nicknamed Lucid Lynx. The first submission has already been made to the Lucid Lynx artwork wiki.

• I’m very pleased with the way that Ubuntu developers (many, but not all of which work for Canonical) have jumped in and helped out when we needed it.

• Great job KDE and Kubuntu Teams!

• Although there’s not an awful lot unique to netbook remix to touch on, it’s a superior experience over all to the 9.04 version. It also easily beats the rest of the Ubuntu-based netbook “distros” such as EeePeasy & Jolicloud by being easier to install, easier to use and ships with just about everything one needs. (Perhaps it ships with too much, but that’s moot.)

• Ubuntu is no doubt the most popular Linux distribution out there. Although, sometimes you would like to go for something different from the mainstream, you are so much into Ubuntu and are so reluctant to try out another distro. In such a situation, you can try out some other Ubuntu based distributions. That way, you are in for some added support, some modified features and you are still using a lot of Ubuntu.

Devices/Embedded

Android

• Indeed, the Dext has a gorgeous touchscreen, a fine Qwerty keyboard, good browser plus a reasonable camera and media players. User friendly, it offers plenty of potential for personalisation, along with growing range of apps plus Motoblur’s ability to keep you up to the second with your social networks. After the last few years of underwhelming variations on a Razr theme, Motorola has made a serious attempt to knock back the doubters with the Dext and, in all honesty, we’re a little surprised that it has come up with such a strong offering.

• The red-hot smartphone sector is posed to get even hotter as competition grows with two signature releases due out in coming days — Verizon’s Droid and BlackBerry Storm2 — along with new indications that Android is making huge gains on the mobile software front.

• The open-source Google Android operating system, which was introduced by the Open Handset Alliance in November of 2007, will have its successor Android 2.0 appear for the first time on the Verizon’s Motorola Droid smartphone, reportedly to be released on November 6, 2009.

• It looks like Android 2.0 – also known as Eclair for some reason – will allow users to sync their devices to a number of different contact sources, as well as allowing something called ‘Quick Contact’ to be embedded within an application. The new Bluetooth API is expected to facilitate peer-to-peer activities like gaming.

• Actually, Verizon did sort of put that on the iDon’t list, just not in those words. The original iDon’t list includes both ‘iDon’t allow open development’ and ‘iDon’t customize’, both of which imply that the Droid does those things which means the Droid provides a customizable, open development platform that business customers can work with.

• Some folks are claiming that Google is faking the open-source funk by not being as open as it could be about Android.

Free Software/Open Source

• Today we are listing here 11 Most Popular Open Source Softwares Of All Time in which most of them are cross-platform. You might not be able to enjoy all the features as commercial software but it will really help you to perform your task in a better way when your pocket does not allow you to purchase paid software.

• OPEN source software offers one cure for clinical system implementation woes, as authorities struggle to find solutions that meet all medical requirements, a leading health informatics researcher says.

• “Some of the greatest efficiency gains in the health sector will come from open source software, rather than packages supplied by large corporations,” said Professor Jon Patrick of the University of Sydney’s School of Information Technologies. “It’s not in industry’s long-term interests to come up with efficient and interoperable systems.

• PT Indosat Mega Media (IM2) has announced that they are supporting the open source technology. They claimed that 50 percent of the total number of the company’s servers has been installed with open-source-based applications and systems.

• Right now, the project site contains the Python/Google AppEngine source code for the Salmon demo. Writes Panzer, “I also intend to host the actual spec text there for the moment, along with the reference implementation code, and develop both in parallel based on discussions on the mailing list.”

• IT budget cuts, an improved ecosystem and more maturity have boosted the demand for open source applications in Indian enterprises, writes Brian Pereira.

• The economic downturn may be regarded as a blessing in disguise for the open source community and proponents of open source software. The skeptics (read commercial software vendors) have suddenly become silent and are in fact willing to support open source, ironically finding that this move somehow works to their advantage.

• Messaging software vendor Zimbra has signed up distributor Interactive Ideas to help build its UK channel and the two firms claim interest in open source technologies is on the up.

• Interactive Ideas will focus on the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) which uses an AJAX web client. The product integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, messaging, tasks and online document sharing.

• Nicholas Bellenberg, IT director at Hachette Filipacchi, said all of the publishing house’s web development is based on open source technology: “I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything different! There’s no point in spending a fortune on proprietary systems or programming frameworks that don’t move with the times. And yes, you can scale it big – Facebook does.”

• According to the research firm, it is likely that number of Smartphone users will shoot up and it is expected to touch around 412 million Smartphone users globally by 2014. Around 250 million of them are surely expected to equip with accelerometers.

• In other words–development costs for reusing the same old molds is a dead argument. It is about giving up control, lowering costs and recognizing that the danger signal has sounded with increasing adoption rates of open source solutions.

• They are soliciting your input, if you have installed solar. It is a community driven project and only as accurate as the data entered in a collaborative effort between government, industry, and the public. As they point out, currently, it is only estimates.

• “Our project, Empowered by Open Source, will enable libraries to collaborate and more effectively influence the evolution of their information systems so that the systems can be molded to fit the services that libraries and patrons want, rather than services having to be designed to fit what the systems allow.”

• Zenoss Inc., corporate sponsor of the award winning open source network monitoring project Zenoss Core, today announced it will host its third Zenoss Community Day on November 6. The daylong event is being held during the USENIX 23rd Large Installation Systems Administrator Conference (LISA), where Zenoss is a sponsor and premium exhibitor.

• First, OpenLogic reported a 41 percent year-to-year increase in 3Q 09 revenue with a 100 percent renewal rate. These are strong results and the renewal rate suggests that clients value OpenLogic’s offerings.

• The first CPT offering is a stand-alone, ready-to-use application that can be downloaded from SourceForge under OpenCarbon.

• So, increasingly I find myself, like many others, asking why it is that in general the public sector appears to be so far behind the curve when it comes to F/OSS adoption. We do hear that there is a faster uptake in places such as Brazil and where budgets are likely to be more limited than in, say, the UK or the USA. France’s national police force has reportedly saved 50 million euros since 2004 through adoption of F/OSS and migrating a portion of its workstations to Ubuntu. Back in February the UK Government issued a document titled Open Source, Open Standards and Re-Use: Government Action Plan, in which it was reported that over the previous five years “government departments have shown that Open Source can be best for the taxpayer”, and suggested that “we need to increase the pace”. However, the overall picture with regards public sector F/OSS adoption, both here in the UK and elsewhere, remains seriously disappointing. Furthermore, we are still hearing reports that some government agencies are violating their own procurement policies by mandating vendor-specific technologies in their invitations to tender. Where instead they ought to be simply defining requirements – not solutions – and thus creating a more fair, diverse and competitive market, and one that has the potential to lead to better value for the taxpayer coupled with increased innovation.

• First came the formation of Dynamo Business Intelligence Corp, (aka Dynamo BI), a new commercially supported distribution, and sponsor, of LucidDB. Then came the launch of InfiniDB Community Edition, a new open source analytic database based on MySQL from Calpont.

• We actually included Calpont in our report but its product plans at that time looked precarious to say the least as the company found that its plans to launch a data warehousing platform based on MySQL were overshadowed by Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.

OpenOffice.org

• OpenOffice’s future as open source appears to be assured; “After the transaction closes, Oracle plans to continue developing and supporting OpenOffice as open source”. Oracle plans to offer a commercial license for OpenOffice for larger customers who require support and enterprise tools.

• When looking at the download counter more than 100.000.000 people downloaded OpenOffice.org since version 3.0 was released about a year ago. I think this is something we need to celebrate next week at the OpenOffice.org conference in Orvieto, Italy.

• The developers are currently working on new features for version 3.2 of the office suite, which is currently in beta and expected to be available at the end of November. The latest stable release of OpenOffice is version 3.1.1. OpenOffice is released under version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3).

Government

• The Department of Defense Tuesday clarified its stance on open source software saying it is equal to commercial software in almost all cases and by law should be considered by the agency when making technology purchase decisions.

• “The continuous and broad peer-review enabled by publicly available source code supports software reliability and security efforts through the identification and elimination of defects that might otherwise go unrecognized by a more limited core development team,” the attachment noted.

• The U.S Department of Defense is not only encouraging use of open source applications, it recently open-sourced an enterprise human resources application that has over a million lines of code.

• This isn’t the first time the DOD has released code to the public. In June, a PC-based mapping application developed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute for the military, FalconView, was also made available as open source.

• While this measure may not be an immediate cost-saver (5 different companies are involved in re-building and maintaining the White House web site), long-term costs should fall as government agencies are able to borrow from the greater Drupal community while incrementally improving on the websites code. But the question remains, will the Obama White House share some of the contributions it’s making to open source?

• Like many of you, I awoke Monday to read that whitehouse.gov was now running on open source products, including Drupal, Red Hat Linux, Apache web server, MySQL, and Apache Solr.

• White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure — and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future.

Openness

• In a way, Daedelus’s live performances could be considered “open source,” with the set list and performance adapting to his audience. “I really like the fact that on different nights, the show can go in a wildly different direction,” he explains. “I hope as an artist there’s a bit more of a mandate to be challenging. As much as I want people to have a good time, I also want them to be exposed to sounds that they would want to hear in a more open environment or constructive setting. I think they should both be happening, but my heart is really in melody.”

Programming

• In the world of computer languages, nothing speaks louder than who adopts its usage. The Python language hit a home run with Google adopting it for a high percentage of their internal and public (Google App Engine) projects. One of the things that makes the Python language appealing to so many is how it treats everything as an object. This makes the language inherently object-oriented but not so complex and wordy that it can’t be understood by beginning programmers.

Leftovers

• Sony has asked more than 69,000 owners of some of its all-in-one desktop Vaio PCs to return the machines’ AC adaptors in order to avoid the risk of electric shock.

• But if you are in the music industry, movie industry, journalism, software services, cloud computing, if you are a software engineer, if you are a web designer, if you design logos, if you do any kind of digital work you are exposed to a huge amount of competition, you are exposed to the lowest cost provider in your sector — thanks to the Internet.

Finance

• Well, it seems it was you, taxpayer – it was your money being used to play the stock market, artificially inflate it, give favored banks some big (and entirely illusory) profits. Why? Because the big banks and the big government need you to feel that things are getting better – so that you’ll go out and spend, so that revenues to big corporations and big government will rise, thus allowing them to carry the toxic assets for one more year, or so. To call this smoke and mirrors is to be nice about it – outright fraud is a better description.

• Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that received a $10 billion bailout from taxpayers via the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), recently released its income statement for the third quarter of 2009, and at least on the face of it the firm’s recovery from a November 2008 loss in net income of over $2 billion seems a success.

• But it turns out that Paulson just happened to be in Moscow at the same time that Goldman’s board of directors was having dinner there with Mikhail Gorbachev. (You know, as one does.)

• [...]

• This is sleazy in the extreme, and will only serve to heighten suspicions that Paulson’s Treasury was rigging the game in favor of Goldman all along. (It’s also a bit peculiar, to say the least, that the only two times Paulson met with private-sector boards he was out of the country, and arguably outside US jurisdiction.)

• Are we supposed to be impressed that Goldman Sachs is spending $200 million on a foundation to support “education”?

• Goldman Sachs certainly thinks so.

• That foundation has been much hyped recently, as America’s premier financial magnate has tried to offset the news that, shortly after being rescued by the taxpayers, it is expecting to dole out some $23 billion in bonuses this year.

• So, just to be clear: Goldman Sachs would like us to think of it as a good public citizen because over the last 10 years it has donated 0.08 percent of what it’s giving out in bonuses just this year to charity.

• Just a few days ago we learned Government Sa-er, I mean Goldman Sachs-announced it had set aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from the year before. That works out to more than $527,000 for each employee. Not bad for nine months of work.

• While many ordinary Americans are still waiting for an economic recovery, Goldman and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank’s 140-year history.

• Here’s a video from Dylan Ratigan that speaks for itself. It’s about how Goldman Sachs has taken all of us to the cleaners.

• Perhaps we need a new vocabulary, one that helps us describe a society that promotes the accumulation of vast riches, bails out the rich when they take too many chances, and avoids responsibility for the common good. Even Milton Friedman would have trouble calling that capitalism. How about the Billionaire Bailout Society? Here are its salient features: 1. We promote accumulation of vast fortunes without limits. 2. We shun progressive income taxes that could narrow the gap. 3. We keep most of finance deregulated even after it has collapsed so spectacularly.

Internet/Censorship/Web Abuse/Rights

• A posting over on the Big Government blog details recent attempts by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to shut down the website at AFTExposed.com (which, as you might guess from the name, doesn’t have very nice things to say about the AFT). The AFT’s General Counsel has sent the operators of the offending website a cease-and-desist letter, demanding “immediate cessation of use of the domain AFTexposed.com or any other variant that includes the acronym AFT.” The asserted grounds: (a) trademark infringement (that use of the AFT acronym is “likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive”), and (b) violation of ICANN’s Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy (on the grounds that the AFTexposed.com name is “confusingly similar” to AFT’s trademark and was “registered in bad faith.”).

Intellectual Monopolies/Copyrights

• AC/DC’s new $200 box set packs musical rarities and memorabilia inside a functional 1-watt guitar amplifier.

• The AC/DC Backtracks packaging, pictured, is unique and fully operational. And what’s inside is impressive as well: The limited-edition box set includes a stunning variety of media and collectibles.

• Remember GateHouse Media? The regional news company sued the NY Times for linking to it, claiming it was copyright infringement to include the headline and a brief snippet along with the link (you know, like Google…). Amusingly, it turned out that GateHouse Media was doing the same thing. Eventually the two companies settled, and apparently that’s convinced GateHouse Media that complaining about such links is a good idea.

• The Public Domain is supposed to be a safe place for artists to get content without fear of copyright infringement.

• This permits Rumblefish advertising rights and control over public domain and the content of independent artists. (We are the only ones we know of – but we are sure that we are not the only ones)

• This is a violation of our rights as artists.

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